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Need Diagnosis Row: Playbooks Under 40% Adoption

On the Playbook Scoreboard, the second row of tiles is the one built to flag trouble. It surfaces every decision plan your organization has shipped to the network that is both measurably underperfo…

9 min read·Updated July 14, 2026
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What this row is

On the Playbook Scoreboard, the second row of tiles is the one built to flag trouble. It surfaces every decision plan your organization has shipped to the network that is both measurably underperforming (adoption completion under 40 percent) and has been live long enough for Verinode to have actually measured it. It is not a workload queue and it does not tell you what to do next on any single membership. It is a portfolio-health flag: of everything you have pushed, these are the plans that need a second look.

The row sits between Top Performers (the plans that are landing best) and All Active Playbooks (the full ranked list). Where Top Performers answers "what's working," this row answers the other half of the same question: "what isn't, and has had a fair chance to."

Where to find it

Open Playbooks from the HQ sidebar, at hq.verinode.ai/playbooks. Scroll past the page header and the four-tile hero band (Active playbooks, Completed 90d, In draft, Distinct kinds). The Need Diagnosis row is the second horizontally scrolling row of tiles on the page, directly under Top Performers and above All Active Playbooks.

There is no separate page, tab, or filter for this row. It is one section of the single continuous Playbook Scoreboard scroll, alongside the other two rows described in Playbook Scoreboard: the network-wide adoption view.

Why it stays hidden until there is data

This row applies two conditions before a plan qualifies, and both have to be true at once:

  1. The plan's adoption completion rate is under 40 percent.
  2. The nightly adoption cron has decorated the plan at least once.

The second condition is the one that is easy to miss and matters most. Adoption percentages are not calculated live. A background job runs overnight, reads every membership's status on every plan (pushed, acknowledged, in progress, declined, completed), and writes a completion rate back onto the plan. Until that job has touched a plan for the first time, the plan simply has no percentage to judge, it is not that it is doing badly, it is that nothing has measured it yet.

Without this gate, a plan you activated an hour ago would show 0 percent adoption (nobody has had time to act on it) and would land in this row purely because no membership has responded yet, not because the plan is failing. That would make the row noisy and unreliable, and it would punish plans for being new rather than for underperforming. The gate means a plan only ever appears here once it has had at least one honest reading.

Note

"Awaiting cron" is the label you will see elsewhere on the Scoreboard (in Top Performers and All Active Playbooks) for a plan that has not been decorated yet. A plan showing "Awaiting cron" will never appear in Need Diagnosis, no matter how low its eventual adoption turns out to be, until that first overnight run has actually happened.

What counts as "under 40%"

The percentage behind each tile is the adoption completion rate: the share of memberships the plan was pushed to that have reached completed status on that plan, not merely acknowledged or started it. A plan where every membership opened and read the push, but few finished acting on it, will still show a low number here. That is by design, acknowledgment is not adoption.

The row draws its candidates from both completed and active plans, the same pool Top Performers draws from. A plan that has formally wrapped (moved to completed status) can still land in Need Diagnosis if its final completion rate never climbed past 40 percent, closing a plan out does not erase a poor adoption record. Plans in draft or paused status are never candidates for this row: a draft has not been pushed to anyone yet, and a paused plan is not currently being measured for the same reason it does not appear as a top performer either.

Among everything that qualifies, tiles are sorted lowest adoption first, so the plan struggling the most sits at the front of the row when you open the page. The row caps at six tiles; if more than six plans qualify, only the six lowest-adopting show.

The Analyse-red, high-intensity styling

Every tile in this row is rendered in the Analyse signal color (Ember Red) at the platform's high-intensity treatment, the same visual language used for Take Action alerts elsewhere on the platform. Two things distinguish it from the calmer tiles in Top Performers and All Active Playbooks:

  • Color. Regardless of exactly how far under 40 percent a plan sits, every tile here is Analyse red. There is no gradient of severity within the row, being present in Need Diagnosis at all is the signal.
  • Intensity. The gradient fade on these tiles is deliberately heavier than a normal browse tile. Verinode's tile system reserves this "high intensity" fade for surfaces that should read as "this is worth looking at" on sight, rather than "here's some data." Need Diagnosis tiles use it intentionally: this is the row where your eye should land first when scanning the page.

This pairing (Analyse red plus high intensity) is the same combination used for the tiles in All Active Playbooks that individually drop under 40 percent, but here it is applied to the entire row at once, since every tile in Need Diagnosis has already cleared that bar by definition.

