Network playbooks and directives as decision rows

What this covers

Every playbook, directive, recommendation, and experiment your organization authors lives in one table, the network data. That same table also drives the Playbook Scoreboard (hq.verinode.ai/playbooks), but this article is about a different read on it: how each plan shows up as a row in the Decisions log and the Action Plans view, the two surfaces that reuse the same board Verinode operators use on the IQ side.

Decisions is a franchisor inbox, not just a playbook list. Alongside your own decision plans, it also carries three other kinds of rows your organization deals with: the intervention queue for at-risk memberships, consent requests waiting on a membership's response, and program audits and violations. Those three have their own dedicated articles, linked at the bottom. This one is grounded specifically in how a decision plan, one you authored and pushed (or are still drafting), gets projected into that shared board: which status it shows, which color it wears, and what clicking Act, Park, or Ignore actually does to the underlying plan.

Where to find it

Two sidebar entries, both in the same top cluster as Feed:

• Decisions, at hq.verinode.ai/decisions. The full log, every plan alongside every intervention, consent request, and program flag, laid out as a gallery of tiles.
• Action Plans, at hq.verinode.ai/actions. The execution view, in-flight plans laid out on a timeline instead of a flat gallery.

Right below those two on the sidebar sit Playbooks (the ranked adoption Scoreboard) and Broadcast (where a plan is actually written and pushed). All four work together: Broadcast is where a plan is born, Decisions is where you track and act on it day to day, Action Plans is where you watch it run, and Playbooks is where you step back and rank how the whole portfolio is landing. See Scoreboard vs Decisions Inbox for that distinction in full, and Broadcasting to your network for how a plan gets written and pushed in the first place.

The four plan kinds

Every plan carries a plan_kind you choose when you author it in Broadcast, and it cannot be changed afterward. Four kinds exist today:

| Kind | What it means | |---|---| | Playbook | A canonical, multi-step process meant to be standardized across the network on an ongoing basis, a safety cadence, an estimate-review protocol, a recurring workflow. | | Directive | A one-shot instruction with a date attached: do this, by then. Firmer language than a recommendation, but Verinode does not enforce it. Nothing locks a membership out for missing a directive. | | Recommendation | A soft nudge, guidance you want to surface with no enforcement behind it. | | Experiment | A network-level test, used when you want to try an approach on a subset of memberships before rolling it out further. |

The kind is the one thing that changes how a plan is treated visually once it lands in the log: a Directive carries warning-level severity, everything else (Playbook, Recommendation, Experiment) carries info-level severity. That distinction is covered in detail below.

From a draft in Broadcast to a row in the log

A plan enters the log the moment you save it in Broadcast, Initiatives tab, even before you activate it. It saves as draft status, and it is already visible on the Decisions page at that point, sitting in the Pending bucket described below. Nothing has been pushed to any membership yet; a draft is content you are still writing.

Activating the plan and pushing it to your chosen memberships (with an optional per-membership IU sponsorship budget) flips it to active, and that is when it starts accumulating adoption data on the Playbook Scoreboard. See Broadcasting to your network for the full authoring and push flow.

Status lifecycle: five plan statuses, five log states

A decision plan's own status column only ever holds one of five values: draft, active, paused, completed, archived. The Decisions log doesn't speak that vocabulary directly. It runs the same five-state model the IQ side uses (Pending, Acted, Parked, Ignored, Resolved), so every HQ row, plan or otherwise, gets translated into that shape first. For a decision plan, the translation is:

| Plan status | Internal log state | What you see in the status filter | |---|---|---| | draft | seen | Pending | | active | actioned | Acted | | paused | parked | Parked | | completed | resolved | Resolved | | archived | dismissed | Ignored |

A draft plan lands directly in the "seen" bucket rather than "new", which in practice means the same thing here: it shows up under Pending in the status dropdown, counted alongside the intervention, consent, and audit rows still waiting on a decision.

