The expensive part of a decision is often the five weeks you spent not making it, during which the problem carried on costing money and everything queued behind it stopped moving.
Most of what an owner decides can be undone. Treat those decisions as if they cannot be, and you will be slow at everything — including the handful that deserve the time.
What does the model say?
Jeff Bezos set this out in a letter to Amazon shareholders. Some decisions are one-way doors: walk through and you cannot come back, or coming back costs more than you can stomach. Most decisions are two-way doors. You walk through, look around, and if it is wrong you walk back out and try something else.
The test is a single question: if this turns out to be wrong, what does it cost to reverse, and how long does that take? Under three months and an amount you would not lose sleep over, it is a two-way door.
One-way doors are rarer than most owners think: a long lease, taking investment or a business partner, selling equity, a redundancy, a capital purchase with no second-hand market, or losing your reputation with a key client. Almost everything else — most hires, most systems, most marketing — is reversible if you notice quickly enough.
Why is the confusion so expensive?
Owners routinely run one-way process on two-way decisions. They spend a week thinking, ask three colleagues, build a comparison spreadsheet and sleep on it, for a decision they could unwind in a fortnight for a few hundred pounds.
The indirect cost is larger, because everything behind that decision stops. Your team learns that things take a while to come back from you, so they stop bringing them, so they either guess or wait. That is how an owner becomes the bottleneck without ever meaning to.
The same owner will sign a five-year lease in an afternoon because the agent mentioned another interested party. The one-way doors are the ones taken fastest, usually under time pressure created by somebody with an interest in the answer.
A worked example
The figures are illustrative. An owner is comparing scheduling systems at about £480 a month. It takes five weeks: three demos, a comparison sheet, opinions from four people, and a trial nobody had time to run properly.
Do the arithmetic on being wrong. Pick the poorer system, run it three months, admit it and switch: roughly £1,440 of subscription plus perhaps twenty hours of setup wasted. That is under £3,000.
Now do the arithmetic on the delay. The thing the system was meant to fix is costing about six hours a week of manual work. Five weeks is thirty hours gone, and behind that decision sit four others that did not move because the owner’s attention was here. The delay costs more than the mistake would have.
The same owner, that year, signed a five-year lease inside a single afternoon: a total commitment well into six figures with no break clause. The figures are illustrative.
Who should be making it?
Reversibility also tells you whose decision it is. Two-way doors below a sensible value should not reach you at all. If your operations manager cannot choose a supplier, a rota or a piece of software without checking, the authority has not been handed over.
Set the boundary by cost of reversal rather than by cost of purchase, because those are different numbers. A £4,000 piece of equipment you can sell on is a smaller commitment than an £800 contract with a two-year term. Most owners set spending limits and never think about lock-in.
Then hold the line when it goes wrong, and it will. The first time somebody uses their authority and gets it wrong, what you do next decides whether anyone uses it again. Ask what they would do differently, agree the fix, leave the authority where it is. Pull it back once and every decision returns to your desk within a fortnight, permanently.
How to use this in the next week
- Label the door before you start. First question, every time: one-way or two-way?
- Put a decision date on it the moment it arrives. Set a date by which the decision is made. Two-way doors get days.
- Decide at about seventy per cent of the information. On a reversible decision the last thirty per cent costs more to gather than the mistake would, and you will learn more in a fortnight of doing than in a fortnight of asking.
- Give the two-way doors away with a boundary. “Anything reversible under £2,000, decide it and tell me afterwards.”
- For one-way doors, run a pre-mortem. Write the sentence “it is eighteen months on and this was a disaster — here is why”, then take counsel from someone with nothing to gain from your answer.
- Keep a one-page decision log. Date, decision, what you expected, what happened. Three months of this tells you whether you are habitually too slow, too fast, or wrong in a particular direction.
Common mistakes
They mistake discomfort for rigour. A reversible decision left open feels safer than a reversible decision made badly, but the open decision costs you every day, while a bad one gets corrected in three weeks.
The second mistake is confusing deciding with announcing. Owners often decide in April, tell nobody until July, then wonder why nothing has moved. A decision nobody has been told about has not been made.
The third is judging a decision by its outcome. Sometimes a good decision produces a bad result, because the world does not co-operate. Punish yourself, or your managers, for outcomes rather than for the quality of the reasoning at the time, and everyone around you learns to make the safest possible choices.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of 10, how quickly do decisions come back out of you? Ask someone in your team the same question and compare answers.
- What decision is currently open in your head, and what is the daily cost of it staying open?
- Of the last five things you took real time over, how many were one-way doors?
- Which of the last year’s fast decisions were fast because you were being pressed by somebody who benefited from your speed?
Speed on reversible decisions buys you time to be careful with the few that deserve it. That habit is Personal Coaching work.