This section is a longer one that contains answers to these questions:
How much detail should I put in my playbook?
Can I have more than one form for it?
How do I organize different kinds and levels of information?
What are useful formats for playbooks, and how do I select from them?
In which environments should I teach the system?
How can I use my teaching itself to improve the playbook?
Where do I start teaching, and where do I stop it?
It’s worth repeating: A good playbook can help you teach great tactics to a well coached team, so that you win more often. There is some merit in developing a playbook to organize your own thoughts. Yet, you would use at least some parts of it to show it to others in some shape or form. You developed the system in writing, only to tell others the various calls and the play diagram that go with it.
Here, again, you first think of who your audience is.
What level of detail can they digest?
What do they have to know?
What is nice to know for them, but not essential?
Err on the side of using fewer elements in your explanations.
There are many useful formats. It starts with scribbles on paper hand-outs and ends at wearable devices. There are many specialized apps and tools. There are general office apps, like Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. They let you present a mix of textual and graphic information.
Use the tool that is easy to access for your audience. Even if that means to have the same information in more than one form. After all, you would like your material to be as digestible as possible. The key questions to ask yourself:
Who needs the information in which situation?
Do you need it on the field/court?
Can you always rely on a working projector in a classroom?
Do I hand out stuff, or can I reduce it to memorizeable size?
Don’t overestimate the ability of others to follow your classroom speeches.
It helps to be very precise with terminology. Define your terms and then use only them. There is no merit in paraphrasing without need. Showing one term in your materials and then use it when speaking about it. Think of the cues that you would use in drills, and make them part of your terminology.
A great way to organize things for you and your audience is to use hyperlinks. Link essential information with non-essential, more detailed information. That way, anyone who would like to go deeper on a topic (including yourself), can access those details. Imagine a library. There, you can find both the “My Awesome System for Dummies”, and read up on all the sources that informed that book.
When teaching, you should teach every aspect of your playbook. If you don’t teach a particular piece of it, why did you put it in in the first place? This serves as a great check to make sure there’s no fluff in it. Nothing self-serving, over-complicated, or purely intellectual. Notice when you skip things while teaching your system. Take this opportunity to go back and delete them from your playbook.
The same is true for things you teach, but one cannot find in your playbook: add them. There is this incremental process again! This way, you will end up with a playbook that is both dense and rich. It contains the essentials.
Bonus advice: Why not test-drive your playbook? Teach it to a confidante who would give you honest feedback on your teaching (and your system)? ;-)
Lastly, you should teach your playbook from scratch every season. Even if you didn’t change anything. This is an important step to make sure that everybody understands every detail of it. It’s not only necessary for every new staff member and every new player. It also helps the old ones to remember. Terminology, coaching points, and nuances of your system, they all are worth repeating. Or aren't they?
