Memo Culture

Make decisions and run meetings on memos, not docs and decks. One rule (Write A Memo) and two laws: no memo, no decision, and no memo, no meeting.

What it is

memo-culture is a lightweight, AI-native operating system for making decisions and running meetings. It is built on one rule and two laws:

• WAM: Write A Memo. When someone asks “should we do X?” or “can we decide Z?”, the answer is always: write a memo first.
• No memo, no decision. Any real decision requires a memo before it is made.
• No memo, no meeting. If there are no memos in review, the meeting does not happen.

The output is plain markdown. Your assistant takes your disorganized brain-dump and organizes it into a clear six-section memo. You read it, adjust it, and decide. Decided memos pile up in a shared store and become your institutional knowledge: onboarding becomes “read the last 20 memos,” not a slide deck.

Built for the solo operator too

The charter says it directly: memo-culture is most valuable for the solo operator going fast under uncertainty, not less. The busier you are, the more a written memo pays off. The best reason to write one is for yourself.

When to use it

Situation	What to do
A decision needs to be made	Write a memo before deciding anything
A meeting is on the calendar	Produce a memo with open questions first. No memo, no meeting
A new person joins	Run the onboarding digest against the decided memos
A draft is ready for a second opinion	Run the review pattern to tighten it
The board / agenda is stale	Run update-board to regenerate it from live frontmatter

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What you get

Piece	What it provides
Charter	The rules, the four-step decision framework, and the meeting protocol
Memo template	The six-section form that maps directly to the decision framework
Shared store	A drafts → review → decided lifecycle, a BOARD dashboard, and a full INDEX
Six patterns	Ready to invoke through your CLI agent (see table below)
Store template	An empty scaffold you copy to your own location to get started

The six-section memo

Every memo uses the same structure. Each section maps to a step in the decision framework so the form and the thinking reinforce each other.

Section	Decision step	What to write
Story So Far	Understand the context	Everything a zero-context reader needs to follow the rest
The Issue	Isolate the issue	Exactly one decision or problem, in one sentence
Recommendation	–	What you think should happen and the single strongest reason
Risks / What Breaks	Accept the risk	Named costs and worries. Nothing fearful stays implicit
Open Questions	–	The things genuinely unknown. These are what a meeting is for
The Ask	Map the decision	A specific request answerable with yes/no or a clear choice

The guiding trick

Write every memo to someone with zero context – a new advisor, a future teammate. If a stranger could read it cold and know what is going on and what you need, the memo is ready.

The six patterns

Pattern	What it does
write_memo	Takes your brain-dump and produces a decision-ready memo in the store
decision_memo	Builds a memo aimed at getting one specific decision made, including downstream consequences
review_memo	Critiques a draft against the quality bar and returns a tightened version
run_memo_meeting	Builds the agenda from Open Questions. Captures decisions back into the memos after
update_board	Scans the store, reconciles memo locations with their status, and regenerates BOARD.md
onboarding_digest	Produces a fast catch-up from the decided memo archive, grouped by theme

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How to use it

Step 1: Set up your store

Your memos live in one shared place – a folder, NAS, S3, or Drive – that every person and every AI assistant on your team can read and write. The workbench ships with a store-template/ folder (an empty reference layout) that you copy to your chosen location.

The store has a simple structure:

<your-store>/
├── BOARD.md       (the dashboard; regenerated automatically)
├── INDEX.md       (the full log of decided memos)
├── drafts/        (memos the author is still writing)
├── review/        (memos ready to pre-read before the next meeting)
└── decided/       (permanent record; never deleted)

Once copied, record the location in the workbench’s store config so every pattern can resolve it. The default, when installed into a workshop, is a memos/ folder at the workshop root.

Step 2: Invoke a pattern

Say “write a memo” or “WAM” and your CLI agent will run the write_memo pattern. Or ask your assistant to suggest the right pattern for your situation.

Starting a new memo:

WAM: we need to decide whether to hire a contractor for the Q3 campaign

Your assistant asks for your brain-dump, organizes it into the six-section form, and saves the draft to your store.

