In the past few months, what have you been experimenting with and learning from it, CEO and founder at Vapaus, Mikko Ampuja?
My experiment has actually been a bit of a “meta experiment”. Meaning, I’ve been pondering, when is an experiment the right thing to do and when it’s not an option.
I had a chat with my coach, Christian Berte, about the topic and he came up with a brilliant decision-making tool that I’ve been experimenting with. When thinking if you can experiment with something or not, ask yourself if the decision is a one-way-door decision or a two-way-door decision.
The one-way-door decision is something that’s very hard to go back on. If you make the decision, you have to live with the consequences or at least it will be extremely painful to come back. An example of this would be a divorce or the building of a nuclear power plant. In this situation, you need careful planning before the decision and then efficient execution.
The two-way-door decision is something that you can try and then come back to the current state if it didn’t work, such as trying a new recipe or using a new sales deck with customers. I decided to try this tool in two very different decision-making situations.
The tool has been working really well. It’s a useful and simple tool for decision-making that speeds up my decision-making. I still need to test if this is something that everyone can use to lower the threshold for being more “action-oriented”.
If you feel that you are under pressure to make a decision fast, you should always stop to think. If we do this, can we come back? If it’s a two-way-door decision, you can decide “yes, let’s experiment” and then gather the learnings after a suitable time. This speeds up the decision-making process A LOT. Don’t overanalyze the consequences but plan the experiment and go. You can either succeed or learn.
If it’s a one-way-door decision, you need to stop, analyze and only make the decision to go forward after you’ve gathered enough information. After realizing a decision would lead us to track that can’t be cancelled, I asked for guidance from our board as well as spent more time internally understanding the consequences of the decision. This prevented me from making a huge mistake under time pressure this week. I am very sorry that I can’t reveal more details on the decisions but shoot me a message on LinkedIn and perhaps I can share more 🙂
Thank you, Mikko for sharing this brilliant tool!
Small experiments and inspiration 