Stop 3 of 9 · Weekly
Brand governance for colleagues
The one page of rules colleagues will actually read, the templates that teach while they are used, and the review checklist Claude runs on a colleague's file before Farah looks at it.
The guide is sixty pages and nobody has four minutes
Farah guards a brand for a marketing team, a sales team and whoever is presenting at the town hall on Thursday. They are not going to read the guide. They are going to open last quarter's deck, change the title and present it.
Governance is therefore not a document. It is four things in order: one page of rules, templates that hold the rules for you, a checklist that runs before Farah looks, and a reply short enough to act on. Build them once and the brand stops depending on Farah noticing.
The one page
Eight rules, written as what to do. A rule a colleague cannot follow without opening another file is not a rule, it is a referral.
Read the brand guide and the last ten files colleagues made without me. Write the one-page rules for non-designers: eight rules maximum, each phrased as what to do rather than what to avoid, each one followable with the template and nothing else. Order them by how often we have seen the rule broken. Add one line at the top saying what to do when a rule and a deadline collide.
Templates that teach
The template is where the rule lives when nobody is reading rules. Placeholder text is the cheapest teaching surface in the company: the headline box says how long a headline is, the Arabic box says which family it is set in, the image box says what may go in it.
Here are the six slide layouts and the two document layouts in our templates: [paste the layout list]. Write the placeholder text for every box. Each placeholder states the rule for that box in under twelve words, in plain language, in Arabic and English. For the image boxes, say what is allowed and name the one thing that is never placed there.
The checklist run
A colleague sends a PDF. Claude reads it against the checklist in the Project and returns findings before Farah spends any attention on it.
[attach the colleague's PDF] Run our brand review checklist over every page. For each finding: the page, the check it fails, what was found, and the one-line fix in language a non-designer can act on. Rank findings as blocking, visible or minor. Blocking means it cannot go out. Then write the three-sentence reply I will send, naming only the blocking findings and linking the template.
Read the twelve colleague-made files in this quarter's folder and the checklist results. Which three checks fail most often, and is each one a rules problem, a template problem or a training problem. For each, propose the single change that would stop it recurring, and say which of the three it changes.
The drift report is what turns governance from nagging into work. A check that fails in nine files out of twelve is not nine careless people, it is a template with a box that should have been locked.