Main idea

An audit firm recommends a strict paywall to a regional daily. A year later, when someone looks for the reasoning, nothing has been lost: the interviews are in the consultants' notes, the audience figures in a spreadsheet, the trade-off with management in an email thread, the report in the client's case.

Each tool kept the object it had been given. None of them was there to keep the whole. The link between these pieces — what made them justify the recommendation together — existed only in the consultants' heads. Clear during the engagement, it disappears when one of them leaves the firm and the other goes through six more engagements.

Why it matters

This shifts the cause of the loss: it isn't an archiving failure, since everything is archived, but the absence of an object whose job is to connect. Adding storage tools doesn't fix it.

Nuances and limits

The link can sometimes be rebuilt by rereading everything, when the people are still around and the pieces are accessible. The loss isn't absolute; it's the cost of rebuilding it that grows with time and with people leaving.

Open questions

• In an engagement, who is responsible for writing down the link between the pieces, when each consultant only holds their own?