If you find yourself (or your team) getting stuck in decision paralysis frequently, a framework you can use to unstick yourself is Amazon’s decision-making model: the doors.

Let’s jump right in!

🚪 What are the doors?

One-way doors are decisions that have big consequences and are irreversible – or just really, really hard to undo. These are decisions that you make after careful, deliberate analysis. Getting a one-way decision wrong can have real, negative impact.

Two-way doors are decisions that have smaller consequences and are easy to undo. They’re decisions that can be made fairly quickly and without too much worry, because if they don’t work out you can just walk it back.

Now that we’re all caught up on the difference between these decision types, you can start to apply them when you get stuck.

When you identify a one-way door, you know you need to:

• consult your stakeholders carefully,

• weigh up your options and consider the risks of each,

• spend time developing a plan for release, rollout, or change management

But if you’ve found yourself a two-way door, you can take an opposite approach:

• make a quick decision,

• frame it like an experiment (with clear success metrics),

• move on to bigger decisions

Not every decision can be neatly put into the one- or two-way door model, but I find it can be really helpful to step back from your problem and consider if you’re spending the right amount of energy on it.

Are there any problems you’ve been stressing about that are actually two-way doors? 👀