The Symptom
Most organisations that keep any record of their decisions at all keep the same kind of record: a line in a meeting note, a bullet in a summary, a status change in a tracker. The decision itself — what was agreed — is captured cleanly. What led to it rarely is.
Consider an organisation where a pricing exception was approved for a specific client eighteen months ago. The decision is on record: exception granted. What isn’t on record is why — which factors were weighed, what alternative was rejected, what would have to be true for the exception not to apply. When a similar request arrives from a different client this quarter, nobody can say with confidence whether it’s actually the same situation or a different one wearing a similar shape. The decision gets reopened, argued from scratch, by people who may not even know it was already decided once.
This isn’t a one-off. Across the same organisation, the pattern repeats at a smaller scale constantly — a scheduling rule revisited every few weeks, a vendor selection questioned again each time procurement changes hands, a process exception someone keeps quietly re-litigating in one-on-one conversations rather than in the meeting where it was actually settled. Each instance looks, from the inside, like an isolated case of someone not quite remembering or not quite agreeing. Across a whole organisation, the accumulated time spent re-deciding things that were technically already decided is rarely small.
What Leaders Usually Conclude
The common explanation is that this is a memory problem — the organisation has simply grown too large, or too much time has passed, for anyone to be expected to recall a decision from eighteen months ago. The fix that follows from this diagnosis is usually more logging: better meeting minutes, a more disciplined decision tracker, a clearer paper trail.
More logging does help with one thing. It rarely helps with the thing that’s actually causing the reopening. An organisation can invest in a considerably more thorough decision log and still watch the same decisions resurface, because the log answers a question nobody was actually struggling with. Nobody doubted that a decision was made. What they doubted, without necessarily naming it that way, was whether the decision still applied to their situation — and a record of the outcome alone gives them nothing to check that against.
What the Evidence Suggests
Research on procedural fairness offers a more precise explanation than simple forgetting. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s work on what they term “fair process” — developed across studies published in Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, and later Harvard Business Review — identifies three conditions under which people genuinely accept a decision, even one they personally disagree with: engagement in the process, clarity about what’s expected afterward, and explanation of the reasoning behind it.
The third condition is the one most decision records skip entirely. Kim and Mauborgne’s research found that explanation isn’t a courtesy extended after a decision is made — it’s a condition for whether the decision actually holds. People who understand the reasoning behind a call they disagree with tend to commit to it anyway, even while continuing to disagree with it personally. People who only receive the outcome, without the reasoning, are considerably more likely to privately reserve the right to revisit it the moment circumstances seem to shift, because they were never given the actual logic that would let them judge, for themselves, whether their own situation genuinely falls inside or outside it.
A decision log that records only the what is, in this light, doing half its job by design. It satisfies an audit trail — proof that a decision happened, when, and by whom. It does very little to satisfy the actual condition the research identifies as what keeps a decision from being quietly reopened: a reasoning trail specific enough that the next person facing something similar can genuinely check their situation against it, rather than simply guessing whether the old decision still applies.
This distinction matters more as an organisation grows, not less. In a small team, the reasoning behind most decisions lives informally in shared memory — everyone was in the room, or close enough to it, to absorb the logic alongside the outcome. As headcount grows and decisions get made by an increasingly narrow group on behalf of an increasingly wide one, that informal transmission breaks down first, often well before anyone notices the formal decision log itself has any real gap in it.
What It Looks Like in Practice
A few patterns tend to recur in organisations where this gap is live: the same underlying question resurfaces every few months, asked by different people, each time as though for the first time; a decision’s original owner has to be tracked down personally to explain why something is done a certain way, because the reasoning was never written down anywhere else; new hires propose solutions that were already tried and already rejected, because the record shows only that something didn’t happen, not why; and teams in different parts of the organisation independently reach different, quietly conflicting interpretations of the same original decision, each confident in their own reading, because no shared reasoning exists for either side to check against.
None of this is evidence of a careless organisation. It’s evidence of a documentation habit built around capturing outcomes, in a context where outcomes alone were never going to be enough to make a decision stick.
Looking for your own sector? The Other Sectors page points to the closest match.
Questions worth considering
- Pick any five decisions currently recorded in your organisation’s most-used log — could a reader with no memory of the original conversation explain, from the record alone, why the decision went the way it did?
- Is there a decision your team keeps quietly re-litigating in side conversations, rather than treating as settled — and if so, does anyone actually remember why it was decided the way it was?
- When a new hire asks “why do we do it this way,” is the answer written down anywhere, or does it depend on finding the one person who happens to remember?
This perspective is part of Operations.
Your team is facing similar challenges?
Subscribe to The Riddle Ledger
Perspectives are sent as they are published, with no promotional email, and you can unsubscribe at any time.