The method
Decide at seventy percent confidence, then spend the energy you saved on correcting quickly.
Move at 70 is a decision method for organisations where the information is never complete and the clock never stops.
It came out of fourteen years in hospital operations, where a decision deferred to the next meeting was a decision made anyway, and where every hour of hesitation had a name attached to it.
It has four moves and no software. A room can use it in the meeting it learns it in, which is the only test of a method that matters.
01
Establish what the delay is actually costing per week, in the unit the organisation already tracks. Bed hours, trailer movements, outage minutes, billable weeks. Not a new measure, the existing one.
02
Write down the cost of undoing it. If that number is small, this is not a big decision, it is a slow one. If it is large, you have found a one-way door and it deserves the scrutiny the others have been borrowing.
03
Make the call at seventy percent confidence, out loud, with a named owner and a date. Saying the confidence level is part of the decision, not a hedge against it.
04
Book the review before you need it: a date, one or two named signals, and an owner accountable for bringing the answer rather than for having been right.
Organisations measure the cost of wrong decisions obsessively and the cost of late ones not at all. The first move makes the invisible number visible.
Your approval sits with four people for eleven days. What does a day cost you? Nobody in this room can answer that, and that is the problem.
The missing thirty percent is not information you can gather in advance. It is information the decision itself produces.
You are not going to feel ready. Feeling ready is what happens two weeks after you commit, not two weeks before.
The right question is never how big this is. It is whether you can walk it back, and what walking it back costs. Most decisions treated as one-way doors are revolving.
Write down the cost of undoing it. If that number is small, you are not making a big decision. You are making a slow one.
It produces more small errors, on purpose, in exchange for fewer expensive ones found late.
That trade is only safe when the fourth move is real. A decision without a correction point is a guess, and this method is not an argument for guessing.
Move at 70 is a decision method. Decide at seventy percent confidence, then spend the energy you saved on correcting quickly.
It has four moves. Name the clock: work out what the delay is costing per week, in the unit the organisation already tracks. Test the door: decide whether the decision is reversible, and at what price. Call it at 70: make the call out loud, with a named owner and a date. Set the correction: book the review before you need it.
It is written in those three words every time. Not a percentage sign, not a framework with a trademark bolted on.
It is not a measurement, it is a threshold. Below it you are guessing. Above it you are usually paying for information you could have bought more cheaply by moving.
The number matters less than the habit it creates: naming the confidence you actually have, out loud, in front of the people affected by the decision.
Organisations measure the cost of wrong decisions obsessively and the cost of late ones not at all.
An approval that sits with four people for eleven days has a price. Almost nobody in the room can say what it is, and that is the problem the first move solves.
Neither could a hospital, and that is where the method came from.
The reversibility test exists precisely so the irreversible decisions get the full scrutiny, and the other ninety percent stop borrowing it. Regulation tells you which doors are one-way. It does not tell you to treat every door that way.
Yes, and on purpose. It produces more small errors, caught earlier, in exchange for fewer expensive ones discovered late.
That trade is only safe if the fourth move is real. A decision without a correction point is a guess.
The method removes work. Most of what exhausts a team is carrying undecided things, not doing decided ones.
The undecided items are the ones that get re-read, re-explained and re-escalated. They cost more attention than the work itself.
One real decision, made out loud, with an owner, a date and a correction point written down.
In a keynote that is one worked example from the audience’s own sector. In a workshop it is each leader’s own decision, the one they walked in still holding.
Senior and mid-level leaders in operationally complex organisations: health systems, logistics, utilities, manufacturing, emergency services, engineering firms and financial operations.
Rooms that are sceptical of stagecraft and allergic to being told to be brave.
The keynote
Forty-five minutes, all four moves, one worked example from your own sector.
In house
Two thirds of the year is spent inside single organisations rather than at open conferences.
Notes
Costing a delay, shortening an approval chain, and what a handover teaches about deciding.
