There is a natural “gravity” in every organization that pulls leaders away from significant, complex decisions toward smaller, more manageable ones. As companies scale, they often stop making “big bets” and start optimizing for “minor wins.”
Why?
Because making a hundred small decisions is cognitively easier and emotionally safer than making one large, high-stakes choice.
But it is infinitely riskier.
The risk of “Small Decision Comfort”:
1. Lower Stakes: Small projects rarely fail spectacularly. They offer the illusion of progress without the vulnerability of a “one-way door” decision.
2. Cognitive Ease: Our brains are wired to favor the immediate gratification of clearing a task list. Checking off ten small “to-dos” provides a sense of accomplishment that a multi-year, complex strategic initiative cannot match in the short term.
3. The Default to “Optimizing”: It is much simpler to improve an existing process by 2% than it is to invent a new mechanism from scratch.
How to counter the “gravity” of small decisions:
At Amazon, investing time in innovation was not a once-a-year planning event; it was a continuous process, and leaders like me spent 10-20 hours of every workweek developing and refining new product ideas using the Working Backwards PR FAQ process.
As Jeff Bezos famously noted, if the size of your failures isn’t growing along with your company, you aren’t actually inventing at a scale that moves the needle.
The lesson is that leaders must be vigilant—if your calendar is filled with “triage” and “status updates” on minor projects, you are likely succumbing to operational gravity.
True leadership requires the discipline to step back from the easy, small decisions and reclaim the bandwidth for the difficult, defining ones.
