How do you tell what you decided from what you were thinking about?
Written for agents, brokers, lenders, contractors, home services.
The short answer
Put one of three words on every record: ideation, evidence or decision. Ideation is thinking out loud. Evidence is observed, sourced and dated. A decision carries a date and the name of the person who made it.
No status means ideation. An unmarked note is a maybe, however confident the writing sounds.
Only the owner promotes anything to decision. Everybody else gathers evidence, recommends, and says plainly when something looks settled but has no record of being decided.
This matters more now than it did five years ago, because an assistant drafts in clean confident prose whether or not anybody concluded anything.
A changed decision gets a new decision that supersedes it, and the original stays where it is.
A team leader opens a file from March. It says the split for new agents is seventy thirty. She cannot remember whether that was a number somebody floated in a car on the way to a listing appointment, a number she worked out from last year's production, or the number she told two people they would be getting. The file reads exactly the same in all three cases.
That gap is what three words close. Every record in the system carries one of them, and each one means something specific and testable.
What do ideation, evidence and decision mean on a record?
Ideation is thinking out loud, with nothing settled. Evidence is something observed, sourced and dated, where the record says who looked, when they looked, and what they looked at. A decision carries a date and the name of the person who made it.
The three form a ladder and things climb it in one direction. An idea becomes evidence when somebody goes and checks. Evidence becomes a decision when a person decides. Nothing skips a rung, and nothing climbs on its own.
The words are ordinary on purpose. Anybody on a team can be taught them in under a minute, and the whole point is that a person reading a file six months later can tell at a glance which kind of thing they are holding.
The three, and what each one has to carry
| Status | What it means | What the record has to carry |
|---|---|---|
| Ideation | Thinking out loud. A draft, a maybe, a brainstorm on a drive. | The words and a date. It is allowed to be wrong and it is allowed to be half formed. |
| Evidence | Somebody observed something. | Who looked, when they looked, and what they looked at, with the source sitting inline next to the claim. |
| Decision | Somebody decided. | The date, and the name of the person who made the call. Both, every time. |
The middle row is the one people fill in loosely, and it carries most of the weight. "The comparable sales support 640" is not evidence. "Three closed sales inside half a mile in the last ninety days, pulled from the MLS on 2026-07-14, support 640" is evidence, because a reader can go and check every part of that sentence and find out whether it holds.
A source goes beside the claim rather than in a list at the bottom of the page. Sources collected at the end get read as decoration. A source in the same sentence as the number gets read as part of the number.
Why the default has to be ideation
What happens when a record has no status on it?
It is treated as ideation. An unmarked note is a maybe, however confident the writing sounds, and nothing unmarked is ever treated as authority by anybody or anything reading the records.
This default does more work than any other rule in the system, because the failure it prevents is a silent one. Nobody sets out to treat a brainstorm as a settled matter. It happens because a well written paragraph reads like a conclusion, and six weeks later nobody remembers which it was.
The default also ends an argument before it starts. If somebody wants a note to count as settled, the fix is to mark it, with a date and a name, and that takes ten seconds. Anything nobody bothered to mark was, by definition, worth less than ten seconds to somebody at the time.
A machine may record anything. Only a person promotes anything.
That sentence is the entire governance model, and it is worth understanding why the line is drawn there rather than somewhere tighter or somewhere looser.
Recording is cheap and reversible. A note written wrongly costs a few seconds to correct, and if the folder is under version control the earlier version stays in the history. Nothing is lost and nobody acted on it.
A decision is neither cheap nor reversible. People act on it. Money moves. A number gets told to a seller. Somebody is hired, or a bid goes out, or an offer gets countered. Undoing it is a second decision with its own consequences rather than a keystroke.
So the boundary sits exactly where the cost of being wrong jumps. Everything below that line can be automated without much worry. Everything at the line waits for a human being to put their name on it.
Why this matters more now than it did five years ago
Effort used to carry the signal. A scrawl in a margin looked like a scrawl in a margin. A typed memo looked considered, because somebody had gone to the trouble of typing it, and the trouble itself was information about how sure they were.
That signal is gone. An assistant produces the same clean prose for a wild guess and for a checked fact. Same font, same length, same tone, same steady voice. Fluency has stopped being evidence of anything at all, and a reader six months out has nothing to go on except what the record says about itself.
The three words put the signal back in a form that cannot be faked by writing well. A paragraph marked ideation reads as a maybe no matter how polished it is. That is the point of marking it.
What the three words look like in your business
| Ideation | Evidence | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| A listing price idea from a Tuesday car ride | A comparative market analysis, dated, with the comparable sales named | The number the seller signed on the listing agreement |
| "We will probably use Dave for the tile" | Three written bids for the tile, dated, with the scope attached to each | An awarded contract, signed, with a start date |
| "That should qualify" | Income documents received and reviewed, dated, with a note of what was checked | A pre-approval issued, carrying the name of whoever issued it |
| "We should probably raise what we pay on a referral" | What three comparable arrangements pay, and where that came from | The new figure, dated, with the owner's name on it |
Read across any row and the danger is obvious. The left column and the right column can be written in the same file, by the same person, ten minutes apart, in sentences of identical length. Only the label tells them apart.
The lending row is the one with teeth. "That should qualify" said on a phone call is ideation, and a borrower hears something much firmer. Marking it correctly in your own records does nothing about what the borrower heard. What it does is make sure that when the file is reviewed, nobody inside your business mistakes an encouraging sentence for an underwriting outcome, which is how a second person repeats it and turns it into a promise the business never made.
The contractor row has the same shape and a different cost. "We will probably use Dave" sits in a file until somebody builds a schedule around Dave being available, and by then it has been treated as settled for a month by three people who never saw the original sentence.
