Change management: should we preserve the reasons behind decisions?
During a transformation, meeting records often state what was decided but less often the assumptions that justified the decision. The management question is specific: what should be retained so that a choice can be reconsidered without restarting the entire discussion?
What the literature establishes
James P. Walsh and Gerardo Rivera Ungson (1991, Academy of Management Review) propose a framework of organizational memory that distinguishes the acquisition, retention and retrieval of information from an organization's history. This memory resides not only in archives but also in people, structures and work transformations. Their conceptual analysis therefore invites a distinction between having a record and being able to retrieve and use it.
When experience becomes a rule without an explanation
Barbara Levitt and James G. March (1988, Annual Review of Sociology) describe organizational learning as the encoding of lessons from history into routines that guide behaviour. These lessons emerge from interpretations of experience, not from a neutral record of what works. For a transformation, this suggests a risk: a rule may remain in force even when the conditions that justified it are no longer understood.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every exchange and every rejected option should be documented. Yet these studies do not demonstrate that exhaustive documentation improves transformations. The task is more selective: for consequential decisions, retain the problem being addressed, the main alternatives and the assumptions on which the choice depends. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
Both articles are conceptual and review contributions, not trials comparing different decision-log formats. They establish neither an optimal volume of documentation nor an expected performance gain. A written record may also reconstruct a coherence that did not exist at the time: distinguishing reasons recorded when the choice was made from justifications added later remains essential.
A practical check in Lausanne
As part of SHR's change management programme, an exercise applicable in Lausanne would be to maintain a concise log of consequential decisions: the chosen option, a rejected alternative, the pivotal assumption and the condition for reconsideration. In a medtech company, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a Lake Geneva region scale-up, this log would complement rather than replace mandatory documentation. After one month, a colleague who was not involved in the deliberations would use the log to identify each decision's pivotal assumption and condition for reconsideration. The proportion of decisions for which both elements can be retrieved and match the original record would indicate usable memory, not prove the success of the change. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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