Too Many Decisions Feel Permanent
September 26, 2026
Read Time - 4 minutes
“Decision-makers miscategorize two-way-door decisions as one-way-door decisions. This results in wasted effort and unnecessary stress.”
~Ricardo Valerdi, The Five-Tool Team
A few years ago a college wanted to launch an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in entrepreneurship. It required no new lines, no new space, and no new funding. It needed only a few new courses, taught by existing faculty.
An easy win, right?
Well, it took three years to get off the ground.
They put a tremendous amount of effort into designing the courses, identifying the market, projecting revenue, studying peer institutions, and allaying fears that the certificate would cannibalize enrollment in existing programs.
Nobody said it out loud, but the strategy seemed to be from Field of Dreams. Build it and they will come. When it was finally approved, the people who built it were ecstatic. There was a press release with much fanfare, and then…crickets.
No one enrolled.
The theory was that the target audience would rather invest back in their businesses or learn through experience than pay tuition.
Fair enough.
So what did they do about it?
Nothing.
No one brought the group back together. No one revisited the assumptions made. The certificate stayed in the catalog. The courses continued to be listed, but the program was dead in the water.
It took three years to launch the program. Not one hour went to understanding why no one came.
Every decision has two sides worth learning from: what we can find out before, and what only shows up after. We build an enormous amount of structure for the first and almost none for the second.
Two kinds of doors
Ricardo Valerdi gave me a way to think about this. He reached out to me last month and we talked over Zoom. He heads the department of systems and industrial engineering at the University of Arizona and has spent his career helping SpaceX, Major League Baseball, and the U.S. Army make better decisions. His book The Five-Tool Team happens to come out this week.
He categorizes decisions as one-way doors and two-way doors.
A two-way door is reversible. If the decision turns out badly, you can change your mind and try something else. Examples might be a new hire, a new policy, a new course, or a revised course schedule.
A one-way door is permanent. Once you make a decision, you have to live with what you chose. For example, awarding someone tenure, closing or merging a program, taking a public position on a contested issue, telling a major donor “yes,” or ending someone’s employment.
The launch of the interdisciplinary certificate was treated as a one-way door. It took three years of proof gathering for a decision the college could have reversed in a semester. Treating it as permanent also explains why no one looked back after nobody enrolled. People don't schedule a review of a decision they consider final, and once it failed, reopening it meant someone had to be the one who was wrong.
Design for exit ramps
Ricardo's answer to that problem is an iterative loop rather than a decision. Make a small move, watch what it teaches you, fold that into the next one, and go again. He calls two-way doors learning moments for exactly that reason.
He tells it through the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team. They tried a two-for-one season ticket offer in the upper deck at Chase Field. It failed, and not quietly. The discount angered full-price buyers elsewhere in the stadium, and retention collapsed when renewals came back at standard rates. What made it worth doing was the experiment that followed. They surveyed season ticket holders, moved to dynamic pricing, and grew revenue without losing anyone.
The failure paid for the success. That only works when an attempt is cheap enough to be followed by another one. It also requires the humility to learn from what didn’t work.
His instruction for making that possible is five words: design them with exit ramps.
Here are three that work on a campus.
Build the smallest version that tells you what you need to know. If what we need to know is whether students will enroll, two elective courses will tell us. A full certificate does not tell us more. It costs three years of approval to find out the same thing.
Say the end date when you announce it. A change announced as permanent becomes permanent, because walking it back means admitting in public that you were wrong. A two-year trial can end without anyone losing face.
Write the objections into what you will watch. When a colleague says this will pull students from the major, you can spend capital defeating that argument, or you can make it the thing you watch and ask what number would prove them right. You do not have to win to proceed, and the skeptic gets a role instead of a defeat.
Try this before Friday
Take the initiative you are planning this fall and apply two-way door thinking to it:
Name a future date you will stop and assess.
Then write down a.) what would make you keep going, b.) what would make you change course, and c.) what would make you stop.
That is a post-mortem you can learn from.
And it's what turned the Diamondbacks’ failure into a win.
Bottom Line
Most of what we agonize over on a campus can be undone. We simply don't treat it that way, and the cost is that good ideas arrive oversized, over-justified, and too expensive to try more than once.
What’s encouraging is that this shift needs no funding, no new policy, and nobody's permission. All it takes is framing a change as something we will test and adjust rather than something we must install and defend.
Framed that way, a change becomes something your people can bring you unfinished. A disappointing result becomes information instead of a verdict on whoever proposed it. And a first attempt gets a second one, which is often how a good idea gets good.
When we treat a decision as permanent, it has to be right the first time. When we treat it as reversible, it only has to be a first draft.
If you want to go deeper on decision making, I recommend Ricardo's book The Five-Tool Team. I have no affiliation other than I enjoyed the read and wanted to share.
That's all for today. Thanks for reading.
Put this to work on your campus.
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