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Outputs: Decisions, Followups, Captured Risks

What This Concept Is​

A review produces three categories of written output, and only three:

  • Decision. The ADR status transitions: Accepted, Rejected, or Deferred (with specific condition). This is the primary artifact.
  • Followups. Actions the team owes as a result of this decision: fitness functions to write, migrations to schedule, documentation to update. Each has an owner and a due-date or milestone.
  • Captured risks. Risks identified during the review that the decision does not eliminate, and that must be tracked somewhere visible (risk register, ADR Consequences section, incident runbook).

If a review ends and any of the three is missing, the review has not finished - it has paused.

Why It Matters Here​

Reviews fail long after the meeting when outputs are vague. "We talked about it" is not an output. "We decided to defer" is an output only if the condition for unblocking is written.

Discipline here is also what distinguishes a review from a discussion. Discussions are valuable but do not count as governance. Reviews do, because they leave behind something durable.

Concrete Example​

Post-review log for the event transport review:

Decision. ADR-0044 accepted (2026-03-18). Kafka chosen. Classification: one-way door.

Followups.

  • Platform team (owner: Priya): deploy 3-broker Kafka cluster in staging by 2026-04-05
  • Platform team (owner: Priya): migration plan doc for orders service by 2026-04-10
  • Orders team (owner: Ken): draft consumer error handling RFC by 2026-04-12
  • Platform team (owner: Priya): write fitness function - publishers must use schema registry - by 2026-04-15
  • Ops team (owner: Dana): on-call runbook for broker failure by 2026-04-20

Captured risks.

  • Analytics ingest does not yet handle Protobuf; if not resolved, cutover blocked. (Owner: Analytics team; tracked in risk register R-2026-04.)
  • Orders service currently has no idempotent consumer; duplicate delivery under Kafka's at-least-once semantics may produce duplicate charges. (Mitigation: ADR-0034 idempotency keys.)
  • Kafka operational expertise limited in current ops team. (Mitigation: training scheduled Q2.)

Nothing ambiguous. Every followup has an owner. Every risk is tracked somewhere.

Common Confusion / Misconception​

"A followup in Slack is an output." It is not. Slack is not durable. Put it in a tracker or in the ADR's followups section.

"Captured risks go in the ADR Consequences." Some do (the ones that are permanent properties of the decision). Those that are active, mitigable, or assigned belong in a risk register or incident runbook, linked from the ADR. Do not conflate "known consequence" with "tracked risk."

"We can always add followups later." You can, and you will forget which were real versus nice-to-have. Capture in the moment.

"Decisions without consequences." If the review produced a decision but no captured risks or followups, either nothing real was decided, or the review lied to itself about the costs.

How To Use It​

Before the review ends, check:

  1. Is the ADR status written? (Accepted / Rejected / Deferred-on-condition)
  2. Does every followup have an owner and a date?
  3. Is every risk surfaced during the review captured - in the ADR if permanent, in the tracker if actionable?
  4. Has every participant read the updated ADR on screen?

If the answer to any of these is no, stay in the meeting. The cost of five more minutes now is less than the cost of a follow-up meeting next week.

Check Yourself​

  1. What is the difference between a followup and a captured risk? Give one example of each from the same review.
  2. Why is "defer" a valid decision only if paired with an explicit condition?
  3. A review produces 12 followups and 0 risks. What is suspicious about that?

Mini Drill or Application​

For a review you attended recently:

  • reconstruct the three output categories as they should have been
  • identify which were actually captured and where
  • flag the ones that fell out of memory by now

If you cannot find the decision, the followups, and the risks of a review from a month ago, the review did not produce durable governance. Write up what you remember as a retrospective ADR.

Read This Only If Stuck​