Should this decision have taken two minutes, or two weeks? That’s the wrong question. The right one is: does this decision’s door open back once you’re wrong?
If the door opens back, walk fast and be wrong. If it doesn’t, sit down first.
Most organisations know one speed and apply it at the same intensity to every decision. Some turn everything into a committee vote — because they once paid for a bad hire, and now even choosing office supplies needs three signatures. Others do the opposite: wave everything through with “let’s move fast,” right up until they sign an irreversible contract with the same breeziness. Both are the same mistake wearing different faces — setting a decision’s speed by the organisation’s general reflex instead of the decision’s actual nature.
The Door Test
In his first shareholder letter, in 1997, Jeff Bezos wrote this distinction as two kinds of doors: some decisions are one-way — once you’re through, you can’t go back; others are two-way — if you don’t like it, you walk back out the same door to where you were. In his account, organisations’ biggest mistake is treating two-way doors with the weight of one-way ones. The mistake I see more often today runs the other way: rushing through one-way doors as if they were two-way — signing a brand position, a partnership, a key hire with the comfort of “we’ll try it, and reverse if it doesn’t work.” Some doors don’t accept trials; only outcomes wait behind them.
My test is simple: if I reversed this decision, would the cost be money, or reputation and time? If it’s money, it’s usually a two-way door — a budget can absorb it. If it’s reputation and time, it’s probably one-way; neither is bought back.
Not knowing which way a door swings isn’t itself the offence; the real failure is moving through without asking. When I hear “let’s decide fast” in a meeting, I check this first: did anyone ask the door’s direction before reaching for speed? Usually the answer is no, because speed earns praise in most cultures and asking looks like hesitation. But asking the right question is faster than the decision itself — it takes seconds, and it changes what the door even is.
Slowness Spent in the Wrong Place
The real waste here isn’t the slow decision itself; it’s slowness spent in the wrong place. An organisation’s total decision speed is roughly fixed; if a committee burns six weeks choosing a vendor, those six weeks are stolen from a genuine one-way door — a culture call, a brand promise. Speed isn’t a virtue, it’s a resource to be allocated. Misallocated speed sinks a company two different ways: slow where it should be fast, it loses the opportunity; fast where it should be slow, it institutionalises a mistake it can never undo.
Managers who notice this often build the opposite reflex: they treat speeding everything up as a management virtue in itself. Meetings shrink, approval layers get stripped out, “agility” becomes a culture slogan — and nobody asks which door just got shorter. Agility applied without knowing a door’s direction isn’t a virtue; it’s a gamble left to chance.
What separates a well-run organisation from a poorly run one isn’t how many decisions it makes, but how clearly it knows which decision earns which speed. There’s only one way to earn that clarity: before sitting down at any decision table, ask what’s behind the door. An organisation that doesn’t ask doesn’t choose its own speed — the door chooses it.