Strong opinions, weakly held (a good leadership trait)
Jeff Bezos on one-way vs two-way door decisions
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Jeff Bezos says that leaders should have “strong opinions, weakly held”.
He taught Amazon leaders that it is foolish not to change your mind in the face of new evidence. This means good leaders must have an opinion AND be open to input.
This lesson relates to Jeff’s widely known model, the “two-way door decision”.
Which describes a decision that is easily reversible. Jeff’s expectation of leaders is that they figure out if a decision is reversible, and if the answer is yes, to then move quickly on their best hunch. For two-way door decisions, good leaders favor speed over perfection.
The reason speed matters is that your competition is always moving.
With more time we can be more accurate in our decisions, but then it may be too late for the accuracy to matter.
Also, a culture of conservative decisions slowly becomes a culture of perfection, and then of paralysis.
This is because leaders are afraid of being wrong…so they slow everything down double checking and covering their backsides.
The “two-way” door framework gives leaders permission to be wrong in low consequence situations.
Examples of two-way doors include button placements and advertising messages. Almost all of a user interface design can be A/B tested and changed over time. In my personal coaching business, things like my writing style are easily changed. Each week I try different topics, opening lines, lengths, and calls to action.
By contrast, a one-way door is something that is painful to change and that often loses customer trust. Examples of this are things like brand names (high cost to change) and raising prices (loses customer trust). For these decisions, Jeff advised slowing down and taking your time to get the first choice right.