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.

(delayed)

Only difference is time. Much like an eventually consistent transactions, recoverable decisions have propagation latency.

The breaking part here is that will you able to survive until the recovery is complete?

what? this article is making a different point if you read past the title.

> Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though.

I don’t think it’s different. Recoverable == Reversible to an extend. Unless you take reversible in the strictest sense of “undo” it’s different. But you can’t “undo” a leadership decision, all you can do is later correct it and recover.

So imo it’s splitting hairs over the same outcome.

An example - say you introduce 5 day return to office. Half you staff leaves and you now go back to a flexible work from home model. You don’t “undo” the damage done, but you can recover. It was a costly 2-way door.