John Bornholt

Engineers learn early that decisions have risks and consequences. A miscalculation in a circuit, a missed failure mode in a system, a misjudged load on a construction site. The feedback is fast and sometimes lethal. That grounding shaped how I have approached risk and decision-making ever since.

Career Background

For more than forty years I have worked across a dozen industries as employee, CEO, CFO, CTO, board member, business founder, and corporate adviser. I have worked in and with organisations ranging from early-stage technology startups to global institutions with over 90,000 staff.

In all of them I noticed the same patterns. Most people, and most organisations, make their most important decisions without any real framework for doing so. They also do not capture learning from decisions and strategies to inform their next one, or the ones of the leaders who come after them. They rely on instinct, habit, unexamined assumptions, and whoever had the strongest opinion. More often than not, they failed to achieve the outcomes they expected, they encountered risks they hadn't considered, and they were surprised by consequences they could have anticipated.

I also noticed that risk management and decision-making are consistently treated as separate disciplines in books, in courses, and in organisational structures. In practice they are inseparable. Decisions involve risks. Risks require decisions. Treating them apart can produce worse outcomes in both.

The Research

Over several years I have worked to synthesise what I have learnt across those industries and in those roles into a coherent, practical framework or process. One that works equally well for individuals facing personal decisions, for organisations dealing with strategic risk, and for governments navigating the particular challenges of public-sector decision-making and risk-taking.

The result is a structured approach that draws on risk management, decision theory, cognitive psychology, philosophy, project management and decades of direct practical experience. It is designed to be accessible to people without specialist backgrounds, because most important decisions are made by people who are not specialists in any of these areas.

The Book and This Site

The framework is set out in full in Life: Our Uncertain Experiment, available from Amazon worldwide. This site provides supporting resources (questionnaires, tools, frameworks and guides) to accompany the book and extend its practical application.

The resources are organised by audience: individuals, organisations, and governments. Each audience faces the same underlying challenge (making consequential decisions under uncertainty) but in different contexts, at different scales, and with different accountability structures. The framework addresses all of them.