A running record of the significant decisions made in a programme or leadership team: what was decided, by whom, on what evidence, and what alternatives were rejected. Cheap to keep, and the only defence against hindsight.
Outcomes get judged years after decisions get made, by people holding information the deciders never had. A decision log is how an organisation remembers what it actually knew at the time.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
A client brief to the Global Board turns the reasoning you are about to log into something independently challenged before it is committed.
Pressure-test this decisionA decision log captures each significant decision as it is made: the question, the options considered, the choice, the reasoning and evidence behind it, who decided, who was consulted, the date, and any conditions or review triggers attached. It differs from meeting minutes in being organised around decisions rather than discussions.
The log earns its keep in three moments. When a decision is challenged months later, the record distinguishes between "the reasoning was sound and the world changed" and "the reasoning was thin", which is the difference between learning and blame. When a settled question resurfaces, as settled questions do whenever a new executive arrives, the log ends the relitigation in minutes instead of meetings. And at review time, comparing recorded rationale against outcomes is the only honest way an organisation improves its judgement, because unrecorded reasoning gets rewritten by memory to match whatever happened.