Every project I've seen go sideways had the same thing underneath it. Not a difficult client. Not a scope that was impossible to price. A decision, made during a site visit or a Tuesday phone call, that nobody wrote down. By the time it mattered, the person who remembered it had moved on to the next project, or the next firm.

I've been in enough Friday calls to know this is not an outlier. It is the standard.

There is a number that captures the cost. FMI Corporation and PlanGrid put it at $31.3 billion a year, lost across the construction and design industry to poor communication and rework. More striking: 52% of that rework is preventable. The information existed. Someone on the project knew it. It just never made it into a record that traveled with the project.

This is what I call Decision Debt. The gap between what gets decided and what gets documented. It accumulates quietly. It shows up as a scope dispute in month seven, an approval no one can find, a client who is certain they never signed off on the thing you are looking at in the permit drawings.

The firms that avoid this problem are not the ones with the best software. They are the ones with a consistent practice. A place where a decision goes when it is made.

I wrote about the full picture here: The $31 Billion Communication Problem

Archen is building the tool that makes that practice possible, without adding a new step to an already crowded day.