Why Decision Reconstruction Fails
At a Glance
Decision reconstruction refers to attempts to explain or justify a decision after it has been made, using records that were not created to preserve decision context or judgement.
While reconstruction is often unavoidable, it is inherently unreliable and vulnerable to hindsight bias, missing context and fragmented records.
This page explains why reconstruction routinely fails and why decision provenance addresses those limits.
What Is Decision Reconstruction?
Decision reconstruction describes efforts to explain how and why a decision was taken by assembling evidence after the decision has occurred.
In organisational settings, this reconstruction typically draws on emails, documents, meeting notes, system logs and personal recollection. These materials may describe events or communications, but they are rarely designed to preserve decision context or judgement.
As a result, reconstruction relies on inference rather than preservation.
See also Decision Reconstruction, Narrative and Retrospective Explanation .
Loss of Context
Information available at the time a decision is made is often partial, provisional or time-sensitive. Constraints, assumptions and trade-offs that influenced judgement may never be recorded explicitly.
When reconstruction occurs later, missing context is inferred rather than recovered. It becomes difficult to distinguish what was genuinely known at the time from what is assumed with the benefit of hindsight.
Hindsight Bias
Knowledge of outcomes exerts a powerful influence on how earlier decisions are interpreted.
Hindsight bias leads reviewers to overestimate what could reasonably have been foreseen and to understate uncertainty present at the time a decision was made. Even well-intentioned reconstruction is affected by this distortion.
Reconstruction processes rarely account for this bias in a systematic way.
Fragmentation of Records
Decision-relevant information is typically distributed across multiple systems, documents and individuals.
Over time, records are deleted, systems are replaced and personnel change. What survives is often determined by convenience rather than relevance.
Reconstructed decision narratives are therefore frequently incomplete and internally inconsistent.
Why This Matters
Decision reconstruction does not fail because individuals act improperly, but because it relies on artefacts that were never intended to preserve decision context or judgement.
When decisions are examined later by regulators, courts, auditors, insurers or internal governance functions, reconstructed explanations may appear coherent while remaining evidentially weak.
Decision provenance differs because it preserves relevant context, judgement and outcomes at the point a decision is made, reducing reliance on retrospective inference.