Planzai knowledge sprint
I’ve been in Belfast for the past weekend, doing what we came to describe as a ‘knowledge sprint‘. My friend Rich Dale (pictured above, uploading his brain to the internet) is co-founder of a startup called Planzai. I’m on their board of advisors.*
Planzai is a web application that helps people do things, with easy-to-follow expert guidance. It’s like having a project management plan for whatever you want to get done – growing potatoes, training for a marathon, creating a personal budget, organising a wedding… but with someone who knows what they’re doing there to guide you along the way.
Planzai provides the platform, and experts create ‘blueprints’ – step-by-step plans that do the guidance, make sure you don’t forget anything, that you do them in the right order, allow enough time for each thing and perform the tasks in a timely fashion.
You tick off the steps as you go along, and the steps are explained and demystified as you encounter them.
Example Planzai blueprint for making a music video for your band
But they need more of these blueprints – and they need them soon, and so originally, I was asked to help run a workshop that would allow us to quickly generate more of these plans. A “knowledge sprint” to create as many useful blueprints as possible over a weekend.
Instead, I suggested that we do a workshop to generate the perfect ‘How to make a Planzai blueprint’ blueprint. The “meta-blueprint”, if you like… so that we can always quickly and dependably source more blueprints using a system that had its own quality control and step-by-step guidance built in.
This, for these guys, made perfect sense. It would mean that anyone with a bit of specialist or expert knowledge in any field could follow the instructions and generate a Planzai-quality blueprint for others to use.
