What is "Bias for Action"?

One of the core Leadership Principles (LPs) at Amazon is “Bias for Action”. Directly quoted from Amazon:

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

You get the gist fairly intuitively. It’s about taking initiative, going fast, and leaping into action. It’s a should-have-been-done-yesterday type of mentality! Said another way, this should simply be “move fast and break things”.

Figure 1. Tony Stark telling MIT students to “go break some eggs” — after casually funding all of their research.

Not quite.

It’s a bias for action — not “action or bust”, “action all the way”, or something else that’s catchier. It’s a lean, which implies there is room for something else that’s not just action.

The LP talks about whether actions and decisions are reversible. If we dig a bit deeper and examine the famous 1997 shareholder letter from Amazon, it explains the reversibility of decisions using the concept of one-way and two-way doors:

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions.

But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.