One-way doors: which decisions deserve the agony

The common failure is uniform deliberation. Every decision gets a meeting, a document and a week, which means the genuinely irreversible ones get the same attention as the ones you could reverse on Thursday. The result is an organisation that is simultaneously slow and under-considered.

Sorting in one question

If this is wrong, what does it cost to undo, in money, time and credibility? Three broad categories fall out:

• Cheap to reverse. Pricing experiments, most tooling, most copy, most process. Decide fast, instrument it, move on. Deliberating here is expensive and produces nothing.
• Expensive but possible. Senior hires, a new segment, a platform choice. Worth real thought, worth a pre-mortem, not worth a quarter.
• Effectively permanent. Co-founder terms, taking money from a particular investor, selling, a public position you cannot walk back. These deserve everything you have.

Speed on the reversible ones is what buys you time for the ones that are not.

The trap

Some decisions look reversible and are not, because the reversal is technically possible and socially impossible. You can technically undo a title you gave someone. You can technically re-raise a price you cut. Both are one-way doors in practice, and the mistake is to classify by mechanics rather than by what you will actually be able to do.

Making it operational

Say which category a decision is in before discussing it. It takes ten seconds, it settles how much time the thing deserves, and it prevents the most common failure in a leadership meeting: forty-five minutes on something that could have been tried.

Five Peers editorial note. Sources named in the text.