ESSAYSNO. 07

Decision Debt

Every requirement that cannot be traced to the decision that authorised it is debt, and it always falls due at the worst moment.

It's 4:07pm on a Wednesday. A vendor just told the steering committee that change was "never agreed."

You know it was. You were there.

And you already know how this ends.

You dig — SharePoint, minutes, an email thread from a BA who left in March. The artefacts are all there. Beautifully formatted. Version controlled.

The decision is nowhere.

But here's the thing — your documentation was never the problem.

This is Decision Debt. Every requirement that can't be traced back to the decision that authorised it. It accumulates silently, and it always falls due at the worst possible moment.

The cost isn't the search time. It's that you concede points you shouldn't, absorb scope you didn't agree to, and slowly lose authority in rooms where you used to have it.

The shift — stop asking whether your artefacts are good. Start asking whether they're evidence.

A practice built to produce documents will always lose the 4pm argument. A practice built to produce evidence ends it in ten minutes.

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