Gareth Holebrook spent eighteen years trying to qualify for the Ironman World Championship in Kona. He got there in 2022 and collapsed seven kilometres from the finish. Gareth got up and finished. He tells it as a governance failure, because his effort kept going after his awareness had stopped.
Gareth is a former Royal Navy weapons engineer. He spent five years working with David Marquet on intent-based leadership, and he ran the agile practice at Visa. His books are Ishi: The Discipline of Determined Intent, Kaizen of the Day, and Kettei: The Discipline of Governed Intent.
His argument is that capable people rarely fail for lack of capability. They fail because nothing governs the decision once it is underway. Who owns a decision after it is made? Who sets its boundaries, and who can call the abort?
Separating the decision from the outcome
Kona gave us the clearest case. Gareth decided in the moment to keep going, and the outcome was a finish. Looking back, he calls it a bad decision. We spent time on the gap between decision quality and outcome quality. We also talked about planning the contingencies, so the go and no-go calls exist before the race starts.
The scene I missed
Gareth pointed out a scene in Top Gun: Maverick that I had watched and missed. In the bird strike scene, Phoenix calls the action she is about to take. Gareth uses the scene to teach point-and-call. You say what you are going to do and pause, so the people around you can challenge it.
We also covered the Santa Fe, crew resource management, the limits of checklists, Tim Noakes and the central governor, and what a leader does in a complex domain when they do not know the answer.
Late in the conversation, Gareth asked me to challenge his Ishi Spiral against the OODA loop. My answer was that his spiral describes ways a living system can improve how it engages its environment. Orientation stays at the center of that.
Who owns your decisions once they are underway?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.