Feature
Six months later, somebody always asks the same question.
Why did we do it this way? The decision itself is usually easy to find. The reasoning almost never is, because it was given once, out loud, in a thread that has since scrolled past three thousand messages.
Why it matters
Chat is the right place to reach a decision and the worst place to keep one.
A conversation is good at the part where people disagree. It is bad at every part that comes after: finding the decision again, knowing whether it was ever actually agreed, seeing who approved it, and understanding what it was weighed against.
So the decision survives and its reasoning does not. The cost lands later, when the same question is argued again from scratch, or when somebody has to explain to a client or an auditor why a choice was made and can only offer a recollection.
Microsoft Teams has no answer to this, and neither does a chat-first Nextcloud. It is one of the few things a team workspace can add that nothing else in the stack does at all.
How it works
Propose, discuss, approve, and record why.
A decision is raised against the team that owns it and filed under a category. The category is what routes it: filing something under Budget puts it in front of the finance lead without anybody having to chase.
What it holds
What a decision carries.
- The proposal. What is being decided, in the words of whoever raised it.
- The impact. What changes if this is agreed.
- The category. What kind of decision it is, which determines who approves it.
- The approver. A named person, not a group that might get to it.
- The reason. Recorded at approval, by the person approving. This is the part everything else exists to protect.
- The linked work. The Deck card, the milestone or the document the decision relates to.
- The source. Where it came from, when it came from a file or a discussion.
- The trail. Every state change, appended, never edited.
Decisions link into a tree rather than a flat list. A settled question is superseded rather than overwritten, so what was agreed in March survives the decision that replaced it in September, along with the reason each was taken. An audit trail you can edit is not an audit trail.
Who this is for, and what it leaves alone
Who benefits
- Team leads, who stop relitigating settled questions.
- Managers, who can see what a team decided without attending the meeting where it happened.
- New members, who read the history instead of being told it.
- Anyone answering an auditor or a client, who can point at a record rather than a recollection.
What stays where it is
- Talk keeps the discussion. Decisions records the outcome and the reason, not the argument.
- Files keeps the document. A decision links to the source document; it does not copy it.
- Deck keeps the card. A decision can link to a card, or create one that arrives already linked.
The limits
What Decisions is not.
- It is not a workflow engine. There are no conditional branches, no parallel approval chains and no escalation rules. A decision has a proposer, a category, an approver and a reason.
- It is not a voting system. Where a team wants to gauge opinion first, that is a poll in the message stream, and the decision comes after.
- It is not a substitute for a contract. It records what an organisation decided internally, which is a different thing from what it agreed with somebody else.
That constraint is the feature. It is the reason people file one at all, because filing a decision costs about as much attention as writing the message they were going to send anyway.
Community or licensed
Decisions is in the free base application, with no seat limit. The compliance centre, which gives oversight across every workspace on the instance, is licensed.
Keep reading
Team coordination
What changes when a standing team gets one page instead of six applications.
Read the use caseProject delivery
Decisions in the context of the project that made them, alongside phases and health.
Read the use casePricing
What Community includes, what a licence adds, and what happens if you do not renew.
View pricingWhere does your team’s last decision live?
If the answer is a chat thread, this is the part of TeamHub worth seeing first.