Nudge · 2-minute read
Organisations slow themselves down by treating easily reversible choices with the same heavy process as irreversible ones.
Jeff Bezos distinguished between one-way doors — decisions that are hard or impossible to reverse — and two-way doors, which you can walk back through if they don’t work out.
Most decisions are two-way doors. Applying one-way-door caution to all of them makes organisations slow, and teaches people that deciding anything is risky. Reserve deep deliberation for the genuinely irreversible.
The research: Bezos (2015), Amazon letter to shareholders — “one-way” and “two-way” doors.
Adapted from Nudges at Work by Tareef Jafferi, shared in partnership with Happily.ai.
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