Twenty years in, it was time to write some things down.

The Vonk Playbook.

Five unwritten rules for the people side of digital change.

Kindle, available to pre-order now, arrives 1 October. Paperback follows on 1 October.

The dashboard is green. The project team has moved on. And the floor is still working the old way.

I have watched that happen more than once.

Every one of those plans was reasonable. What decided the outcome was what happened around them. Who got asked, and who did not. Who stopped saying anything, and when. What people worked out for themselves about whether this was being done with them or to them.

None of that is in the plan. All of it decides how the plan lands.

Who this is for

If you work where digital change meets people, this is for you. Whatever your title says.

Change, adoption, communications, training, project teams, implementation. You might be leading the work or three years into learning it. What you share with every other reader is the moment when a plan meets real people and reality turns out to be less neat than the framework suggested.

You have probably read the books. You have taken the courses. Something is still missing, and it is usually the part nobody wrote down.

And who it is not for

If you are looking for a certification framework, a maturity model, or a methodology with governance structures and swim lanes, this is not that book.

If you believe the people part is solved with one more reminder email and one more training session, we are going to disagree on most pages.

The five rules

Five rules, each one learned the hard way, each built around a real story from my career. They are not a method and they are not a formula. They are what I wish someone had told me earlier.

Know Your Audience

Every project team says it knows the audience. Most know about the audience. This is the rule that sets your definition of success, and it starts with asking instead of assuming.
Use Common Sense

Red, amber, green. Three colours, and still ignored. This one runs underneath everything else, because it is about questioning the frame that everybody has already agreed to.
Listen to the Loudest Critic

The person slowing things down is often the person who understands them best. They are loud because they usually care. This rule tells you who to sit next to.
Own Your Mistakes

When the work pushes back, and it will, this is the rule that is already waiting. Own it quickly, before the explaining starts.
Make Others Shine

This one you do not wait for. You go looking for the person you can put in the light.

Rules 1 and 3 are where you anchor. Rule 2 runs the whole time. Rule 4 is there for the hard days. Rule 5 you go looking for. The book calls that the shape of the rules.

Pre-order the Kindle edition Read the first story

What is in the book

92 pages.

Five chapters, one for each rule.

Ten tools.

One Monday Morning System.

Every chapter is built around a real story from my career. A Dutch telco in 2007. A Dutch ministry in 2012. A Dutch retailer. South Africa in 2014. Then the principle behind the rule, two practical tools, scenarios to test your thinking, and a Monday Morning Action you can start this week.

Ten tools in total. The Success Question. The Fourth Color. The Loudest Critic Protocol. The 15-Minute Rule. The Spotlight Handoff. And five more.

At the end there is a bonus chapter, Your Monday Morning System, built around a five-question check-in.

The book also gives you access to the digital toolkit, where the templates live.

Arlette Vonk on the phone, smiling, in a light open office

Who wrote this

I have spent twenty years in the rooms where digital change actually happens, across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I started as an end user. I still ask why.

That is a lot of projects, and a lot of getting it wrong before getting it right. Somewhere along the way I noticed I kept coming back to the same handful of things. They weren’t things I had learned from a methodology or a course. I had learned them from experience. So I wrote them down.

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