What a Decision Log Is For, and What It Is Not

Picture this. A new board member, an investor or your own head of sales asks: "Why did we raise prices last spring?"

You remember roughly what happened. But the full answer is spread across several places:

• an email thread with your finance lead
• notes from two leadership meetings
• a chat conversation where someone raised a concern about churn
• your own memory, which has faded

To give a straight answer, you dig through all of them. You try to piece together what you knew then, what you assumed, who pushed for the change and whether anything has shifted since. That can take hours, and you still may not be sure you found everything.

The cost goes beyond your time. When the reasoning is lost, the team may repeat old debates. It may also miss that an assumption behind the decision has stopped being true.

This course is about fixing that one problem. Use the sliders to estimate what rebuilding past decisions costs you now. These are your own numbers, not industry figures.

A decision log is a single running record of the decisions your organization makes. Each decision gets its own short entry, meaning one record in the log. An entry captures:

• what was decided
• why, the reasoning at the time
• the assumptions it rested on, meaning the things you believed were true but could not be sure of
• the owner, the person accountable for it
• any later changes, and why they happened

"Running" means you keep adding to it as decisions happen. You do not write it once and file it away.

Go back to the price rise. With a log, you open one document, search for "pricing" and find the entry. It says the decision was made in April, owned by your finance lead, because costs had risen. It assumed that most customers would accept a moderate increase. A linked entry from September shows a smaller rise for one customer group after churn went up.

You have the answer in minutes, and you can see what changed. That is the whole job of a decision log.

A decision log is easy to confuse with records you already keep. Each of those has a different job.

• Meeting notes record what was discussed. A one-hour meeting might produce two pages of notes and just one decision. The log keeps that decision, not the whole discussion.
• A transcript is a word-for-word record of a conversation. The log is not a transcript.
• A task list or project plan tracks who does what by when. "Send new price sheet to customers by Friday" is a task. "We will raise prices by a moderate amount from 1 May" is a decision. The log holds the second.
• Formal board or company minutes are official records your organization may be required to keep. A decision log does not replace them. Any legal requirements for those records are outside this course. Check them with the people responsible, such as your company secretary or lawyer.

A simple way to remember the difference: the log records the decision and why. It leaves out every discussion point and every action item.

If you log every choice, the log becomes noise and you will stop keeping it. You need a quick filter.

A practical test: log a decision if it does any of these:

1. Commits money, people or direction. Examples are a price change, a new hire, entering a new market or dropping a product line.
2. Is hard to reverse. Examples are signing a two-year supplier contract or closing an office.
3. Is likely to be asked about later. Someone such as an investor, a new manager or the board may want to know why.

If a decision meets none of these, it probably does not need an entry. Choosing the venue for the team lunch or changing the time of a weekly meeting can stay out.

Some cases sit on the line. A small change to the sales script might seem minor. But if it changes how you position the product, it sets direction and belongs in the log. When unsure, ask: "Would I want to find this in six months?"

Flip the cards to test yourself on each example.

The most common way a decision log fails is that it stops getting written. People aim for a perfect, detailed record, find they have no time, and skip it. A few weeks later the log is empty.

The fix is to keep entries short and write them soon after the decision, ideally the same day while it is fresh. A few clear lines written now beat a full page you never get round to.

Compare two entries for the price rise:

• Short, written the same afternoon: "Raise prices moderately from 1 May. Why: supplier and hosting costs up. Assumes most customers accept it. Owner: finance lead."
• Perfect, planned for "when I have time": never written.

The short one answers the question six months later. The perfect one does not exist.

You can always add detail later. In later lessons you will also use an AI assistant to draft entries from your notes, which makes writing them fast. The habit matters more than the polish.

Throughout this course you will work on one real decision from your own organization. You will turn it into a full log entry, record a later change and set up a review. A real case makes every lesson concrete.

Good candidates are decisions that pass the test from earlier and that you still have records for. For example:

• a pricing change
• a hire for a key role
• a supplier switch
• dropping or launching a product or service

The most important condition: you still have the notes or messages. These could be meeting notes, an email thread or chat messages. You will use them as the source when you draft the entry with an AI assistant later.

One caution for now: if the decision involves board discussions, acquisition plans or details about individual employees, choose a different case for practice. Handling that kind of material safely comes later in the course. For now, a pricing change or supplier switch is a safer place to start.

Put the steps in order, then name your case.