Not every decision deserves the same rigour

Spend your best thinking on the decisions you can't undo. Spend almost none on the ones you can.

Most people do the exact opposite.

That may sound like heresy from someone whose work is pressure-testing decisions. It isn't. Knowing which decisions to labour over, and which to make fast and move on from, is itself the skill. Spend equal care on everything and you'll be slow on what's trivial and rushed on what's irreversible. Both are expensive.

The test: can you walk it back?

Before the analysis, before the debate, one question sorts the pile: if this goes wrong, can I walk it back, and what does walking it back cost?

Most decisions are reversible. You try the supplier, the pricing, the small hire, and if it's wrong, you unwind it in a quarter, out a little time and a little money. These deserve speed, not ceremony. Analyse them to death and you've paid a large cost in delay to avoid a small cost in error. Make them quickly, watch what happens, adjust.

A few decisions are not reversible. The lease you're locked into for nine years. The senior hire who reshapes the culture before you know whether it worked. The co-founder. The acquisition. The market you enter and can't quietly exit, or build the whole company around. The capital you commit that isn't coming back.

These aren't a matter of degree. They are a different category. The cost of getting them wrong isn't a bad quarter. It is a direction you can't undo.

Rigour aimed at the wrong tier

The error I see most isn't a lack of rigour. It is rigour aimed at the wrong tier.

Businesses agonise over the reversible call (the hire they could let go in ninety days, the price they could change next quarter) and wave through the one that actually locks them in. There are two reasons it happens.

The first is visibility. The reversible decisions are in front of you every day, and the irreversible ones arrive disguised as ordinary. Nobody labels them. You find out which door you walked through only after it's shut.

The second is momentum. The irreversible decisions are often exciting, or urgent, or championed by someone senior, and slowing down feels like resistance.

Sort first, then decide how hard to think

So before you decide how hard to think about a decision, sort it.

• If the answer to "can I walk it back?" is "easily", bias to speed and learn by doing.
• If the answer is "never", that is where the full weight belongs: the stress test, the hunt for the blind spot, the willingness to hear a no. That is the decision that earns real rigour, because it is the one you only make once.

That triage, which calls can't be undone, is the first thing I look for in any decision worth the name. It is also why the 6-Lens Framework is reserved for high-stakes calls: a senior hire, a pricing move, a new market, an acquisition, a capital commitment. Running every small decision through six lenses would be the same mistake in the other direction.

Rigour isn't thinking hard about everything. It is thinking hardest about the things you can't take back.

A useful check: of your last five big decisions, which were actually irreversible, and did you spend your effort on the right one?