// playbook · 12-week program

The 12-Week Program

Not a six-month program with a steering committee — a twelve-week deployment with documented results. Four phases, each with a clear owner, a clear output, and a clear failure mode. The program ends with your team drawing its own Maps, not with a deck that gets reviewed once and shelved.

Build your plan

Fill in your context and generate a twelve-week plan written around your actual task, builder, baseline, and where the recovered time goes — not a generic checklist. Copy it or download it and run it.

Function / team · who's running this

Who builds it · one person, not a committee

The one task to automate first

How often it happens

What it costs today · your baseline

If it goes wrong, the error is…

Where the recovered time goes · the redirect — name it now

Add a function and a first task to generate.

The four phases

The thinking your plan is built on. Each phase builds on the last: the audit informs the build; the build informs the expand; the expand creates the time that the redirect converts into permanent capability. Skip a phase and the value from the phases before it degrades.

Weeks 1–2

Audit & Pick

Each function maps how its team actually spends the week — not the org-chart version — and picks one automation candidate: work that happens often, that the team does grudgingly, where being wrong costs you an afternoon.

Weeks 3–6

Build & Pilot

One person builds — not a committee, not a vendor. Six hours, a rough first prompt, tested on real examples. By week six every function has at least one workflow live with documented results — or an honest post-mortem of why the first attempt did not.

Weeks 7–9

Expand & Connect

Second and third automations go faster because the team learned the pattern. Patterns start jumping functions — the reporting workflow in finance maps to operations. A thirty-minute cross-function sync makes the learning visible, and that is where the compounding starts.

Weeks 10–12

Redirect & Document

The phase most businesses skip — and lose the value because of it. Recovered time that does not get explicitly redirected gets reabsorbed by Slack, meetings, and busywork. Each leader names where the time goes.

Want us to run the program with your team?

We run the 12-week deployment live — every phase, every function, documented results at the end.

From Running at the Speed of Light, Chapter 15 — The 12-Week Acceleration Program · Prometheus Press