FREE Engineering leadership LESSON · Engineering leadership
Match process to decision risk
Reversibility, evidence, and decision rights
Not every decision deserves the same ceremony.
Classify a decision by reversibility, blast radius, time pressure, uncertainty, and who bears the consequences. Reversible choices should be made close to the work with fast feedback. Hard-to-reverse choices need explicit options, pre-mortems, dissent, and evidence plans. Name one decider while preserving the reasoning and conditions for reversal.
Consensus can inform a decision without obscuring who owns it.
A decision record is useful only while the future is uncertain.
Capture context, options, assumptions, consequences, dissent, owner, review date, and reversal signals before hindsight makes the outcome look obvious. Records should shorten future reasoning and expose stale assumptions—not become permanent monuments to authority.
Write down what would make the current choice wrong.