Network Playbooks: intelligence from your franchise network

What Network Playbooks is

Network Playbooks is your inbox for the things your franchise network sends you directly. If you belong to a franchise or association that runs Verinode HQ, the leadership team there can push a playbook, a directive, a recommendation, or an experiment straight to your IQ account. This section is where those items land, and where you acknowledge them, work them, decline them, or mark them complete.

It is a one-way inbox from HQ to you. Verinode does not generate the items in this list on its own and does not decide anything on your behalf here: everything in Network Playbooks was written and sent by a person at your franchise network, and every status change on a playbook is a click you make.

Four kinds of item can show up:

• Playbook: a documented process or approach HQ wants you to run.
• Directive: an instruction from HQ, typically something with less room for interpretation than a playbook.
• Recommendation: a suggestion, framed as optional.
• Experiment: something HQ is testing across part or all of the network and wants your participation in.

Where to find it

Network Playbooks lives at /network/playbooks, but you will not always see it in the sidebar. The Network Playbooks entry only appears in the left nav, right below Feed and Decisions and above Action Plans, when you have at least one playbook that still needs your attention. Next to the label is a badge with the count of open items. Once every playbook you have is either declined or completed, the sidebar entry disappears again: there is nothing more for you to act on, so it steps out of the way.

The playbook list

At the top of the page, an eyebrow line reads "From your franchise network," followed by the page title, "Network playbooks," and a short explainer: "Playbooks, directives, and recommendations your franchisor has sent you. Open each to acknowledge, work on, decline, or complete."

Below that, your playbooks are split into two groups:

• Active (N): playbooks with a status of New, Acknowledged, or In progress. These are the ones that still need something from you.
• Closed (N): playbooks you have declined or completed. They stay here so you can look back at what you were sent and how you responded, but there is nothing left to do.

The N in each heading is a live count of how many playbooks sit in that group. A group heading (and its list) simply does not render if you have zero playbooks in that state, so on a quiet day you might see only "Active (2)" with no Closed section at all, or the reverse.

Each row in a group shows:

• Kind, in small caps: Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment.
• Group name, the name of the franchise network or association that sent it, shown right after the kind with a middle dot separator.
• Title, the playbook's headline, in bold.
• Body preview, up to two lines of the playbook's detail text, if HQ included any. Not every playbook has a body: some are title-only.
• Status pill, on the right: New, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed.
• Relative time, under the status pill: how long ago the playbook was pushed to you. It reads "today" for anything pushed within the last day, "1 day ago," then a day count up to 29 days, then "1 month ago" or a month count beyond that.

Click anywhere on a row to open that playbook's detail page.

Empty state

If your franchise network has never pushed you anything, the whole list is replaced with a single line: "Your franchise network hasn't sent you any playbooks yet." There is no Active or Closed grouping to look at in that state, just that sentence.

The playbook detail page

Opening a row takes you to /network/playbooks/<id>. A "← Network playbooks" link at the top returns you to the list. The detail page flows flat, with no card frame around any section, consistent with the rest of the platform.

From top to bottom:

Pills row. Three pieces sit side by side: the kind (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment), the current status pill, and "From {group name}." The status labels on this page are: Pushed to you, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, Completed.

Title. The playbook's headline, large.

Detail. The playbook's full body text, if HQ wrote one. If they didn't, this section reads a fallback sentence, for example "Your franchise network sent this playbook without additional detail" (the word swaps to directive, recommendation, or experiment to match the kind).

Sponsorship (only when HQ has funded it). Some playbooks come with an IU budget your franchise network has committed to cover the cost of AI work you do on that specific playbook. When that budget is greater than zero, a "Sponsorship" block appears, naming the group and showing three numbers side by side:

• Budget: the total IUs your franchise network committed for this playbook.
• Used: how many of those sponsored IUs have been drawn on so far.
• Remaining: budget minus used, floored at zero.

Underneath, a note explains how to use it: "Open the IQ panel from this page to use the sponsored IUs. Your own balance only kicks in once the sponsor cap is reached." In practice, that means if you open the agent panel while you are looking at this specific playbook, any AI work you ask for draws from the sponsor's budget first, and only spills over to your own IU balance once that budget is exhausted.

Your notes. If you have added notes at any point (most commonly when declining), they appear here verbatim, under the heading "Your notes."

Lifecycle. A row of up to four timestamps: Pushed, Acknowledged, Started, and either Declined or Completed depending on where the playbook landed. Each shows the date it happened, or an em-dash-free ", " if that step hasn't happened yet. Dates are formatted like "Jul 13, 2026."

Update status. This is where you act. The buttons offered here depend on where the playbook currently sits:

| Current status | Buttons offered | |---|---| | Pushed to you | Mark acknowledged, Mark in progress, Decline | | Acknowledged | Mark in progress, Decline | | In progress | Mark completed, Decline | | Completed | none, this is a terminal state | | Declined | none, this is a terminal state |

1. 1Open a playbook from the Active group on the list page.
2. 2Read the Detail section and, if present, the Sponsorship block.
3. 3Click one of the status buttons: Mark acknowledged or Mark in progress to move it forward, or Decline if you are not going to act on it.
4. 4If you click Decline, an optional notes field appears. Type a reason if you want your franchise network to see why you passed, then click Confirm decline. Clicking Cancel instead backs out without changing the status.
5. 5When the work is genuinely done, come back and click Mark completed.

Once a playbook reaches Completed or Declined, the "Update status" section disappears entirely: there is nothing left to click, and the playbook moves from Active to Closed on the list page.

"Not available"

If you land on a playbook detail URL that was never actually pushed to your operator profile, you will not get a generic error. The page instead reads:

Not available This playbook isn't associated with your account. If you think this is a mistake, ask your franchise network admin to confirm they pushed it to your operator profile.

This is a deliberate boundary, not a bug: Verinode does not confirm or deny whether a given playbook exists at all to an operator it was not sent to. The consent boundary is the record of it having been pushed to you specifically. If your franchise network intends for you to see something and you get this message, the fix is on their side: they need to push it to your operator profile.

How to use it well

Treat the Active group like any other inbox that has a deadline attached in spirit, if not in the data. A playbook sitting at "New" (Pushed to you) for weeks is a signal to your franchise network that you haven't looked, even if nobody there can see your notes or your reasoning. Acknowledging quickly, even before you've started the work, tells them you've seen it. Moving to In progress when you actually start gives them an accurate read on adoption across the network. And using Decline with a note, rather than letting an item sit unacknowledged forever, gives them something they can act on: maybe the playbook doesn't fit your market, maybe the timing is wrong, maybe you need something clarified before you'll commit to it.

If a playbook shows a Sponsorship block, use the IQ panel from that specific page to get the sponsored help before it expires or gets reassigned. It's a franchisor covering the cost of you doing the work; there's no reason to spend your own IU balance on the same task when their budget is sitting there unused.

Data sources

Related

• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• The Feed