Pip Decks
Tools for business, strategy, storytelling, user experience design, marketing, and workshop leaders.
What are Pip Decks?
Pip Decks are the invention of Charles Burdett, a UI and UX innovator living and working in Manchester, England. Charles writes that “create tools that inspire action and make work more engaging.”
Pip Decks are a set of physical and digital cards that provide “recipes” that help business leaders and teams work together to solve problems and perform better.
Each deck has a unique angle – teamwork, storytelling, user experience. The full set of decks draws on a mix of business management, marketing, creativity, and innovation skills and puts them in an accessible form factor. Pre-plan presentations and creative sessions or use the decks in collaboration with colleagues and clients during work sessions and meetings.
While some have proposed that Pip Decks make work categories like innovation, marketing, copywriting, leadership, and strategy quick and easy to adopt, we see these tools through a more nuanced lens. If we were to position Pip Decks with a slogan it would be something like, “Where murky ends and hard work begins.”
Use our affiliate links to get Pip Decks. Each purchase through our links pays a percentage back to support our work on storytelling and business development.
What do we mean by that? Pip Decks offer tried-and-true processes, but not answers. The essence of your organization, your team, your brand, and your messaging are for you to figure out by getting close with your customer base, understanding them, and cultivating a point of view, products, services, and ideas that really connect.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular Pip Decks available today.
Pip Decks for Stories
Storyteller Tactics
The Storyteller Tactics deck by Pip Decks puts pitch, advertising, branding and customer journey stories in the palm of your hand. Build a bank of rich stories that clarify, motivate, educate, and inspire your customers, stakeholders, clients, and team.
Storytelling is at the heart of how humankind has crafted experience beyond the here and now. Though stories feel familiar, there’s a craft to telling stories and common frameworks that help to maintain interest, build tension, and provide the satisfying experience listeners, viewers, or readers expect from the stories they see and hear.
This deck starts with a series of recipes for stories that sell, motivate, convince, connect, lead, and so on. Each recipe includes the stages and questions to ask yourself as you craft your story.
Whether you are pitching to investors, collecting customer stories for marketing, documenting internal stories to demonstrate your organization’s knowledge and expertise, or building a brand story from the ground up, Storyteller Tactics provides the knowledge to “cut to the chase,” so you can get on with writing and expressing what you have to say.
But what about when you have your stories down, and your team is trying to structure work projects so everyone is in alignment, and the group is proactively contributing based on what’s needed to move the project forward? Workshop Tactics by Pip Decks provides processes to improve collaborative outcomes.
Workshop Tactics
Structure better workshops with 54 workshop tactics cards, each built around a recipe for workshopping challenges and opportunities in your business and marketing mix. When you execute on these simple plans you’ll gain more clarity and create more consistency in your organization.
When first establishing a team, Workshop Tactics provides steps for onboarding team members and orienting them to the work at hand. Goal setting, understanding the framework, and generative idea development exercises help to build early synergy.
But synergy is not enough. Teams need processes for evaluating, testing, discarding, and elevating ideas and objectives within the framework of the job at hand.
Pip Decks for Workshops
Evaluation and decision processes are included, as well as a set of “technique” cards that provide team leaders with foundational practices for improving collaborative work environments.
But what about times your teamwork and stories are clear, but you’ve got to find a way to express and showcase your value through the development of a comprehensive brand?
Pip Decks for Experience Design
Build Your Brand Presence
A brand is far more than your logo what you say about your company. It’s how others perceive you, what you do, and how you do it. Access a toolkit of 54 recipes that help you evaluate the market, differentiate yourself, and create products, services, and ideas that people actually want and need!
Get the Pip Decks Ultimate Collection
What is so great about the ultimate collection? It provides the full bank of currently available tools to help you innovate, develop, pitch, and launch new ideas. Whether you are working intra-preneurally – that is innovating within an existing business, nonprofit, club or organization or entrepreneurially – that is, to launch a new business, the processes or “recipes” in these decks work synergistically to help you solve problems, tell stories, and get teams engaged and excited about what you are launching.
More Pip Decks
Pip Decks for Experience Design
Laws of UX
Design better experiences, processes and user interfaces with this set of 54 user experience guides from Pip Decks. The deck is organized by principles, methods and theories. Built from the ever-popular book of the same name, this deck keeps UX concepts front-of-mind as you develop products and services.
Pip Decks for Teams
Team Tactics
Increase buy-in and reduce confusion and friction with 54 team recipes that clarify projects, define scope, identify and mitigate barriers, define roles, and delegate tasks. Take your organization from siloed to collaborative with team activities that promote teamwork.
Pip Decks for Strategy
Strategy Tactics
Build short and long-term strategic skills to evaluate scenarios, frame objectives, and adjust tactics as you go.
Pip Decks for Innovation
Innovation Tactics
Develop customer insights, test hypotheses, and avoid feature bloat with actionable activities to shape products & services.
Pips for Productivity
Innovation Tactics
Solve planning, scheduling, and overwhelm with proven, actionable tactics.
Build more dynamic characters and evaluate the motivations and drives of your customers with Storyteller Archetypes.
Figure out what went wrong – and what went right, with retros, and evaluative process of the past that positions you for the future.
Why do we promote Pip Decks?
As media marketers, we tell stories all the time. After becoming a Pip Decks customer and using the decks for some time to accelerate our creative process, we applied to become an affiliate.
At Murdock Media Production we have a simple rule: market what you believe in. It might seem obvious, but there are plenty of marketing and production companies that will work on any project that slides into its pipeline. We are the opposite. We want the story to make sense, and we take the time, even when it increases our costs, to find the right story – something authentic, funny, moving, motivating that adds to the customer’s experience and understanding of the brand.
Pip Decks cards help us work with clients because we can use the card recipes to quickly demonstrate what we are looking for. Because the recipes create clear stepping stones from idea to realization, they empower and motivate our clients to get us what we need to be great creatives. Pip Decks help us help them.
In fact, we move between decks. Say we want to hold a workshop about how teamwork empowers an arts organization. We can use workshop tactics to structure our event so it’s focused and lively, teamwork cards to learn about how they work, and storyteller tactics to draw out interesting moments and scenarios that illustrate the story we need to tell.
Why wouldn’t we want to keep these skills a big secret?
Because when our clients are adept at these skills they are prepared to make the most of their media production. Whether we are working on a website and structuring the hierarchy of SEO optimized content, filming interviews with founders, employees and customers, capturing B-roll of a nonprofits annual parade, or simply working on talking points for a speech a founder needs to give, we want our clients to be prepared for creativity and innovation.
These tools help leaders turn their organizations toward teamwork, problem solving, innovation and creativity. For us that’s a huge win. We recommend these decks to everyone we work with. If you haven’t gotten your deck and you appreciate the work we do to increase access and understanding, follow our affilate links. A small commission on the sale will come back to us to support our work. Pip Decks provides an ROI guarantee on your purchase. We’ve seen it, and we think you’ll see it in both monetary as well as “soft” return in areas like teamwork, collegiality, creativity, and commitment.