The Climb
What a Climb is
A Climb is a bounded run at one Question. It starts when the Question is written down, it reaches its Summit the moment that Question resolves into a Decision, and it ends with the artifacts needed to act on it. One Question, one Summit, one Decision — that is the whole shape, and it does not change with size.
A Question earns a Climb when the answer isn’t known and the choice matters. Work whose path is already clear doesn’t need one — that is execution, and it can just be done.
Every Climb has an up and a down
A Climb is a hill in miniature. You go up one side and down the other, and the Summit is the turn between them. Uncertainty is on the way up; execution is on the way down.
Several answers are still live. The work is finding out which one holds — gathering context, testing assumptions, putting real options side by side.
The direction is chosen and the doubt is spent. The work is making it real and handing over enough that someone can act on it.
The turn is Wednesday: kickoff Monday, Summit Wednesday, delivery Friday. Every Climb is one week — a question too large for a week is not a longer Climb, it is several, taken one at a time.
The same shape at any size
Because a Climb carries its own up and down, it works at any size. It can take a whole small hill, or one stretch of a large one, and however many Climbs a stretch takes, together they cover it — three runs at it take a third each, one run takes the lot.
What a Climb leaves behind
A Decision, which is permanent — a change of direction is a new Decision that supersedes the old one, never an edit. The Artifacts that support it or act on it. And one Reflection, which is the part that compounds: what was learned, written once, inherited by the next Climb.
Which is the real return. A Climb produces a result, and it also produces someone better able to read the next stretch of ground — so the same uncertainty costs less the second time.