> We’ve all been in that 30-minute meeting that could just as well have been a two-paragraph ADR, if anyone would have bothered writing the decision down as it happened. Organizations learned to run on oral tradition because the alternative required discipline that was hard to reward, and not documenting it properly rarely turned into a real problem - at least not immediately. With agents, on the other hand, the full cost of a missing paper trail is paid every time the session terminates.

I just think this is entirely wrong. Oral tradition is valuable because it's flexible in a way that written tradition struggles to be. Just a handful of oral-tradition decisions I routinely see that could never be written up as persistent documentation:

* The CEO said X is our top priority, but we think Y is more important and we can do it without compromising too much on X, so we're going to do both.

* Team A has a track record of quality and success, so their decisions are subject to less review and receive more deference

* Team B is sloppy and makes a lot of bad calls, so we don't trust their judgments when doing so might lead to an outage for us.