The meeting that runs twice

A client asked me to sit in on a pricing meeting last year. Nine people, ninety minutes, and a decision at the end that everyone seemed happy with.

Four months later I was in the same room for the same meeting. Same question, mostly the same people, and one new person arguing hard for the option that had already lost. Nobody could tell him why it lost. They could only tell him that it had.

That second meeting cost about fourteen hours of senior time. It was not the expensive part. The expensive part was that they changed the answer, because the person who had held the original reasoning had left in June and taken it with him.

Two failures that look identical

From the outside, a question coming back looks the same either way. Inside, they are different problems with different fixes.

The first is that no decision was actually made. The meeting ended, people nodded, and everyone left with a slightly different understanding of what had been agreed. Nothing was recorded because there was nothing to record. You find this one by asking three people what was decided and getting three answers.

The second is that a decision was made, and only the outcome survived. Somebody wrote “we are going with option B” in a channel and nobody wrote down what made option A worse. When the context shifts, or a new person arrives, there is nothing to argue against except the conclusion itself.

The fix for the first is facilitation. The fix for the second is a record. Companies usually buy the first when they need the second.

What a decision record has to hold

Not much, and that is the point. The version that survives contact with a busy company has four fields.

The question, written as a question. “Should we move enterprise pricing to per seat” rather than “pricing”.

The options that were live, including the ones that lost. This is the field that gets dropped, and it is the one that does all the work later.

Why the winner won. One or two sentences, in the language people actually used in the room.

What would change the answer. This is the field almost nobody writes, and it is the difference between a record and an archive. “If we sign two more customers over 400 seats, revisit” turns a decision into something with a trigger on it.

Whoever writes it needs about four minutes. If it takes longer than that, the format is wrong and people will stop.

Where it goes

Wherever the team already is. A decisions channel in Slack works. A database in whatever tracker you already pay for works. A markdown file in a repo works if the audience is technical.

What does not work is a new tool that only the person who bought it opens. I have watched three companies buy a decision log product and abandon it inside a quarter, every time for the same reason: it was one more place to remember, and remembering was the thing they were bad at.

The test

Pick a decision your company made about a year ago that still shapes how you work. Try to find, in under five minutes and without asking a person, why it went that way.

Most companies I have run this on cannot do it. That is not a failure of discipline. Nobody was ever asked to keep it, and keeping it was never anyone’s job. It becomes a problem at roughly the size where the founder stops being able to hold all of it, which for most companies lands somewhere between fifty and a hundred people, and it announces itself as meetings that feel oddly familiar.