Definition
Decision lineage is the ordered, append-only record of a decision's full life: the recommendation, the action taken, the delta between them, the identity of who decided, and the outcome. It is the atomic unit of organizational memory - distinct from information storage, knowledge management and audit logging, because it preserves not just what was decided but how judgment was exercised.
Why it matters
An organization that cannot reconstruct the chain from recommendation to outcome cannot learn from its decisions and cannot prove them - to a regulator, to a customer, or to itself. When the record of a decision lives in one tool, the rationale in a second, the approval in a third and the outcome in a fourth, no system - human or artificial - can rebuild the chain. Decision lineage makes judgment continuous and provable: memory without it is an archive; judgment without it is amnesia.
Where it comes from
Named in the fifth paper of the Human Layer series as the genuinely novel category at the heart of the Sovereign Memory Layer - the mechanism that binds owned memory to provable judgment.
Read the source papers: The Sovereign Memory Layer