Decision-making glossary
Decision log
A decision log is a running, dated list of the decisions a team has made, kept in one place. Each entry records what was decided, who owns it, why, and what else was considered. Good logs also record what the team expected to happen, so the outcome can be checked against it later.
Teams keep a decision log to answer a question that comes up constantly: did we already decide this, and why? An entry is written when the decision is made, not reconstructed afterward. It usually holds a date, a one-sentence statement of the choice, an owner, the reasoning, the options rejected, and a date to review it.
A decision log is not meeting minutes. Minutes record a discussion in order. A log records only the conclusions, one per entry, so they can be found months later without rereading the conversation. It is lighter than a decision register, which is usually a formal record kept for a board or committee, and broader than an architecture decision record, which explains one technical choice in depth.
The most common failure is a log that stops being written. If an entry takes ten minutes to fill in, it gets skipped, so keep the required fields few. The second failure is a log nobody reopens. Adding an expected outcome and a review date turns it from an archive into something a team can learn from.
In Decize: A free decision log template with these fields, as CSV and Markdown. See how →
Free template: Meeting decision tracker template
Sources: Architectural Decision Records (adr.github.io), which defines a project’s decision log