![[Decisions are documented and versioned to ensure long-term clarity#^description|Decisions are documented and versioned to ensure long-term clarity]] In most software teams, decisions don’t fail because they’re wrong - they fail because they’re **unclear**. They disappear into Slack threads, get diluted across meetings, or remain locked in someone’s head. The result? Confusion, recurring mistakes, slower delivery, and growing uncertainty about _why_ the team is doing what it’s doing in the first place. This also showed up recently while I was auditing a long-running project: ![[Who actually keeps a project on track#^angular-upgrade|Why did you upgrade?]] A perfectly reasonable [[Onboarding|onboarding]] question emerged: **“Why did you upgrade?”** And the most unsettling answer followed:   **That’s why tracking decisions matters.** When teams make their reasoning explicit - the options considered, the trade-offs accepted, the constraints acknowledged - they replace ambiguity with shared understanding. Practices like [[Decision record|decision records]], [[Architecture Decision Record|ADRs]] or [[Product Decision Record|PDRs]] work not because they create more documentation, but because they **externalize thinking**: they turn implicit, fragile [[Knowledge|knowledge]] into durable context that anyone can revisit. This reduces rework, accelerates onboarding, prevents repeated debates, and helps teams stay aligned even as people, priorities, and conditions change. Clarity in decisions doesn’t slow you down; it’s what keeps momentum possible. To understand _why_ this works, let’s break the idea down into a set of focused questions using the [[7Ws]] framework: - [[Why does clarity in decision-making matter?]] - [[Who is responsible for making the decision?]] - [[How should decisions be made clear?]] - [[What can I use to make decisions clear?]] - [[When should a decision be documented?]] - [[Where should a decision be documented?]] --- ![[Linked.base#Calendar]]