Why decisions don't stay decided
Halfway through a program I was running, a senior director joined a steering meeting and asked, with apparent earnestness, why we'd chosen vendor A over vendor B. The room went quiet. Six of us had been part of the decision. It had been made eight months earlier. None of us could defend it on the spot.
We lost a week reconstructing the answer. The team lost faith in itself for slightly longer. That program is the reason I keep a decision log.
"Decisions don't take care of themselves. Programs that act like they do end up making the same decisions twice. Or three times. Or five."
Most PMs resist logging decisions because it feels like make-work. The decision is fresh, everyone remembers it, why write it down? The answer is that "everyone remembers it" decays at a rate most PMs don't appreciate. Six months later, half the room is different people. A year later, the original sponsor is gone. Two years later, the decision shows up in a strategy review and nobody knows why it was made.
The five-field core
The format is short. Five fields. The whole entry fits in a paragraph.
- Date. When the decision was made. Anchors the reasoning to a moment in time.
- The decision itself. One sentence. Specific. "We chose vendor A" is not a decision. "We chose vendor A on a three-year contract at \$1.4M annually" is.
- Options considered. Named, not "we looked at alternatives." One line on why each was rejected.
- Rationale. Why this option, in plain language. Tie it to an OKR or charter goal if you can.
- Owner. One name. Not "the team." Not "leadership." A person who owns the call if it goes wrong.
That is the whole core. A four-sentence record of a decision is worth a thousand times more than a perfectly remembered version of the decision in the PM's head, because the four-sentence version survives org changes, sponsor changes, and the PM's own forgetfulness.
The director move: tie every decision to an outcome
Decisions made in service of an outcome are durable. Decisions made in service of nothing in particular are perpetually re-litigable. A decision entry that says "we chose vendor A because they had the lowest TCO" is a decision in search of an objective. A decision entry that says "we chose vendor A because lowest TCO directly serves OKR Q3-2: reduce platform run-rate by 25%" is a decision anchored to something.
When the OKR shifts, the decision can be honestly revisited. When the OKR holds, the decision holds. The OKR is the load-bearing wall. The decision is what's hanging on it.
