# Reversible decisions _Reserve your caution for the decisions you can't take back._ --- You're in a quarterly business review. Two decisions are on the agenda. First, whether to rebrand the product's entry tier from "Starter" to "Growth" and adjust the feature set. The team has been working on this for six weeks. Three rounds of customer research, two design sprints, a pricing committee review, a final sign-off still pending from the VP of Marketing. The deck is forty pages. Second, whether to sign a five-year exclusive distribution agreement with a partner who would control access to forty percent of your target market. Item seven on the agenda. Fifteen minutes allocated. The partner's terms look favourable, the relationship is warm, and the deal is "time-sensitive." --- The rebrand is completely reversible. Change the name, adjust the feature gates, update the website. If it doesn't work, change it back next quarter. The total cost of being wrong is a few weeks of engineering time and some confused customers. The distribution agreement locks you in for five years. If the partner underperforms, or their incentives drift from yours, or your direct sales team finds themselves competing against your own channel, you're stuck. Breaking the contract costs seven figures. The relationship damage lasts longer. Six weeks of scrutiny on the decision you can undo tomorrow. Fifteen minutes on the one you'll live with for five years. --- Pricing page layout changes get months of A/B testing while a shift from monthly to annual billing as the default gets decided in a single product review. Three interview rounds and a panel for a mid-level hire while a CTO appointment gets fast-tracked because the board liked the candidate. The first is completely reversible within a quarter. The second will shape technical culture for years, and unwinding a senior hire is one of the most expensive things an organisation can do. Reversible decisions attract scrutiny because they're visible, debatable, and comfortable to analyse. Everyone has an opinion on the rebrand. The data is accessible. The stakes feel manageable enough to argue about. Irreversible decisions attract speed because they're uncomfortable and complex, and people want to get past them. The distribution deal is unfamiliar territory. The CTO hire involves judgment that resists frameworks. The team wants certainty, and the fastest path to feeling certain is to decide and move on. Comfort drives the allocation of rigour, not consequence. --- Six months later. The rebrand shipped a week after the review. Customers barely noticed. If it hadn't worked, a single sprint would have reverted it. The distribution deal closed on schedule. By quarter two the partner was prioritising their own products, discounting your software to sweeten their bundles, and undercutting your direct team's pricing. By quarter three you escalated. The partner pointed to the contract. Five-year term, exclusive territory, signed and countersigned. The fifteen-minute decision will take longer to unwind than the rebrand took to ship. --- The decisions your team agonises over are usually the ones they can undo. The ones they rush are usually the ones they can't. Next quarter's business review has two decisions on the agenda. Check which one got the forty-page deck. ---