Playbook: Difference between revisions

Playbooks derive from the belief that business is a [[heuristic]]<ref>See {{author|Roger Martin}}’s {{br|The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage}}.</ref>.  

In {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}’s conception of it<ref>{{br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}}. It's a brilliant book. Read it. </ref>, [[normal science]]: There are no mysteries or conundrums. The landscape has been fully mapped, boundaries have been set, tolerances limited, parameters fixed, risks codified and processes fully understood. Playbooks are [[algorithm]]s for the [[meatware]]: a means of maximising efficiency when operating within a fully risked environment.

They speak to the belief that ''the only material risk lies in not complying with established rules'': Playbooks are of a piece with the [[doctrine of precedent]]: When the [[playbook]] runs out of road, there is an [[escalation]] to a [[control function]]. the [[control function]] acts like a competent court, the idea being (in theory, if not in practice) that the the [[control function]] can develop the [[heuristic]] to deal with the new situation, and it can be fed back down and incorporated into the playbook as a kind of ''[[stare decisis]]'' to updating and building out the corpus of established [[process]].<ref>This is rarely what happens in practice. [[control function]]s make ''ad hoc'' exceptions to the process, do not build them into the playbook as standard rules, meaning that the playbook has a natural tolerance (and therefore inefficiency).</ref> The [[heuristic]] is set inside the organisation’s {{tag|risk}} tolerance (this is a good thing from a risk monitoring perspective, but a bad one from an efficiency perspective, as [[escalation]] is a wasteful and costly exercise.