The problem
Excessive water use and cost
Using more water is normal.
Redesigned the fluid control structure itself.
Result
Up to 95% reduction in water use. Adopted in roughly 40,000 locations across Japan.
Cohort 1 · November 23–25, 2026 · MIT campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts
When did you last update the premises you decide on?
Decision Architecture in the Age of AI
Delivered in English, with Japanese interpretation available. Seats fill early given the travel commitment.
Left to right: Michael Davies (MIT), Masaaki Takano, Blade Kotelly (MIT) — MIT campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Co-developed with Blade Kotelly, Senior Lecturer at MIT
Red Dot Design Award — “Best of the Best,” 2025
MOU with Olayan Group, Saudi-Japan Investment Forum
Dates
November 23–25, 2026
3 days + two online sessions
Venue
MIT campus
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Language
Delivered in English
Japanese interpretation available
Format
Small cohort
Selective admission
On completion
Certificate signed by
Kotelly and Takano
Why now
Whatever your premise is, AI will amplify it.
AI is not neutral; it works with what you give it. When the premise is right, AI accelerates success. When the premise is wrong, AI accelerates failure just as fast. AI does not correct mistakes — it scales them.
If your premise is “compete on price,” AI will sharpen your pricing strategy.
If your premise is “win in the market you already know,” AI will optimize your position inside it.
If your premise is “avoid risk,” AI will make your caution more efficient.
In the age of AI, effort is no longer the issue, and most successful organizations already know how to execute. What determines whether AI delivers results is the premise underneath. That is what this program teaches.
What makes this program different
Premise Design and Design Thinking.
There are thousands of AI programs. What is taught here is not how to be more efficient, or how to operate a particular tool. It is two methods that transfer across fields, industries and organizations.
Premise Design
Masaaki Takano
A method for redesigning the premise beneath a decision — not the decision itself. Masaaki Takano developed it in his own work, tested it across Japanese manufacturing, and applied it to national-scale projects in the Gulf. It is now taught on the MIT campus.
What is taught is not an idea — it is the method itself. Because it isn’t talent, it transfers. It installs in two places: your own judgment, and the decision-making structure of your organization. Change both, and the direction AI accelerates changes with them.
Design Thinking
Blade Kotelly
A method for turning human needs into products and services people value. Blade Kotelly, Senior Lecturer at MIT, brings experience leading the Advanced Concept Lab at Sonos and design and consumer experience at Jibo, with work spanning robotics, cybersecurity and speech recognition.
The method gives innovation a repeatable structure: understand people, develop ideas, test solutions, refine them. It builds both your own ability to design solutions and your team's ability to form a shared vision and evaluate results. Paired with Premise Design, it turns a reframed problem into something you can build and test — giving AI a clear purpose in meeting human needs.
The problem
Premises are invisible from the inside.
The premise beneath a decision operates below the level of conscious judgment. If you could see it, you would already have changed it. You use it in day-to-day decisions without ever pausing to examine it. The most capable people are often the least likely to question their own premises, precisely because they execute on top of them faster and more precisely than anyone else. This isn’t a personal failing. It is how judgment is structured.
Reviewing your own work won’t reveal the premise behind it. Talking to people in your own industry won’t either — anyone who shares your premise cannot see it as a premise.
It has to be pointed out from outside, by someone standing on different ground. That is why this program deliberately mixes industries and countries, and runs as one intensive block of time, away from the environment where the premise was formed.
“It took me nine years to notice and correct the premises in my own work. In my consulting work, it takes me days to see the premises in a client’s business and offer a different perspective. That’s because a premise is hardest to see when you’re standing inside it.”
Masaaki Takano — Originator of Premise Design
Evidence
What happens when one premise moves.
Premise Design is not a theory. It is a pattern that recurred, repeatedly, across Masaaki Takano’s own manufacturing business — none of it the result of working harder.
The problem
Washing dishes is difficult and time-consuming
Clean harder, from the outside.
Redesigned the surface of the plate itself.
Result
Grease lifts off with water alone — no detergent.
The problem
Can’t hire the talent we need
Compete within the domestic market.
Moved the arena to the world stage.
Result
Began recruiting at the IITs and secured a Day 1 slot, alongside Goldman Sachs and GAFAM.
