Two-Way Door Decisions
Speed up your decision-making by classifying choices into reversible (two-way door) and irreversible (one-way door) commitments.
In his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos outlined why large organizations slow down: they apply heavy, slow governance to reversible decisions. Learn how to calibrate decision velocity to reversibility.
Step 1: The One-Way Door (Type 1) vs Two-Way Door (Type 2)
Type 1 (One-Way Doors): Irreversible decisions. Walking through the door locks it behind you. Examples: selling your company, launching a nuclear power plant, signing a 10-year lease, having a child. These require exhaustive deliberation, pre-mortems, and multiple perspectives.
Type 2 (Two-Way Doors): Reversible decisions. If the outcome is suboptimal, you can simply walk back through the door. Examples: testing a new landing page, trying a new pricing tier on a subset of users, experimenting with a 30-day remote work policy. These should be made quickly with 70% of available information.
Step 2: The 70% Information Rule
If you wait until you have 90% or 100% of information for a Type 2 decision, you are moving too slowly and competitors will out-iterate you. Making decisions with ~70% certainty and correcting course rapidly is optimal.
Step 3: Lowering the Reversibility Cost
Before treating a decision as high-stakes, ask: "How can I convert this one-way door into a two-way door?" (e.g. pilot programs, time-boxed milestones, consulting contracts before full-time hiring).