Grant Purdy
Grant Purdy has spent nearly fifty years helping decision-makers have effective conversations about whether their decisions are providing sufficient certainty that intended outcomes will be achieved. For most of his career that work sat under the label of risk management, until he came to believe the label was the wrong frame entirely.
He was a nominated expert to the ISO working group that wrote ISO 31000 (the international standard for risk management) and ISO Guide 73, and provided substantial input to ISO/IEC 31010. He was a member of the Australia/New Zealand joint standards committee on risk management for fourteen years, chairing it for ten, and led the Australian delegation to the ISO technical committee that maintains the standard. Before that, he was Group Risk Manager at BHP Billiton, Managing Director of Aon Pacific Risk Management, and held senior roles at Andersen, DNV and IRCA, working across more than twenty-five countries.
For the last twelve years until he retired, Grant worked throughout the world advising major clients on projects and decisions as an Associate Director of Broadleaf Capital International.
Deciding (2020), co-authored with Roger Estall, is the book where the two of them set down the alternative they’d spent thirty years building: a five-step method any Decider can apply to any decision, without the risk-management overhead.
Roger Estall (d. 2023)
Roger Estall and Grant collaborated for three decades. Roger spent over forty years in assurance and decision-making practice across New Zealand and internationally, including more than two decades in senior management and governance roles at a multinational. Appointed by the New Zealand Government to chair the New Zealand Fire Service Commission and National Rural Fire Authority, he led reforms that significantly reduced annual fire fatalities and pursued the smoke-alarm and fire-sprinkler legislation that Grant credits with saving more lives in New Zealand than any other public-health intervention of his generation.
He served on twenty-five national and international standards-writing committees over thirty-seven years, covering fire engineering, building controls, aviation firefighting, and what was then called risk management. He was the founding chairman of the New Zealand Society for Risk Management.
“He taught me never to compromise on logic and to challenge anything that, quite simply, did not make sense.”
— Grant PurdyDeciding (2020) was their last work together. Roger died suddenly on 21 June 2023, while visiting the city he was born, Christchurch.
Read Grant’s full tribute →Carrying the method forward
Grant retired from advisory practice in 2024. His son Jo built the Walk so the method wouldn’t retire with him: the book made conversational, in front of the Decider one decision at a time, rather than on the shelf. Grant stands behind it as the method’s surviving co-author. Grant reviews everything that goes out under the method’s name.
DecidingA guide to even better decision making
Risk management was meant to make organisations decide better. After decades of standards, registers and frameworks, almost none can name a decision it improved. The book argues the problem was never risk, it was always the decision, and sets down the five-step method that replaces the apparatus.