Dan’s Notes / Issue 6: Playbooks • World-Building • Mobilizing for a Climate Moonshot

Hi friends,

Lately I've been thinking about the concept of playbooks.

A playbook is a collection of methods and tactics for how to take action in a given scenario. They're most commonly thought of as a sports thing, but it's an effective tool to deploy in life, too.

Here are some examples:

• Birthdays: a list of nice gift ideas at a few different price levels; websites or phone numbers of local flower shops; links to shops with fun birthday cards

• New Hires: actions to take on day one (welcome chat, issuing logins, etc); common issues that trip up new hires; a list of good day-one projects

• Beach Trips: favorite access points with their fees and operating hours; standard packing and grocery lists; recipes that are great for making with portable cooking gear

• Meal Prep: collections of recipes that are easy to make simultaneously and keep well for a few days, and maybe even the order in which to prep them. I'm currently experimenting with finding the best combinations of recipes that make use of the crock pot, instant pot, toaster oven, and stovetop all at once, ideally bringing cook time for the whole week under 90 minutes.

My goal with a playbook is to reduce the amount of time I need to spend thinking about a given scenario by gathering all of the most common need-to-know information in one place. Ideally, when these scenarios happen - a birthday, a day at the beach, a new co-worker's first day - I don't have to start from scratch or reach back into partial memories and figure out what I need to do. Playbooks also help optimize decision-making: if a given situation happens, I've already planned for how to respond.

Maintaining playbooks also has another compounding benefit: if maintained well, playbooks improve each time you execute them. The gift ideas list gets longer. I get better at planning day trips. Meal prep takes up less time and becomes more fun. With just a bit of regular maintenance, playbooks get better the more you use them.

The key is to write important information down (literally any notes app will do) and make a habit of updating them as you use them. I spent today at the beach and I've already updated my 'beach day' file with the name of the spot we went to and a list of things I wish I brought. This is the third time I've added a "wish I brought X" list, and each time the list has become shorter - and my beach days have become better. ☀️

A few of my favorite links from this week:

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World Building

I love re-framings like this - slightly different ways of looking at the world around you and the work you're doing within it. Instead of sales, writes Alex Danco, consider the job as "world-building". Also several mentions of systems thinking, another favorite subject of mine.

If you want to change how a system works, and move the system into a new steady state that’s closer to your goal, sequential effort won’t do much. What you need is parallel effort: you need several different things to happen, all at the same time, for the system to actually move in the direction that you want and stay there. [...]

It’s not enough to tell one good story; you have to create an entire world that people can step into, familiarize themselves with, and spend time getting to know. Initially you’ll have to walk them around and show them what’s in your world, but your goal is to familiarize them with your world sufficiently, and motivate them to participate, to the point that they can spend time in your world and build stuff in it without you having to be there all the time.

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The Weakness of the Despot

A really great interview with Russia expert Stephen Kotkin about the Putin regime and its blind spots, the difference between Russia and the West, and what may come next.

[The United States has] corrective mechanisms. We can learn from our mistakes. We have a political system that punishes mistakes. We have strong institutions. We have a powerful society, a powerful and free media. Administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia or in China. It’s an advantage that we can’t forget.

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Nationalize All the Oil Companies

While rising gas prices can't be blamed on a lack of private investment (for now, anyway), it does call into question the viability of continued investments by the private industry into oil, a resource that is "absolutely essential to maintain in the short term and absolutely essential to eliminate in the long term":

Private owners and investors are not in the business of temporarily propping up dying industries, which means that they will either work to keep the industry from dying, which is bad for the climate, or that they will refuse to temporarily prop it up, which will cause economic chaos. A public owner is best positioned to pursue managed decline in a responsible way.

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Mobilizing for a Climate Moonshot

Public investments as world-building, both literally and metaphorically.

To that end, we should heed the primary lesson of the Apollo program: that inspiring people with hope in a mission is crucial to ensuring its success. In the case of climate change, that inspiration must involve rethinking how we organize our societies. We need to start thinking of ourselves as fundamental problem solvers once again. […]

Redesigning a large public system is not easy. The first step is to consider what public policy is actually for. Rather than just fixing market failures, policymakers should view themselves as market makers, using their resources to create the flexible and adaptable structures for guiding a collective vision and establishing the conditions for bottom-up solutions to emerge.

Phew. I feel good about this one - not only did I finish in record time (before midnight!) but it feels like the most “Dan” issue yet. My own world-building project, in a way. ✌️

See you next week!

-Dan