Three decisions a day

Jeff Bezos has said that a senior executive should make few decisions a day, but they have to be good ones. People often take this as a productivity tip. In my view it is a statement about what executive work is for in the first place.

The idea is simple. A leader’s judgement is scarce. A leader can make only a few important, hard-to-reverse decisions well in a day. So the whole organisation should be built to ration that scarce thing. Routine decisions are moved away from the leader. The morning hours are protected. Hard questions are left for when the leader is fresh. And you have to accept that most of the leader’s day produces no visible output, because thinking produces no visible output.

Something follows from this that Bezos does not say as plainly. If routine decisions can be handed on, you need a mechanism that takes them over. Someone or something has to do the work the leader should not be doing.

The agent does not take the desk

This is where agents come in. Not as a replacement for the leader’s judgement, but as the mechanism for handing work down. The agent takes away the work the leader should never have been doing. Then the leader’s scarce attention is left for the few decisions that deserve it.

Much of what is written about AI executives gets this muddled. The agent is treated as a junior executive, to be promoted once it has proved itself. I think that is wrong. It produces a faster bureaucracy, not a better one. The agent’s job is to take work off the leader’s desk, not to take the desk.

Something else is scarce now

A leader can think hard about a few things a day. An agent can give a hundred reasoned answers an hour. There is no point in limiting how many decisions the agent makes. But in a working system something is always scarce. With agents, three things become scarce.

The first is a person’s time to review the results. If agents make decisions at machine speed and a person reviews the important ones, that person’s time becomes the bottleneck. It fails quietly. The person does not stop reviewing, they simply review more shallowly. On paper everything is in order. In reality they have become a rubber stamp.

The second is the organisation’s trust. Every visible mistake by an agent takes some of it away. One visible failure can cost more trust than ten quiet successes brought in.

The third is accountability. An agent cannot be fired, has no reputation to lose, and cannot have its bonus clawed back. The accountability always lands on a person. And a person is willing to answer for decisions made by others only up to a point.

That is why an agent should be judged against these three resources, not against its capability. An agent that makes excellent decisions but needs more review time than the reviewer has does harm overall. Capability is a necessary condition. It is not the constraint the system should be designed around.

One-way doors

Bezos distinguishes between one-way and two-way doors, that is, decisions that cannot be reversed and decisions that can. With agents the distinction is harder.

An email to a customer is mechanically a small thing. But it cannot be taken back, and neither can the promise it carries. A person who makes a hundred small decisions a year can get over a few mistakes. An agent makes a hundred decisions a day. A small error rate builds up, and the combined effect becomes hard to reverse.

The rule I recommend is simple. Before you give an agent a type of decision, ask: if a thousand of these are made and ten per cent are wrong, can the organisation reverse the combined effect? If it cannot, that type stays above the agent’s authority.

What this means for a leader’s day

For the founder of a small company, I would suggest this.

1. For one working week, write down every decision that reaches your desk. Note whether it can be reversed and how often it recurs. By the end of the week you will see a pattern: a small number of recurring decisions that can be reversed eat most of the day, and the few irreversible decisions get neglected.
2. Find the types of decision where three conditions hold. The consequence can genuinely be reversed. The organisation can carry the combined effect of a tolerable error rate. If something goes wrong, you can establish afterwards what happened.
3. Start narrow. One agent, one type of decision and one named person who reviews its work and is willing to be accountable. Write down the name of the person who will explain the agent’s worst plausible mistake to the customer. If you cannot name anyone, the agent is not ready.
4. Keep the freed time empty.

The fourth step is the one most often skipped, and then the whole point is lost. Routine work is not handed to an agent so that more routine work can be done. It is handed over to free attention for the irreversible decisions. If the freed time fills up straight away with new routine that the leader takes back because it now feels manageable, nothing has been gained. The discipline is to leave that time empty and use it for the few decisions the company really needs from its leader.

These are working hypotheses that have to be tested against experience. I am most certain of one thing: agents are infrastructure for human judgement, not a substitute for it.

Agents do not change Bezos’s principle. They change which decisions reach the leader. Not three decisions a day for the agent, but three decisions a day for the human, because the agents do the rest. The scarce thing is, and remains, human judgement where it is really needed.