Top Performers Row: Highest-Adoption Playbooks

What this row is

Top Performers is the first tile row on the Playbook Scoreboard, the one directly under the hero metrics. It answers one narrow question: of everything you have shipped to your network, which plans is the network actually adopting. It is not a list of plans you are proud of or plans you have flagged, it is a mechanical ranking built from the same nightly adoption numbers that power every other row on the page. This article is the deep-dive on exactly how that ranking is built and what each element on a tile in this row means. For the page as a whole (the hero metrics, the other two rows, the privacy boundary), see /help/hq-playbook-scoreboard.

Where to find it

Open Playbooks from the HQ sidebar, in the top group of links alongside Feed, Decisions, and Action Plans, at hq.verinode.ai/playbooks. Top Performers is the first horizontally scrolling tile row on the page, sitting directly beneath the four-tile hero band (Active playbooks, Completed (90d), In draft, Distinct kinds) and above the Need Diagnosis row.

How the candidate pool is built

The row starts from two groups of plans and no others:

• Every plan currently in completed status.
• Every plan currently in active status.

Plans in draft status and plans in paused status are never candidates for this row, no matter how strong their adoption number might eventually be. A draft has not been pushed to anyone yet, so it has nothing to rank. A paused plan is excluded on principle: pausing a plan takes it out of the "what's working right now" conversation this row exists to answer, even if its last known adoption number was strong.

From that combined pool, the row then:

1. Drops any plan whose adoption percentage has not been calculated yet. A brand-new plan sits with a null adoption figure until the nightly cron decorates it for the first time, and a plan with no figure yet cannot be ranked on one, so it is left out entirely rather than sorted to the bottom.
2. Sorts what remains by adoption percentage, highest first.
3. Keeps only the top six and drops the rest.

If two plans land on the exact same adoption percentage, the tie is broken by two rules working together, neither of which you configure directly. First, a completed plan and an active plan tied on the same percentage: the completed plan sits earlier in the row, because the underlying candidate list is assembled completed-plans-first, then active-plans. Second, two plans of the same status tied on the same percentage: the one you created more recently sits earlier, because the base list every row on this page draws from is already ordered newest-created-first before any adoption sorting happens.

Reading a tile in this row

Every tile in Top Performers renders at the larger, double-width tile size (matching Need Diagnosis, and wider than the standard tiles in All Active Playbooks). Each one carries four pieces of information:

Accent color. Every tile in this row is colored in the Expand signal green, regardless of whether its adoption figure is 76% or 100%. This is a deliberate, static choice: Top Performers is a "what's working" lens, and by construction every plan that qualifies for it is already among your best-adopted plans, so there is no need for a second color tier inside the row. Contrast this with All Active Playbooks, the row below Need Diagnosis, where tile color is dynamic and tied to the exact percentage (Expand green at 75% and above, Maintain yellow between 40% and 75%, Analyse red under 40%). In Top Performers, color communicates "this row" rather than "this specific number."

Label, top of the tile. The adoption percentage itself, rounded to the nearest whole number and formatted as "N% adopted," for example "82% adopted." Because plans without a calculated percentage are filtered out before this row is built, you will never see the "Awaiting cron" placeholder inside Top Performers, that state only ever appears elsewhere on the page (the hero row's underlying data, and tiles in Need Diagnosis or All Active Playbooks that have not yet been decorated).

Headline. The plan's title, exactly as you or your team wrote it when authoring the plan. Verinode does not rewrite, truncate for meaning, or re-title anything here.

Sub-line, plan kind and franchisee count. A single line combining two distinct pieces of information, separated by a middle dot:

• The plan's kind: Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment, whichever the author selected when the plan was created. See /help/network-playbook-kinds for what each kind is meant to signal to the franchisees who receive it.
• How many franchisees out of your total network are still affected by the underlying condition the plan targets, for example "8 of 12 franchisees."

That second number is easy to misread as an adoption count, it is not. It comes from the most recent network signal reading tied to the plan's target condition (the same signal that likely prompted the plan in the first place), refreshed nightly independent of the adoption figure in the label above it. That means a plan can carry a high adoption percentage (most franchisees who were pushed the plan have completed it) while this count still reads a nontrivial number, if the underlying condition it targets is still showing up elsewhere in the network, including at franchisees the plan was never pushed to. For a plan authored without a linked network signal, this reads "0 of 0 franchisees," since there is no signal reading to source the count from.

Meta line, bottom of the tile. Timing context, one of two things depending on what data is available:

• If a median days-to-acknowledge figure exists for the plan (the median number of days it took franchisees who were pushed this plan to move it to Acknowledged), the meta line reads "median Nd to acknowledge."
• If that figure is not yet available, the meta line falls back to how long the plan has been live, reading "live since [month] [day]," using the date it was activated.

Clicking a tile

Clicking anywhere on a Top Performers tile opens that specific plan on the Decisions page (/franchise/decisions?plan=<id>), the franchisor inbox and workload queue, not the Scoreboard. From there you see the plan's fuller per-membership breakdown: which franchisees have acknowledged, which have started, which have declined, which have completed, and any Intelligence Unit sponsorship budget attached to the push. Top Performers itself never exposes that per-franchisee detail, it stays at the aggregate, ranked level. See /help/hq-playbook-scoreboard-vs-decisions-inbox for the full contrast between these two pages.

Empty state

If no plan across your completed and active portfolio has a calculated adoption percentage yet, the row is replaced by a plain line under the heading "Top performers, highest adoption" reading:

Adoption rates appear after the next nightly cron decorates recently-activated plans.

That is a literal status, not a placeholder. It means every eligible plan is still waiting on its first overnight decoration, not that your network has no adoption activity worth showing.

How to use this row

1. 1Scan the row top to bottom (left to right) for the plans with the strongest adoption. Everything here already cleared the bar, use it to spot what made these plans land: a short acknowledgment window, clear language, or an attached sponsorship budget.
2. 2Read the sub-line's franchisee count alongside the adoption percentage, not instead of it. A plan can be 100% adopted among the franchisees it was pushed to and still show a meaningful affected count if the condition it targets is still active in parts of the network the plan never reached, that is a signal to consider a second push, not a contradiction.
3. 3Click into any tile whose kind, meta timing, or franchisee count you want to understand at the individual-membership level. That detail lives on Decisions, not here.
4. 4Use what is working here as the template for your next plan. A Top Performer with a fast median days-to-acknowledge is worth copying the structure of, not just celebrating.

The privacy boundary

Every figure in this row, adoption percentage, franchisee counts, median days to acknowledge, is a rollup computed across your network by the nightly aggregation cron. HQ does not see, and this row does not expose, any individual franchisee's underlying business data (their jobs, their financials, their clients) anywhere in Top Performers or on the plan detail it links to on Decisions. What you see when you click through is where each membership stands in that specific plan's adoption lifecycle (pushed, acknowledged, in progress, declined, or completed), never the business results that led a franchisee to that status. Franchisees own their data; this row measures whether your network acted on what you shipped, nothing more.

Related reading

• /help/hq-playbook-scoreboard: the full Playbook Scoreboard, hero row, all three tile rows, and the privacy boundary in one place.
• /help/hq-playbook-scoreboard-vs-decisions-inbox: why this scoreboard is a separate page from Decisions, and when to use each.
• /help/network-playbook-kinds: what Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, and Experiment mean from the receiving franchisee's side.
• /help/broadcasting-to-your-network: how a plan gets authored and pushed in the first place, upstream of everything this row measures.
• /help/hq-overview: how Playbooks fits into the rest of the HQ sidebar.