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Coaching Playbooks

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 Learning Facilitation

A playbook written by the thinkers for the doers turns into a curriculum, and curricula kill immersive learning. A good playbook is a set of starting points that coaches change in the room.

Overview

A coaching playbook is a collection of techniques, teaching aids, stock questions, and procedures that brings consistency to a coaching practice. Dojos often keep one for parts of the challenge experience: framing a team, running a hyper-sprint, or introducing mob programming.

Playbooks cut both ways. At their worst, they become scripts that reinforce the bureaucratic culture a transformation is trying to dismantle. An experiential learning engagement is not training. Coaches build complex skills on the team’s real problems, and that takes adaptation in real time. You can’t script it.

At their best, playbooks turn a dojo into a repeatable product. They do two things well: they help new coaches get up to speed, and they give the coaching team something concrete to iterate on.

How to Keep a Playbook Useful

Make the audible the first play

In American football, an audible is a play changed at the line based on what the offense sees. Every coach keeps the right to call one. Senior coaches read the room and make small adjustments or wholesale pivots, and no document can anticipate the social dynamics of a team. Treat plays as starting points, not scripts.

Keep plays light

Don’t let a play grow into a curriculum or a standard operating procedure. Tacit knowledge can’t be scripted, so a play that tries to script it gets in the coach’s way.

Write new plays as experiments

“Experiment” gets used loosely. Framing an experiment as a play adds some rigor: write down what you’re trying, then keep a light log of iterations and pivots. If it keeps working, it becomes a play. If it doesn’t, you have a record of why.

Where Playbooks Fit

The same format works beyond the dojo:

  • Coaching. Consistent experiences across coaches and teams.
  • Instructional design. A workshop or a series of workshops.
  • Platform engineering. Enablement campaigns for the teams adopting your platform.
  • Consulting. Statements of work framed around outcomes and data.

Resources