Introduction

One-way vs two-way door decisions is an effective tool to make decisions that are right and fast. Speed and accuracy of decisions are two main parameters for success in business and this framework helps decision makers and leaders to do just that. Introduced by Jeff Bezos in one of his shareholder letters, Amazon widely adopts this decision making framework to be decisive and fast in its key decisions.

The analogy comes from doors itself wherein one-way doors are those where once you enter there is no way back. Whereas, two-way doors are those that you can come back to again. The same applies in decision making and helps us understand when to move fast and when to pause & deliberate further. 

One-way door decisions

These types of decisions are those that involve huge risks to the business or customers and hence need longer considerations when arriving at the final decision. The risks involved could be reputational risk to the company, impact on technical architecture, customer trust, etc. that have the potential to greatly impact the business. Once impacted it is difficult to go back and hence need to be slow in making those decisions. 

To be able to make one-way door decisions, gather as much data as possible about your customers, markets and engage is multiple deep dives into the topic in discussion. A typical litmus test, oftenly used at Amazon, to make one-way door decisions is to ask the question: What could end up becoming the headline of New York Times if things do not go well? 

When encountering such decisions, it is best to take an incremental approach instead of going all-in. Break the big decision into small components. This allows us to test the waters and reduce the overall risk to company and customers. Create short-term plans and evolve it as you gather more information. If the evidence is overwhelmingly detrimental then you can pull the plug and avoid detrimental impact. 

In the process of making a one-way door decision, one framework that can be used is a RAPID framework that allows us to identify the right person with the right accountability. RAPID is acronym for Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide:

R: Who should recommend the proposal?

A: Who must agree to the recommendation?

P: Who will perform the decision once made?

I: Who needs to provide the input when developing the decision recommendation?

D: Who gets to decide the final decision?

Once accountability is created and all the necessary deep dives are done, the group or the decision maker can make a go/no-go decision.

Two-way door decisions

These types of decisions are those that are low risk to business or customers. They involve changes to features, user experience changes, experiments, technical debts, etc. These are the one’s on which we should go fast and not worry about the impact as we can always rollback. 

The individual teams should be empowered to own two-way door decisions. These decisions should be made by those who are closest to the problem instead of surfacing them to leaders. It allows teams to be empowered and do not need to wait on leadership approvals. At the same time it frees up time and space for leaders to focus on more important decisions. 

To make such decisions fast, the teams should not spend time to get all the required data to make the final decision. Make the decision with 70% of the information and move ahead. Adopt disagree and commit principle and experiment to remove any judgment. 

Conclusion

Thinking decisions as one-way or two-way allows the decision maker to pause and determine the best strategy towards decision making. It also increases the organization’s efficiency to make faster and correct decisions over a long term.