Your tools file information away neatly, but they never build up what that information teaches you. This piece explains why the future of the information system is not a better AI-assisted form, but a shift towards `Contexts`: portable, governed units of memory that connect sources, decisions and reasoning instead of merely storing them.
Certain product decisions come up everywhere: in roadmap reviews, with sales, in specs, with every big client. Without a record, the company keeps re-deciding them, often with less context. The PDR — inspired by technical ADRs — documents these cross-cutting decision rules. Rare, short, immutable: it doesn't say what to build, it says why the company chose a rule. It removes dozens of pointless discussions.
You leave a meeting with an action plan, yet nothing has truly been settled. This is what I call a soft decision: a non-decision dressed up as consensus. Organizations often prefer it to a genuine judgment call because it preserves the appearance of agreement without making the loss visible. This piece explores why the mechanism is rational in the short term, and why it costs so much at the execution stage.
Your teams leave the meeting aligned—and each walks away with a different version of the decision. The problem isn't a lack of meetings, it's the absence of shared objects. Glossary, one-pager, PR/FAQ, ranked metrics, decision log, escalation rules: these tools don't produce alignment, they force disagreements to become visible before they turn costly.