From cutting a budget to inheriting a team mid-crisis, there’s a Playbook for the decisions on your desk. Choose a behavioural Play, work with the tools that bring the room with you, and a clear move to make. Backed up with stories from leaders who faced the same decision. What’s Next? isn’t a course or a chatbot, it’s the Playbook you open for today’s challenge.
Choose just the Playbook that you need today. Subscribe for full access, for yourself or for your Team.
A chatbot, gives you an answer.
A Playbook gives you a Position, Plays to choose between, a Plan with Your Next Move at every step, and the Precedents of leaders who’ve made the same call.
The Position, a choice of Plays, and the Precedents — open. The Plan, tool by tool with Your Next Move.
Free sample This is a complete Playbook, open in full — no card, no sign-up.
“I'm writing next quarter's plan and last quarter's didn't land.”
“I'm writing next quarter's plan and last quarter's didn't land.” A Playbook for leaders: a Position, a choice of Plays, a Plan of tools with Your Next Move, and the Precedents of those who faced it.
Declare what stops. Publish a won’t-have list before anyone negotiates up. Protect focus by surfacing the losses, named.
Play BNegotiate the budget bilaterally with one peer whose priorities also slipped. Keep the conversations explicit; keep the commitments short.
Each position explained in full to make an informed choice.
Your Next MoveWhat’s actually in your won’t-have list this quarter — and if the answer is ‘nothing’, whose disappointment are you avoiding by refusing to say no?
Your Next MovePlot this quarter’s commitments by value and effort, then name the one high-effort, low-value item you’re still carrying out of habit — and what it would cost you to stop it.
Leaders who made the same call — framed by how it went.
Position, Play, Plan, Precedent, and Your Next Move.
Buy the one playbook you need today or subscribe for full access.
Buy or Subscribe →Each Playbook is built the same way, in the same order. You learn the shape once; the shape does the work.
A single sentence names the situation, the one you’d actually say. If it sounds like you, you’re in the right Playbook.
PEach Playbook offers a choice of behavioural Plays. Each positions you differently for what comes next. The choice is how you’ll stand; what follows flows from it.
PPlan the right tools & techniques to use, in order. A sequence of moves to deliver your chosen Play. Begin with Your Next Move, a single challenging direction you can act on today.
PLeaders who’ve made the same call. What they tried, what held, what didn’t. Hard evidence, not theory.
POne Playbook for the situation in front of you, the full Library for the year ahead, or five seats for the team you lead. Every one at the Founders’ rate.
Will Rowan has spent over fifteen years in product leadership and coaching, much of it in financial services and government, two settings where the cost of a badly run decision is unusually visible. What’s Next? grew out of that work: the same management situations recurring across very different organisations, and a shortage of usable answers in the moment. The Playbooks are those answers, worked out and written down.
What’s Next? is an editorial project for leaders who meet new situations faster than the textbooks can cover them. It isn’t a course, a coach, or a chatbot. Forty Playbooks covering the Positions you’ll meet this year, each one a Position, a choice of Plays, a Plan of tools with Your Next Move at every step, and the Precedents from leaders who’ve made the same call.
What’s Next? is built on 2,490 sources, the books, cases, and research behind every Play and Precedent.
Updated
What’s Next? is The Leader’s Playbook, a library of forty, each one working through a real situation a leader walks into, from cutting a budget to inheriting a team mid-crisis. Every Playbook follows the same four-part structure, the Four Ps: a Position to stand on (the situation named in a single sentence), a choice of two Plays so you pick your approach deliberately, a Plan that turns that choice into a sequence of concrete tools, and the Precedents of leaders who stood there before. Each Playbook runs about twelve minutes, short enough to watch in the gap before the meeting it’s made for. It isn’t a course, a coach, or a chatbot; it’s an editorial library you open for the situation in front of you. The 115 tools behind the Playbooks are free to read in the Toolbox, without an account.
Every Playbook works through a different situation, and each is built the same way so you learn the shape once. It opens by naming your Position, the sentence you’d actually say walking in; if it sounds like you, you’re in the right Playbook. It then gives you two Plays to choose between, so you pick your approach deliberately rather than by drift, with each Play explained in full so the choice is informed. The Plan turns your chosen Play into a sequence of tools, used in order, each one ending in a single concrete move. Running through it is Your Next Move, one challenging direction you can act on today. And it closes on Precedent: leaders who stood exactly where you’re standing, what they tried, what held, and what didn’t. You walk out with a question to take into the room and answer there.
A chatbot gives you an answer, a paragraph of plausible advice generated from your prompt. A Playbook gives you the structure of a decision instead: a Position to stand on, two Plays to choose between, a Plan with Your Next Move at every step, and the Precedents of leaders who actually made each choice work. The difference isn’t that the answer is better; it’s a different medium for the decision. You don’t describe your situation from scratch and hope the model understands it. You open the Playbook named for the situation you’re already in, made by an editor who has worked through it, and choose your own Play. A chatbot improvises every time you ask. A Playbook is composed, recorded, and the same whether you open it at midnight or before the board meeting. One answers questions; the other helps you decide.
No. There’s no curriculum, no progression, no certificate. What’s Next? is an editorial library you open for the situation in front of you, not a programme you work through start to finish. You subscribe to the Library and open whichever Playbook fits the meeting you’re walking into.
Leaders who meet new situations faster than the textbooks can cover them, mid-career and above. If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting thinking that could have gone better, or inherited a team and a mess in the same week, the Playbooks are named for situations you’ll recognise in seconds.
Yes. The Toolbox, all 115 tools behind the Playbooks, is free and public; you can read any of them without an account. The newsletter is free too, and never gated. The forty Playbooks sit behind a Library subscription.
A Library subscription gives you all forty Playbooks, each around twelve minutes. The Plan inside each one opens tool by tool as you work it. A subscription also includes the Working Toolbox, your work, kept across sessions, coming soon.
A Library subscription is the Founders’ price, a launch rate held for twelve months, then reverting to standard. It’s £18.96/month, or £136.51/year on the annual rate. Prices are shown in your local currency, see Subscribe for the full breakdown.
