The Playbook hierarchy

This is the canonical reference for how a Playbook Template is structured and how that structure becomes a runtime Playbook. If you're new to the vocabulary, Key concepts in 5 minutes is a gentler entry point.

The design-time hierarchy

Five levels deep, top to bottom:

Playbook Template

The whole design — the thing you publish, version, and share. A Playbook Template owns its own metadata (title, description, visibility), its theme, and the chain of phases that make up the journey. Templates have a draft / published lifecycle (see Lifecycle reference) and accumulate a chain of versions over time.

Phase

A coloured frame on the canvas that groups related session templates — for example, Discovery, Design, Implementation, or Opening, Middle, Closing. A Playbook Template typically has 2–6 phases. Phases are purely organisational: they don't carry their own pre-work or agenda.

Session Template

A single session's blueprint. This is the level where most of the design work happens. Each Session Template carries:

• A title, purpose / goal, and estimated duration.
• Pre-work — what participants complete before the session: questions, reading, uploads, decisions, ranking, watch-and-respond, and the rest of the prep task library. See Pre-work and engagement for the full task catalogue.
• An agenda — the in-session running order, made up of activities, steps, breaks, and labels (described below). Each item carries its own timing and facilitator guidance.
• Variables that resolve at runtime — attendee names, project specifics, or anything else that's per-instance rather than baked into the design.
• An optional theme override (see Theme priority chain).

Activity

One item inside a Session Template's agenda — a discussion, a working session, a decision moment, a break, or a label. Activities are what the facilitator and participants experience as the running order during the session. Each activity has a duration, a facilitator-facing description, and a stack of steps inside it.

Step

A micro-instruction inside an Activity — the smallest unit. A step might be a single facilitator note ("ask each person for one word"), a timed beat, a question to read aloud, or a small piece of guidance. Steps are what the facilitator follows in the moment.

The runtime mirror

When you instantiate a Playbook Template, the design-time structure is mirrored as runtime objects:

The mirroring is one-way and version-pinned:

• A Playbook is the live counterpart of a Playbook Template. It carries the team, dates, status, and tabs (Tasks, Questions, Sessions).
• Each Session is the live counterpart of a Session Template, with its own scheduled time, attendees, and recorded responses.
• The Playbook is pinned to the template version it was created with. Publishing v4 of the template tomorrow does not change a Playbook running on v3.

Where structure lives vs where data lives

A useful way to keep the layers straight:

Said in one sentence: Templates own structure. Playbooks own runtime data. If you're trying to find where something is stored, ask "is this part of the design, or part of what happened?" — and that tells you which side of the line it lives on.

Pitfalls and gotchas

Related pages