Read the Flow board

Flow in the sidebar is one row per initiative: what it is, the stage it has reached, and what it is waiting on. It is the shortest answer to “what is actually moving this week”.

The four counters

Across the top: Initiatives (everything tracked), Building (work under way right now), Needs You (initiatives with at least one blocker), and Shipped (shipped or already being marketed).

Needs You is the one to read first. It counts initiatives that are stopped on something a person has to do.

The stage line

An initiative moves along one line, and later stages win: an initiative with a published asset reads as marketing even though its tasks are also done.

Stage	The board shows this when
captured	Intent exists and nothing has been planned from it yet
planned	Drafts were accepted, or tasks exist, but none has started
building	At least one task is in progress, or a run is active
verifying	Every task is done, but a verification gate has not passed
shipped	Every task that was not cancelled is done, and nothing is holding it
marketing	Something derived from this work has been published

Nobody sets these. The stage is recomputed from the initiative’s tasks, drafts, checks, and published assets every time the board is read, so a card cannot be dragged to make a week look better than it was. See initiatives and flow for why that matters.

The Waiting on column

The blockers, in the words the board uses:

What you see	What is true
N blocking questions open	The meeting behind it asked something nobody has answered
N tasks blocked	Work is in the blocked status
N approvals waiting	An approval task on this initiative has not been decided
verification failed (N checks)	A check ran against the work and did not pass

Each has a person-sized action behind it, which is why the board leads with them rather than with a percentage complete.

Track an initiative

1. + Track initiative.

2. Pick the meeting where the intent was expressed. That anchor is what lets the journey reach back to a decision.

3. Give it a title, or leave it to take the meeting’s.

4. Track creates it and opens its journey.

One initiative per meeting

Tracking is idempotent per meeting, so tracking the same conversation twice does not produce two threads. If one meeting genuinely produced two separate efforts, hold the second conversation.

Next steps

• Follow an initiative’s journey: the receipt trail behind one row.
• Work the approvals queue: where the “approvals waiting” blocker is cleared.
• Initiatives and flow: why stage is computed rather than claimed.