Don’t Trust the Playbook

This Playbook lays out a clear sequence of steps. It tells you what to do first, what comes next, and where to go from there. That is useful. It gives you orientation and a starting point. But don’t mistake it for a plan you can follow blindly.

A Simplification, Not a Blueprint

Every playbook is a simplification. It takes something complex and presents it as a series of steps. That makes it accessible. It helps leaders and teams build a shared understanding of what AME3 adoption looks like and what is coming next. Potentially.

The key word is potentially. A playbook can show you a likely path, but it cannot predict the path your organization will actually take. Your enterprise has its own history, culture, market pressures, and people. No two organizations will walk the same path, and no sequence of steps can account for everything you will encounter along the way.

Use this Playbook as a compass, not as a GPS. It points you in the right direction. But the terrain you cross is yours to navigate.

Organizations Are Living Systems

Why can’t you just follow the steps? Because an organization is not a machine. It is a living system. More like an organism than a factory.

In biology, Open Ended Evolution describes systems that generate increasing complexity over time without a predefined endpoint. Life on Earth works this way. It doesn’t follow a plan. It evolves through variation, selection, and adaptation. Creating higher-order systems with even higher complexity along the way.

Your enterprise works the same way. Every decision, every reorganization, every new Arena you launch changes the system. People adapt. New behaviors emerge. Interactions between teams, products, and markets create outcomes that no one foresaw. The organization evolves, whether you plan for it or not. What you can do is provide guidance. This is why AME3’s strategic doctrines are so important. They don’t prescribe specific actions, but they shape how decisions are made across the enterprise.

This is exactly what makes a playbook unreliable as a literal guide. The steps described here assume a starting point. But by the time you complete step three, steps four through seven may need to look different than what this Playbook suggests. The system has changed. You have changed it.

Empirical Control: The Real Guide

If you can’t trust the Playbook, what can you trust? The answer is the same principle that runs through all of AME3: empirical control.

Your organization is a Complex Adaptive System. In complex environments, cause and effect can only be understood in retrospect. You cannot predict outcomes reliably. But you can create short feedback loops that allow you to inspect results and adapt your approach.

AME3 embeds this principle in the AAA-Loop: Anticipate, Advance, and Assess. This loop is not just a practice for Teams within an Arena. It is the fundamental structure through which the entire enterprise evolves. And it maps directly to how you should use this Playbook.

Anticipate. Design your own path. Read the Playbook. Understand the steps and their intent. Then design your own path based on where your organization stands today. What makes sense as a first move? What can you skip or adapt? Formulate hypotheses about what will work in your context. This is not about guessing. It is about making informed decisions while accepting that you are operating under uncertainty.

Advance. Move forward with your Arenas. Execute. Start the game for the enterprise. Launch your first Arena. Let Teams begin their work. Gather real data. Observe what happens. Not just in the Arena, but across the organization. How do people respond? Where does friction arise? What works better than expected?

Assess. Inspect and adapt at the enterprise level. This is why the Playbook recommends starting the Tournament early. The Tournament is not an afterthought. It is the enterprise-level feedback loop where Accountable Representatives assess the Enterprise Product and the Enterprise Owner adapts the Strategy. Without it, you are flying blind. With it, you have a regular checkpoint to compare your hypotheses against reality and adjust course.

The Tournament is where the Playbook gets corrected. By your own experience.

Trust the Loop, Not the Steps

The steps in this Playbook will get you started. They represent a proven sequence based on years of observation and practice. But the real value of AME3 is not in any particular sequence of steps. It is in the system of empirical feedback loops that lets your enterprise learn and evolve continuously.

Follow the steps loosely. Trust the AAA-Loop completely. Anticipate where you want to go. Advance with courage. Assess with honesty. Then adjust. And keep evolving.

That is the game.

You may think this is odd. Writing a playbook and then telling you not to trust it. But that is exactly the point. Any framework that claims to have all the answers is not being honest about the reality of organizational change. Being your own critic is not a weakness. It is a discipline. Question the steps. Challenge the sequence. Test your assumptions against what actually happens. The organizations that evolve fastest are the ones that treat every plan, including this one, as a hypothesis worth testing.