You will be able to sort decisions by reversibility and set how much time each deserves.
Hafiz manages operations for a small chain of cafes across Singapore. On one Monday he has to decide on a new seasonal drink, which supplier to use for paper cups, whether to try a new rostering app, and whether to sign a five-year lease for a fourth outlet in Tampines. He spends most of the week agonising over the drink and the cups, because those are the decisions people keep asking him about. The lease gets signed on Friday afternoon after a twenty-minute call.
Most people distribute their decision time like this, by how loud a decision is rather than by what is at stake. This module is about matching the effort to the decision, and it starts with the simplest sorting question there is: can you undo it?
In his letters to Amazon shareholders, most clearly the one covering 2015, Jeff Bezos described two types of decision. Some are consequential and irreversible or nearly so. He called these one-way doors: once you walk through, you cannot come back. They deserve to be made slowly and carefully, with plenty of discussion.
Most decisions are not like that, because they can be changed or reversed, and Bezos called these two-way doors: if you walk through and do not like what you see, you can step back out. Bezos argued that these should be made quickly, by individuals or small groups with good judgement, because the cost of a mistake is low and can be fixed.
His warning was about what happens when an organisation gets these mixed up. As companies grow, he wrote, they tend to use the heavy, careful process meant for one-way doors on every decision, two-way doors as well. The result is slowness, timid choices and a lack of experiments.
For Hafiz, the seasonal drink is a two-way door. If customers do not like it, it comes off the menu in a month, with some wasted syrup and a few hours of staff training lost. The paper cup supplier is also a two-way door, as long as the contract allows him to switch with reasonable notice. The rostering app has a free trial.
Each of these deserves a short, sensible decision, made by the person closest to the problem. Hafiz could give the drink to the head barista with a budget and a deadline. He could pick the cup supplier with the best price and an exit clause, and set a date to review it. The value of moving quickly is real: the team learns faster, and his own attention is saved for the decisions that need it.
The test for a two-way door is not "could this go wrong", because almost anything can. It is "if it goes wrong, how much does it cost to reverse, and how long does it take?" If the answer is a little money and a few weeks, it is a two-way door.
The five-year lease is a one-way door. Once signed, Hafiz is committed to five years of rent whether the outlet does well or not. Breaking it early is likely to be expensive. A wrong call here could drag down the whole business.
This is where the tools from the rest of the course belong. The landlord's footfall figures need the checks from Module 3. The claim that a nearby MRT exit will bring customers needs the causal questions from Module 4. His estimate of how quickly the outlet will break even needs the outside view from lesson 5.3, Vivid stories and the planning fallacy. And before signing, a pre-mortem, which lesson 6.2 covers, would help him see what could go wrong.
Other common one-way doors at work and in life: buying property, signing a long contract, firing someone, making a public commitment that would be damaging to withdraw, choosing a degree that takes years, or anything involving safety or legal exposure.
The opposite mistake is common too, especially in cautious organisations. Every decision goes through the same approval chain. Changing a font on a slide needs three sign-offs. A small trial of a new tool waits two months for a committee. People stop suggesting changes because getting a yes takes longer than the change is worth.
This wastes the attention of senior people on decisions that do not need them, and it slows the whole team down. Hafiz's real error was not spending too long on the drink. It was spending so long on it that he had nothing left for the lease.
Many decisions that feel permanent can be made reversible, or at least more reversible, with some thought. Before treating a decision as a one-way door, ask whether there is a smaller first step you could take back.
Hafiz could ask for a shorter first lease with an option to renew. He could run a pop-up or a weekend kiosk in Tampines for two months before committing. A company considering a new system can pilot it with one team. Someone thinking about a career change can take a short course or a part-time project in the new field before resigning. Each of these turns one big irreversible decision into a smaller reversible one, followed by a better-informed big one.
Pilots and trials cost something too, in money and time. But for a decision that would be expensive to undo, that cost often buys the most useful thing available: real information before the door closes.
Your own month ahead is full of doors of both kinds, and some of the quiet ones may matter more than the loud ones. The activity below asks you to sort them before they arrive.
List ten decisions you face this month and mark each as a one-way or two-way door, with how long you will spend on each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).