This is not new. It has been reported on before. But I just finished reading this article about Jeff Bezos’ relentless commitment to “high-quality and high-velocity decision making” at Amazon.

Here are a couple of high level points:

- There are decisions that cannot be easily reversed (Type 1) and there are decisions that can be (Type 2). Knowing which is which is important. To help get better at this, they are very diligent about tracking the outcomes of previous decisions.

- Make decisions without all of the info you wish you had, because if you don’t, you’re probably moving too slow. Speed is paramount. If you’ve categorized your decisions properly (see above), being wrong may not actually be that costly.

- There’s a company philosophy centered around “disagree and commit.” It is about moving forward – since speed is so important – without full consensus. In other words: We may not all agree, but can we disagree and commit to this?

Perhaps the most interesting, and seemingly paradoxical, aspect of Amazon’s “high-velocity decision making process” is that it is built upon narrative memos, instead of PowerPoint decks. In fact, decks have been banned at the company since 2004.

The reason for this is that narrative memos are more difficult to write, which means you really have to understand what you’re talking about. It encourages deeper thought and it allows nuances and interdependencies to come through.

Apparently important meetings start with everyone just sitting in a room reading the narrative memo, which are often between 4-6 pages. Once everyone has read the memo and is on the same page, the meeting starts.

As someone who writes a daily narrative, this approach really resonates me. It would be a hell of a lot easier if I could just show up here every day and throw down a few bullet points. But then both of us would get far less out of this practice.

Writing takes time. Bezos has acknowledged that these memos cannot be written in a day or two. But clearly there’s a belief that more time spent up front translates into greater overall speed. Their market cap suggests that is working.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a book that I read a number of years ago (Amazon just told me that I purchased it on March 12, 2014), but that I frequently come back to in my mind. 

One of my favorite themes in the book can be summed up with this quote: “Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.”

Decisions can be scary. What if I make the wrong decision and things go horribly wrong? Then things are on me.

In some organizations, indecision may feel like the safest decision. Let’s do one more study just to make sure that we’ve got this right. 

But in a startup (which is what Ben Horowitz’s book is about) and in organizations that would actually like to grow, innovate, and accomplish things, indecision can mean death. Without decisions, organizations lock up.

None of this is to say that bad decisions are okay. Executives must make high quality decisions as fast as possible, and as a rule of thumb you probably want to make more good decisions than bad decisions. 

But speed, momentum, and organizational clarity also matter a great deal. 

One of the reasons why I mentally come back to this book is because oftentimes I find that things can get hung up on relatively inconsequential decisions. So I like to remind myself that go is better than stop.

As Ben points out in his book: “The only mistake you cannot make is running out of cash.” And time has a funny way of burning through cash.

I’m listening to the below podcast right now with Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon, and Steven Johnson. Steven recently published a new book called, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter Most. If you can’t see the embedded podcast below, click here.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/497128947" params="color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]

It is about the big and meaningful decisions that we make as individuals – such as where to live or who to marry – as well as the big and meaningful decisions that we make as a collective – such as how to plan a city or fight climate change. But most importantly, it is about how we can get better at them.

Supposedly, part of the science (and art) behind deliberative decision making is using tricks to get our minds to see problems and their complexities differently. That could involve scenario planning and even considering the weirdest possible outcomes. In fact, Steven finds a lot of value in fictional storytelling.

There could also be implications for city building. Tech is allowing us to collect a lot more data about the ways in which our cities operate today. But as we get better at running complex simulations, we should also get a lot better at understanding the long-term implications of our decisions.

I may just have to get Steven’s new book.