Make Faster Decisions (Without Losing Sleep)

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. Download Episode Transcript 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®