Every leadership coach will mention the above concept and throw in Bezos name to add some weight to their assertion. They make it sound easy– it is easy conceptually, the difficulty is in recognizing which one is a one way versus a two way door.
One-Way Doors:
These decisions often involve substantial financial investments, long-term implications, and limited opportunities for course correction. High stakes and scarce resources are often associated with one-way doors, necessitating a careful and thorough assessment before proceeding.
Two-Way Doors:
Two-way doors, in contrast, offer a more flexible approach to decision making. They allow for exploration, experimentation, and learning without the fear of irreversible consequences. These choices are easily reversible, enabling you to pivot, adjust, or even abandon them if they don’t yield the desired results.
Putting the Concept into Practice:
There is a little bit of art to putting this in practice, The reality is you never know for sure for big/high impact projects. I find it to useful to ask the following questions
- What is the investment required and the time to implement?
- Can we test the hypotheses in a smaller scale to learn and to validate?
- What is the commitment required either in terms of dollars or people?
- Are the skills of the people working on this scarce or plentiful?
- What are the risks of negatively impacting customers?
- What are the risks of damage to brand reputation?
My bias is to experiment at a smaller scale for anything that requires longer commitment (or high $$ commitment) and ties up scarce resources/skills for an extended period of time. This gives the opportunity to course correct and double down or shutdown after the initial learnings.