Making and escalating decisions as a distributed team

As a distributed and manager-lesser team, we want to make sure that each of us has the autonomy to make decisions and execute them without needing to ask the boss™ for permission.

Read boss™ here as a manager, lead engineer, VP, CEO, CTO, the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, $DEITY, your cat, a couple of dice, flipping a coin, or any other authority figure of any kind.

But this is easier to tell than to put into practice. Some decisions should be taken with extra care and involve other team members and bosses™ to ensure that they match the overall project and company strategy.

It’s hard, especially for the less experienced people, to differentiate when they can just execute an idea or escalate it. Lack of confidence can lead you to become too conservative and end up asking your boss™ about the smallest decisions, introducing an extra overhead that will slow things down. On the contrary, if you lean towards the other side and act in a lone-ranger-reckless way, you can become a potential threat to your project’s continuity or even your company.

Jeff Bezos coined the terms “One-way” and “Two-way” doors in his AMZN 2015 Letter to shareholders. He was explaining that to make Amazon become an “invention machine,” they would need to avoid “one-size-fits-all” (conventional) decision making and learn to differentiate between two kinds of decisions:

• One-way doors: decisions that are consequential and nearly irreversible; should be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.
• Two-way doors: decisions that are changeable and reversible; should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups. If you’ve made a suboptimal decision, you can reopen the door and go back through.

It’s easier to decide if you should escalate a decision by thinking about whether it’s a one-way or a two-way door. If you can undo an action with no consequences, it’s better to execute it. Otherwise, it’s better to make sure you’re doing the right thing and check with your team members and leaders.

Most decisions are two-way doors, so following this simple framework will make your team faster and more confident.