The Decisions Nobody Can Explain

“Why do we do it this way?”

It’s one of the most common questions in any organisation, and one of the least satisfyingly answered. The process has an extra approval step. The contract has an unusual clause. One customer is handled differently from all the others. Nobody currently in the room can say why.

What’s striking is that the decision itself is perfectly well recorded. It’s in the policy, the system, the signed agreement. It is only the reasoning — the part that would tell you whether it still applies — that has gone missing.

Two expensive responses

Faced with a rule nobody can explain, teams reliably do one of two things.

1. Preserve it blindly

The safe move is to leave it alone. It’s presumably there for a reason, so the extra step stays, the odd clause is copied into the next contract, the exception is honoured forever. Over years, a business accumulates a layer of rules that everybody follows and nobody understands — some of which stopped being necessary a long time ago.

2. Reopen it from scratch

The other move is to relitigate. A meeting is scheduled. Senior people work through the trade-offs again, without the information the original decision was based on. Often they land in the same place, having spent the time twice. Sometimes they land somewhere new and rediscover the original problem the hard way, six months later.

Without the reasoning, you can only obey a decision or repeat it. Neither is thinking.

Why the “why” disappears

The reasoning behind a decision lives in the discussion that produced it: the constraint that ruled out the obvious option, the customer commitment nobody wanted to breach, the thing that was tried before and failed. That discussion happens in meetings, calls and message threads.

What gets written down afterwards is the conclusion, because the conclusion is what people need to act on. The context feels obvious at the time — everyone in the room shares it, so nobody thinks to record it. Twelve months and two staff changes later, it is the only part anyone actually needs.

The compounding cost

Individually these moments look trivial — a puzzled question, a meeting, a small inefficiency preserved. The cost is in the accumulation.

Processes get heavier, because nobody can safely remove anything. Change gets slower, because every proposal runs into rules that can’t be evaluated. New joiners learn to follow conventions they can’t question. And the same debates resurface on a cycle, consuming the attention of exactly the people whose judgement is most valuable.

Keeping the reasoning attached to the decision

The fix is unglamorous: keep the why attached to the what, so a future reader gets both. Not a separate decision-log initiative that runs for two quarters and lapses, but reasoning captured where the work happens, as it happens.

When that’s in place, the question changes character entirely. “Why do we do it this way?” gets a real answer — including whether the original reason still holds. You can retire rules with confidence, and you can stop re-running debates you already settled.

A decision with its reasoning intact is an asset: it keeps informing the business long after the meeting. A decision without it is just a rule that everyone obeys and nobody trusts.