What happens when two records disagree
Any business keeping records for more than a year will have a day when two files say different things. The three words come with a rule for that day, and it has three parts.
- Flag both and quote both. Neither one gets edited to make the disagreement go away.
- Name the system that could settle it. The transaction system, the signed agreement, the MLS, the accounting, or the person who would know.
- Never pick. A person, a session or an assistant choosing between two records is guessing with extra steps, and the guess then enters the record looking exactly like a finding.
The same discipline governs a decision that changes. It changes by addition. A new decision gets written, with today's date and the name of whoever made it, and it says which earlier decision it supersedes. The earlier one stays where it is, marked. Editing the original to match the new reality destroys the only thing that would let anybody understand why the business moved, including you, in two years, when somebody asks.
This is the same mechanism as recording a promise by adding dated lines instead of editing the first one. A record shows how something arrived at where it is. A checklist shows only where it is, which is enough right up until it is not.
The four boxes
The four boxes applied to the three status words in a real estate, lending or trades business, as of 2026-07-29. The fourth box carries the argument.
There, and should be
One of three words on every record, and a date on all three.
- Ideation costs nothing to write and it is the one people skip, because marking something as thinking feels like an admission. It is the most useful of the three by a distance.
- Evidence carries its source inline, beside the claim, in the same sentence as the number.
- Decision carries a date and a name. A decision with no name attached is really evidence that a conversation happened.
Missing, and should be there
A regular pass that finds material reading like a settled matter with no record of anybody settling it.
- The report says one sentence and then stops: this looks settled and nobody promoted it. Promoting it is a person's job and the report does not get to do it.
- Anything carrying no status at all belongs in the same report, sorted by how much of the business is currently standing on it.
- A decision with a date and no name is the most common defect and the easiest to repair while people still remember the room they were in.
There, and should not be
Anything automatic that writes a decision, and any confident unmarked prose sitting where other people read it.
- On 2026-08-09 an overnight pass wrote two entries marked as decisions that were not true, with quotations attributed to a named person that could not be found in any source in that system. A human reader caught it the following day.
- Unmarked prose in a shared file. Mark it or move it, because a reader will supply a status for it and the one they supply will be the flattering one.
- Historical records edited to resolve a disagreement. Supersede instead, and leave the original standing where somebody can find it.
Missing, and correctly missing
There is no fourth status meaning somebody else decided this.
- This absence is correct and the reason is worth stating. A decision status names the person who decided and carries their authority. Your seller, your broker, your lender, your client and the city inspector all make decisions that bind your work, and none of those are yours to promote.
- So a decision made by somebody else gets recorded as evidence that they said it: the words, the date, the source, and who said them. That is what evidence is for, and it describes truthfully what you hold, which is a report of a decision rather than the decision itself.
- Name the cost, because it stings. It reads as a demotion. A seller signing at 640 feels far more settled than the word evidence suggests, and somebody on your team will argue that a signed listing agreement deserves the stronger label.
- The answer is that the strength sits in the source rather than in the label. Evidence sourced to a signed agreement is worth more than a decision with a name and no reasoning behind it, and the record shows both, so a reader can weigh them. What you avoid is the alternative, where the file says decision and nobody can tell whether your business decided or your business was told.
What the three words do not do
The team leader with the seventy thirty file has a two minute job in front of her. Open it, write ideation at the top with today's date, and then decide whether it is worth going to check. The checking is the smaller half. The larger half is that from that morning on, the file says which kind of number it is holding, and nobody has to reconstruct a car ride from memory to find out.
Common questions
- What do ideation, evidence and decision mean?
- Ideation is thinking out loud, with nothing settled. Evidence is something observed, sourced and dated, where the record says who looked, when, and against what. A decision carries a date and the name of the person who made it. Every record in the system carries one of the three.
- What happens if a record has no status on it?
- It counts as ideation. No status means ideation, and an unmarked note is treated as a maybe however confident the writing sounds. Marking something as settled takes ten seconds, so anything nobody marked was worth less than ten seconds to somebody at the time.
- Who is allowed to mark something as a decision?
- Only the owner of the business. Everybody else gathers evidence, recommends, and says plainly when something looks settled but has no record of being decided. Recording is cheap and reversible. A decision is neither, because people act on it and undoing it is a second decision rather than an undo.
- Why can an AI assistant not promote something to a decision?
- Because a drafting system produces confident prose whether or not anything was concluded. On 2026-08-09 an overnight pass in a records system wrote two entries marked as decisions that were not true, with quotations attributed to a named person that could not be found in any source in that system. A human reading the record caught them on 2026-08-10. Nothing automatic did.
- What do you do when two records disagree?
- Flag both, quote both, and name the system that could settle it, such as the transaction system, the signed agreement or the accounting. Never pick between them, because a guess written into the record then looks like a finding. Never edit a historical record to make the disagreement go away.
- How do you record a decision that somebody else made?
- As evidence that they said it, carrying the words, the date, the source and the name of who said them. There is no status meaning somebody else decided this, because a decision status carries the authority of the person named in it. A seller, a broker, a lender or an inspector makes decisions that bind your work, and recording their call as evidence describes accurately what you hold, which is a report of a decision.
Worth passing along
This one serves the brokerage owner and the general contractor. The brokerage owner is the person whose half formed thoughts get repeated by other people as policy, because everything a principal says sounds settled by the time it reaches a third listener. The contractor lives the same problem in reverse, with three crews building schedules around a name somebody mentioned once. Both are running a business where the gap between a maybe and a commitment is measured in money.
Written by Brett K Moore. We build the PAD System, a records structure for people, assets and deals that lives as plain text files on your own computer. Read what it is.
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