Decision Log Setup Skill

Teams re-decide because decisions evaporate: made in a meeting, mentioned in a thread, remembered differently by everyone, and relitigated the moment someone new (or someone persistent) asks "wait, why do we…?" The decision log is the cheapest institutional memory there is — one line per decision (what, why, who, when, and the reopening rule) — but logs fail as shelf-ware unless capture is wired into existing moments (the meeting's last five minutes, the thread's landing) and retrieval becomes reflex ("checked the log?" as the first response to why-questions).

What This Skill Produces

• The format — the five-field line, with the two-sentence-why discipline and the option-we-rejected field that does the anti-relitigation work
• The capture wiring — the existing moments (decision-meeting-format closes, thread-to-decision landings, 1:1 calls) that now end with a log line
• The reopening rule — what reopens a decision (new information) and what doesn't (new mood, new people)
• The retrieval habits — the log-first reflex, the onboarding tour, the link-not-relitigate response

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• Where decisions currently happen — the meetings, threads, and hallways; capture wires into real venues, and unwired venues keep leaking
• The platform — a doc, a wiki page, a database/table; sortable-and-searchable beats beautiful, and the log lives where the team already looks
• The scope line — which decisions get logged (the test: would someone plausibly ask "why" in six months?) vs. the operational micro-calls that don't; over-logging kills the habit as surely as under-logging kills the value
• The relitigation history — the decisions that keep reopening; they get back-filled first, because they're the demonstration