The reasoning most worth capturing is the reasoning your experts can’t articulate.

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We keep saying the design rationale “walked out the door when the engineer left.” But it is more nuanced than that; a lot of it was never in a form that could be written down in the first place.

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Michael Polanyi called it tacit knowledge. “We can know more than we can tell.” Your most experienced engineer looks at a design and knows the tolerance is wrong. Ask why, and the honest answer is often “thirty years of watching parts like this fail.” That is real knowledge. It is also nearly impossible to capture as a clean rationale record.

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This is a gap in the Product Memory conversation. The reasoning that is easy to capture is usually the reasoning that was already half-documented: the trade study, the analysis report, the review minutes. The reasoning that is most valuable, the pattern recognition that quietly prevents expensive mistakes, is exactly the reasoning that resists structured capture.

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So the question is not only “did we record the why.” It is “which why can actually be recorded, and what do we do about the part that cannot?”

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Two things help. First, capture reasoning at the moment of decision, in the room, while the expert is reasoning out loud, not six months later from memory. A change review is the richest tacit-to-explicit moment your process already has, and CM2’s structured change process is one of the few places that conversation happens on the record.

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Second, be honest that some knowledge lives in people, not records. Design your mentoring and succession around that fact instead of pretending a database will absorb it.

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A reasoning record is a tool, not a brain transplant. Treat it like one.

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Whose judgment on your team could you not reconstruct from any system today? And what are you doing about it before they retire?

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Ready to go deeper?

Use code Martijn10 for 10% off training—and don’t forget to tell them Martijn sent you 😉.

Copyrights by the Institute for Process Excellence

This article was originally published on ipxhq.com & mdux.net.

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