Somewhere in your organisation there is a decision that everyone works around and nobody can explain.
It might be a field on a form that absolutely has to be filled in. An approval that must come from one particular team. A platform choice that constrains six other things. A rule about who can publish where. Something mildly annoying, surprisingly consequential and apparently ordained by God.
Ask why and you’ll get a shrug and a name, usually the name of someone who left in 2021.
The decision itself is in the record. It’s probably in several records. There’s a PowerPoint about it. A Teams thread. A project page nobody has looked at since launch. Possibly a PDF called FINAL_v7_APPROVED tucked lovingly into SharePoint.
What isn’t in any of them is the useful bit: why.
What trade-off was being made. What constraint applied at the time. What other option was considered and rejected. Whose objection was overruled and on what grounds. Which apparently permanent principle was, in reality, “we had £40k left in the budget and it’s use it or lose it.”
That part existed for about a fortnight, in the heads of four people and a meeting that wasn’t minuted properly, and then it evaporated.
This is something I think internal communicators — and anyone responsible for the digital workplace — need to take much more seriously.
We’ve spent fifteen years making work more findable, but we have not made it any more explicable.
Those are quite different problems. Worse, solving the first has made it easier to ignore the second, because a beautifully indexed archive of outcomes looks so much like organisational memory that we kinda stop noticing it isn’t.
Why the reasoning goes first
Every organisation loses knowledge. What’s less obvious is that it loses it in a pretty predictable order.
The decision survives because it has to. Someone needs to act on it, so eventually it becomes a policy, a configuration, a process map, a field marked mandatory.
The artefacts survive too. The deck. The paper. The approval email. The minutes saying “the group agreed to proceed with option B.”
What disappears first is the reasoning, and there are three mundane reasons for that:
The first is that reasoning is the only part that feels unnecessary to record at the time. When you’re in the middle of a decision, the logic is so obvious that writing it down feels faintly ridiculous. Of course we’re doing it this way. Everyone knows why.
The problem is that “everyone” is a group with an aggressive rate of attrition. Four years later, half of them have left, one has changed role twice, nobody can remember which supplier caused the problem, and a new person is staring at the resulting process wondering why on earth anyone would design it like this.
The second reason is that the reasoning is often awkward, embarassing even.
Real decisions are made under constraints. Budgets. Politics. Supplier relationships. Deadlines. Personal preferences. Compromises. A senior person who really, really liked option B.
None of this looks at all elegant six months later, so the rough edges get sanded off. What enters the official record is a rationale: tidy, retrospective and strategically aligned.
What happened was reasoning: contingent, human, occasionally embarrassing and considerably more useful.
And then there’s memory itself.
Six months later, ask the people involved why they made the decision and they will generally give you an answer. They’ll probably believe it, too. Humans are extremely good at constructing coherent explanations backwards from outcomes.
Which means there is a fairly short window in which you can capture why something actually happened. Miss it and you don’t preserve the reasoning later. You preserve a plausible replacement.
We touched on this in Digital Communications at Work as “shrinking organisational memory”, alongside hybrid working patterns and rising employee expectations as conditions tightening around communicators.
I’ve come to think this one has the longest tail. Hybrid arrangements will settle into something. Organisational memory won’t magically improve, because almost nothing in the way we’ve designed modern work is intended to preserve it.
Quite the opposite.
The expensive consequences of forgetting why
None of this appears as a line item in a budget, which is convenient, because it costs organisations a fortune.
Decisions become permanent by accident.
A decision with a recorded reason can be revisited. You look at the original constraint, ask whether it still applies and, if it doesn’t, change your mind.
A decision without a recorded reason has only two possible statuses: permanent or arbitrary. Neither is terribly useful.
In practice, organisations tend to choose permanent, because overturning something when you can’t explain why it exists feels reckless. So temporary constraints acquire the status of ancient law.
This is how you end up with an intranet governed in 2026 by the ghost of a licensing arrangement that expired in 2019.
Platform decisions are often driven by a single technical constraint: it has to be SharePoint, because…
The “because” deserves far more scrutiny than it usually gets. But if nobody writes the “because” down, three years later there is nothing to scrutinise. The organisation inherits the conclusion, assumes some clever person once had an excellent reason for it, and carries on.
It’s an extraordinarily efficient mechanism for turning temporary compromises into strategy.
New people can’t learn from the record
“We decided X” teaches you nothing.
Onboarding someone properly into a function is largely about teaching them the shape of decisions already made: why things work the way they do, which obvious alternatives have been tried before, where the bodies are buried and which bits of received wisdom are still true.
If none of that exists in the record, it has to be transmitted person-to-person.
Organisational knowledge then moves at the speed of coffee. And worse, it only reaches people who get invited for one.
This is one reason informal networks matter so much more inside organisations than org charts suggest. The person who knows why the process is like that becomes part of the infrastructure. Lose them and you haven’t just lost a person. You’ve deleted part of the manual.
Discovery becomes archaeology
When I go into an organisation to work out what’s actually wrong with its internal comms or digital workplace, a surprising amount of the work is reconstructing why the system looks like this in the first place.
