Deciding before you have enough information: one-way and two-way doors, the seventy per cent rule, and the half page to write before you commit

There is a kind of procrastination that is hard to spot because it looks like care: gathering more information. One more report, one more person to ask, one more quarter for the numbers to settle. Each step is reasonable, and together they add up to six months of deciding nothing. In those six months, not deciding is itself a decision; it is just one nobody signs.

One-way doors and two-way doors

In his 2015 letter to shareholders, Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos divided decisions into two types. Type one is a one-way door: once through, you cannot come back, or coming back is very costly. Selling the company, letting someone go, launching a product under the whole brand. Type two is a two-way door: if it is wrong, you step back through, having lost a little time and money, no more.

He wrote that most decisions are type two, and that a common failure of large organisations is to run two-way doors through the process meant for one-way doors. Everything slows down, and staff learn that trying something is expensive and dangerous.

• Two-way doors: decide fast, hand them to whoever is closest to the work, and set a date to review.
• One-way doors: genuinely slow down, ask the people who will live with the consequences, and write down your reasons before deciding.

Seventy per cent

The following year, in his 2016 letter, Bezos added a line that is often quoted: most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around seventy per cent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for ninety per cent, in most cases you are probably being slow.

The American general Colin Powell had a similar rule before him, much repeated in military and management circles: do not decide with less than forty per cent of the information, and do not wait for more than seventy. Between those marks, trust your judgement.

The exact numbers do not matter. What matters is that both men admitted something rarely said aloud: complete certainty never arrives, and the last bit of information is usually the most expensive and the least useful.

Write it down before you decide

A cheap and effective habit: before committing to something big, write half a page covering three things. What you expect to happen. Which assumptions you are relying on. And what sign would show you were wrong.

That half page does two jobs. Now, it forces you to notice assumptions you had never put into words. Six months later, it is the only record of what you actually thought. Without it, memory rewrites itself into a more comfortable story: if things went well, you will remember knowing they would; if they went badly, you will remember having foreseen the risk.

Annie Duke, a professional poker player turned decision researcher, calls this trap "resulting": judging a decision good because the outcome was good, and vice versa. In poker you can play correctly and still lose the hand, or play badly and win. A half page written beforehand is the only way to tell the two apart when you look back.

Most bad decisions are not a matter of choosing the wrong option. They are chosen too late, or nobody later remembers why they were chosen.

The last question

When you have done all of the above and are still torn, one question often undoes the knot: if you had to decide in the next five minutes, what would you choose? The answer is almost always there already. What is missing is usually not information but the willingness to own an uncertain choice.

That does not mean being reckless. It means telling apart the times you genuinely need to know more from the times you want to avoid the feeling of not being sure. The two have the same symptom and need entirely different treatment.