Kettei

Kettei is Japanese for decision. The word carries both the act of deciding and the state of the thing decided, and this book is about the second one.

In 2004 I bought an altitude training business on a 10 minute decision over a coffee. One of New Zealand's leading endurance coaches had already told me the physiology was sound and the commercial model was not. I heard him and went ahead anyway. The business ran for 6 years, employed 6 people and cost me close to a million New Zealand dollars. The loss had been visible from the first few months. I kept funding it, because nothing in that decision said when it ended.

My first book, Ishi: The Discipline of Determined Intent, is about governing your own intent under pressure. It holds because one person decides, does the work and carries the authority to stop.

Move the same problem into an organisation and that alignment breaks. The decision is taken by a committee, conditions move, everyone can see the commitment failing and no one owns the authority to end it.

Look at the systems we already run on. OODA, PDSA, double loop learning, the Flow System. Each is strong on acting, testing, learning and flowing. None treats a consequential decision as an object carrying an owner, a validity boundary, dependencies, pre committed stopping conditions and the authority to revalidate. Boyd assumes mutual trust. PDSA assumes a sponsor. Argyris assumes a willing top. The Flow System declines governance by design. Read the failures recorded in those same literatures and an ungoverned decision usually sits underneath.

Kettei carries the Ishi Spiral into the organisation, Kettei, Shugyo, Gaman and Hansei, with Adjust, Hold and Abort at the centre. It works a consequential decision as a governed object across 7 properties: owner, validity boundary, abort criteria, coupling dependencies, reversibility, lifecycle state and scope. The 737 MAX runs through the book as the case at scale, traced back from the Java Sea in 2018 to a 2011 decision about how to classify an airframe. Every step in that chain was signed off by someone competent. Each was properly authorised. None was ever governed again.

I am writing this in the open on Leanpub. Buying it now gets you every update through to completion, and what you push back on goes into the next version.

This is offered as a working model to test in your own context, then keep, adapt or discard.