Free. Five templates. One stuck meeting.

One hour. No decision. Repeat until morale improves.

Your meeting has been rescheduled three times.

Not because anyone is busy. Because nobody is quite sure what it's for. The invite says 'project alignment.' The agenda, if there is one, says 'discuss next steps.' Everyone arrives mildly prepared for a vaguely different conversation.

An hour passes. Opinions are shared. A few slides are shown. Someone raises a concern that was raised last time. Someone else says they'll check with their team. The last fifteen minutes are an extended negotiation about whether the next meeting should be a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

Nothing is decided. But everyone feels like something was said.

This is not alignment. This is the appearance of alignment. And the gap between the two is where most good work quietly disappears.

The fog has a name

There are five kinds of meeting fog.

Decision fog: nobody can say what has actually been decided. Blocker fog: everything is 'legal, data, budget or governance' and nothing is owned. Proof fog: lots of debate, no evidence, endless circling. Cadence fog: lots of updates, no movement. Message fog: the story changes every time it leaves the room.

They feel different in the moment. They produce the same result: another meeting, same people, same problem, slightly more frustration.

The reason they persist isn't that people are bad at meetings. It's that most meetings don't have a mechanism for producing an output. The conversation happens. The time runs out. Everyone disperses. The fog regrows before the lift reaches the ground floor.

What the room needs is a spine.

Not a facilitator. Not a workshop. Not a template you print out and forget to fill in. Something you open when the meeting starts circling, fill in with real information from the actual room, and leave with in your hand.

This week I built that thing.

The Stuck Meeting Survival Kit is five templates — one for each kind of fog. You pick the symptom, fill in the fields with what's actually happening in your meeting, and leave with a Decision Sentence, a Conditions to Proceed, a Proof Plan, a Cadence Reset, or a Story That Travels.

It's interactive. You can download a populated PDF and send it to the room within 24 hours, before the fog regrows.

Free. No sign-up: the book toolkit

The bit nobody wants to hear

If the room can't fill in the template, that's not a failure. That's the information.

A room that can't write a Decision Sentence doesn't have a decision-making problem. It has a problem that sits earlier than that — the project doesn't have a clear enough purpose to make decisions from. A room that can't complete the Conditions to Proceed doesn't have a blocker problem. It has an ownership problem that's been dressed up as a blocker problem for several weeks.

The template doesn't fix the meeting. It shows you what the meeting is actually about.

One thing to try this week

Open the toolkit before your next meeting that feels vague.

Pick the fog type that feels closest. Don't fill it in in advance. Fill it in live, in the room, with the people who are there.

If the room can complete it, you'll leave with something you can point at.

If the room can't complete it, you'll leave knowing why nothing has been moving.

Both of those are better than a Tuesday.