Who can see and change a network playbook

What a network playbook is

If you belong to a franchise network or association, your franchisor can author a plan in their own Verinode HQ dashboard and send it to specific memberships. Verinode calls these plans one of four kinds: a Playbook (a process to follow), a Directive (an instruction), a Recommendation (a suggestion), or an Experiment (something HQ wants to trial with a subset of the network). Whichever kind it is, once your franchisor pushes it to you, it shows up on your account as a network playbook you can read, work through, and mark up as you go.

This article is about the privacy and authorization side of that relationship: who can see a given playbook, who can change its status, and exactly what your franchisor sees on their end. The short version is that a single database row, your adoption record, is the entire boundary. Your franchisor authored the plan and decided to push it to you, but from that point on the lifecycle inside it is yours. Verinode surfaces the plan and your options; you decide what to do with it.

Where to find it

Look for Network Playbooks in the sidebar, between Decisions and Action Plans. It only appears once your franchisor has actually pushed you something that still needs attention: the entry carries a count badge, and both the entry and its badge stay hidden until that count is above zero. Once you have acknowledged, started, declined, or completed everything currently pushed to you, the sidebar entry disappears again until the next push arrives.

Clicking it opens the list at /network/playbooks. Opening any row from that list takes you to the individual playbook at /network/playbooks/<planId>.

The consent boundary: how visibility actually works

Every playbook your franchisor authors lives in their own HQ dashboard first. Authoring or activating a plan there does not put it in front of any franchisee. The only thing that makes a playbook visible to you is a specific row created for you and you alone, one row per (playbook, membership) pair, and that row only gets created when an HQ admin explicitly pushes the plan to your membership by name.

That row is the authorization boundary, not just a display filter. When you open a playbook's detail page, Verinode looks up your row for that exact plan ID and your operator identity. If the row exists, you see the playbook. If it does not, you do not, and it makes no difference whether the playbook actually exists somewhere in your franchisor's dashboard. The response is identical either way: a plain "Not available" page, never a broken link or an error that would confirm or deny anything about a plan you were never meant to see.

Concretely, the page 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.

with a link back to your own list of network playbooks. This is what you would see if you tried to open a playbook ID that was never pushed to you, whether it belongs to a different membership in your network or does not exist at all.

The same boundary is enforced again on every write, not only on the read. When you acknowledge, start, decline, or complete a playbook, the update only succeeds if your membership's adoption row for that exact plan ID exists. A forged or guessed plan ID that was never pushed to you cannot be updated: the action returns "This playbook is not available to your account." and nothing changes.

HQ cannot rewrite your adoption state

Pushing a playbook and changing its status are two separate actions, owned by two separate sides of the network, and only one of them belongs to HQ.

The franchisor's push action does exactly one thing to your adoption row: it creates it, with status Pushed to you, the moment they select your membership and send the playbook. If your franchisor pushes the same playbook to you a second time (accidentally, or because they are re-sending a reminder), that second push is a no-op on your row. It does not reset your progress, it does not overwrite anything you have already recorded, and it does not touch your status, your notes, or your timestamps. Your existing adoption row is left exactly as it was.

From that first push onward, moving the playbook through its lifecycle is entirely yours to do. There is no HQ-side action anywhere in the platform that flips your adoption status, sets your timestamps, or edits your notes. Your franchisor can see where you are (covered below), and they can follow up with you directly if a playbook is stalled, but they cannot mark it acknowledged, in progress, declined, or completed on your behalf.

The list view: Network playbooks

The list page opens with a short header, "From your franchise network," and the description: "Playbooks, directives, and recommendations your franchisor has sent you. Open each to acknowledge, work on, decline, or complete."

Everything pushed to you is split into two groups:

• Active, playbooks still in Pushed, Acknowledged, or In progress. This is the same set the sidebar badge counts.
• Closed, playbooks you have declined or completed. Nothing disappears when it closes; it just moves down here so the active list stays focused on what still needs you.

Each row shows:

• The kind (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment) and, next to it, the name of the franchise network group that sent it.
• The title, and, if your franchisor wrote one, a two-line preview of the body text.
• On the right, a status pill: New (this list's label for a freshly pushed playbook), Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed.
• Underneath the pill, how long ago it was pushed: "today," "1 day ago," a day count under 30 days, or a rounded month count beyond that.

If your franchisor has never pushed you anything, the whole page reads simply: "Your franchise network hasn't sent you any playbooks yet." That is not a broken page, it means no adoption row exists for you on any playbook yet.

The detail view

Opening a row takes you to that playbook's own page. Everything here flows directly on the page, there is no card wrapped around it, in keeping with how every surface in Verinode is built.

