Two Way Doors
One of my favorite learnings from Amazon is “Two way door decisions”. It’s generally practiced under “Bias for Action” leadership principle.
It helps you in making decision when you have multiple options and none of those is clear winner. In such scenarios instead of spending time(and being stuck) in figuring out winner, try to find out if you have a two way door decision(TWDD) at hand and start with one of favorable paths. Now, what’s a two way door decision. To put it simply,
A decision which can be reversed later without much impact is two way door decision.
Let’s try to understand with an example.
I want to start a blog and I have been thinking about it for long time. Finally I get out of my comfort zone and sit in front of laptop to start. Now the first thing (for me) to decide is which platform I should choose. There are thousands of options to choose out there : Wordpress, Medium, Github pages, Blogger and more. All of these platforms have their pros and cons. Since I am confused and I don’t want to get into analysis paralysis I go to “Two way doors” for rescue. I ask myself :
- Is this the most important decision where I should spend my time? Answer : No, the most important area to focus on is content for blog. And even before that focus on “just start”.
- If I choose one blogging platform, can that be changed later ? Answer : Yes, I can always move my content to some other platform. Also, it’s not like my blog would become famous overnight so it won’t even hurt SEO later after migration.
So now I have a two way door decision to make. And I know I don’t need to spend huge effort in making this decision. So, I simply pick Medium as blogging platform for now and start writing this very first post :P . If I find any shortcomings later with Medium I would move to some other platform.
This principle can be applied to both software decisions and day to day life decisions.
Pitfalls
- Don’t stay with TWDD paths for long. You need to finalize and find long term path. For example let’s say my blog becomes a hit with a million subscribers(yeah I know I am getting ahead of myself) and then later decide to move to some platform, I might loose my readers then. So I need to decide,sooner than later, if I need to stick with Medium or not.
- You need to be careful in figuring out cost of a wrong TWDD. If cost is huge it’s not TWDD. For example you want to propose framework(native,react,etc) for you company’s next billion dollar app, which multiple developers will develop together. Theoretically you can migrate app to new platform later but the cost is huge here, one of the costly affair is developer’s learning curve since they have already spent time in learning framework.
