The Toast Audit (A Diagnostic Tool Disguised as Breakfast)

Read The Toast Series — 6 posts about systems, sabotage, and why your good plan broke before the meeting ended.
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What Most Meetings Get Wrong

Here’s how most meetings start:

“Where are we with this?”

Innocent. Reasonable.
And completely useless.

That question assumes two dangerous things:

1. That we all agree on what “this” is.
2. That we’re all heading to the same place.

In reality?

• Half the team is building toast.
• One guy’s building a panini press.
• Finance is trying to cancel the kitchen.
• And someone is quietly Googling “how to make bread gluten-free.”

You don’t need a status update.
You need a map check.

That’s where the Toast Audit comes in.

The One Question That Fixes Things

“What kind of toast are we making — and does everyone know that?”

Sounds ridiculous.
That’s why it works.

It cuts through the politeness.
It makes people pause.
And it forces teams to say the quiet confusion out loud.

When to Use It

• At the start of any project or initiative
• Midway through a sprint, when things feel “off”
• During retros, post-mortems, or post-meltdowns
• In meetings where everyone’s nodding but nobody’s saying anything useful

How to Run a Toast Audit (It’s Exactly This Simple)

1. Ask the question out loud:

“What kind of toast are we actually trying to make?”

Then shut up.