Recoverable and Irrecoverable Decisions

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/402425.Steve_Blank#:...

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.

Timing is everything. A bad haircut decision right before the most important job interview of your life might not be recoverable.

Great Clips or Weldon Barber, are you feeling lucky?

For some reason before reading I thought this was going to be an AI thought leadership piece but it's even better than I expected.

Great concept. Culturally, I think we are better at understanding this than ever before.

In the last 15–20 years, many people have been forced into an uncomfortable moment due to job loss (Great Recession, COVID, AI etc). They have learned to recover. Could this be why we see more entrepreneurs than ever before now?

The main difference being the time it takes to recover/reverse the decision.

Second point is: You don't need to reverse the decision you took, instead you may find a way to fix the impact but not the root-cause.

It's like when one fucks up the MySQL replication and the data consistency is corrupted. One can manually (and slowly) fix the inconsistency with downtime. Or, spin up a whole new cluster from an existing well-known node/state. Some entities may be missing, but you could gradually add them back later.

Not a reversible, but recoverable decision.

Amazon goes by with one-way vs two-way door decisions internally. Sometimes adding much bureaucracy to the equation. Just-do-it/Bias-for-action aspect usually don't go as far as the recovery period prolongs.

I actually like hats, haircuts, and tattoos. Seldom we have irrecoverable decisions--except death. https://jamesclear.com/quotes/i-think-about-decisions-in-thr...

(Also works well with LLMs, for risk assessments)

I've often thought along similar lines. I've found that indecision is almost always worse than a bad one. Very few choices are so decisive that you can't course-correct later.

That mindset has served me well both personally and professionally.