BookYol

Concept

The communication playbook

A communication playbook is a short personal reference with one page for each kind of communication you do often (a message, a one-to-one, a hard conversation, a presentation). Each page answers four questions before the event: what is my point in one sentence, how do I open, in what order, and what am I asking for?

Good communication habits are easy to know and easy to skip under pressure, so the playbook gives each one a fixed place to live. The message page might read: put the point in the subject line and the request in the first sentence, make only one request per message, then reread it as a busy colleague would on a phone. The one-to-one page: ask a question, listen, say back what you heard, and only then reply. The hard-conversation page: write the goal you share with the other person and a sentence saying what you do not mean; open with a neutral description of the disagreement; give the facts before your interpretation; and name your own part in the problem first. The presentation page: a one-sentence summary, a short opening story, three main points, data as evidence, then the request. BookYol's Communicate Better road builds this playbook over twelve daily Stations drawn from six books, including Made to Stick, Crucial Conversations and Talk Like TED, and its final Station has you write the four pages. After a month of use the questions tend to become reflexes and the pages matter less, which is the point.

A real-life example

A software team lead writes her four pages and uses them for a month. The message page all but ends her director's follow-up questions in the weekly meeting, the hard-conversation page carries a difficult one-to-one with a senior developer, and the one-to-one page turns out to be what her team had been asking for in retrospectives.

How to use it

  1. 1Write one page per format with four slots: core message, opener, structure, ask.
  2. 2Fill the slots before the event, never during.
  3. 3After a month, notice which page you use most; that is where your work happens.