Early in one of my HR leadership roles, a new executive asked me why our tuition reimbursement program capped out where it did. It was a fair question, and I did not have a good answer.

The decision had been made several years earlier by a group that included people who had since retired or moved on. One person remembered that cost was part of it, another thought it had to do with a tax limit, and a third was sure it was about retention. We spent two meetings rebuilding a decision that had already been made once, and we still were not certain we had the reasoning right.

Most teams have this problem, and it rarely looks like a problem at the time. A decision gets made in a meeting, everyone nods, and the reasoning lives in the heads of the people in the room. Six months later a new person joins, a circumstance changes, or someone simply forgets, and the debate starts over.

A decision log fixes this by recording what was decided, why, who decided, and what would cause you to revisit it. The idea is simple, but keeping it up is hard, because writing a good entry takes time that nobody has after a busy meeting.

AI can carry most of that writing load. Give it your meeting notes, an email thread, or even a rough voice memo, and it can pull out the decisions, separate them from the discussion, and draft log entries in a consistent format. It can also flag decisions that were discussed but never actually made, which may be the most useful thing it finds.

What AI cannot know is whether your notes captured the real reasoning. That judgment stays with the people who were in the room, and a quick review before an entry goes into the log keeps it trustworthy.

Today's brief helps you turn scattered notes into a decision log your team will actually keep using.

Let's go raise your AIQ.

Every Master Prompt in AIQ with Paul is written as an AIQ Brief. Each section answers a question AI needs answered before it can do good work for you.

Context tells AI what the situation is and who the work is for. Intent says what the result must accomplish, and Constraints list what cannot change or is off limits. Output describes what good looks like, and Check names what AI should show you and what you will verify before you use the result.

Fill in the brackets, run the brief, and treat the Check section as your to-do list once AI responds.

Take your skills beyond the brief. In my AIQ Advantage™ program, I teach working professionals how to build briefs into reusable workflows, check AI output before it goes out under their name, and decide where AI fits in their work. Learn more at AIQAdvantage.com

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