What is Playmaking?

Plays are everywhere.

You run plays. Plays are run on you. Every organization and every person runs plays to increase their relative competitive advantage in busy marketplaces. Some do it well. Some try to avoid it. Some do it directly. Some use surrogates. Some run one play at a time. Some run many simultaneously. Almost all do so on instinct but fewer with the support of stated objectives, policies and augmenting research.

Whether as soaring rhetoric, like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, or nervy deeds, like the lone Chinese dissident daring the tanks of Tiananmen Square, plays are the bridges that take us from what we wish would happen to what we do to get it. Every advertisement is represented and explained by plays. So is every grassroots campaign, special promotion, mass mailing, press release, position paper, speech, protest, and legal brief. Every effort whose core motivation is to prod, position, or persuade, even subtly, is based on and executed through plays.

Who calls plays? Who runs them?

There is no distinction between people who call the plays from those who run them, at least not by name. By their nature, plays require constant adjustment to the marketplace and involvement at every level to refine the strategy and its execution, so anyone who calls or runs a play might simply be called a playmaker by virtue of the fact that they run plays. Baseball catchers, coaches, quarterbacks, and point guards are playmakers of course. So are poker players and chess grandmasters. Even spouses, partners, parents, siblings, relatives, preachers, and teachers run plays. We all do.

Remember the surly waitress that wouldn’t serve you last week? She was perhaps running a Pause, a strategic suspension of activity. Remember when your minister asked each family of the congregation to give a little more? It was a Challenge, albeit a most polite one, to cross a line from a position of comfort.

When Oprah Winfrey gives away one new car to every member of her studio audience she’s running a Peacock, a play that moves a marketplace through the raw power of showmanship. Unlike most other plays, the Peacock doesn’t bother much to leverage the marketplace. It manhandles it. It is the news and when well-run, it elevates mere stuntery to a decisively competitive advantage. For Oprah, the Peacock creates incredible residual goodwill that accrues to her brand and various ventures.