How important is any given decision? Jeff Bezos focuses on how easy it is to walk back
What are 1-Way vs 2-Way Doors?
Making decisions can be anxiety-provoking as we worry about what will go wrong. And, sometimes, we enter “analysis paralysis” as we strive to reduce our uncertainty.
In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos encourages us to allocate decisions into one of two buckets:
- Reversible ‘2-Way Door’ Decisions: we make a call, and it’s relatively easy to change it if we discover it’s not working out as we’d hoped.
- Irreversible ‘1-Way Door ‘ Decisions: once we’re in, we’re not coming back out. From Jeff B: “These decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before.”
In our professional lives, 1-way door decisions could be quitting a job, acquiring a company, or making a major tech platform change.
In our personal lives, they could be getting married, going closely-cropped if we currently sport long hair, or moving to a new country (like our Mayflower friends).
All of these are technically reversible but would take years and potentially large amounts of pain.
Connecting this to a favourite children’s book, Alice may return from Wonderland after she tumbles down the rabbit hole, but she’s going to reemerge forever changed.
When to use 1-Way vs 2-Way Doors?
We can ask ourselves, “Is this going through a 1-Way Door or 2-Way Door?” whenever making any decision.
Asking ourselves this question becomes more important as we progress further in our careers and as the organizations we work at become larger. There’s no universal law that says more mature leaders and companies become more risk-averse, but more often than not we’ve found it’s accurate.
This leads to an increasing default tendency to overestimate the number of 1-Way Door decisions. Here’s Jeff B on this topic:
“As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavyweight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.”
Although it may seem surprising at first glance, Bezos has shared that neither Amazon Prime nor AWS were 1-Way Door decisions. In both cases, Amazon launched a new product without a lot of fanfare and could have wound it down without a lot of fanfare. Today, shutting either down would no longer be easy, but these were 2-Way Door Decisions at launch.
How do we use 1-Way and 2-Way Doors?
John:
What I find nuanced about AWS and Amazon Prime being considered 2-Way Door Decisions is that it may have felt differently to Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO at the time) versus the executives launching and running each new bet. Bezos and Amazon had a long history of successful bets and a growing portfolio of offerings to customers, so failure here was a 2-Day Door; but was it a 2-Way Door for the executive in charge? What if he/she had been hired externally to come in and lead the new charge on this new big bet? His/her identity at the company is going to be the “Prime Person,” which makes it trickier to suddenly unwind it because it could be a 2-Way Door for the company, a 1-Way Door (OUT!) for the executive.
James:
100%. It’s why these larger adjacent bets tend to work better with a leader who already has a track record and trust built up. This was the case with AWS: Amazon’s current CEO, Andy Jassy, took over AWS in 2003, a full 6 years after joining Amazon. These 6-years of experience built-up increase the likelihood that it also felt like a 2-Way Door for Jassy’s career at both Amazon and outside. I love this quote from Jeff B that broadens out to discuss his philosophy around risk:
“…failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”
Moving beyond Amazon, when have you used 1-Way and 2-Way Doors?
John:
I’ve used it a lot to make sure that my team or I isn’t overthinking something. I’m not saying 2-Way Door decisions require no thinking, but they require less thinking than 1-Way Doors. I’ve been guilty of seeking the same level of rigor for both types, which leads to the following scenario:
“We don’t go deep enough on the 1-Way Doors because we go too deep on the 2-Way Doors.”
We’re peanut-buttering our thinking - Brad Garlinghouse’s famous Yahoo! memo-style - vs weighting more focus to 1-Way Door Decisions.
As LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero talked about in our Blueprint on 
JAMES:
I love “What answer do we want?” We used it all the time with Bain clients and I know that our longtime colleague and superstar operator, Mike Derezin, is a huge fan of it too. Let’s Blueprint it. As a closing thought, 1-Way and 2-Way Doors also connects to legendary Intel Co-Founder and longtime CEO Andy Grove’s idea of Revolving Doors. In the mid-1980s, when Intel decided to move from focusing on memory - where they were losing to Japanese competitors - to chips, Grove outlined in his book, “Only the Paranoid Survive,” a conversation with fellow Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore):
“I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Gordon answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” I stared at him, then said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”
I (James) am not a huge fan of “Only the Paranoid Survive,” but I know a lot of folks love it. On the lovin’ it front, I do love Grove’s “High Output Management,” which is one of the top 2 or 3 business books I’ve recommended the most (here’s my “What’s the So What?” write-up).
Want to learn more?
WANT TO GO DEEPER ON 1-WAY VS 2-WAY DOORS?
Here’s 60 seconds with LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero, our Operator Extraordinaire on
And here’s 60 seconds with Incredible Health CRO Holly Procter, whom we can neither can confirm nor deny will be in a Blueprint going live in the next week or so!
Here’s a good piece by a former Amazon exec, including the memorable phrase, “At Amazon, we spent significant effort trying to turn every door into a two-way door.”
And here’s a good take on the concept from an R&D leader’s perspective
WANT TO GO DEEPER ON JAMES CLEAR’S SIMILAR FRAMEWORK?
James Clear (author of Atomic Habits; James R’s “What’s the So What?” write-up here) recommends a similar framework, adding some memorable imagery:
"I think about decisions in three ways: hats, haircuts, and tattoos.Most decisions are like hats. Try one and if you don’t like it, put it back and try another. The cost of a mistake is low, so move quickly and try a bunch of hats.
Some decisions are like haircuts. You can fix a bad one, but it won’t be quick and you might feel foolish for awhile. That said, don't be scared of a bad haircut. Trying something new is usually a risk worth taking. If it doesn't work out, by this time next year you will have moved on and so will everyone else.
A few decisions are like tattoos. Once you make them, you have to live with them. Some mistakes are irreversible. Maybe you'll move on for a moment, but then you'll glance in the mirror and be reminded of that choice all over again. Even years later, the decision leaves a mark. When you're dealing with an irreversible choice, move slowly and think carefully."
WANT TO GO DEEPER ON JEFF BEZOS & AMAZON?
Anytime that Acquired covers a topic - it’s the best business-focused podcast ever created, and in some ways an inspiration for Blueprints - we’ll always recommend it first because the quality is so consistently off-the-charts, including here:
We recommend both of these books from author Brad Stone: the first tackles Amazon through about 2010; the second through about 2020:
Finally, at the time of writing, I (James) am about half-way through and enjoying this book tackling Amazon’s “secret sauce” operating practices:
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