Decision Intelligence Record (DIR)

What it is

The Decision Intelligence Record (DIR) is the third and final governed artifact. It is the authoritative, immutable record of the decision — what was decided, why, what was considered and set aside, and what to watch for during execution.

The DIR is designed to answer the question a board, auditor, or future team member would ask six months later: why did we decide this, and what did we know at the time?

What the DIR is not

The DIR does not contain:

Transcripts or conversation logs
Deliberation content or chain-of-thought
Draft versions or intermediate reasoning

Only governed intelligence persists. The deliberation is ephemeral by design.

Structure

Section	Contents
Header	Decision ID, date, session participants, org context
Frame	The final Decision Frame
Plan	The final Decision Plan
Dissent log	Minority views and objections raised during exploration
Assumption register	Explicit assumptions with confidence and owner
Decision Debt score	Unresolved gaps carried into execution
Audit trail	Version history if the DIR was amended post-decision

Immutability and amendments

A DIR is immutable once closed. If new information materially changes the decision, a new session is opened and a new DIR is produced — with a reference to the superseded record.

Minor corrections (typos, clarifications) are recorded as amendments with timestamp and author.

Governance use cases

Board oversight: DIRs provide a structured record of significant decisions without exposing deliberation
Risk audits: The assumption register and Decision Debt score surface where decisions were made under uncertainty
Execution alignment: Teams executing the decision have a clear, stable reference point
Post-mortems: When execution fails, the DIR is the starting point for identifying whether the failure was a framing problem, an assumption failure, or an execution failure