I was sent a meeting recap last month and asked to treat it as the record of what had been agreed. It was an accurate recap. It contained no decision, because no decision had been made in the meeting, and nobody had noticed that until somebody went looking six weeks later.
This is the pattern now. The recap arrives, it reads well, it goes in the channel, and everyone takes it as the record. But a recap summarises what was said. A decision log records what was agreed, who owns it and by when. Those are different documents, and only one of them can be produced by summarising a conversation in which the words “so we have decided” were never spoken. There is a second-order problem underneath it. A summary follows the shape of the conversation, so the thing discussed longest and loudest reads as the outcome. The quiet objection near the end, from the one person who knew the system in question, gets a clause. Six weeks later that clause is the only trace of the reason the plan was wrong.
The old version of this was minutes, and minutes had one accidental virtue. A person had to write them, and that person had to work out what to put in the decisions column. If they could not tell, they asked, usually in the room, usually to the discomfort of whoever had been talking in circles. That question was the control. It has quietly disappeared, because the summary now writes itself and nobody is left holding the pen.
The fix is small and nobody does it. Stop the meeting three minutes early and say the decision out loud, in one sentence, with a name and a date attached. Say it slowly enough that it lands in the transcript. Then the recap has something to find, and the record and the summary can go on being two different things without anyone getting hurt.
The recap did not lose your decision. It reported, accurately, that you never made one.