Spend One Hour on the Lineage Audit Before Writing Plays

This is the full playbook from “Short Written Playbooks Make Small Teams Fast.” The book prints a shorter version at the end of that chapter, and this page keeps every step and every example.

Spend one hour on this audit before “Write a Short Playbook That Explains Why” asks you to write your first three plays. It is a diagnostic, not a scorecard; it shows you where to aim the next two chapters.

1. List your three most important standing requirements: the release process, the review gate, the compliance control everyone complains about. Next to each, write the name of the person who owns it. A person’s name, not a team name. If the owner is a department, an employee who left, or nobody, that requirement goes on a list titled “question first.”
2. Run one deletion pass. List every recurring meeting, report, approval, and pipeline gate in your engineering organization, and ask one question of each: would we create this today if it did not exist? Delete everything that gets a no. Record the deletions somewhere visible and give each one a restoration path, so the first restoration counts as calibration rather than error.
3. Find one process you are automating, or plan to automate, that has not been through steps one and two. AI tooling has made this the most common failure in engineering organizations today. Stop that automation. Give the requirement an owner, then put it through the deletion question.
4. Check yourself against Rule One. Write down the three most consequential decisions your organization made last quarter, and who made each one. If the responsibility was yours but a committee made the call, you have found the gap between your accountability and your authority. Take that gap to the person you report to. In Johnson’s terms: delegate me the program, or relieve me of the outcome.
5. Score your cost honesty. When did the people who fund your work last get an accurate account of where the time and the money went, before they asked for it? If the answer is “at the QBR, when they asked,” adopt the monthly no-surprises review before you write a single play. It is the least exciting item in the audit, and its answer tells you the most. One more question closes the audit: which of your rules encode judgment your competitors do not have, and which merely encode habits?

Try this with AI.

“Play the CEO I report to. I am about to ask for decision rights over this program, and you push back the way a founder protecting control would. Then tell me which of my three asks I should trade away to win the other two.”

All of the playbooks are listed on the playbooks page.