The FOSS Method · Play Sheet
Process Play
The play for No Playbook. Your standards live in your head, not on paper.
Your standards exist in your head, not on paper. When you’re present, things run well. When you’re not, they don’t. The business has your values. It just doesn’t have your systems, so your team gets interrupted all day with questions a single page could answer. They’re not incapable. They’re uninstructed. This play gets the first process out of your head and onto one page anyone can run.
Think about your grandmother’s cookie recipe. She didn’t write a cookbook. She wrote a recipe card. One card: the ingredients, the steps, the temperature, the timing. And those cookies came out right every time. That’s what a Process Play is. A recipe card, not a cookbook. You document what matters and skip what doesn’t. If it doesn’t fit on one page, you’ve gone too deep. You’re capturing the steps that produce the result, not every edge case that might happen once a year.
- Pick the process that breaks most often when you’re not there. That’s your first Process Play.
- Name it and name the trigger. What is this, and what kicks it off? Every process starts with a trigger.
- Write the steps, one sentence each, from trigger to finish. Mark the points where a decision has to be made.
- Set one stat. The single number that tells you it’s working, and the target that proves it. Not five. One.
- Hand it to the person who needs it. Walk them through it, let them run it while you watch, then let them own it.
Name: keep it plain. “New Customer Onboarding.” “Inbound Lead Response.” “Weekly Inventory Count.”
Decision points: mark the forks. “If the order is over the threshold, route to the sales manager. If under, process directly.”
The stat: the one number that tells you it’s healthy if you never looked at anything else. For onboarding, time from signed contract to first delivery.
Get one process onto one page this week and hand it to the person who needs it. The next time that thing runs without you, it runs right, and the question doesn’t come back to your desk.