Decision-making glossary
One-way door decision
A one-way door decision is one that is consequential and hard or impossible to reverse, so it deserves slow, careful deliberation. Its opposite, a two-way door, can be undone cheaply if it turns out wrong and should be made quickly. Jeff Bezos popularized both terms in Amazon’s 2015 letter to shareholders.
In that letter, Bezos split decisions into Type 1, one-way doors that are consequential and irreversible or nearly so, and Type 2, two-way doors that are changeable and reversible. His warning was that as organizations grow, they apply the heavy Type 1 process to most decisions, including many Type 2 ones, and the result is slowness.
In practice the label is a question to ask before deciding: if this is wrong, what does it cost to go back? Signing a multi-year lease, shutting down a product or publicly changing a price sit close to one-way. Rewriting an onboarding email, trying a new meeting format or piloting a tool with one team are two-way.
Two mistakes are common. Treating two-way doors as one-way wastes time and makes a team timid. Treating one-way doors as two-way is worse, because the cost appears only after the door has closed. Many decisions are partly reversible, and the useful move is often to find the part that can be tried cheaply first.
In Decize: Every decision in Decize is marked as a one-way or two-way door, and Decize drafts that reading from the message it was captured from. See how →
Sources: Amazon, 2015 Letter to Shareholders (published 2016)