Most decisions are like hats
I like things that come in threes, and this in particular seems like a useful heuristic for helping categorise a change process. Emily Webber riffs on an original idea by James Clear: is this like a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo?
The language that I tend to use with clients around this, informed by Sociocracy is whether a proposal or idea is “good enough for now, and safe enough to try.” Going forward, I think I might couple that with these metaphors.
Most decisions are like hats. Try one and if you don’t like it, put it back and try another. The cost of a mistake is low; the decision is made quickly and can be easily reversed. Teams should be able to make these on their own and share the results fairly quickly.
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Some decisions are like haircuts. You can fix a bad one, but reversing it can take some effort, and you might need to live with it for a while.
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A few decisions are like tattoos. Once you make them, you have to live with them. Reversing them would be very expensive and painful, and not always possible.
Source & image: Emily Webber