design-a-crisis-decision-log

name	design-a-crisis-decision-log
category	start
description	Design a crisis decision log that preserves facts, uncertainty, options, authority, rationale, dissent, actions, communications, review, and supersession. Use when fast decisions must remain accountable under changing evidence.

design-a-crisis-decision-log

When to use

• Use during safety, security, operational, financial, legal, people, or reputation crises.
• Do not put privileged, medical, or identity-sensitive detail in a broadly distributed log.

Procedure

1. Define the crisis clock, log owner, authoritative channel, access classes, approvers, and retention.
2. Give every decision and update a stable ID, timestamp, author, authority, status, and linked incident event.
3. Record the question, known facts, disputed facts, assumptions, uncertainty, time constraint, and affected people.
4. Record options, expected benefits, harms, reversibility, obligations, dissent, consultation, and decision rationale.
5. Link actions, owners, deadlines, dependencies, public or internal communications, and evidence produced.
6. Supersede rather than overwrite decisions; record triggers, expiry, review time, outcomes, and corrections.
7. Reconcile the log against incident timelines, tickets, approvals, communications, and material external effects.

Failure plan

• Mark unverifiable entries as disputed, preserve versions, and escalate missing authority or unsafe disclosure.

Worked example

A product-safety team records why it paused shipments before causality was proven and later supersedes the decision with new test evidence.

Done

• A crisis decision log design records identity, time, facts, uncertainty, options, authority, rationale, dissent, actions, communication, and review
• A version, access, timeline, approval, action, communication, and outcome reconciliation report provides evidence that the log is complete