# Where did we decide that? A workplace detective story

> The case of the missing decision, featuring three tabs, two screenshots and one very tired teammate.

Source: https://llll.gg/blog/where-did-we-decide

The question arrived on a Tuesday: “Why do we do it this way?”

Nobody remembered. Someone thought the answer was in a document. The document linked to a Task. The Task linked to a chat message. The message said, “Agreed, let's go with the second option.”

There were no options in the message.

Detective Morgan opened a notebook. The first suspect was a screenshot named `final-final-actually-this-one.png`.

## Context has a habit of escaping

A team makes a decision in conversation, acts on it somewhere else and later needs to understand why. If the link between the two disappears, every new teammate has to reconstruct the plot from fragments.

In L4, conversations, Tasks, Data and Documents live in the same Server, and a message can [become a Task that links back to it](/blog/from-message-to-task). That doesn't produce perfect documentation. No software can force someone to write down what “the second option” means. But it gives the team a way to keep work connected to the discussion that started it.

## The detective's advice

Write the actual decision. Link to the relevant discussion. Give the work an owner. And when you name a file `final`, understand that you are making a prediction, not a guarantee.

Morgan eventually found the answer. It was in a Thread, next to a GIF of a dancing frog. The frog, unlike everyone else, had been there the whole time.