Build 1
A municipal service desk
The situation
A front counter and an email queue sat on the same small team. Scripts existed. What did not exist was a shared way to draft a reply when the script ran out, without dropping a name, an address, or a file number into a public assistant. New staff copied old threads. Older staff rewrote every letter from a blank page.
Managers wanted speed and a consistent voice. Records staff wanted a trail. The teaching problem was not “how to prompt.” It was how a shift could use a model for wording while keeping identity in the case system, where it already belonged.
What we built
- A classification strip on the desk. Four buckets, in the language the team already used, with examples from their queue (rewritten so no person could be recognized).
- Answer frames, not canned letters. Openings, middle asks, and closings that could be completed from the case file by a human.
- A red-line card. What never leaves the case system: identifiers, health-adjacent notes, anything still under investigation.
- A shift briefing. Ten minutes at handover covering new templates and one failure example from the week.
- A light log. Tool, task class, initials — enough to answer “did we put that in a chat?” without building a surveillance habit.
The curriculum arc
Week 1, baseline and classification. Week 2, frames for the three most common request types. Week 3, the red-line drills and de-identification. Week 4, shift briefing and the log. Week 5, review of live (still de-identified) drafts, line by line.
What changed in the work
Drafting time stopped being a private craft. People could point at a frame and a rule instead of a personality. The voice of the desk got duller in a useful way: fewer flourishes, fewer extra facts in the closing paragraph. Managers could see which request types still needed a specialist, because those were the ones the frames refused to cover.
What stayed hard
Angry threads and anything that mixed several files still needed a senior officer. A model is fluent under pressure in the worst sense: it will soothe in a sentence that accidentally confirms something. We left that class of mail off the tool, on purpose, and said so in the binder.