There’s a balance somewhere put there, but that balance is different for everyone.
Personally I think problematic decision making is more to do with the “blame” side of ownership. It benefits the unsure more than the certain, and not many people are okay with making and admitting to mistakes.
Have fun with that. At the end of the day you run into the same problem as most wikis, where people just "threw stuff over the wall" into a big wiki database, and it gets to be really difficult to find relevant decisions. Eventually people add a new decision that contradicts an older decision that they didn't find, then later on someone with better search skills finds both contradicting decisions. It doesn't help anyone. All you did was increase the cost of making a decision by forcing a higher documentation cost, which slows down the business.
Most companies looking at structured decision making are better off with a better approach to writing internal policy, which is a kind of technical documentation. You need someone to own the meta/framework surrounding policy (clean presentation, different ways for different questions to reach the same policy, handling the workings of how different owners have permissions to control their areas of policy, making sure stakeholders are notified of changes, etc.), and a culture of collaboration which encourages people to propose changes to outdated policy (and not just dismissing them out of hand). Good policy simplifies decision-making: either it's already allowed by policy and people are free to continue without bureaucracy, or a proposal to change policy results in a tangible artifact already in the relevant place, either the accepted proposal or an addendum to the policy explaining why alternatives were rejected.
Most organizations suffer from *Decision Debt*: decisions get made in meetings, Slack chats, or hallway conversations, then never get written down. Result:
- People rework decisions that were already made - New team members don't know the reasoning - Previous context is lost when people leave - The same arguments happen again 6 months later
The pattern I've seen in well-functioning teams:
1. *Asynchronous Decision Records* - Every meaningful decision gets written (not a 2-page manifesto, just: What, Why, by whom, when) 2. *Immutable Decisions* - Once recorded and approved, they don't get rehashed in every meeting 3. *Clear Reasoning* - Document not just what was decided, but why (constraints, alternatives considered, tradeoffs) 4. *Searchable Archive* - You can find "why did we choose X over Y" without asking someone who might have left
This eliminates most "collaboration sucks" friction because people spend less time in meetings debating things already decided, and more time actually building.
The problem isn't too many cooks - it's that nobody wrote down the recipe.