A Playbook is defined only by a limited number of practices (the original image from Ahmed Sidky has been reused for this visualisation)
# A Playbook
A Playbook as intended here separates authors from readers or at best makes it hard and complicated for readers to contribute disincentivizing contributions.
Contributions and their publication become formal processes with gates controlled by a few individuals. As a consequence, a Playbook starts to be outdated and falls behind from the moment it gets published, becoming an overhead.
A Playbook does not make space for conversations and multiple points of view. And usually represents one standard solution for everyone if not even an imitation of solutions from other organisations, missing the key Agile point of adaptation and fitness for purpose.
Practitioners tell stories about very prescriptive Playbooks pushed top-down to the teams and stifling their creativity.
The Playbook, as intended here, often comes in the form of a medium (e.g. a pdf) or a tool (e.g. some CMS) whose inherent characteristics require, promote or lead to some governance and control and some of the other challenges described above, that are not aligned with an Agile approach. For example, when an org releases software via a CD, can it really do continuous delivery well?
# A wiki or equivalent
What we learned from the history of Agile and its C2 first ever wiki (see P2 For Short to read about C2), is that: - the whole team share the responsibility and authority of constantly improving and documenting and sharing their own ways of working - it should be done in a way that allows continuous and frictionless contributions from everyone, where everyone is both reader and author at the same time - every team should tell what works and what doesn't for them in their circumstances - it should be a living document, a place for conversations, in a constant flow of evolution - it is usually updated while people are reading it; they fix outdated info, add missing info, clarify obscure parts, give shape to the structure that is emerging, etc.
Any tool that, like a wiki, allows any form of living documentation (a Google Doc open for contributions, Literate Programming, DocsAsCode, ...) and that has all the positive characteristics listed above, is aligned with Agile and is the preferred alternative to any medium and approach that does not.
Some teams and some org use the name Playbook for such a wiki-like medium and approach. Clearly what they are doing is not an Agile anti-pattern.
On the topic see also this posts:
- The CATIA acronym of what is good for a "playbook" 