Two Way Door Decisions

Jeff Bezos framed decisions as doors. A two-way door can be walked back through if it turns out wrong: the cost of a mistake is small and bounded. A one-way door is hard or impossible to undo. Most decisions are two-way doors, yet organizations often treat them all as one-way: slow, committee-driven, and risk-averse. The skill is to sort decisions correctly, move fast on the reversible ones, and spend scrutiny only where it buys something.

Input required

• The decision and who owns it.
• What happens if it is wrong — cost, time, people affected.
• How long it takes to reverse and what reversing would cost.
• The deadline, and what delay itself costs.

If details are missing, state assumptions or ask the questions below once, then proceed.

Questions to ask first

Ask in one batch of at most five questions, skipping any already answered, then proceed:

1. If this turns out wrong, what would undoing it take: days, months, never?
2. Who or what is affected that cannot easily be restored (customers, data, reputation, a person's career, a contract term)?
3. What does waiting cost per week?
4. Who has to approve this today, and is that proportionate?
5. Could a smaller or time-boxed version be tried first?

Method

1. Describe the exit. Say exactly how you would reverse the decision, what it would cost, and how long it would take.
2. Score reversibility on three dimensions: - Cost to reverse — money, effort, goodwill. - Time to reverse — hours to years. - Blast radius — how many people or systems are touched before you can reverse.
3. Classify. - Two-way door — reversal is cheap, quick, and contained. Decide now with roughly 70% of the information you wish you had; the owner decides; document in a line. - Mostly two-way — reversal costs something real. Time-box a trial and define the success and abort criteria first. - One-way door — reversal is costly, slow, or impossible. Gather evidence, consult widely, run a Premortem, and decide deliberately.
4. Look for a way to convert one-way into two-way. Pilot with a subset; use a feature flag; sign a shorter term or a break clause; rent before buying; run in parallel; stage the commitment; keep the old path alive for a period.
5. Match process to door. Give the cheap, reversible decisions to individuals, and reserve committees and sign-off for the rare one-way door.
6. Set a review point for any two-way door taken, so reversal actually happens when the data says so.

Output format

| Decision | Cost to reverse | Time to reverse | Blast radius | Door | Process | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Change pricing page copy | Low | Hours | Visitors | Two-way | Owner decides today | | Sign a 3-year vendor contract | High | Years | Whole team | One-way | Evidence + premortem + sign-off |

Follow with:

• Verdict — which door, in one sentence, with the reason.
• Conversion options — ways to make it more reversible.
• Abort criteria — the observable condition that triggers going back (see Tripwire).
• Review date.

Ground rules

• Judge the door, not the feeling. Anxiety is not irreversibility.
• Reversibility includes people. Layoffs, public statements, and broken trust do not easily reverse.
• Reversible is not free. Frequent flip-flopping has its own costs; set review points rather than reversing on whim.
• Say when you don't know. If reversibility is unclear, treat it as one-way until you learn otherwise.

Self-check before answering

• Is there an explicit description of how to reverse, with cost and time?
• Were conversion options considered before accepting a one-way door?
• Does the recommended process match the door?
• Is there a review point or abort criterion?

Common pitfalls

• Treating everything as one-way — slow decisions, risk-averse culture.
• Treating one-way doors as two-way — "we'll just change it later" on a contract, a public launch, or a data migration.
• Ignoring hidden lock-in — dependencies, training, and sunk cost make a "reversible" choice sticky.
• No abort criteria — a two-way door you never walk back through.
• Decision by committee for small things — consensus costs more than the mistake it prevents.

Example prompt

We're deciding whether to migrate our database to a new vendor next quarter. Is this a one-way or two-way door? How could we make it more reversible, and how much process does it deserve?

Learn more

• Weighted Decision Matrix for choosing among options once the door is classified.
• Premortem and Tripwire for guarding the one-way doors.
• Regret Minimization for the personal-scale version.
• Architecture Decision Record for documenting technical choices.
• Decision Journal for reviewing quick decisions later.