Often framed as “one vs two-way doo decisions” at Amazon.
Video of Bezos talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxsdOQa_QkM.
IMO it’s a useful decision making strategy at times, mostly to not overthink the easily reversible.
Video of Bezos talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxsdOQa_QkM.
IMO it’s a useful decision making strategy at times, mostly to not overthink the easily reversible.
> Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though.
So imo it’s splitting hairs over the same outcome.
An example - say you introduce 5 day return to office. Half you staff leaves and you now go back to a flexible work from home model. You don’t “undo” the damage done, but you can recover. It was a costly 2-way door.
Those words mean entirely different things.
One is about reversing a decision. One is about reversing an outcome.
Irreversible decisions mean decisions without backsies. Recoverable decisions mean decisions that leave the potential for survival and a comeback.
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You cannot (typically) reverse a poorly-reasoned midlife-crisis divorce. But you can recover by getting one's life in order.
You cannot (typically) reverse a disastrous corporate merger. But you can recover, by identifying a better path forward.
You cannot (typically) reverse a money transfer after buying into a scam. But you can recover, by continuing to earn and save.
You can change your streaming service name from "HBO" to "Kansas" to "Pumpernickle" to "Cheese Please", and then revert to "HBO". And leverage the PR waves from a mea culpa. And, snowball the PR into a reputation as a lovable rake, by doing the same thing every year around April 1st.
But, you cannot reverse adding caffeine to 7-up after adding caffeine to 7-up, and resume your famous marketing campaign of "No caffeine. Never had it. Never will."
Only difference is time. Much like an eventually consistent transactions, recoverable decisions have propagation latency.
The breaking part here is that will you able to survive until the recovery is complete?