Writing things down helps decentralise decision making, breaks down hierarchy and encourages rigourous thinking - all of this improves the quality of the decisions we make. Standardising our approach to writing things down speeds up With three important clarifications, (1) it's generally the self-discipline of writing the document itself that is more valuable than reading it, (2) you should only use a template while it's useful and (3) it is not set in concrete. . I’ve gathered some simple, lightweight and useful templates that can provide a jumping off point or a point of reference as you work out what your process should look like.