Creative request triage for a team running eight shows at once

The Monday triage call runs for fifty minutes and the production lead reads each item aloud. Sponsor logo swap on the Frankfurt exhibitor deck. Speaker card for the Barcelona keynote. Email header for the March renewal push. Around item fifteen somebody asks whether the speaker card needs a brief, and the room pauses, because the honest answer is that every choice in a speaker card was made in September and the card is a template fill.

That question, asked of every item, is the whole of creative request triage. Most weeks the board is dominated by work where nothing is being decided, and the process treats it identically to work where everything is.

Three axes, and what each one settles

Triage is a routing decision, so it needs the smallest set of questions that changes the route. Three do it.

Reversibility. Can the output be changed cheaply after it goes out? A social post can be deleted in a minute. A printed floor plan cannot, and neither can a mailing to 40,000 registrants. Reversibility sets how much review the item gets and who has to sign it.

Edition date. How many days until the thing this supports happens. The date is a hard constraint, and a hard constraint behaves differently from a priority: an item due in six days cannot be traded against an item due in nine weeks, however important the second one is.

New decision or reuse. Does completing this request require somebody to choose something that has not already been chosen, or does it apply an approved decision to a new surface? This is the axis that changes throughput, because reuse cases can skip the brief entirely.

Two of the three take four seconds each. The third takes a judgement, and it is the one worth arguing about in the call.

All three answers depend on the request carrying an outcome, a date and an owner when it arrives, which is the case for anything that came through a proper intake form and never the case for anything that arrived as a message.

Reversibility first, because it decides who has to look

Sort on reversibility before anything else, since it sets the cost of being wrong.

An irreversible output with a new decision behind it needs the show director. An irreversible output reusing an approved decision needs a proofreader and nothing more, because the risk is a typo and not a strategy error. A reversible output with a new decision needs the marketing lead but can ship before the show director sees it, on the understanding that it can be pulled. A reversible output reusing an approved decision needs one pair of eyes and can go the same day.

That is four routes from two axes, and it is a considerably better use of a show director's attention than a queue ordered by arrival. Most approval processes I have seen apply the same review depth to a printed hall plan and a LinkedIn card, which produces a director who signs 60 things a week and reads none of them carefully.

Does this request need a new decision?

Ask it as a lookup. Is there an approved answer already in the brief for this edition that covers what the requester wants?

For a speaker card: the positioning is approved, the audience is approved, the template is approved, the photography treatment is approved. The card is an application of four existing decisions to a new person's name. No new decision.

For a request to run a paid campaign into a segment the brief lists under non goals: that is a new decision, and a fairly large one, because it contradicts something already agreed. Route it to whoever signed the non goals section, and route it as a change to the brief instead of as a piece of production work.

The awkward middle is the request that looks like reuse and quietly is not. "Same email as last year, but for the retrofit audience" reuses a template and introduces a new audience decision. The tell is a new noun in the request. Somebody in the triage call has to hold the brief open and check, which takes about thirty seconds and is the single highest value half minute in the meeting, because getting this wrong is how a decision gets made by a coordinator at 4pm instead of by the person accountable for it.

One week of requests, sorted

A studio supporting eight editions logged 63 requests in one week through the intake form. Sorted on the decision axis:

Reuse of an approved decision: 38 items. New decision required: 17 items. Ambiguous, needing the brief opened during the call: 8 items, of which 5 resolved to reuse and 3 to new decision.

So the final split is 43 reuse and 20 new, which is 68 per cent of the week's board carrying no decision at all. Under the old process all 63 got a short brief, at roughly 25 minutes of writing plus a review cycle. Dropping the brief for the 43 reuse items saves 43 times 25 minutes, which is about 18 hours of writing a week, and removes 43 review cycles from a queue where review is the bottleneck.

The saving is real and it is the smaller half of the benefit. The larger half is that the 20 items needing a decision are now visible as a set of 20 rather than buried in a list of 63, and 20 decisions a week is a load a show director can actually carry.

Add the reversibility axis to those 20 and the picture sharpens further. In this week, 6 of the 20 were irreversible, so 6 items needed the director and 14 needed the marketing lead. Six is a Tuesday morning. Sixty three is a permanent state of being behind, which is what an unranked intake queue feels like from the inside.

Where does appetite come in?

At the point where a new decision item gets scoped, and it replaces the estimate conversation that otherwise eats the call.

Ryan Singer's Shape Up, published by Basecamp in 2019, puts it as a direction of travel. "Estimates start with a design and end with a number. Appetites start with a number and end with a design." The team fixes the time it is willing to spend and lets the scope adjust inside it.

In practice this means the triage call sets an appetite on each new decision item: two days, one week, or three weeks. Nobody estimates anything. If the work will not fit the appetite, the scope changes or the item is declined, and both of those are decisions somebody in the room can take.

The reason this matters more for an event studio than for most teams is the fixed date. A software team that misses an appetite ships next month. A team that misses an appetite on the show guide ships nothing, because the show happened. Fixed time with variable scope is the only shape that fits a business built around dates that do not move, and it is worth saying that most creative teams still run the opposite way, fixing scope and letting the time float until it hits the wall.

Classes of service, and the lane that eats everything

David J. Anderson's Kanban, 2010, introduced classes of service as a way of giving different work different handling policies, agreed in advance and written down. Triage output maps onto that directly: reuse items get a fast lane with light review, new decision items get a scoped lane with an appetite, and anything irreversible gets an extra reviewer regardless of lane.

The failure mode is the expedite lane. Every team creates one, everybody agrees it is for genuine emergencies, and within two quarters a third of the board is in it. The fix is a written policy with a number in it: at most two expedited items at a time, and starting a third requires a named person to say which of the existing two is being stopped. A limit that costs nothing to breach is decoration, which is the same reason work in progress limits need a person attached rather than a rule.

Publishing the lanes matters as much as defining them. When a requester can see that their item is in the reuse lane with a two day turnaround, they stop asking, and the triage call stops opening with eleven status questions. Holding the lanes and the queue in a shared request and brief workspace is what makes them visible to the people asking, which is where the behaviour change actually comes from.

Where triage stops working

Triage sorts requests. It cannot sort a portfolio whose editions all land in the same eight weeks.

Three of the eight shows in the example above run in March. During January and February the edition date axis stops discriminating, because everything is close, and the board collapses into one lane. No routing scheme survives that. What survives it is a capacity decision made in October about which of the three March editions gets the studio's attention in which week, and triage is downstream of that decision rather than a substitute for it.

The second limit is that the reuse judgement depends on the brief being trustworthy. If the approved positioning is eleven months old and the market moved, every reuse item is quietly applying a stale decision at speed, and triage has made the problem worse by removing the review step that might have caught it. Triage on a good brief is a multiplier. Triage on a bad one is also a multiplier, in the other direction.

This week, take one week of requests and mark each with a single letter: R for reuse, N for new decision. Count the Rs. If they are over half, you are writing briefs for work where nothing is being decided, and that is the first thing to stop.