The problem
Losing ground in a saturated home market
Win in Japan first.
Went abroad as a coalition of Japanese firms.
Result
Selected as a participating company in a Saudi national megaproject.
Neither product began as a water-saving project. Both became one once the premise was removed.
Third-party recognition
Red Dot Design Award — “Best of the Best,” 2025
The faucet. The same international design award that has recognized the iPhone and Ferrari. Out of over 20,000 annual entries from 70+ countries, “Best of the Best” goes only to roughly the top 1%. The dishware received a Red Dot in 2024, making this back-to-back recognition.
MOU with Olayan Group, Riyadh
Signed at the Saudi-Japan Investment Forum, witnessed by Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry and Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Investment.
Saudi national megaproject
Selected as a participating company, as part of a coalition of Japanese firms.
Japan’s Energy Conservation Grand Prize, 2023 and 2024
Dishware in 2023, faucet in 2024. Both awarded to products that consume no electricity at all.
Japan’s national school curriculum
Featured in a Ministry of Education-approved technology textbook for junior high schools, as a case study for the next generation.
Nikkei Business, “50 Japanese Changing the World,” 2019
The same issue as Toyota’s Akio Toyoda, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, and MLB’s Shohei Ohtani.
Japan’s national Monodzukuri Parts Award — Grand Prize, 2009
Won by a one-person company with its first product. That year’s runners-up were TDK, Terumo and Sony.
Forbes JAPAN and Nikkei Cross Trend
“10 Ways Japan Wins After ChatGPT” (2023). Marketer of the Year, Excellence Award (2023).
Proof of applicability
Once learned, participants use it in their own companies.
Manufacturing. Marketing. Design. Recruiting. AI. Masaaki Takano was not an expert in any of these fields when he entered them — no apprenticeship, no decades of training. The results still followed. Not once, but repeatedly, across fields that share nothing else in common. Talent would explain a single success. Experience would explain success confined to one field. Neither explains results that repeat across unrelated domains. What's left is a method.
Every case above is something Takano did himself. What follows is other people doing it — in their own companies, on their own. All three attended the Tokyo cohort in March 2026: a manufacturer, an executive at a large corporation, a creative director. Their conclusion is the same. The problem was not AI.
“Decisions I used to make on instinct, I can now explain to my team.”
Forecast-driven production planning I used to run on gut feel, I can now put into logical terms and explain. On the floor, people have started asking why we are doing a given step at all — and real improvements are following from it. Our sales proposals changed. So did how we recruit in Vietnam.
What I thought I needed was an answer to the AI singularity: where my company and Japanese manufacturing would be in ten years. What I wanted was not prompt technique or workflow efficiency, but how an executive should decide in the era that follows.
I was drilled on three questions until my head was smoking: why does this exist, what is it standing on, and what feels wrong about it. My decision-making process was overturned at the root.
I used to read a great many books on management and business. I read far fewer now — not out of dismissal, but because I stopped taking my starting point from what someone else had written and began reasoning from the ground up myself. The vague dread about the future is gone, because the business is standing on solid ground now.
Takanori Saito — President and CEO, Saito Resin Industry Co., Ltd.
Tokyo cohort, March 2026 · Feature article forthcoming (loconomiQ)
I thought my problem was how to deal with AI in an era where everyone uses it as a matter of course. I wanted to learn Takano’s thinking directly, and to discuss it with people I don’t normally get to meet.
“I thought I was the one making my decisions. It turned out I wasn’t.”
Someone else had set the premise of the question, and I hadn’t even noticed there was one. That was the source of the exhaustion — fighting on someone else’s arena on effort alone.
Yoshizumi Tanaka — Large corporation
Tokyo cohort, March 2026
I support SMEs with social media and corporate branding. My problem, I thought, was depending too heavily on product strength — I was hitting a ceiling in inventing new things and new value.
“It was never about product strength. It was which arena I chose to create value in.”
The level was in a different class entirely. I began applying it inside my company immediately, and ideas keep coming. A few days felt like several years of progress.
Ayumi Endo — Creative Director, Oade Inc.
Tokyo cohort, March 2026
The program
Three days. Your own decision.
