Five moves.
One direction.

Make the decision visible enough that everyone is arguing about the same thing.

Not harmony. Not a mission statement. A sentence that would still make sense outside the meeting. Big, safe-sounding words like customer, strategy, value and risk let everyone sound serious without becoming specific. This is the move that stops those words doing the hiding.

You’re forcing the room to choose a sentence with edges. One that has a subject, a boundary, and a purpose that could be forwarded to someone who wasn’t there.

Surface what’s making this feel unsafe. Turn blockers into conditions.

The obstacles are rarely technical. They are usually pride, scar tissue, fear of blame, or a need to win. This is not therapy. It’s the practical act of surfacing what’s making this feel unsafe and turning it into something the room can work with.

Constraints become conditions. Conditions are workable. Fog is not. Once a blocker is named as a condition, the room shifts from defence to design.

The smallest step that creates real evidence. Not a pilot programme. A proof point.

A decision without a proof plan is still only half-born. It exists socially, not operationally. It survives only as long as the attendees remember it the same way, which, as experience shows, is not long.

Launch means starting something real enough to create evidence. Learn means not mistaking enthusiasm for proof. The proof plan has four parts: what you’re producing, who owns it, when it’s due, and what decision the room makes when it sees it.

A cadence that keeps momentum without heroics. Without it, every meeting starts from scratch.

Track & Tune is not status theatre. It is a rhythm that turns proof points into momentum and makes relitigation harder, because there is always a visible loop coming where decisions land.

The cadence runs on three questions, weekly: what shipped, what did we learn, what decision do we need? Not what was worked on. Not what was progressed. Shipped. Evidence the room can see.

Give the decision a shape it can survive in. The meeting after the meeting is coming.

A decision made in a room is not the same as a decision that holds. Once the meeting ends, the story starts mutating. Someone says “they’ve cut scope”. Someone else says “it’s a delay”. A third forwards a note starting with “concerns were raised”. Technically true, completely wrong in spirit.

Story & Spark is not performance. It is narrative control. The test is simple: can someone explain the decision accurately to their boss after the meeting, without improvising? If not, you’re in trouble. Improvisation is where programmes go to die.