Type 1 vs Type 2 Decisions — When to Be Fast, When to Be Slow

60-Second Summary

Type 1 decisions are one-way doors: hard or impossible to reverse. Slow down.
Type 2 decisions are two-way doors: cheap to undo. Speed up.
Most organizations treat all decisions as Type 1 — that's how speed dies.
Some startups treat all decisions as Type 2 — that's how they walk through doors they can't come back through.
Ask one question first: 'If this is wrong, how expensive is the reversal?'

Speed is not a virtue. Speed in the right places is a virtue. The leaders who appear decisive aren't faster on everything — they're calibrated about what deserves deliberation.

The distinction

Bezos articulated this in his 1997 shareholder letter and repeated it for two decades. Type 1 decisions are 'one-way doors' — irreversible or extremely costly to reverse. Selling a business unit. Public IPO. Firing an executive. Major brand pivot. These deserve heavy analysis, multiple perspectives, and explicit pre-mortems.

Type 2 decisions are 'two-way doors' — cheap to walk through and walk back. A pricing experiment. A new hire onto a probation period. A landing-page test. A team reorg you can undo in six weeks. These should be made fast, by small groups, with light-touch process.

The common failure

The bureaucratic drift

As organizations grow, they default to treating every decision as Type 1. Six-person committees approve copy changes. Two-week review cycles for org tweaks. The result: a 200-person company that moves slower than a 2,000-person one — because no one has permission to walk through a two-way door without a meeting.

The decision-type matrix

Treat each decision based on its actual reversibility

Type 1 — one-way door

Sell, acquire, or spin off a business
Fire or hire an executive
Public statement of values
Major architecture rewrite
Naming the company / brand

Type 2 — two-way door

Pricing experiment
New tool trial
Team reorg < 10 people
Most hires (esp. with probation)
Marketing campaign

The 3-question decision triage

1
1. Reversibility
If this is wrong, how hard and expensive is the reversal? Hours, days, weeks, never?
2
2. Information value
Will more analysis change the answer, or are we already at diminishing returns?
3
3. Cost of delay
What does waiting another week actually cost — option value, competitor moves, team morale?

Case: Amazon's day 1 letter

In Bezos's 2015 shareholder letter, he made the case bluntly: 'As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight 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.'

Amazon's culture engineers around this: a 'disagree and commit' norm to avoid endless deliberation, two-pizza teams that can decide locally, and explicit framing of which type a decision is at the start of any meeting.

Do this Monday

In your next decision meeting, open with: 'Is this Type 1 or Type 2?' Make the call before the discussion, not after.
Audit your last 10 decisions. How many were treated as Type 1 that were actually Type 2? Recover that lost speed.
Push more Type 2 decision rights down. If your team can't experiment without your approval, you've centralized speed-killers.
For genuine Type 1 decisions, mandate a pre-mortem (see related article) — it's cheap insurance for irreversible bets.
Track 'decisions per week' as an org-health metric. A slow drop usually means Type 2 drift toward Type 1 treatment.

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow.”
— Jeff Bezos, 2016 shareholder letter