We Archive Documents Well, But Lose the 'Why' Behind Them

A software engineer recounts struggling to determine why their team had chosen Redis for a service, despite all related artifacts — tickets, pull requests, Slack threads, and commits — being fully intact and searchable. Each document answered a different question about the decision, but none captured the core reasoning on its own; the explanation only emerged from the relationships between them. Tools like Git, Confluence, Jira, and Slack are built to preserve individual artifacts, not the connections that give those artifacts meaning. Once the people who held those connections in their heads move on, the documents survive but their collective context does not. The author argues that true organizational memory requires preserving not just what happened, but why — pointing to decisions, rather than documents, as the more meaningful unit to record.