Top pills. Three pieces of context sit in a row above the title: the plan kind (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment), your current status (this page uses fuller labels than the list: Pushed to you, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed), and "From [group name]" so you always know which part of your network sent it.

Detail. Under the "Detail" label sits whatever body text your franchisor attached when they authored the plan. If they didn't write anything, this reads: "Your franchise network sent this [playbook/directive/recommendation/experiment] without additional detail."

Sponsorship. This block only appears when your franchisor has committed IU budget to cover the AI work you do on this specific playbook. When it shows, the heading reads "Sponsorship, [group name] is covering AI help on this playbook," followed by three figures: Budget (the IU cap your franchisor set), Used (how much of that has been drawn on so far), and Remaining (the difference, floored at zero). Underneath: "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 any IQ conversation you have while this page is open draws from your franchisor's committed budget first, and only spends from your own balance once that budget runs out.

Your notes. If you have attached a note at any point (the decline flow is the one place in the product today that prompts you for one), it appears here under "Your notes," exactly as you wrote it. This is your own record. The note is saved on your adoption row, and while the decline box tells you your franchisor can see it, the franchise network's adoption dashboard on HQ's side reads your status and your timestamps, it does not pull this notes field into what HQ sees per playbook. Treat it as your working notes on the playbook, not a message guaranteed to be relayed.

Lifecycle. Four dated fields in a row: Pushed, Acknowledged, Started, and a fourth field that reads Declined if you declined or Completed if you finished it (whichever applies, or Completed by default before either has happened). Each shows the date in month, day, year format, or a placeholder dash if that step hasn't happened yet.

Moving a playbook through its lifecycle

The state machine is narrow by design, so there is never ambiguity about what you can do next:

1. 1Pushed to you is where every playbook starts. From here you can mark it Acknowledged, jump straight to In progress, or Decline it.
2. 2Acknowledged means you've read it. From here you can move to In progress or Decline.
3. 3In progress means you're actively working it. From here you can mark it Completed or Decline.
4. 4Completed or Declined are both terminal. Once you reach either, the "Update status" controls disappear, there is no further transition, and no way to reopen it from this page.

A shortcut is built into step 2: if you skip straight from Pushed to In progress without ever explicitly acknowledging it, Verinode stamps both Acknowledged and Started with the same timestamp, so your lifecycle record stays complete even though you clicked through it in one step.

Declining is the one path that opens an extra screen: clicking Decline swaps in an optional note box, "Decline (optional note)," with the placeholder "Why are you declining? (Optional: your franchisor can see this.)" You can leave it blank and click Confirm decline, or write context first. Either way, declining is final on this page: there's no undo button once it's submitted.

Every status change refreshes the page in place, your new status, pill, and lifecycle timestamps appear immediately, with no reload.

What your franchisor can see, and what they cannot

Your franchisor's own decisions dashboard shows them, per playbook, the set of memberships it's been pushed to and where each one stands. Specifically, for each membership they pushed to, they can see:

• The membership's name and contact information from their own network directory.
• The current adoption status (Pushed, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed) and the same four lifecycle timestamps you see on your own page.
• Which of their own HQ admins performed the push.
• If they sponsored IU budget on the push, the budget amount, how much has been drawn, and which admin set up the sponsorship.

Rolled up across everyone the plan was pushed to, they also see summary counts (how many are in each status) and sponsorship totals (how many memberships have sponsorship, total budget committed, total drawn), never a raw peer benchmark, just their own network's participation in their own plan.

What they cannot see or do:

• Your notes. The note field you can attach when changing status is not part of what their adoption dashboard reads back.
• Change your status. No HQ-side action edits your adoption row after the initial push. Re-pushing the same playbook to you again is a no-op, it does not reset or overwrite your progress.
• A playbook that was never pushed to a given membership becomes visible to that membership. Authoring or activating a plan in their dashboard has no effect on any franchisee until they explicitly select memberships and push.

Best-practice example

Say your franchisor pushes a new Directive titled "Standardize the mitigation intake checklist" to your membership. It appears in your sidebar with a badge of 1, and in your Active list with the New pill. You open it, read the detail body your franchisor wrote, and see no sponsorship block, meaning any IQ time you spend on it draws from your own balance. You mark it Acknowledged, work through it over the next week, then mark it In progress once your crew starts using the checklist on live jobs. When it's fully rolled out, you mark it Completed. Your franchisor's dashboard shows your membership moved from Pushed straight through to Completed, with the dates to match, without ever needing to ask you directly. If instead you'd decided the checklist didn't fit your market and declined it with a note explaining why, your franchisor would see the Declined status and date, and would need to reach out to you to hear the reasoning behind it.

Related reading

• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• The Feed