Why are there three intranets? Why does this team own that channel? Why is this audience excluded? Why is everyone still producing a weekly PDF? Why is there a separate platform for seventeen people in Belgium?
Sometimes the archaeology is the discovery. The reason something happened five years ago turns out to explain a great deal about why it isn’t working now.
But it’s slow. And there is something a little absurd about paying an outside consultant to interview twelve people in order to reconstruct a decision your own organisation made.
Teams with decent decision records get to spend that time solving the current problem instead.
Please don’t create another database
The obvious response to this is to write a policy saying decisions must be documented. But really, please don’t.
“Document decisions” already appears in thousands of governance frameworks, where it sits alongside “ensure stakeholder alignment” and other phrases that are technically instructions but provide no clue what anybody should actually do.
It fails because it has no threshold, no format and no home, and in the real world, where I am forced to live, you need all three.
Set a threshold
Don’t document everything. That’s how you create another repository everyone resents.
Instead, record the reasoning behind decisions that will outlive the person making them, cost money or credibility to reverse, or constrain somebody else’s choices later.
That’s a much smaller number than it sounds. For most communications and digital workplace teams, you’re probably talking about a handful a quarter.
It also gives everyone permission not to document the other 97% of things they currently feel vaguely guilty about.
Give the record a fixed shape
Four lines will do it:
- What we decided
- What we chose it over
- What made the difference
- What would make us revisit this
That last line is the clever bit.
It turns a historical record into something useful. Whoever inherits the decision knows not only why it was made, but under what circumstances they have permission to change it.
It also improves the decision itself. A room full of people forced to answer “what would make us revisit this?” has to confront how certain it actually is.
“We will never reconsider this” sounds considerably sillier when someone has to type it into a box.
Put the reasoning next to the thing it explains
The most reliable way to lose a decision record is to create a dedicated Decision Log in a worthy corner of SharePoint and announce its existence in Teams.
Six months later it will contain eleven decisions, seven made by the person who created it.
Reasoning needs to live with the thing it explains: in the governance space where the platform decision sits, in the channel framework, in the standing papers for the group that made the call.
In Digital Communications at Work we describe programme governance as needing “just enough structure”: a steering group, a standing agenda, records that are actually kept and remain visible.
Most organisations already have somewhere this could live.
You almost certainly don’t need another tool.
One of the counterintuitive benefits of doing this properly is that you can actually write less down.
Teams that don’t capture the why tend to compensate by capturing everything else. Status updates. Meeting recaps. Partial summaries. Deck after deck explaining where we’ve got to, because nobody is entirely confident that the important thing has been retained.
Four honest lines about an actual decision can replace an awful lot of anxious documentation.
And a note on ownership: this isn’t a communications job in the sense that comms should become the organisation’s official minute-taker. It is a communications job in the sense that communications people are often among the few who sit across enough of the organisation to notice when a decision has gone feral and nobody can account for it.
That’s an argument for a seat at the governance table, not for taking the minutes.
And now we’re making the archive intelligent
There is one reason this perennial problem has suddenly become more urgent.
Until recently, people wrote things down on the assumption that the record was essentially inert. Yes, the organisation retained it. Yes, technically someone might find it. Yes, lawyers occasionally appeared carrying the word “discovery” when someone uses a DSAR as leverage.
But most of the time, the Teams chat you wrote in 2022 sat on a server doing nothing.
That assumption is disappearing.
I wrote about this recently for Reworked, prompted by the proposed sale of Spirit Airlines’ workplace data during its bankruptcy. The interesting thing about that story wasn’t simply that workplace messages had survived. We always knew they did.
It was that the archive had acquired value in its own right.
Emails, chats, documents and other traces of organisational life aren’t just records any more. They’re material that can be searched, analysed, synthesised and used to teach machines something about how organisations actually work.
Which creates an tricky tension.
At precisely the moment technology is becoming extraordinarily good at reading the organisational record, humans have more reason to be cautious about what they put into it.
You don’t have to believe your company’s Teams archive is going to be sold in a bankruptcy auction for that to change behaviour. You only have to think your colleagues believe their words may eventually be read by audiences they cannot currently imagine.
And people won’t respond by writing nothing down. They’ll do something much more rational. They’ll keep recording the decision. The project update. The agreed position. The clean version.
What they’ll become less inclined to record is the messy, contingent, human explanation of why one option won and another didn’t.
The politics. The uncertainty. The compromise. The constraint. The thing everyone in the room understood but nobody particularly wants appearing in an AI-generated summary three years from now.
In other words, exactly the part of organisational memory that was already starting to disappear.
That, my friends, is the paradox.
We’re building tools capable of searching almost everything an organisation has ever written at the same time as we’re creating stronger incentives for people not to write down the bits that would make the archive genuinely useful.
The result may be organisations with an almost perfect record of what they did and progressively less idea why they did it.
A decade of impeccably searchable history and no memory at all.
And it won’t happen because somebody forgot to switch on retention.
It’ll happen one perfectly sensible individual decision at a time.
I help organisations — usually large, usually complicated, often regulated — work out what their communication system is actually doing and how to make it hold together. That’s the work I do through Lithos Partners. If any of the above sounded uncomfortably familiar, get in touch.