Reading a tile

Each tile in this row follows the same four-part shape as the rest of the Scoreboard:

  • Label (top): the adoption percentage, read as "N% adopted." Because every plan here has already been decorated at least once, you will never see "Awaiting cron" in this row, that label only ever appears elsewhere on the page.
  • Headline: the plan's title, exactly as your team authored it in Broadcast.
  • Sub-line: the plan's kind (Playbook, Initiative, Intervention, Pattern, or Subtask, depending on how it was authored) followed by the current affected count over the current total count, for example "Playbook, 3 of 14 franchisees." That fraction is how many memberships the plan is currently reaching, out of how many it was pushed to, the same fraction shown elsewhere on the Scoreboard.
  • Meta line (bottom): this is where Need Diagnosis differs from every other row on the page.

The review-friction signal in the meta line

The meta line is the row's second diagnostic layer, and it is worth reading carefully because it distinguishes two different failure modes that both produce the same low adoption percentage:

  • If the plan has a median-days-to-acknowledge figure, the meta line reads it with an explicit flag attached, for example "11d median ack, review friction." The "review friction" phrase is not decoration, it is the point: a plan can be under 40 percent adopted either because memberships are actively declining or ignoring it, or because it is simply taking them a long time to even open and acknowledge it before they ever get to acting. A high median-acknowledge number attached to a low adoption percentage tells you the friction is upstream, at the review step, not necessarily in the work itself.
  • If no membership has acknowledged the plan yet at all, the meta line reads "Awaiting acknowledgment" instead. That is a stronger signal than slow acknowledgment: nobody has engaged with the plan at all, which points toward a visibility or communication problem rather than a friction problem.

Reading the meta line alongside the percentage turns a single number into a diagnosis. A plan at 15 percent adopted with "Awaiting acknowledgment" needs a different conversation (did the push even land, is it buried under other requests) than a plan at 15 percent adopted with "22d median ack, review friction" (memberships are seeing it, but something about the ask is making them slow to commit).

Tip

A plan in this row is not automatically a bad plan. It may be a good plan poorly communicated, one that needs a reminder broadcast, or one whose ask is heavier than the network's current bandwidth allows. Click into the tile to reach the plan's full detail on Decisions, where you can see exactly which memberships have and have not engaged, and follow up directly with the slow movers rather than judging the whole network by one aggregate number.

Clicking a tile

Clicking any tile in this row navigates to /franchise/decisions?plan=<plan-id>, opening that specific plan's detail inside the Decisions Inbox. Need Diagnosis itself has no modal, drawer, or per-membership breakdown of its own, it is a ranked entry point, not a workspace. The actual per-membership roster (who has acknowledged, who has started, who has declined, who has completed, and any IU sponsorship attached to the push) lives once, on the Decisions page, and every tile on the Scoreboard routes there rather than duplicating that view.

Empty state: the row disappears entirely

Unlike Top Performers and All Active Playbooks, Need Diagnosis has no fallback text. If no plan currently qualifies (nothing is both under 40 percent adopted and already decorated by the cron), the row is omitted from the page altogether, heading and all. There is no "Nothing needs diagnosis right now" message.

This is a deliberate choice: a network with no Need Diagnosis row is a network with nothing currently flagged as struggling. It is not a rendering gap or a sign that data has not loaded. If you expect to see this row and do not, the most common explanations are that every plan you have shipped is either performing above 40 percent, or every underperforming plan you have is still too new for the cron to have decorated it yet, check All Active Playbooks for plans still reading "Awaiting cron" if you want to confirm which case applies.

How to use this row

  1. 1Open the Playbook Scoreboard at hq.verinode.ai/playbooks and scroll to the second row. If it is not there, nothing currently qualifies, skip ahead to All Active Playbooks to see what is still awaiting its first cron reading.
  2. 2Scan left to right. Tiles are sorted lowest adoption first, so the plan in the most trouble sits at the front.
  3. 3Read the meta line on each tile before clicking through. "Review friction" points at a slow-review problem; "Awaiting acknowledgment" points at a visibility problem. Each calls for a different follow-up.
  4. 4Click into a tile to reach its full per-membership detail on Decisions, and work the slow movers directly rather than treating the aggregate percentage as the whole story.
  5. 5Revisit this row on a regular cadence, since a plan can move out of it (adoption climbs past 40 percent) or a new plan can move in, purely as the nightly cron keeps recalculating.

The privacy boundary

Every figure in this row, the adoption percentage, the affected-over-total fraction, and the median-days-to-acknowledge figure, is a rollup across your network. HQ does not see any individual membership's private business data (their jobs, their financials, their clients) anywhere on this row or on the plan detail it links to. Clicking through shows you where each membership stands in that plan's own adoption lifecycle, pushed, acknowledged, in progress, declined, or completed, not the underlying business results that led them there. On an independent-operator network, membership names in that detail view are shown anonymized; on a same-entity network, real location names show through. Either way, the Need Diagnosis row measures whether your network is acting on what you have shipped, not what any single membership's business looks like.

Related reading

Data sources

  1. 1.Your decision plans and their per-membership adoption status. the network data / the network data.
  2. 2.Nightly adoption decoration (affected/total counts, median days, completion rate). HQ aggregate-refresh cron.
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