Held November 23–25, 2026, on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Every participant brings a live decision from their own company. Not a hypothetical case — the actual problem is what gets worked through over the three days.
Layer 01
Structure
Frameworks for innovation. How to reduce the uncertainty between an idea and its execution, and how to build organizational agreement around it. This builds directly on the Tokyo cohort held in March 2026, with additional depth added for Cohort 1.
Layer 02
Judgment / Premise Design
The premise underneath your decision criteria. The moment you start from your own strength, you are already standing on someone else’s arena. This layer dismantles — from the outside — what you have defined as success and what you have defined as risk.
Application
To your own decision
The case you bring is worked through in sequence: phenomenon → decision criteria → premise → redefining the arena → implementation. Down to who decides what, and in what order — something you can act on the moment you are back.
Phenomenon → Decision criteria → Premise → Redefining the arena → Implementation
Faculty
Taught by the people who did it.
A five-day program was held in Tokyo in March 2026. The quality of participants’ cases and discussion led the three instructors to decide, together, that the next cohort would move to the MIT campus.
Masaaki Takano
Originator of Premise Design
Has systematized a method for identifying the premise beneath a decision and redefining the competitive arena itself. Named in Nikkei Business’s “50 Japanese Changing the World” and Forbes JAPAN’s “10 Ways Japan Wins After ChatGPT.”
Blade Kotelly
Senior Lecturer, MIT · Design Thinking & Innovation
Led advanced concept research at Sonos; Head of Design and Customer Experience at Jibo. Has shaped experience strategy for Google, Cisco, Bose, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, MIT Sloan Management Review, NPR and BBC. Author of a foundational book on voice interface design. Co-developer of this program and an instructor at the March 2026 Tokyo cohort.
Michael Davies
Senior Lecturer, MIT · Technology Strategy & Value Creation
Founder and Chairman of Endeavour Partners, advising businesses on technology strategy and growth. Co-founder and Chairman of silverthread, Inc., commercializing research from MIT and Harvard Business School. Works on how technologies gain adoption, how platforms and ecosystems shape competition, and how companies turn technological change into commercial advantage. Joins the faculty for Cohort 1.
Tokyo, March 2026. A five-day program, delivered with simultaneous interpretation throughout.
The cost
The real comparison isn’t three days.
It’s another year spent running decisions on premises that haven’t been updated.
A plan built on a misaligned premise goes further off course the faster it is executed. Add AI, and it moves faster still. A year of investment, a year of hiring, a year of decisions — all compounding in that direction.
This program is three days, plus two short sessions beforehand. That is the entire commitment. In exchange, you leave having examined — and updated — the decision criteria everything else in your company runs on.
[ USD to be confirmed ]
Travel and accommodation not included.
Certificate of Completion issued to participants who complete the full program.
Sending more than one executive? Corporate nominations are available on request — contact us for group terms.
Fit
Who this is for — and who it isn’t for.
A strong fit if
You personally decide your organization’s direction.
You already have a specific decision you want to bring.
Something about your current trajectory feels wrong.
You want to argue it out with peers carrying equal weight of decision.
Not the right fit if
You want to learn how to operate AI tools.
Touring the MIT campus is the main goal.
You’re gathering information without decision authority.
You believe your current premises are already right.
Process
How to apply.
Admission is selective and cohort size is small. Registering does not guarantee a seat. Before enrollment, we confirm together that the case you want to bring is a genuine fit.
1
Register for priority information
Not an application. You’ll receive full program details and next steps.
2
20-minute fit call
What decisions you’re currently responsible for, and what case you’d bring.
3
30–45 minute individual briefing
How the three days would work with that specific case.
4
Formal application
Admission is confirmed following review.
Corporate nominations
Request a corporate briefing → confirm candidate nominees → group enrollment.
Given travel arrangements, we recommend international participants confirm by early October 2026. Confirmation from Japan: mid-October 2026.
Staying on the same course is a choice. Updating the premise is too.
If you have a case you want to bring, start with priority registration. Delivered in English, with Japanese interpretation available. Seats fill early given the travel commitment.
November 23–25, 2026 · MIT campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts · Delivered in English with Japanese interpretation · Small cohort, selective admission · Certificate of Completion