Kettei / The Board Question

Kettei Workshopfor executives and programme directors

Once a consequential decision is approved, who governs it?

The Board Question was first run at Signal Not Noise, Melbourne, on 13 November 2026.

POA. Email for details.

Gareth A Holebrook presenting to a seated audience, pointing to a slide on the screen behind him

A copy of Kettei: The Discipline of Governed Intent on a dark wooden desk, stacked on a side table at the front of an empty seminar room

The format

The Harvard Business School case method

The room decides before it hears the outcome. Tables of 4 to 6 work on paper: a case card, a Watchcard, an evidence card and a sentence card.

The agenda

As run in Melbourne, in 40 minutes

4 min
The Boeing card
Each person is on Boeing’s board in the spring of 2011 and has 60 seconds, in silence, to write what authority to grant, who owns the decision and what would stop it. The cards go face down.
4 min
Where Kettei came from
The Ishi Spiral, and Kettei: intent held outside a single skull.
4 min
How decisions fail after the thud
Pairs compare cards. Then what actually happened, and a count of the cards that named an owner still watching years later.
8 min
The fix
The 7 properties that make a decision governable, taught against the room’s own cards: owner, reversibility, lifecycle state, coupling, scope, abort criteria and validity boundary. AHA (pronounced A-Hey): Adjust, Hold or Abort in flight; Recommit, Pivot or Release at the review. A Watchcard for each decision and a Watchlist for each endeavour.
18 min
Worked example: WANZCORP Bank, a hypothetical
Each table writes the Watchcard the bank needed: alone, then in pairs, then as a table. An evidence card is handed out, 10 weeks after go-live. Each table decides Adjust, Hold or Abort, who declares it and on what evidence. Then the governed answer.
2 min
One sentence for the board
Each person writes the sentence to take back: before you approve this, you need that, because of this.

The outcome

Each person leaves with

A Watchcard the table wrote for the bank, which another person could act on; a blank Watchcard and Watchlist to copy for a live programme; and one sentence for the executive or the board.