Request for Comments

When large decisions were made only in meetings, the quality of a decision depended on the mood in the room. Raising an objection inside an hour means inventing the argument on the spot, and whoever spoke first sets the frame everyone else responds to. There is no time to check a number or reread the code before you have to speak.

That is how a Pagedeck discussion about changing the data storage structure went. Once Grace said she leaned one way, no objections came, and the decision closed that day. Three weeks later Theo told Mia there was something he had not said. Going that route meant a month of work just to move the existing data. He had stayed quiet in the meeting not because he agreed, but because there was no time in the room to assemble the argument.

A second pressure stacked on top. On teams where asynchronous communication — work that proceeds without everyone being online at the same time — is the default, getting people into one room at one hour is itself a way of postponing a decision by a week.

So the order got inverted. The proposal goes into writing and gets published, objections get written by people on their own time, and when the window closes the author writes the conclusion. An objection in writing carries the same weight regardless of who wrote it.

There are six slots, and the order carries meaning — context comes before the proposal.

1. Title and one-line summary. The title alone should say what is being decided. Not "Storage structure change" but "Proposal to move document bodies to paragraph-level storage."
2. Context and problem. Why this discussion is needed now. Opening one document currently averages 1.8 seconds, and on long documents a save from one editor overwrites an earlier one — numbers and a scene together.
3. The proposal. One direction, stated. Laying out several options and asking people to pick scatters the discussion. The author backs one and sends the rest to the next slot, which also makes it clear what the objections should be aimed at.
4. Alternatives considered and why they were dropped. This slot carries most of the document's value. When the two or three alternatives a reader would think of first are already there with reasons attached, the comments skip past them instead of repeating them.
5. Consequences. What changes if this is done, who picks up extra work, and what reversing it would cost. A sentence saying that undoing this in six months means migrating the data that accumulated in between changes how people read the rest.
6. Window and decider. When comments close and who closes it. Without this slot the document stays open for weeks with nobody writing a conclusion. One or two weeks is typical, and exactly one person is named as the closer. Naming a group instead means nobody is the person who has to write the conclusion.

One more slot appears at closing: the conclusion and the reasoning behind it. Filling it turns the document from a proposal into a record. Listing which objections were accepted and which were set aside, one line each, means that when the same topic returns in six months you can read how far the discussion already went.

The author is whoever felt the decision was needed. Seniority and role do not determine it. Theo writes the storage proposal, Mia writes the pricing one, Sofia writes the one about changing contract terms. The decider not writing it is a property of the format — when the person who decides also writes the proposal, objecting gets hard again.

Readers come in two layers.

1. Named reviewers. The author picks the stakeholders, the people affected by or able to affect the decision, by name. Three to five of them, asked explicitly for comments inside the window. Nobody who isn't named treats it as theirs.
2. Everyone else. The document is open to the whole company. Reading it is not an obligation; being able to find it is. It is the place someone who joined six months later goes to read why the system looks like this.

Holding the window is part of the format too. Pagedeck sends an automatic reminder the day before it closes, and closes on schedule even with no comments. Documents that never close pile up, people stop opening new ones, and the format dies of a backlog nobody wants to read.

"Let's open this as an RFC. It's hard to reverse, so it shouldn't be settled in a meeting."

The impact is large enough to collect written comments and leave a record.

"Why isn't that approach in the alternatives slot? Answer that first."

An option the author should have considered is missing.

"Closing Friday. If you disagree, comment before then."

After the window, silence will be read as no objection and the conclusion gets written.

Pagedeck reserves the format for decisions that are hard to reverse. Swapping the database or reworking the pricing structure gets a document; picking a library gets a short record. Without that line drawn, trivial decisions get documents too and two weeks disappear.

What gets used more is the closed document. One with objections preserved alongside the conclusion explains why the team works the way it does faster than a bare record, so Mia hands a few recent ones to new joiners. That is also why the format runs well on teams with a documentation-first habit of writing things down before talking them through.

The most common assumption is that everyone has to agree before it can close. It collects opinions, so consensus looks like the goal. What the format is actually after is having objections on the record. Reading the objections and going ahead with the original proposal is a legitimate outcome, as long as that choice and its reasoning land in the conclusion slot. Make agreement a condition and people stop writing objections and start voicing them outside the document, which puts you back where meetings left you.

The second is that length signals quality. Told to fill six slots properly, people write ten pages, and at ten pages even the named reviewers stop partway. The length that actually works is two or three pages. With numbers and a concrete scene in the context and alternatives slots, a short document still gives people something specific to argue with, and the moment that argument lands the document starts doing its job.