Efficient Decision Making

But probably not so effective

Every single day we’re faced to make multiple decisions, from small ones (what cloth should I wear today) to bigger ones (should I hire this guy or not). There are a lot of decision-making frameworks (RAPID, DACI, RICE) and a lot of parameters for decision-making (speed, correctness, impact).

As a leader, your success can be traced to your decisions. So you need to make decisions better (correct ones, and timely).

Accuracy → Effective. Precision → Efficient

I want to share one simple decision-making framework that I think will help you make decisions efficiently (but probably not effectively):

Is it a one-way or two-way decision?

A one-way decision is a decision that once taken and implemented, is something you can’t reverse or take too much effort or cost to rollback

Few examples:

• Should I hire/fire this person (reverting this decision is usually hard, and unethical)

• Which vendor should I use for our cloud computing platform? AWS or GCP? (vendor locked. Migration takes multiple months or years)

• Which vendor should I use for the analytics tool? Datadog, New Relic, or Honeycomb? (choosing one vendor will risk us into a vendor-locked situation)

A two-way decision is a decision that can easily be reverted. It’s not correlated to how big the decision is

Few examples:

• Should we try selling a subscription model or a one-time purchase? (we can find new buyers to try new models)

• Should we show the onboarding page or not? (we can always experiment)

• Should we use tabs or spaces? (we can just change the linter and code formatter to enforce one or the other)

• Which analytics tool supports OpenTelemetry that I should pay to help us today? (we can change our vendor to other vendors who support OpenTelemetry)

The framework is quite simple to execute:

• Given a problem, is it a one-way decision or a two-way decision?

• If it’s a two-way decision, then YOLO. Don’t think too much about it and just do it (any of them is fine).

• If it’s a one-way decision, is there a way to frame the problem to become a two-way decision (check the analytics tools decision-making example above).

• If it’s still a one-way decision, only then we should spend some time thinking deeply about the decision.

Thinking about decisions in one-way or two-way decisions allows you to avoid paralysis analysis, move fast, while preventing costly mistakes. It doesn’t guarantee you get the correct, best decision tho.

So, how many decisions have you made today?