In the last piece, we put a number on decision debt — the slow, invisible cost of making good decisions and then forgetting why. Relitigation, reversals, lost institutional memory, politics.

The fix is almost insultingly simple. It's a decision record: a tiny artifact, written at the moment of deciding, that captures not just what you chose but why.

It takes about two minutes. It saves about two hours, every time the question comes back. Here's how to do it.

What goes in a decision record

Forget heavyweight documentation. A useful decision record is five short fields:

• ✓The decision — one clear sentence. ("We're moving the launch to March.")
• ✓The context — what made this necessary, and why now.
• ✓The options considered — the real alternatives, and why each lost. (This is the field everyone skips and later wishes they hadn't.)
• ✓The deciding argument — the one or two reasons that actually tipped it.
• ✓Owner + date — who made the call, and when.

Optionally, a sixth: the revisit trigger — "reconsider this if X changes." It tells future-you when the decision has expired.

That's it. Five lines. The magic isn't in the format; it's in capturing the reasoning before it evaporates. If you want one ready-made, the decision log template is the same idea in a reusable shape.

How to do it without killing the meeting

The objection is always the same: "we don't have time for process." You don't need much.

• •Spend the last two minutes. When a decision lands, one person says "let me capture this" and reads the five fields out loud while everyone's still in the room.
• •Read it back. This is the secret step. Saying the decision and its reasoning aloud surfaces disagreements you didn't know were still live — "wait, that's not what I thought we decided." Far better to find that now than in three months.
• •One scribe, rotating. It's not a manager's job or a junior's job. Whoever's closest to the keyboard.

Two minutes, while the context is hot, before everyone scatters and the why leaks out of the room.

Where it has to live

A decision record buried in someone's private notes is worthless. It has to be visible and searchable — somewhere the whole team (and next year's new hire) can find it by searching the topic.

That's the difference between a decision record and a decision graveyard. The value isn't in writing it down. It's in being able to pull it back up, six months later, when someone asks "wait, why did we do it this way?" — and having the answer, reasoning intact, right there.

What you're actually building

Do this consistently and something quietly powerful accumulates: a memory of how your team thinks.

• ✓New people onboard by reading why, not just what — so they stop blindly undoing settled decisions.
• ✓Questions get answered with a link instead of a re-debate.
• ✓Reversals become deliberate ("the revisit trigger fired") instead of accidental ("nobody remembered why we chose this").
• ✓And because the arguments are captured — not just the verdict — the best reasoning keeps winning, instead of getting overwritten by whoever argues loudest next quarter.

That last point is the whole game. A team that records its decisions and the arguments behind them doesn't just move faster — it compounds, getting wiser with every choice instead of resetting to zero. That's what it means to decide once.

So: does your team have anywhere that a decision and the reasoning behind it actually live — or does it all evaporate when the meeting ends? For most teams, the honest answer is "nowhere."