Your company decides in meetings, threads, and messages. Different surfaces and the same source of input behind all of them: people.
Sometimes one conversation can generate a decision. Often, it takes numerous conversations spanning weeks before a decision is made.
Every system you own records what a decision produced. Not one records the decision.
Formation
The obvious approach is to put transcripts and threads through an LLM and ask it for the decisions. That treats formation as extraction: find the sentences that sound like decisions and record them. It produces volume immediately, and it is wrong in both directions at once.
It records decisions that were never made.
“We should probably just hold the increase this year and be done with it.” Clean, quotable, decision-shaped. The discussion ran another ten minutes and went in another direction. The question came back in three more meetings before the decision was made. A system keying on that sentence recorded a decision the company never made.
It misses the decision that was made.
A team argues about suppliers for twenty minutes. Nobody ever says which supplier the company is going with. Someone says to get their contract over to legal. Someone asks who is handling the transition. Every one of those is real and extraction will catch them all. You are left with a record that knows a contract went to legal and cannot tell you the company changed suppliers.
Many times, a decision is established in pieces, across weeks and systems.
Take that supplier switch. Nobody in the conversation made a decision to switch suppliers. Two days later, an email goes to legal with the contract attached. A week after that, a thread in the team channel names the owner of the transition. At the end of the month, a purchase order is issued against the new supplier. Not one of those is a decision on its own. Together they establish that one was made.
Nothing that reads one surface at a time can see that.
Formation is a threshold on accumulated evidence, weighted by source.
Evidence about one question piles up over time. Each piece counts for more or less depending on who it came from. A habitual agreer saying “sounds great” cannot count the same as a terse colleague saying “okay, fine.” A decision forms when the weighted evidence crosses the threshold.
Below the threshold, the record does not hold a weak decision. It holds no decision at all, and keeps the question open as a candidate. That is the more useful answer: an unresolved question somebody can finally see is a question somebody can close.
A system that lowers its bar to produce an answer has produced the exact failure the record exists to prevent.
Two kinds of fact
What formation produces is not the kind of fact your systems were built to hold. Every company carries both, and only one of them has somewhere to live.
Authored fact
True because someone wrote it down. A billing address. A job title. A list price. Someone typed it into a field on purpose, and that field is where it lives. Writing it down and making it true are the same act.
Resolved fact
True because people decided something. Whether you are leaving a supplier. What was promised on a call. It became true in a conversation, and there is no field anywhere whose job is to hold it.
The test
Ask what would have to happen for the fact to change.
If the answer is that someone edits a record, it is authored. If the answer is that a group of people decides something, it is resolved. An authored fact is its own artifact, which is why it can be looked up. A resolved fact has none at the moment it becomes true.
Almost every tool built for company knowledge assumes authored.
Supersession
When a decision stops holding, only one thing matters to the person running the business: does somebody still have to decide it?
| What happened | What it means | Does someone still have to decide it? |
|---|---|---|
| Revision | You decided something else instead. The newer decision is the answer. | No |
| Reversal | You called it off on purpose. Not doing it is the answer. | No |
| Drift | Nobody changed it, and nobody follows it anymore. The record says one thing and the company does another. | Yes |
| Abandonment | It stopped being worked on and nobody called it off. There was never a second decision. | Yes |
Reversed and abandoned look identical from the outside.
In both cases the work stops and nothing takes its place. You called one of them off. The other one nobody called off, because nobody realized it needed calling. Six months later, all you can see is that it did not happen.
No system you run today has a field for this. Not the CRM, not the ERP, not the wiki, not the project tool. So nothing tells you which of the two you are looking at, and nobody ever puts the question back in front of you.
In the record
Candidate evidence
Something points at a decision. Not enough to call it one.
A decision
Enough evidence to say one was made, and what it was.
Supersession
It stopped being the live answer.
At every stage
Ownership
Who holds it now. Not a stage of its own, and the one thing that goes missing first.