Decision making for solopreneurs
In the Amazon 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos famously wrote about his approach to decision making. You may have heard of it by the shorthand “one-way vs. two-way doors”:
One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.
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.
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.
I feel that last paragraph in my bones. Long, slow cycles for even the most mundane decisions is exactly what repelled me from big tech.
But interestingly, as a solopreneur I’ve found myself with the exact opposite problem.
I’ll be wizzing through my day, making heaps of Type 2 decisions on the fly:
How should I fix this bug?
What’s the right opening for this marketing post?
How do I reply to this inbound sales email?
Tick, tick, tick. If I did it wrong, it’s not a big deal.
And then, blammo. I’ll hit something big, something Type 1, like:
How do I respond to this challenging pricing question from a late stage prospect?
What can I do right now to maximize the chances of this big renewal going through?
How do I move this paid pilot to a fully signed customer?
And I’ll freeze.
Because I’ve been motoring through all my decisions for the day, I’ve stopped consciously discerning what a Type 1 vs. Type 2 decision feels like. I’ll get frustrated because it feels like I should instantly know the right answer for these Type 1 decisions, but I don’t and need more time to think. And whenever I unexpectedly need more time to think is a great opportunity for my subconscious to whisper that perhaps I’m not so good at this after all!
What I’ve been learning is that being a great solopreneur is having the ability to press pause on everything—even when I’m really busy with lots of Type 2 work—and trust that the space I’m giving myself to get the Type 1 things right will pay off in the long run.