Are you and your team slowing growth by overthinking every decision? In this episode, Shannon Waller shares practical frameworks to speed up decision-making without sacrificing wisdom. Learn how to use the 40-70 rule, distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 decisions, and free your team to move faster with confidence.

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Show Notes:

• Most entrepreneurial companies lose momentum, not from bad decisions, but from decisions that take far too long.
• The speed of your decision-making sets the speed of execution for your entire company.
• People tend to make every decision using their own natural configuration rather than matching the strategy to the size of the decision.
• Visionaries often prefer to move fast with minimal information, while expert team members prefer deeper research and detail.
• Treating every decision like a high-stakes, irreversible choice creates friction, bottlenecks, and frustration on all sides.
• The 40-70 rule gives you a practical “good enough” guideline so decisions don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.
• Less than 40 percent of the information is usually guessing, while more than 70 percent is usually slowing you down.
• Jeff Bezos’s Type 1 and Type 2 decision model helps you match the level of analysis to the real risk of the decision.
• A Type 1 decision is high-stakes and hard to reverse, so it deserves more time, research, and perspectives.
• A Type 2 decision is reversible and more experimental, so it should be made quickly so you can learn and adjust.
• Asking “Can I undo this later?” is a simple filter that keeps you from overbuilding analysis around reversible decisions.
• You can use dollar amounts or impact thresholds to predefine what counts as a Type 1 versus a Type 2 decision in your company.
• When leaders treat everything as a Type 1 decision, teams learn to escalate instead of taking ownership.
• Giving explicit permission for Type 2 decisions frees your team to act rather than waiting for you to approve every move.
• Many team members will not “ask for forgiveness later” unless you first give them permission and clear boundaries.
• Tools like The Experience Transformer® turn every decision, good or bad, into a structured learning opportunity.
• When people only follow instructions, they don’t build real decision-making capability or take full responsibility for outcomes.
• You can coach your team by asking what happens if we go in each direction, rather than just answering the question for them.
• Over time, routing all decisions through a small group at the top builds bureaucracy and slows down innovation.
• Protecting agility means designing decision frameworks that keep power and problem solving as close to the front line as possible.
• Entrepreneurial companies win by making small, reversible decisions quickly and iterating based on real feedback.
• Clear decision rules create confidence for you and your team, which leads to faster action and better learning.

Resources:

Transforming Experiences Into Multipliers
Kolbe A™ Index
PRINT®