Are you diagnosed with Type-1?

If you're thinking it's a disease - no, it's not. But yes, it can lead to organizational paralysis, innovation stagnation, and ultimately, a competitive disadvantage if decisions aren't made correctly. In the fast-paced world of technology and business, understanding the nature of your decisions can be the difference between breakthrough success and costly failure.

According to the Harvard Business Review's 2026 research on executive decision making, one of the most common failure patterns is treating reversible decisions as if they're irreversible. Executives often hesitate and push back when faced with ideas and proposals that feel large, final, or irreversible. The hesitation usually isn't about the idea itself but the perceived risk of saying yes.

The cost? Overanalyzing, over-processing, and slowing down unnecessarily. That's when innovation stalls and agility dies.

The solution? Reframing requests as low-risk, time-bound experiments which is a powerful way to reduce friction and restore momentum. This gives decision-makers the chance to approve something small, get feedback, and reassess without committing to the full plan up front.

When the Door You Choose Changes Everything

From Blocked to Approved in One Meeting

Consider Lauren, a product leader who developed a comprehensive customer-retention proposal. Her initial pitch to executives was met with resistance not because the idea was bad, but because it felt too high-stakes, too final, too much like a one-way commitment.

Her original ask: "We need to approve the full retention program now—new tools, process changes, and a dedicated team."
The executive response: Hesitation. Pushback. "Let's table this for next quarter."
But then Lauren reframed it, guided by Amazon's Type 1 versus Type 2 framework.

Her revised ask: "Let's launch a 30-day pilot with one customer segment to gather insights before scaling."
That subtle shift lowered the psychological barrier. Instead of asking for a permanent commitment (Type 1), she repositioned it as a short, insight-driven experiment (Type 2).

The result? Faster alignment, immediate approval, and within 30 days, data that justified scaling the full program.

Speed Over Perfection

Now consider Vijay, a seasoned engineering manager at a mid-sized fintech company. His team was facing a critical problem: their legacy authentication system was causing intermittent login failures, frustrating customers and impacting revenue. The pressure was mounting, and Vijay stood at a crossroads.
He had two paths before him:

Path 1 (Type 1 Decision): Launch a complete platform redesign. Migrate all services to a new microservices architecture, implement OAuth 2.0 from scratch, redesign the entire user authentication flow, and rebuild the database schema. Timeline: 9-12 months. Budget: $2M. Risk: If it failed midway, rolling back would mean losing millions and months of work. The decision would be essentially irreversible.
Path 2 (Type 2 Decision): Implement a targeted fix. Add retry logic and circuit breakers to the existing authentication service, optimize the current database queries, and enhance monitoring to catch issues proactively. Timeline: 2-3 weeks. Budget: $50K. Risk: Minimal. If it didn't work perfectly, they could iterate, adjust, or pivot to another approach within days.

Vijay chose Path 2. Within three weeks, login failures dropped by 94%. The team gained breathing room to plan a phased, thoughtful modernization over the next year breaking down the larger architectural changes into multiple reversible Type 2 decisions.

Both Lauren and Vijay recognized the same truth: The mistake many organizations make is treating the reversible as irreversible. Shifting the narrative from "this is a commitment" to "this is a learning opportunity" reduces the perceived risk, restores momentum, and allows you to move forward without fear of long-term consequences.

The Amazon's Decision Framework

In my learning day's of leading teams, I've watched brilliant initiatives die not from bad ideas, but from bad decision processes. And some ideas doesn't evolve just because of decision hesitations. Then I discovered Jeff Bezos's 2016 shareholder letter often called his "Day 1" letter and it fundamentally changed how I approach decisions.

Bezos was facing a challenge I've seen in every scaling organization: how do you maintain startup-like agility when you're one of the world's largest companies? His observation was sharp and uncomfortably familiar: decision-making was becoming dangerously slow. Not because people were incompetent, but because they were treating every decision like a career-defining, company-altering choice.

Here's what Bezos wrote, and I encourage you to read this slowly—it's deceptively simple but profoundly powerful:

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible one-way doors and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions.

But most decisions aren't like that, they are changeable, reversible, they're two-way doors. If you've made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don't have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.

Based on my observation and experience, I am totally sold to the framework. Infact I believe that irreversible decisions are like arthritis: the organization/team is still alive, but every movement is slow and painful.

Type 1 : One Way Door

Type 1 decisions are consequential and nearly irreversible like walking through a one-way door. Once you step through, there's no easy way back. These are decisions that:
Fundamentally alter the business trajectory: Entering a new market, acquiring another company, or pivoting your entire product strategy
Require significant resource commitment: Multi-year plans, substantial capital investment, or complete organizational restructuring
Have long-term implications: Changing your core technology stack, relocating headquarters, or rebranding
Are difficult or impossible to reverse: The cost, time, or repetitional damage of undoing them is prohibitive

Examples include:- Launching a completely new product line that requires building infrastructure from the ground up, Committing to a specific cloud provider with deep platform dependencies, Changing your business model (e.g., from perpetual licenses to SaaS) Major organizational restructuring or cultural transformations
The danger: Treating Type 1 decisions with the speed and casualness of Type 2 decisions can be catastrophic. These require deep analysis, extensive deliberation, stakeholder alignment, and scenario planning.

Type 2 : The Two-Way Door

Type 2 decisions are reversible like walking through a two-way door. If you don't like what you see on the other side, you can come back. These are decisions that:
Are relatively low-risk: The downside is contained and manageable
Can be reversed quickly: You can undo them without significant cost or damage.
Allow for iteration: You can try, learn, adjust, and try again
Enable experimentation: They support a test-and-learn approach

Examples include:- Trying a new marketing channel with a small budget- Implementing a feature flag that can be toggled on/off- Reorganizing a single team's workflow, Running an A/B test on your website, Choosing a new tool for internal team collaboration...
The opportunity: Most decisions are Type 2, yet many organizations treat them like Type 1. This leads to analysis paralysis, endless meetings, bureaucratic approval chains, and missed opportunities. Speed matters here.

Conclusion

So, are you diagnosed with Type-1? Here's how to tell:

1. Do simple decisions in your organization take weeks or months?
2. Are there endless approval chains for low-risk experiments?
3. Do people fear making decisions because they might be "wrong"?
4. Is there a culture of over-analysis and under-action?

If yes, you might have a Type-1 disease, the misclassification syndrome where everything becomes a one-way door in people's minds.

The most dangerous mindset is treating every decision as Type 1. In the age of AI, vide coding, and rapid technological change, the ability to experiment, learn, and adapt quickly is a competitive advantage.

The cure: Start labeling. Start empowering. Start celebrating smart, fast Type 2 decisions. Reserve your energy and deliberation for the true Type 1 moments that deserve it.

Choose your doors wisely. And when in doubt, remember: most doors have two ways. Use them.

The mistake isn't failing. It's failing behind the wrong door. Choosing the right door with speed that's the real decision.