Principlev1
Document the reasoning and context behind decisions
Document the reasoning and context behind decisions alongside the decisions themselves in persistent systems that survive personnel turnover, treating rationale as equally important as the decision record.
Why This Is a Principle
This derives from Knowledge that exists only in tacit form degrades without (knowledge that exists only in tacit form degrades without detection and cannot be systematically improved) and Tacit Knowledge Exceeds Linguistic Expression (humans can know more than they can articulate—tacit knowledge resists linguistic formalization). The lesson shows that organizational knowledge depreciates at 96.8% annually without structural encoding. This is prescriptive infrastructure design derived from axioms about tacit knowledge degradation.