Decision Durability: A Foundational Framework and Research Agenda (Canonical Corpus v1.0, Volume I)

Abstract

Organizations have built sophisticated systems for producing and moving information, yet they remain comparatively weak at preserving the active state of judgment as decisions move toward action. This paper introduces Decision Durability: the capacity of a judgment to remain understandable, legitimate, actionable, appropriately contestable, and revisable across boundaries and time without avoidable reconstruction. It distinguishes the decision from the artifact that carries it, proposes nine attributes that must remain answerable, describes a lifecycle from formation through closure, and advances provisional laws concerning boundary degradation, ownership, uncertainty, reconstruction burden, temporal decay, and trajectory governance. An exploratory cross-sector inquiry supports the construct's practical recognizability but does not validate a scale or establish causation. The paper concludes with a measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, and a staged research program intended to operationalize and test the framework. This deposit contains Volume I only of Decision Durability: Canonical Corpus, Version 1.0. Volume I is the substantive authority for the framework's current definitions, ontology, architecture, lifecycle, provisional laws, ethical limits, measurement framework, and research agenda. The original manuscript is dated July 2026 and the canonical text was frozen without substantive rewrite on August 10, 2026, at 10:43 PM Central Time. Publication metadata and technical-report typesetting were added for this Zenodo release; the substantive manuscript content remains unchanged. This is an independent foundational framework paper. It has not been peer reviewed or empirically validated as an integrated construct. No institutional or contributor endorsement is implied. Rights note: This deposited version is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. Patent and trademark rights are not licensed.