What Is an Organization?
Two primitives. That's all you need.
I’m building a new venture from scratch. I have no team to align, no systems of record to integrate with, no tacit knowledge that’s been handed down from operator to operator. I have a blank slate. These are, it turns out, significant advantages.
The question I had was simple: what is the simplest possible system of record I could devise to fully describe the operations for a business?
Here’s what I came up with. Two things: playbooks and projects.
Playbooks: how you operate
A playbook is a deterministic workflow that may include branches and loops, with tasks as nodes owned by some combination of a script, a model, or a human.
Some playbooks are technical. I have one that researches new features based on the competitive landscape, synthesizes the findings, and proposes experiments for the engineering team to implement.
Some are operational. I have one that runs monthly meetups in a city, interacting with the venue, vendors, participants, speakers, and hosts. Different tasks in the workflow are handled by different agents and occasionally by me.
The human-in-the-loop isn’t a given. It’s a parameter. Over time, the mix shifts as the agents get better and the guardrails get tighter.
If you never want to change a business, playbooks are all you need.
Projects: how you evolve
But businesses evolve. That’s where projects come in. And as far as I can see, a project can only have one of three intents:
Experiment. Run an experiment to see whether something might be a good or better idea.
Build. Build a new playbook to operationalize a new line of business, location, or capability.
Improve. Improve an existing playbook to build a more efficient or impactful process.
That’s it. If a project doesn’t fit one of those three, I’d argue it’s not a project. It’s drift.
Experiments produce learnings. Some learnings lead to new playbooks. New playbooks mature through improvement projects. The cycle is: experiment, operationalize, optimize. Repeat.
You already have these
If you’re running a business of any size, you already have playbooks and projects. They’re just hidden under layers of tools, processes, and tribal knowledge. Your SOPs are playbooks. Your Jira board is a project system. They’re the same two primitives, buried under years of accumulated complexity.
The blank-slate advantage isn’t that I discovered something new. It’s that nothing was hiding the simplicity.
What would your business look like if you described it in just in terms of playbooks and projects? And how quickly could you ship a system of record to allow you to start to automate it?