Vale Roger Estall

Roger Estall was co-author of Deciding and a fire-safety advocate whose reforms saved more lives in New Zealand than any other public-health intervention of his generation.

Roger Estall, my dear friend, mentor, collaborator and co-author, passed away suddenly on Wednesday, 21 June 2023, while visiting Christchurch, New Zealand.

Roger saved more lives in New Zealand than anyone else, through his advocacy for smoke alarms and fire sprinkler systems. Appointed by the New Zealand Government to chair the New Zealand Fire Service Commission and National Rural Fire Authority, he led sweeping reforms that resulted in significant annual reductions in fire fatalities. The smoke-alarm and fire-sprinkler legislation he pursued saved more lives in New Zealand than any other public-health intervention of his generation. That is not a claim. It is a fact, demonstrable in the data.

He was a founding chairman of the NZ Society for Risk Management. He delivered the prestigious annual Hopkins Lecture. 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 spent more than two decades in senior management and governance roles at a multinational, and more than forty years in assurance and decision-making practice across New Zealand and internationally.

He taught me never to compromise on logic and to challenge anything that, quite simply, did not make sense. He had no patience for jargon, no tolerance for frameworks that could not survive contact with a real decision, and no interest in impressing people who preferred comfortable language to honest reasoning.

Roger and I worked together for three decades. We spent those years building what eventually became the Universal Decision-Making Method, often in frustration with the risk-management orthodoxy that dominated the profession. We disagreed often and productively. Roger would hold an idea to the light until he was certain it could bear weight. When he was satisfied, he defended it with the same tenacity. It was through this process that the five steps of the method took their final shape.

His practical experience in governance, assurance, and fire safety grounded the method in operational reality. The method is better because Roger insisted on testing every idea against what actually happens, not what the theory says should happen. I discuss Roger's contribution to the method and his decisive role in our departure from the 'risk management' construct in my conversations with Mark Siwik.

Deciding was our final published work together. The book was the distillation of everything we had built: a plain way to think about decisions that does not require an apparatus, an industry, or a special vocabulary. His legacy lives in the fire regulations that protect New Zealand families while they sleep, in the standards he helped write, and in the practitioners he mentored who carry forward his insistence that logic must be earned, not assumed.

Rest in peace, my dear friend. You will be missed for ever.