Decision Amnesia
Now you're about to make the same decision again. Without knowing you've already made it.
Learn thoroughly what should be learned. Having learned, live by it. Valluvar connects learning to living: knowledge without application is incomplete. Why was that decision made? Nobody knows. Your organisation decided to pivot the product three years ago. It was a significant choice. Resources shifted. Teams reorganized. Strategy changed. Today, the people who made the decision have moved on. The documentation was a Slack thread that’s been archived. The reasoning was ‘understood at the time.’ Now you’re about to make the same decision again. Without knowing you’ve already made it.
The BBC knew about Jimmy Savile. I traced the committee structure. The Children in Need committee knew. The hospital volunteer committee knew. The Newsnight editorial committee knew, and killed its own investigation. No single committee owned the decision to act because every committee could point to another committee’s jurisdiction. This is committee disease at its most lethal: distributed knowledge, distributed responsibility, zero accountability. 450 victims over 54 years. The BBC’s committee structure didn’t fail to protect them. It was architecturally incapable of protecting them.
Organisations that can’t remember their decisions can’t learn from them. In neurology, anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new long-term memories. The patient can recall the distant past but cannot remember what happened yesterday. Every day begins fresh, without the benefit of recent experience. Organizational decision amnesia works the same way: the company can describe its founding principles but cannot explain why it chose its current strategy. The distant past is mythology. The recent past is fog. Every new leader inherits decisions without context. Without context, they can only judge outcomes. Without understanding why something was chosen, they can only evaluate whether it worked, never whether the reasoning was sound.
For your next significant decision, write down three things: what you decided, why you decided it, and what you would need to see to change your mind. Store it where it will survive your tenure. The next person in your role will either thank you or need you. Make sure they don’t need you.
That vanished rationale has a name. Decision Amnesia. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Decision rationale was stored in people, not systems. When the decision-makers moved on, the context evaporated. The outcome remained, but the reasoning that produced it was gone. Every successor inherited a result without a lesson.
Navigate
Every significant decision is recorded with three elements: what was decided, why, and what conditions would trigger a revision. The record survives the decision-maker.
Tool
DMG / Decision Record: the documentation protocol that captures context, rationale, and revision triggers for every material decision. DMG is organizational long-term memory.
Implement
For your next significant decision, write down: what you decided, why, and what would need to change for you to reconsider. Store it where it will survives your tenure.
Emerge
When decisions have memory, the organisation stops repeating mistakes, new leaders inherit wisdom instead of mystery, and institutional knowledge compounds over generations.