Two-Way Doors Deserve Two Minutes
Sort decisions by reversibility, not by size, and spend your deliberation accordingly.
- Evidence
- untested
- Topic
- Decisions
- Things to do
- 3
- Read
- 1 min
Not a tested claim. A way of thinking that is useful and widely used, but that nobody has actually put to the test — so it is not dressed up as evidence here.
- Jeff Bezos, shareholder letter, 2015 (Type 1 / Type 2 decisions)
Check it yourself: find this on Google Scholar
A correction to this entry
A decision rule from a 2015 Amazon shareholder letter. Useful, widely adopted, and never tested as a claim — so it is no longer graded as though it were evidence.
Why it works
Most organisations and most people apply irreversible-decision care to reversible decisions, which is how everything slows down without getting safer.
What to do about it
- Label each decision as reversible or not before discussing it. State the label out loud.
- Reversible: decide fast, alone, and instrument it so you notice if it's wrong.
- Irreversible: slow down, widen options, pre-mortem, sleep on it, get an outside view.
Where people go wrong
Misclassifying. Reputation, a public announcement, a hire's effect on a team and anything with a legal signature are less reversible than they look.
Where this fits in your day
Find a third option, name the base rate, and ask whether the door is one-way.
Read next
- Whether-Or-Not Is Not a DecisionA choice framed as one option with a yes/no is the worst-performing shape a decision can take.solid
- 10 / 10 / 10How will I feel about this in ten minutes, in ten months, and in ten years?untested
- Start From the Base RateAsk what usually happens to cases like this one before you consider what is special about this one.proven
- The Planning FallacyYour estimate of how long this will take is an estimate of the best case, and you know it is not the best case.proven