Running the decision flow:

decision memo: should we renew the agency contract?

The decision_memo pattern forces the issue to a single binary choice, adds a downstream consequences note to Risks, and saves straight to review/ so it lands on the BOARD.

Running a meeting:

run memo meeting for 2026-07-08

The run_memo_meeting pattern pulls every status: review memo whose meeting: date matches, builds an agenda from their Open Questions only, and outputs a pre-read reminder. After the meeting, give your assistant the outcomes and it writes the decisions back in, flips status to decided, and rebuilds the board.

The BOARD

BOARD.md at the store root is the single place everyone – human and AI – checks first. It shows:

• What is on the agenda for the next meeting (memos in review/)
• What to pre-read before then
• What was decided recently

Run update_board to regenerate it from live frontmatter any time the store changes. The BOARD is never hand-maintained – it is derived from the memos themselves so it cannot drift.

Solo and async operation

memo-culture works for teams of one. When there is no meeting cadence, set meeting: none in the memo’s frontmatter. The memo moves through the normal lifecycle (draft → review → decided) but never blocks on a meeting date. Decisions can be captured directly: write the memo, decide, flip to decided, and move on.

The BOARD still shows what is in flight and what was decided, so even solo you have a coherent record.

Handing off to a polished final form

When a memo or decision needs to go out on letterhead – to a client, a board, or an external party – hand it to your branded-document tool for an on-brand final version. The memo is the source content. The branded render is the deliverable.

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Common pitfalls

Wrong meeting cadence for a small team. The meeting protocol is built for teams with real meeting rhythms. A solo operator or a two-person shop should use meeting: none freely. Forcing everything onto a meeting date when there is no meeting creates backlog, not clarity. Decide directly on small issues. Reserve the meeting mode for situations with genuine open questions that need another person.

Decisions that never conclude. A memo stuck in review/ with no decision date and no resolved open questions is a stalled decision. The BOARD will surface it every time you look – treat that as the signal to either schedule the conversation, decide unilaterally, or explicitly close the memo as “not proceeding” and move it to decided/ with that as the decision line.

Skipping the memo. The most common failure mode: a decision gets made in a chat thread, a Slack message, or a verbal conversation, then disappears. Six months later nobody remembers why. If a decision matters enough to make, it is worth two minutes to write a memo. The cost of writing one is near zero with AI assistance. The cost of not having the record compounds forever.

Multiple issues in one memo. The rule is one issue per memo. If your brain-dump contains several distinct decisions, the write_memo pattern will flag them and offer to split. Do not skip this step – a memo that tries to decide two things usually decides neither cleanly.

Treating Open Questions as optional. Open Questions are the mechanism that connects memos to meetings. If you leave them blank, the meeting has no agenda and the “no memo, no meeting” law collapses. If you genuinely have no open questions, you do not need a meeting – just decide and write the outcome into The Ask.

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Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
BOARD shows stale or missing memos	update_board was not run after a status change	Run update_board. It reconciles folder locations with frontmatter status automatically
A memo in review/ never gets decided	No meeting date set, or meeting keeps slipping	Set meeting: none and decide directly, or reschedule with a hard date and rebuild the board
You cannot find where memos are stored	Store location not set, or default path not created	Check the store config in the workbench. Confirm the memos/ folder (or your override) exists and is reachable by your assistant
New person is confused about context	Onboarding digest not run, or decided archive is sparse	Run onboarding_digest against the last 20 decided memos. If the archive is sparse, the recent BOARD pre-reads are a good substitute
Memo has too many issues to decide	Multiple decisions bundled into one memo	Ask your assistant to split the memo. Each issue gets its own file and its own Ask
The Ask cannot be answered	The recommendation is vague or the options are not named	Run review_memo on the draft. The reviewer will flag any Ask that cannot be resolved with a clear yes/no or choice
Decided memo is missing from INDEX.md	memo was moved manually without updating the log	Run update_board. It appends missing decided memos to INDEX.md as part of the reconcile step