I hear a recurring mantra from conventional operations management within relational service organisations. I’ve been hearing it for years.
That mantra is the (apparent) necessity for ‘consistency across the front line’.
It often starts with decrying that “we’ve got 1,0001 [front line workers] and 1,000 ways of doing things. We can’t have that, we need consistency!”
So, to examine this presupposition, I’ve imagined a conversation between a senior operations person…and a coach:
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of people around me talking about ‘playbooks’…and this makes me uncomfortable.
This post is me thinking about why this might be.
What is a playbook?
Looking up the definition (Dictionary.com) we get three uses:
The original use (way back in the Elizabethan 1500s) is “the script of a play, used by the actors as an acting text”.
Then we get the sporting usage (ref. American football from 1940s): “a notebook containing descriptions of all the plays and strategies used by a team, often accompanied by diagrams, issued to players for them to study and memorise…”
And finally, we get the more general sense of it being a stock of usual tactics or methods – to solve a particular problem in a particular way.
What we can see from each of these three uses is the fundamental meaning that it is about something being defined up-front (usually by some director or coach), rote-learned1 (by the actors or players), and then ‘delivered’ (regurgitated?) on instruction.
I can almost picture the Director on set shouting “aaand…action!!” Continue reading
I often hear groans from some of my colleagues when we are in conversation.
Their (regular) usage of a specific word triggers me to interject when they are talking…
…which creates an ‘oh no, there he goes again…’ moment 🙂
This post is sort of an apology for me being me…and yet, clearly, it’s not!
This is in no way to blame those that trigger me. The problem (as I see it) is that an important concept has become sooo bastardised in ‘modern’ organisations that it has become ‘how we all speak’. We don’t even notice. I regularly fall in the hole myself. Continue reading
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