The machine had been running forensics for four hours. The attacker was still in the environment. Not because we were asleep at the wheel. Because in incident response, the first loud move can become a flare. Tip the actor too early, and you may lose the trail before you understand the blast radius.
Someone asked: do we wipe it?
I knew the answer before I finished hearing the question. A wipe stops the bleeding. It also destroys the forensic trail, changes the state of the evidence, and may erase what Legal would need if this became a dispute. Once you wipe, you don’t unwipe. That call doesn’t come back.
That’s a one-way door.
The same room had made two other calls that night. We’d read Legal in: reversible, if we needed them to stand down. We’d pulled credentials on three compromised accounts: also reversible, if we were wrong about any of them. Two-way doors. We could move fast, make the call, adjust if we got it wrong.
A wipe wouldn’t be like that.
I made it crystal clear to executive leadership not to wipe. I walked out knowing exactly what we almost traded for the recovery window. The weight from that incident is still legible to me. It has a texture. You don’t necessarily learn it from a framework. You learn it in the room, under fire, when the question lands and something specific sharpens in your attention.
Years in incident response for high-risk corporate and government clients gave me a felt sense for this distinction that no framework really teaches. The calls that are irreversible don’t announce themselves as irreversible. They arrive disguised as the obviously right move. The experienced IR commander learns to pause on “obviously right.” That’s exactly when you ask which door you’re standing in front of.
Years later, I found cleaner language for what that room had already taught me. Jeff Bezos called them one-way and two-way doors in his 2015 shareholder letter. Some decisions are one-way doors. Some are two-way. One-way doors require careful deliberation and time to get right. Two-way doors don’t. Make the call, go back through if you’re wrong. The framework is simple. Most organizations still don’t use it in practice.
That’s not a failure of awareness. From my experience most leaders have heard of one-way doors. The concept lands. What they haven’t built is the habit of classifying before the meeting ends. So they apply the same scrutiny to every significant decision: the same committee, the same deliberation budget for a call that costs a day if it’s wrong as for one that costs a quarter.
That’s the most expensive management mistake that doesn’t show up on any dashboard.
Deloitte’s 2026 research on AI and decision-making puts the gap in plain view:
64% of executives say AI-enabled decision-making is very important, but only 5% believe their organizations are leading there.
Underneath that gap is the real problem: 57% of organizations are still operating at low decision-making maturity. The ambition is high. The foundation isn’t.
AI is about to accelerate the rate at which decisions land on every leader’s desk. The acceleration doesn’t change which decisions are irreversible. It changes how fast you can act on a recommendation. If you can move from “the model says do this” to done in hours instead of days, you’ve compressed the gap between the decision and its consequences. That’s not a problem if you classified the decision correctly. It’s a compounding problem if you didn’t.
A two-way door you walked through too fast: recoverable.
A one-way door walked through because the output looked confident and the process felt smooth: that’s the new incident. Deloitte’s language for this is precise:
“AI is amplifying existing deficiencies instead of solving them.”
The decision framework you have right now is the one AI will run faster. If that framework doesn’t distinguish between reversible and irreversible, you’ll get to the wrong answer more thoroughly than before.
The 60-Second Classification
The instinct I developed isn’t complicated. Before committing to any significant call, ask one question: can this be undone?
Not “should this be undone.” Not “do I want to undo it.” Just: is undoing it structurally possible, in a timeframe that matters?
If yes: two-way door. Move.
If no: one-way door. Slow down. Get the right people in the room. Don’t let it happen by default.
The classification takes less than 60 seconds. The hard part isn’t the analysis. It’s the discipline to stop and ask when the room is moving fast, the pressure is high and the path looks obvious. Obvious is not the same as reversible.
The signal I trust most is the one that fires when someone says “we should just...” and something sharpens. Should just is almost always someone treating a one-way door like a two-way door because the immediate move appears to be clear. It often is clear. The question is what you’re trading when you make it.
Before the Meeting Closes
Every meeting ends with decisions or the appearance of decisions. Most organizations don’t distinguish between the two. The agenda items hopefully resolve, the call wraps, and people leave with a shared sense of what was agreed. Or at least what the loudest voices believed was agreed. That’s the quiet failure mode of modern meetings: too much talking, not enough listening, and a room full of people mistaking airtime for alignment. Nobody asked which agreements were reversible and which weren’t.
That gap is where decisions become regrets.
The practice: before any meeting closes on a significant item, ask the room out loud: is this a one-way door? If it is, name what can’t be undone. Name who’s actually making the call. Ask what would need to change to reverse it.
The silence that follows that question is almost always the most useful data in the room.
If nobody can answer it, you haven’t made a decision. You’ve made a direction. Directions and decisions look the same on the meeting notes. They have very different postmortems.
You can classify any decision in 60 seconds. If you’re not doing that, you’re spending the same deliberation budget on every call. That’s not discipline. That’s recklessness with a calendar.
Outside the security room, I produce trance as ZenOne. Different medium, same obsession: tension, timing, and knowing when a move can’t be taken back: zenonemusic.substack.com.