Separate One-Way Doors From Two-Way Doors
Most decisions that slow companies and teams down are not actually hard. They just get treated as if they are. Bezos draws a hard line between two categories. A two-way door decision is one where, if you get it wrong, you can walk back through and try again. A one-way door decision is consequential, difficult to reverse, and requires a different level of scrutiny. The problem is that most organizations apply the same heavyweight process to both. The result is that irreversible decisions get made too casually and reversible ones get made too slowly. Both are expensive. Bezos says two-way door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or small teams deep in the organization, without escalation. One-way door decisions are the ones that need to travel up to senior leadership, slow down, and get analyzed from multiple angles. His own example from rocketry: choosing liquid natural gas for the booster stage and hydrogen for the upper stage. Change your mind on that later and you have set the program back by years. The skill is in the sorting. Knowing which category a decision belongs to before you start deliberating is what separates high-velocity organizations from slow ones.