Worked example
A board member asks the question
Six steps, from the first question to AI in daily use and kept running.
Under any other business, a board member asks what the body's position on AI is. The chief executive says there is not one yet, and the follow-up is harder: is anyone already using it? Nobody at the table knows.
That question, asked by someone who has to answer for the body, is the one the route is built to answer. What follows is what happens next, worked through for a body with a register of members, a disciplinary function that holds the kind of records nobody should paste into anything, an events team preparing for the annual conference, a policy team that writes consultation responses, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace underneath it all, and an IT lead who is in post and good at the job. These examples are invented, and the findings are the ones we would expect in a body like yours.
Govern
The snapshot answers the board's question in a week.
The readiness snapshot finds a handful of personal accounts on free tiers in the policy and events teams, one of them used to tidy a consultation response. None of it is misconduct. The half-day workshop produces the policy, the register of approved tools and the one-sentence rule a body like this needs most.
You hold: A one-page summary the chief executive can table at the next meeting, and a policy to send to the next funder or member who asks for one.
Stays human: What the rule on disciplinary material says and how far it reaches. Your leadership team decides that in the room, and we write it down.
Adopt
Leadership and the two people who write for the body go first.
The leadership team and the two people who write most of what you publish connect to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace under a signed waiver that names them and caps the team. A company voice skill is built from how the body writes, so a first draft says members and the register, never customers and the database.
You hold: A connection for that named team, the voice skill and the result of a test on one of your consultation responses and one of your member letters.
Stays human: The argument in every consultation response. The skill carries your vocabulary, and the person who knows the subject makes the case.
The review
The membership team waits until the review has passed.
The membership team wants in, because member questions are where the repeated writing is. The connection cannot be narrowed to what a tool should see, so the review checks what the team's accounts can already open, and finds two people who can still open the disciplinary folders from a job they left years ago.
You hold: Corrected access first and the connection after it, even when the conference deadline is close.
Stays human: Whether to widen at all. The waiver your leadership signed covers them and nobody else, and it does not cover a permission the review has found to be wrong.
Discover
Member questions rank first and the shared inbox goes back.
Workshops with the membership and policy teams produce a ranked list. Replies to routine member questions rank top, because the before is measurable and a wrong draft gets caught before it leaves. Funder assurance questionnaires rank second, because the positions now exist. Sorting the shared inbox is sent back, because a filter does it for less.
You hold: The ranked list, with the inbox candidate marked as sent back and the reason written down beside it.
Stays human: Where the list starts. It is scored against what the body needs this year, and the director of membership agrees it before anything is built.
Make and Test
Two skills, tested on last month's member questions.
The reply skill is built from your own replies, the questionnaire skill from your documented positions, both in the tools your people already open. Test is us running last month's member questions and the last questionnaire the body sent through the skills and setting the output against what was sent, with the membership officer and the policy lead seeing the result. If either skill does not do the job, it goes back to Make.
You hold: The reply skill and the questionnaire skill, each with the result of a test on your own work, and no claim from us about what they saved.
Stays human: Every member letter is read before it is sent. Every assurance answer is a representation about the body, and a person signs it.
Trackside
The register, the policy and the two skills are kept current.
We keep the connection and the two skills working, watch for new unapproved tools on the domain, keep the policy current as tools change, and feed the reply drafts that got rewritten back into the skill. The membership and policy teams join the monthly shared session, and that is where the fourth candidate tends to surface.
You hold: A service with a named person watching for drift, so the body never ends up where most pilots do, paying for a tool nobody trusts.
Stays human: The whole disciplinary function. It never touches any of this, and the policy says so in its first rule.
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