the decision
Contents — one page, one day in Furnas
Furnas · São Miguel · Azores 37°46′N 25°18′W
A private five-day reset in Furnas for eight founders and executives — and the conditions to finally make it.
It stays with you, on this device: the decision
October 2026 cohort fully booked. Enquiries open for future experiences.
Read onChapter I: The drift
Sustained pressure doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive as one bad call — it arrives as a slow drift of slightly worse ones, repeated daily. And the sharper your mind, the better it defends them.
Boards, advisors, a trusted second-in-command: each has a stake in your answer. Few are positioned to tell you, plainly, that the decision is wrong.
6×
Across more than 1,000 major business decisions, the process behind a decision mattered roughly six times more than the analysis feeding it. Intelligence was never the bottleneck. The absence of a genuine outside challenge was.
Chapter II: The place
It was made at your desk, in your calendar, between your meetings. So we take you somewhere that has been doing this for centuries.
Furnas is a geothermal valley in the east of São Miguel, in the middle of the Atlantic — and our hometown. The ground steams. The water arrives warm from below. You sleep in private cabins tucked into the forest: no hotel corridors, no lobby noise. Remote enough to force a genuine break.
+50%
Four days immersed in nature, disconnected from devices, improved creative problem-solving by fifty per cent.
Chapter III: Five days
Breathe, move, connect — usually in that order. Here is one illustrative day; times, sessions and places change with the weather and the cohort.
06:40Breathe · a typical day
Wim Hof Method breathwork and cold exposure with Samir Javed, a Level 3 instructor. A deliberate stress, met calmly — and a return to the state where clarity is available again. You can’t think your way to clarity in a stressed body. The body gets there first.
Breathwork and cold exposure aren’t suitable for everyone. We ask about relevant health information before you take part.
09:30Move · a typical day
Somatic movement and yoga with Carolina Lino, then raw nature: forest paths, thermal pools, trails above crater lakes. Movement that slows thinking, not accelerates it. Your best decision will not happen at your desk.
60%more creative output, on average, walking than sitting — Oppezzo & Schwartz, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014
13:00Connect · a typical day
Guided sessions and decision councils with Rob Paynter, twenty years inside C-suites. The coach brings the method. Seven peers ask the questions your usual circle won’t. This is where your decision finally meets an outside challenge — and you still do the deciding. Then cozido das Furnas, slow-cooked underground for six hours, and the conversation carries on at the table.
18:30Water · a typical day
Geothermally heated water rising from deep below the earth’s surface. You immerse, and your nervous system stops negotiating. Nobody is checking a phone. Nobody is performing.
21:30Sound · a typical day
Handpan and sound in nature with Jorge Valerio — the bridge between regulation and stillness. Then Nuno Amendoeira’s sound bath, with the Tibetan singing bowls he has worked with since 2005. Outside, the valley supplies its own sound: running water. Natural sounds lower stress, and water sounds showed the strongest effect on health outcomes (Buxton et al., PNAS, 2021).
By now, the decision is a different size. Distance does that.
An impression of water and a handpan, generated in your browser.
Chapter IV: The room
And the more senior you get, the smaller that room becomes. Everyone manages you instead of talking to you. So we keep it to eight.
Seven others carrying comparable weight. Nothing said here is recorded or repeated.
Group intelligence is real and measurable — and it depends less on the smartest person in the room than on how the group talks: who listens, and whether everyone gets a turn. Woolley et al., Science, 2010
Every facilitator holds a specialism. The programme was built by the founders for themselves first.
“Success was supposed to answer the question. It didn’t.”
After senior roles at Google, Burton and other global consumer brands, Miguel Pestana and Tiago Cordeiro researched what the highest performers actually do to sustain clarity — and built a programme around it, in Furnas, the place they are from. They built it for themselves first.
Chapter V: The container
We never publish a guest’s face or name. Not yours, not anyone’s in your cohort.
One closed cohort of eight. Nothing in the room is filmed or recorded.
The moment a room can be recorded, people perform instead of reset. Privacy is not a courtesy here. It is the condition that makes the work possible.
Chapter VI: After
The week is built so you leave knowing what you will do about the decision — and fully behind it. Goals change behaviour when you are committed to them, and commitment grows when the goal truly matters to you and you believe you can deliver it. Locke & Latham, American Psychologist, 2002
Read personally by the founders, reviewed with Rob Paynter. A reply within 48 hours.
A private session with Rob to name the decision and set your intention.
Breathe, move, connect. The room pressure-tests. You decide.
A private calibration afterwards, so the clarity survives your calendar.
It begins before you arrive and continues after you leave. You only need to come once.
The week is built on research we take seriously — on breath, movement, nature, sound, and how groups and decisions work.
Chapter VII: Is it for you?
Thirty seconds, six honest answers. Nothing is sent anywhere. We would rather tell you now if this isn’t the right room.
Chapter VIII: The conversation
Bring the decision
to the table.
October 2026 cohort fully booked. Enquiries open for future experiences.
Every enquiry is read personally by Miguel and Tiago and reviewed with Rob Paynter, our executive coach. We curate each cohort carefully — eight people who belong in the same room — and reply within 48 hours.