Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

I've sat in a lot of leadership meetings, both inside our firm and as an observer in others.

And the decisions that get discussed the longest are almost always the ones where the door doesn't shut behind them.

There are two types of decisions we make as leaders.

There are two-way doors. If you make the decision and it's the wrong one, it's not the end. Buying a new technology is a good example. Teams will spend months analyzing a technology, only for it to be a highly reversible decision. If it doesn't work, you get rid of it and go somewhere else. A two-way door isn't pain-free. But it isn't deadly.

Then there are one-way doors. You make the decision and there's no turning back. In our world that's an M&A transaction. It’s a decision to add a partner or change compensation and title. The decisions you're going to live inside of for a decade.

Here's what I keep seeing. We spend our best cognitive power on the two-way doors, and we rush the one-way doors.

We have a young company inside our holding company. Still figuring out what it is. I've been pushing that team to stay lean instead of building everything out this deeply this early.

They decided they needed a CRM. Fair enough. They'd tried a few of the tools we already had, plus a homegrown AI solution that turned out to be too early for them.

Then they spent a couple of weeks analyzing dozens of CRMs. They landed on one. Then they ran additional calls to make sure it could do everything our most mature company needs. That firm is thirty years old.

When they brought me the solution and the thesis, I told them I thought they'd gone overboard. They'd taken a sledgehammer to something that needed a hammer. Weeks spent on whether the tool would fit into our data warehouse, whether it would work with our AI solutions. Time and cost, gone.

I told them if they believed it was the best solution, go with it. But they have almost no data and they're going to change as they grow. This was a two-way door. They were treating it like a one-way door.

And they were letting the need to line up with the bigger firm sway a decision that only had to work for where they are right now.

It's a lot easier to see from the outside. That's the whole problem.

I've always wondered why that is. I've caught myself doing it too. The one thing I keep coming back to is that the pain of reversing a two-way door decision is understood. It's recent. We've felt it. The pain of a wrong one-way door decision is something most of us have never actually lived through.

There are side effects to deliberating this deeply on two-way doors.

These decisions sit and loom for weeks. Even when we aren't working on them directly, they're still running somewhere in the background. That looming drains us. It wears us down. It's this slow drain, but it's the one that ultimately keeps us from having the capacity to deliberate on the decisions that actually deserve it.

The research on this is more literal than I expected. As long as a decision stays open, your brain refuses to close the loop on it. It keeps both options live and keeps evaluating them, which measurably reduces the working memory you have available for everything else. So an open decision isn't free. It's costing you something the entire time you leave it open.

We've all had the decision we're deliberating, like a new CRM. And then something else comes up, like wanting to clean up our data. But we hold off, because we want to see what we decide on the CRM first. So the second decision gets blocked by the first. And now we've created a dam, and the dam adds to the strain.

We have to act on two-way doors. Learn by doing. Don't let the fear of having to unravel the decision keep you from making the decision.

Something that has helped me is the intentionality I put into how my days are organized. I do my best thinking in the morning. For most people, the highest cognitive capacity we have is early, because as the day progresses, more decisions get made, and as more decisions get made, our capacity degrades.

Which is why I'd suggest spending your early hours on your most critical decisions and thinking. It's also when I'm the most clear. If I have a stack of two-way door decisions to get through, the morning is when I do it, because I'm far more likely to actually reach a decision. If there's a strategic one-way door in front of me, the morning is when I sit with it.

Be intentional about when you think. Otherwise your cognitive capacity gets spent by whoever asks for it first.

Now here's the part that makes all of this harder than it should be.

I can't speak for everyone, but I'm the one who likes to grind things out, dig in, and find a way to finish the drill.

We grow up in a world where you either win or you lose. You succeed or you fail. For the majority of people, there is no mentality that accepts failing as a stepping stone to future success. Especially in a relational business like wealth management.

I can only imagine how a client would take a conversation about losing $100K in their portfolio, where the advisor explains that this was a learning experience that will make them better in the future. That conversation would never be able to happen. The advisor would be fired.

And the decisions we make aren't just seen and felt internally. They're seen and felt externally, by our clients. If we constantly make decisions that we ultimately fail at or quit, even the ones that have nothing to do with a portfolio, it starts to degrade the trust our clients have in everything else we do.

So as a risk averse industry, we do one of two things. We stay committed to the status quo, because if it ain't broke why fix it. Or we double down on a failing idea so that we never have to admit it failed and quit.

Here's the uncomfortable part. That second instinct isn't irrational.

There's research where observers watched people either double down on a failing course of action or cut their losses and walk away. The people who doubled down were rated as having more integrity. And then those same observers handed them 29% more money in a trust exercise than they gave the people who made the rational call to stop.

Read that again. Cutting your losses gets punished. Staying on a sinking ship reads as character.

That's the double-edged sword. We treat quitting as a crack in trust, while overcommitting to a dead initiative burns the money, time and effort we needed somewhere else.

The way out isn't to care less about how quitting looks. It's to decide what failure looks like before you start. Write down the number, the date, the signal that would tell you to stop. Say it out loud to your team before the thing launches. Then walking away isn't a judgment about your character made in the middle of a mess. It's a rule you set when you were thinking clearly.

The common pushback I get from advisors when I talk about this is that every decision is important. But we all know that if every decision is important, then nothing is.

So before your next strategic session, whether that's with your team or on your own, write down the top five issues you need to think through. Before you discuss a single one of them, label each as a one-way or a two-way door. Then start with the one-way doors, and spend as much time on them as you need to get comfortable.

If you get to the end of that day and you spent more time on two-way doors than you did on one-way doors, go back to the one-way doors. Because you likely took the easy path. You stayed with what felt familiar instead of sitting in what felt uncertain.

FutureProof advisors aren't perfect at this. They fall into the trap of spending an inordinate amount of time on two-way decisions relative to one-way decisions. All of the time.

I know, because I do.

The key isn't being perfect at this. The key is being aware of it. Putting processes in place and building the habits that help you navigate away from your defaults. And our default in decision making is to avoid the uncomfortable and speed through the necessary.

Grinding through reversible decisions is not rigor. It's cognitive waste.

And the FutureProof advisor works to limit how much cognitive capacity they waste.

The best is ahead!

-Matt