The Conditions for a “Reversible” Organization: Lessons from a “Summer Golf Course” and a “Yakuza Funeral”

The Common Thread Between “Summer Risk” and “Organizational Entanglements”

A golf course in Chiba is exploring concrete measures to “stay open” even during extreme heatwaves. Meanwhile, within the Yamaguchi-gumi, the very person who once issued an expulsion order visits the funeral of that individual to pay respects. At first glance, these are two seemingly unrelated news items from entirely different dimensions: business continuity in the leisure industry and human relationships within a unique social organization.

However, when viewed through the lens of “reversible management,” a surprisingly common core emerges. It is the point of whether, in the face of drastic environmental changes (extreme heat / shifting social environment), past decisions or relationships are not treated as absolute, leaving room to ‘reverse course’ depending on the situation.

The golf course is not bound by the past fixed notion (a kind of decision) that “customers don’t come in summer” and shutting down, but is trying to increase “reversible” options through facility investment and service design. The Yamaguchi-gumi case suggests that even in a relationship where the heaviest organizational decision of “expulsion” was once made, the rigidity of that “decision” can be softened depending on the time and circumstances.

In SME management, this “rigidity of decisions” is also the greatest risk. The talent hired, the systems implemented, the new ventures started, the deals turned down… The moment these are treated as “irreversible decisions,” the organization begins to lose its ability to adapt to environmental changes.

The Reversible Experiments Behind the “Stay Open” Decision

According to a report by Chiba Television, the golf course is tackling the heatwave with measures like mist showers, enhanced rest areas, and discounts for early morning and evening time slots. This is not merely a service improvement. It can be seen as a move to redefine the business model of “summer operations,” previously “decided” to be unprofitable, as an aggregate of various small “experiments.”

Installing a mist shower is one “experiment.” It can be removed if ineffective. Trying time-slot discounts is another “experiment.” If the average spending per customer drops too much, they can revert to the original pricing. The crucial point is that instead of suddenly making the major “decision” to “operate fully in summer,” they are accumulating small, reversible judgments to enable it and observing the actual results.

The trap many SMEs fall into is tying a major decision like “starting a new business” to massive upfront investment and fixed personnel. Once started, even with poor data, they cannot retreat due to the “sunk cost.” The golf course’s approach is to, for a large goal (summer operations), repeat small investments (experiments) with clear exit conditions, thereby dispersing overall risk and maintaining reversibility.

Setting evaluation periods, clarifying points to observe (number of visitors, feedback on heatstroke risk, profitability), and discontinuing individual measures if they fail. This process itself is the practical form of “reversible management.”

The Meaning of the “Absolute” Decision of “Expulsion” and Its “Margin”

The other news item, the Yamaguchi-gumi case, is more dramatic but extremely suggestive from an organizational theory perspective. In typical corporate organizations, decisions akin to “disciplinary dismissal” or “expulsion” usually mean an absolute, irreversible severance of relations. Once that happens, returning to the original relationship is virtually impossible.

However, this news is noteworthy because it highlights the reality that a formal, institutional decision like “expulsion” does not completely overwrite all human relationships or organizational memory. In the extraordinary context of a funeral, behavior transcending the framework of past decisions becomes possible.

How does this translate to the context of a general company? It is the principle, obvious yet often forgotten, that “people are not completely defined by their title or employment contract.” Just because someone failed on a project doesn’t mean all contact with that talent must be severed. A candidate judged “not hired” once could become a collaborator in a completely different form years later.

One fundamental principle of “reversible management” is to “look at the work, not the person.” Interpreting the Yamaguchi-gumi case through this principle, “expulsion” might have been a “dismissal from a specific duty (role within the organization),” not a complete, personal severance from the individual. Paradoxically, it teaches us the importance of an organization not overly rigidly fixing individuals to “duties (roles),” but leaving room somewhere, formally or informally, to redefine them according to the situation.

