The Orchestration Playbook
The Ladder tells you which rung a capability belongs on. This playbook is how you actually move it up one — the baseline, the gate, the review, and the evidence you need before you trust it further.
The problem this solves. Most teams adopt AI at the wrong altitude: either they let it draft a tweet and call it transformation, or they hand it a decision it should never have owned. Both fail, and both fail expensively.
What you will have at the end. A written inventory of every marketing task, each one assigned a rung, each rung with an explicit gate and an owner. In practice this takes a leadership team about two weeks.
Who runs it. One accountable owner plus whoever currently does the work. This does not work as a delegated exercise — the person who owns the outcome must be in the room.
The module outline for this playbook. Recorded walkthroughs are planned but not yet published — the written playbook stands on its own without them.
These templates are still being written — nothing here is downloadable yet. Each one is deliberately tool-agnostic, so the Implementation checklist can be run in whatever you already use in the meantime.
Teams skip Observe because it feels slow. Observe is where the capability earns trust cheaply. Skipping it means your first real failure is also your first public one.
"Social posts need approval" is not a gate. "Any post naming a client is approved by the account owner" is. Vague gates get ignored within a fortnight.
If it only worked because a specific person knew the exceptions, automation does not scale it — it scales the gaps.
Drafts produced is not a result. Time-to-publish and rework rate are.
LevelUp Growth can import your existing task list and pre-assign rungs from historical data — the same output as the spreadsheet, without the fortnight.
Approval gates are native, with an audit trail per action. In the manual version this is a shared doc and discipline.
Instrumented automatically. Manually, this is the honest but tedious part of week one.
The playbook does not require it. Each shortcut removes manual work from a process that already runs without it. If you cannot run this playbook by hand, buying software will not fix that.