Exit · Chapter 6
Decide what happens next
Use Evidence to decide what the Bet deserves now, then change the system based on what reality taught you.
Understand
A Bet does not earn continued investment because you already placed it.
Exit means ending the current investment decision, not deleting the capability produced by it.
Begin with Evidence:
Knowing what we know now, would we still make this Bet with the Appetite remaining?
Do this on your project
Make one explicit judgment.
- Continue — the thesis holds and the remaining Appetite justifies continuing.
- Change — the Opportunity matters, but the approach or the Boundaries should change.
- Reduce — the remaining value justifies a smaller investment.
- Increase — new Evidence justifies deliberately increasing Appetite. This is a new investment judgment, not silent expansion.
- Exit — stop the current investment.
Success, failure, and conclusive negative Evidence can all justify Exit.
Learn
Ask:
What did reality teach us?
Then:
What changes because of it?
A Learning can change project instructions, guardrails, an agent skill, architecture, verification requirements, operating heuristics, Direction, a future Bet, or something the organization stops doing.
If nothing changes, you recorded an observation.
Look for
The system should behave differently next time.
That is Evidence that the lesson survived the conversation in which it was discovered.
What you just learned
A lesson is not learned until the system behaves differently.
Golden Frijoles compounds when each completed Bet improves the system that will operate the next one.