How to Deal with the “Three Culprits” that Rigidify Decisions

Now, the two cases of the golf course’s “summer risk” measures and the Yamaguchi-gumi’s “condolence call” provide hints for considering the mechanisms by which organizations rigidify “decisions,” making them irreversible, and how to avoid it.

The “Three Culprits that Make Judgments Irreversible,” repeatedly pointed out by this media, are as follows:

1. Having fixed roles and expectations to people.
2. Having made responsibilities ambiguous through contracts or systems.
3. Having proceeded without grasping the actual situation.

The golf course case primarily shows a countermeasure for the third culprit. It is reviewing a decision based on the insufficiently data-backed fixed notion (past rule of thumb) that “summer is no good,” and continuously collecting new “actual data” through small experiments. If the data is bad, individual measures can be stopped. The reversibility of the decision is maintained.

The Yamaguchi-gumi case makes us think about the first and second culprits. There was an institutional decision of “expulsion” (formal severance of relations by contract/system). However, a “margin” existed, at least informally, acknowledging that it does not erase the individual’s overall value or all past connections. While an extreme example, in general companies, there are many cases where overly fixing relationships between people or organizations to roles or past failures leads to closing off future possibilities. Examples include “never assigning them to that department again” or “absolutely never working with that client again.”

“Reversible” Organizational Design SMEs Can Implement Starting Tomorrow

So, what can SME leaders learn from these news stories and put into practice? I would like to present a concrete decision-making framework.

First, decompose major “decisions” into bundles of small “experiments.” Instead of “starting a new business,” begin with “conducting market research for 3 months, one day a week, with one existing staff member.” Just as the golf course started with the mist shower experiment, minimize investment and decide on the evaluation period and exit conditions from the outset.

Second, apply the brakes to fixing people to roles. Perceptions like “that person can only do that job” or “things haven’t been good with that client since that project” are often the leader’s own assumptions. Create regular opportunities to reorganize work and re-evaluate the potential of your talent. As the Yamaguchi-gumi case shows, people’s abilities and relationships exist on a different dimension from formal systems (titles, evaluations).

Third, stop making lists of decisions that are “absolutely never.” Instead, create an “observation list” of things that are “currently too high-risk.” Items on the list can move as the environment changes and your company’s resources change. Treating decisions as situational and relative prevents rigidity.

Set Evaluation Periods and Clarify Observation Points

Finally, I urge you to develop the habit of always defining an “evaluation period” and “points to observe” as a set for every new initiative.

For example, when introducing a new digital tool: “Establish a 3-month trial period and observe ‘time saved on tasks (hours/week)’ and ‘number of complaints from the team’ during that time. After 3 months, if time saved is less than 2 hours per week OR there are 3 or more major complaints, terminate the contract.” This is the concrete form of a “reversible” judgment.

The golf course in the heatwave likely also set an evaluation period like “during this summer season” for each measure, along with observation points like “increase in users,” “zero heatstroke incidents,” and “profitability line.”

Organizational change is similar. When creating a new position: “Try it as a provisional role for the first quarter, observing project progress rate and team approval speed. If progress is below 20% OR approval takes an average of over 3 days, reconsider the position’s design.” This leaves a door of reversibility even for a decision like creating a position, which tends to seem “fixed.”

Conclusion: A Decision is Not an Endpoint, But a Temporary Placement

What the Chiba golf course teaches us is that even industry common sense (closing in summer) can be rewritten through reversible experiments. What the Yamaguchi-gumi incident suggests is the reality that even an organization’s strictest institutional decision is not completely absolute within the context of human society.

In SME management, we tend to praise “decisiveness” and “resolve.” However, in today’s highly uncertain world, what is truly needed might be “the power not to finalize decisions”—in other words, “the ability to treat decisions not as endpoints, but as ‘temporary placements’ that can be updated according to the situation.”

The environment is always changing. Extreme heat, social conditions, market needs. The greatest management risk is becoming immobilized, bound by one’s own past decisions in the face of that change. “Reversible management” is a philosophy of building the flexibility to adapt to change into the very design of the organization. Starting today, why not design your next judgment as an “experiment”?