Severity: how a plan's kind sets its color

Every row in the log, plan or otherwise, carries a severity of info, warning, or critical, and that severity drives the accent color on evidence-style tiles across the platform. For decision plans specifically, the rule is simple: a Directive is warning severity, a Playbook, Recommendation, or Experiment is info severity. Nothing about a plan can push it to critical, that level is reserved for the intervention and program-violation rows elsewhere in the same log.

In practice this severity shows up less than you might expect on a plan tile, because of what a decision plan does and doesn't carry. Unlike an intervention or a program violation, a plan row has no dollar figure and no per-row consequence sentence attached to it, plans are network-wide content, not a priced risk on one membership's book. That means a plan's tile in the gallery renders as its title alone, large, with no dollar amount and no colored urgency chip above it. The severity value is still there in the data (and it is what a directive's warning level would drive if a consequence line ever gets attached to plan rows in a future release), but today it doesn't change what you see on a pending plan's tile.

What severity does still influence: whether a plan shows up in the domain facet correctly (every plan carries the Operations domain, see below) and how the plan is treated internally when Verinode decides which lane it belongs in on the unfiltered board.

Domain: every plan is Operations

Regardless of kind, every decision plan is tagged with the Operations domain. If your organization also has open interventions, consent requests, or program flags, the business-area dropdown above the gallery will show Operations alongside Risk (interventions), Governance (consent requests), and Compliance (program audits and violations), each with its own live count. That dropdown only appears once your board actually spans two or more of those areas, on a network with nothing but plans in flight, it stays hidden.

Reading a plan tile in the gallery

Each plan renders as one tile, and its top-right corner carries a small status pill instead of an entity logo, since a plan isn't tied to a named vendor, client, or membership the way an intervention or consent request is. The pill's color and label follow the status mapping above:

• Pending (Hard Hat Yellow) for a draft plan.
• Acted (green) once the plan is active.
• Parked (IQ Teal) while paused.
• Resolved (brighter green) once completed.
• Ignored (grey) once archived.

A plan tile never shows the red Urgent treatment reserved for critical-severity or high-dollar rows elsewhere in the log, since a plan's severity tops out at warning and it never carries a calculated dollar value. Once a plan is Acted or Resolved, a diagonal stamp reading Acted or Done appears across the tile and the card washes pale green, the fastest way to scan a busy board for what's already live versus what's still a draft.

Clicking a plan tile's body opens it in the same slide-over workspace used across the platform, see the detail section below.

Where a plan lands: Decide this week, Coming up, or Handled

When the status filter is set to All, the Decisions gallery organizes itself into three lanes: Decide this week, Coming up, and Handled. Because a plan carries no deadline and no dollar figure, a pending plan (still a draft) will almost always land in Coming up, "holding until you have room", rather than Decide this week, unless something else about your board's pacing pulls it forward. The moment a plan is Acted, Parked, Ignored, or Resolved, it moves into Handled along with everything else you've already closed out on the board. See The decision log: lanes and status tiles for how the three lanes work across the whole board, including the reason chips shown on cards in the first two lanes.

Acting on a plan row from the log

Every plan tile carries the same three buttons the rest of the Decisions log uses, Act, Park (labeled "Not now" elsewhere in the shell), and Ignore, but for a plan row each one is wired to a different mutation on the network data than it would be for an intervention or a program flag:

1. 1Act on a draft or paused plan activates it: status flips to active, and the activation timestamp is recorded. Act on an already-active plan instead completes it: status flips to completed, with its own completion timestamp. Act has nothing left to do on a completed or archived plan; clicking it returns an error telling you the plan is already in that state.
2. 2Park pauses an active plan: status flips to paused. Park has no effect on a plan in any other status.
3. 3Ignore archives the plan from any status it's currently in, draft, active, or paused alike.

