Public Square and Playbooks

Playbooks are a proven way to share the practical lessons we learn from the work we’re undertaking. Our aim is to ensure that none of our learning is lost, and that it is shared with practitioners who face similar challenges in the future in as useful and accessible a way as possible.

We’re planning a series of guides, case studies and research presented in a clear and accessible playbook format, to be used by councils and other public sector organisations where greater citizen involvement in decision making is a goal. 

What is a playbook?

‘Playbook’ is a word that’s used a lot these days, by tech and management people. They’ve borrowed it from the world of sports, where the idea of a book telling you ‘how to play’ is a more straightforwardly obvious concept.

If you find this terminology a bit too hipster, though, you can think of them by the less trendy terms of ‘manuals’ or ‘toolkits’ — though we have to say that a playbook does have the advantage of sounding like a lot more fun than a workbook.

Whatever the name, what they aim to give you is a collection of repeatable plans and tactics for responding to typical challenges. As such, they can be absolutely invaluable as an internal company tool; and we think they can also help in sharing knowledge between organisations.

In either case, a well-managed playbook would be easily available to employees, widely used and regularly updated.

Basic ingredients

Playbooks might be for one department (like sales, or design) or for the organisation as a whole. They typically contain several different kinds of content, such as:

  • Plays (or guides), detailing the steps that need to be taken to achieve a goal or cope with a scenario
  • Scenario or problem definitions, describing things that may happen, or go wrong; how they are caused and how they are identified
  • Ingredients: details of the resources needed and the costs associated with them
  • Case studies: Written summaries of real life projects that have come up against scenarios and utilised similar plays or guides to solve them
  • They also usually contain some signposting or navigation method, such as tags or categories — or one of our favourite methods, the questionnaire.

Questionnaires as a content discovery method

One great way to ensure that people are seeing the most relevant content in an often hefty playbook is to use a questionnaire that leads the user to the precise content they need at that particular time.

By answering a series of questions, the visitor can provide some information on their own situation, and in return be delivered the most relevant content. 

For example, Atlassian’s health monitor, part of their playbook, asks you to rate how well you feel your team is doing on certain attributes, such as shared understanding, decision making, and dependencies.

Once the questionnaire is completed it offers suggested plays and lets you assemble and share your own action plan.

What goes into a useful playbook?

Practical advice that is specific to your situation is often the most helpful, and this where playbooks really shine. 

A well thought-out playbook, with a questionnaire that asks the right questions, can make available clearly-defined, tailored content that is domain-specific. This means that the reader doesn’t need to work hard to apply generic advice to their situation, nor untangle clumsy metaphors. 

Playbooks often solve the problem of ‘how do you know what you don’t know?’, with tried and tested solutions to known problems.

A playbook should be designed with the target audience in mind — and that audience can potentially be a narrow one, operating solely within one domain or department — offering rich advice based on experience. It should empower people to achieve their goals, solve their problems and, ultimately, shape the culture of their organisation.

A well thought-out playbook will become invaluable to its users, and consequently they will want to keep it up to date and useful. 

For this reason many playbooks have a method of feedback to aid continual improvement, such as rating a page based on its utility, open feedback methods or collaborative wiki-style editing.

Some examples of playbooks

There are hundreds of great examples, but here are the ones we’ve singled out as particularly strong:

If you’ve been working on a playbook, or your organisation already has one that you think is doing interesting things, please do let us know.

We do not support Internet Explorer. Please use a modern browser for a better experience.