Great concept. Culturally, I think we are better at understanding this than ever before.
In the last 15–20 years, many people have been forced into an uncomfortable moment due to job loss (Great Recession, COVID, AI etc). They have learned to recover. Could this be why we see more entrepreneurs than ever before now?
buildsjets 36 minutes ago [-]
Timing is everything. A bad haircut decision right before the most important job interview of your life might not be recoverable.
Great Clips or Weldon Barber, are you feeling lucky?
IMO it’s a useful decision making strategy at times, mostly to not overthink the easily reversible.
pxx 2 hours ago [-]
what? this article is making a different point if you read past the title.
> Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though.
Insanity 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it’s different. Recoverable == Reversible to an extend. Unless you take reversible in the strictest sense of “undo” it’s different. But you can’t “undo” a leadership decision, all you can do is later correct it and recover.
So imo it’s splitting hairs over the same outcome.
An example - say you introduce 5 day return to office. Half you staff leaves and you now go back to a flexible work from home model. You don’t “undo” the damage done, but you can recover. It was a costly 2-way door.
samsolomon 2 hours ago [-]
I've often thought along similar lines. I've found that indecision is almost always worse than a bad one. Very few choices are so decisive that you can't course-correct later.
That mindset has served me well both personally and professionally.
renato_shira 11 minutes ago [-]
agreed on indecision being worse than a bad decision, with one caveat: i think people systematically underestimate how many decisions are actually recoverable.
as a solo dev, i used to agonize over stack choices, architecture patterns, even naming conventions. then i realized that in a small codebase, almost everything is a two way door. you can rewrite a service in a weekend. you can swap a database before you have real users. the actual irrecoverable decisions for early stage stuff are almost always about time and opportunity cost, not technical choices.
the one that gets people is when a recoverable decision feels irrecoverable because of sunk cost. you spent three weeks building something, so changing direction feels like throwing away work. but the work is already spent regardless, the only real question is what's the best move from here.
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In the last 15–20 years, many people have been forced into an uncomfortable moment due to job loss (Great Recession, COVID, AI etc). They have learned to recover. Could this be why we see more entrepreneurs than ever before now?
Great Clips or Weldon Barber, are you feeling lucky?
(Also works well with LLMs, for risk assessments)
Video of Bezos talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxsdOQa_QkM.
IMO it’s a useful decision making strategy at times, mostly to not overthink the easily reversible.
> Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though.
So imo it’s splitting hairs over the same outcome.
An example - say you introduce 5 day return to office. Half you staff leaves and you now go back to a flexible work from home model. You don’t “undo” the damage done, but you can recover. It was a costly 2-way door.
That mindset has served me well both personally and professionally.
as a solo dev, i used to agonize over stack choices, architecture patterns, even naming conventions. then i realized that in a small codebase, almost everything is a two way door. you can rewrite a service in a weekend. you can swap a database before you have real users. the actual irrecoverable decisions for early stage stuff are almost always about time and opportunity cost, not technical choices.
the one that gets people is when a recoverable decision feels irrecoverable because of sunk cost. you spent three weeks building something, so changing direction feels like throwing away work. but the work is already spent regardless, the only real question is what's the best move from here.