Acting on a plan is restricted to group admins. Any group user can open the Decisions page and read what's there, but if a non-admin group user tries to Act, Park, or Ignore a row, the action fails and returns "Only group admins can take this action." rather than changing anything.

The Action Plans view: a plan's lifecycle as a timeline

Action Plans (hq.verinode.ai/actions) shows only rows that are actually in flight: for a decision plan, that means only active and completed plans appear there at all. A draft, a paused plan, and an archived plan are all filtered out of this view entirely, they only ever show up back on the Decisions gallery.

For every active or completed plan, Verinode builds a four-step timeline anchored to the plan's own dates so it draws correctly on the gantt:

• Drafted, always marked complete, sitting at day zero.
• Activated, marked complete the moment the plan goes active, positioned at however many days passed between drafting and activation.
• Adoption check, a checkpoint roughly two weeks into the rollout (or earlier, if the plan completed sooner than that).
• Completed, positioned at the plan's actual completion date once it has one, or 30 days out as a placeholder while the plan is still running.

The Adoption check and Completed steps both flip to complete at the same moment, when the plan's completion date lands. This timeline is a synthesized read built from the plan's own timestamps, not a step-by-step log Verinode captured in real time as the plan progressed, so treat the day-by-day spacing as approximate scaffolding for the gantt bar rather than a precise record of when adoption checkpoints actually happened.

Opening a plan's full record

Clicking a plan tile opens the same glass-panel workspace used across the platform: a header reading "Decisions / [plan title]", a position counter ("N of M"), and the plan's title, body text, kind, status, and key dates in the body below. Use the arrow keys, the floating prev/next arrows, or a swipe to step to the next plan in your current filtered list without closing the panel.

A decision plan's detail carries no membership-level information at all, no franchisee name, no per-location figures. That is deliberate: a plan is network-wide content you authored, it isn't about any single membership's business. Contrast that with an intervention or a consent request row in the same log, both of which do reference one membership (shown anonymized or by name depending on your network's entity model), because those two row kinds are inherently about a specific location. See HQ overview for the trust boundary that governs what HQ can and cannot see about an individual membership's data.

Empty states

If your board has nothing on it at all (status filter on All, no plans, interventions, consent requests, or program flags yet), the Decisions gallery reads:

No decisions for you yet. They'll land here as Verinode spots cost savings, risk, and growth opportunities in your data.

That message is shared verbatim with the operator-side board; on HQ it simply means your organization hasn't authored a plan or accumulated any of the other three row kinds yet. Filter to a specific status with nothing in it, for example Parked with no paused plans, and the message narrows to the status you picked:

Nothing parked for you right now.

On Action Plans, if nothing is currently in flight, the gantt view reads:

You haven't started a plan on any of these yet. Open one in gallery to start the plan.

Best-practice example

Say you've drafted a Directive in Broadcast asking every membership to adopt a new adjuster-communication cadence within 30 days. The moment you save it, it appears on Decisions under Pending, tagged Operations, sitting quietly in the Coming up lane since it carries no deadline field of its own yet. You review the wording, then click Act: the plan flips to Acted, moves to Handled on the gallery, and immediately shows up on Action Plans with a two-step gantt bar already drawn, Drafted and Activated both checked off, Adoption check due in about two weeks. Three weeks later, adoption across your memberships looks solid on the Playbook Scoreboard, so you open the same tile on Decisions and click Act again: the plan completes, its Resolved stamp appears, and the Adoption check and Completed steps on its Action Plans timeline both light up together. If instead the rollout stalled and you decided to shelve it, Park would have paused it without losing the record, ready to reactivate with the same button once you were ready to try again.

Related articles

• Scoreboard vs Decisions Inbox
• Broadcasting to your network
• Working a playbook: acknowledge, start, complete, or decline
• The decision log: lanes and status tiles
• The interventions queue for at-risk locations
• Consent requests: when a name or private figure can appear
• Audits and violations: enforcing a program
• HQ overview

Data sources