Decision Journal
What must you record now so the next decision does not repeat this investigation?
A decision journal preserves the state of judgment at decision time. It helps people review the process without confusing a good outcome with a good choice. Each entry becomes a node in the Decision Graph.
Entry Contract
Record only what a later decision-maker needs:
| Field | Question |
|---|---|
| Decision | What are we choosing, and is the door reversible, one-way, or compound? |
| Context | What was observed, inferred, constrained, or unknown? |
| Options | What credible alternatives were considered, and why did each win or lose? |
| Authority | Who confirmed the choice, and who may stop or revise it? |
| Prediction | What outcome, range, and time horizon do we expect? |
| Falsifier | What evidence would show the reasoning was wrong? |
| Review | When will we compare the prediction with reality? |
| Status | Is the decision proposed, live, superseded, or killed? |
Record dissent and uncertainty. Confidence is not evidence.
Review Protocol
- Compare the prediction with observed evidence.
- Judge the reasoning separately from the outcome.
- Note which assumption held, failed, or remained unresolved.
- Keep, revise, supersede, or kill the decision.
- Link the consequence to the next choice it should inform.
Review failures first. A journal that records only successful calls trains storytelling, not judgment.
Why It Compounds
Without a journal, context leaves with people and teams repeat old analysis. With one, later readers can query what was known, why the route was chosen, who owned it, and what happened. This scales access to precedent; it does not remove the need for human judgment.
Failure Modes
- Outcome bias — judging the choice only by whether it worked.
- Compliance artifact — recording enough to satisfy a template but not to reconstruct judgment.
- Hindsight rewrite — changing the original prediction after seeing the result.
- Suppressed dissent — removing the earliest signal that the decision may need review.
- Dead record — storing an entry without connecting it to action or a later choice.
Proof Of Done
- The original evidence and prediction are frozen before the outcome is known.
- Authority, review date, falsifier, and status are explicit.
- The observed consequence links forward to a later decision or standard.
Changes my mind: later decision-makers reconstruct the original judgment as reliably without a concise, immutable-at-review decision record.
Context
- depends-on Decision Making — make the decision explicit before retaining it.
- applies-to Decision Graph — connect each entry to work, evidence, consequence, and later precedent.
- pairs-with Context Graphs — make reasoning and precedent queryable across people and agents.
- proved-by Reality — compare the frozen prediction with observed evidence.
Source
Questions
Next question: which decision trace has your organisation already lost?
- What did that forgetting cost?
- Which old decision still governs the system without a remembered reason?
- What evidence will trigger its next review?