26 January 2026 · René de Baaij
English BlogDominant Leadership Series #Dominance#Narcism#Toxic
In healthy organisations, memory is something soft. It lives in minutes nobody reads with suspicion. In agreements that are followed as a matter of course. In the way different people, asked what was decided, tell roughly the same story, without needing to coordinate beforehand.
In unhealthy organisations, memory becomes a battleground.
I never said that. That's not how we meant it. You misunderstood.
Once, that can be human. Repeatedly, it is no longer a misunderstanding.
Then it is a tool of power: plausible deniability. And it works, precisely because decent people find it uncomfortable to gather evidence against someone else. It feels childish. It feels like distrust, like something you should not do towards a colleague or manager with whom you are trying to maintain a working relationship.
But documenting is not distrust. Documenting is care for reality.
Think of a river. If you do not mark where it flowed, it looks afterwards as though it always ran here, in this place, in this direction. And then anyone can say, after the fact: that's just how it is, this was always the agreement. Marking is not meant as hostile. It is precise. It does not say who is right. It only says what actually happened, at what moment, and who was present.
Research into memory under social pressure shows why this matters so much. People who are repeatedly confronted with a reality being rewritten by others eventually start to distrust their own memory. This phenomenon, sometimes described in psychology as a form of gaslighting when it happens deliberately, does not need to be intentional to cause harm. Whether the rewriting is conscious or not, the effect on the person experiencing it is the same: a gradual erosion of trust in their own perception. That is precisely why an external, written trail serves such an important function. It is not only evidence for others. It is, first and foremost, an anchor point for yourself.
The art is to make documenting routine, not loaded. Not something you do once a conflict has already arisen, with the tension that comes with it, but something you do structurally, regardless of whether the atmosphere is tense at that moment or not. After every meeting, you send a short recap. Not to catch anyone out, but to make execution possible for everyone involved. Decision, action, owner, date. A few lines, nothing elaborate. And then the calm sentence that often works wonders: let me know if this isn't right.
That last sentence matters more than it first appears. It turns your recap from an accusation into an invitation to correct. If someone genuinely disagrees, you give them the room to say so now, before the decision is implemented. And if nobody responds, you have a document confirmed by silence, which carries a very different weight in a later conversation than a document you drew up alone, without anyone getting the chance to dispute it.
Something curious happens if you keep this up. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But arbitrariness slowly becomes more expensive. It costs more energy to deny a written trail than to keep to the agreement. Someone who has to repeatedly argue why a documented decision no longer applies eventually gets caught out, not because you confront them, but because the inconsistency becomes visible to anyone who can read back through the documents.
Psychodynamically, documenting also works as what psychology calls containment: the capacity of a system to hold tension without that tension having to land somewhere else, such as in bodies, in nights spent replaying the conversation, in meetings where everyone senses something different was agreed but nobody dares say what. A well-kept decision log does what individual memory cannot: it holds the tension in language, somewhere everyone can read it back, so it no longer depends on who dares to push back hardest in the moment itself.
Documenting does not only reduce the risk of manipulation. It also reduces the physical and emotional toll that constant uncertainty exacts.
There is a nuance worth keeping sharp, because documenting can have two faces. One face is mature: recording to keep the work running, to offer clarity to everyone who needs to work with it, including yourself. The other face is poisoned: stockpiling to punish, building a file with the silent intention of crushing someone with it later. In a context of boundary violations, a file can be a form of protection, and that is legitimate. But keep it factual. A timeline. A source for each fact. A description of the effect. No judgement about who the other person is as a human being. No diagnosis of their motives. Just reality, rendered as purely as possible.
That distinction matters not only ethically. It matters practically too, because a file soaked in judgement loses its power the moment it is presented to someone who needs to assess it objectively, such as a manager, a confidential adviser, or, at a later stage, a formal body. Facts persuade. Judgements provoke resistance, even in people who are in principle on your side.
Make a simple decision log today. One document, one place, not scattered across various folders or email threads you will struggle to find later. Each week, the key decisions and actions, brief and factual. Share it, if you wish, with one trusted colleague, not to form a coalition, but so the memory does not live solely in your own head, where it becomes vulnerable to the doubt that constant pressure can cause.
And ask yourself, at the end of the page, something you usually only ask too late, once the damage is already done: which truth keeps disappearing from the air, because nobody writes it down while it is still fresh and undisputed?
That is the question that justifies this whole move. Not fear of a future conflict, though that may be a reason. But the simple, daily truth that whatever is not recorded will sooner or later be rewritten by whoever has the most to gain from making it sound different.
Notes for those who wish to read further:
- Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (1979, Harvard University Press). Classic research on how memory is malleable under external pressure and suggestion, relevant to understanding how a rewritten reality causes self-doubt.
- Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect (2007, Morgan Road Books). On the mechanism by which repeated denial of someone's perception makes that person doubt themselves, and how documentation offers a counterweight.
- Wilfred Bion, Learning from Experience (1962, Heinemann). The original psychoanalytic source for the concept of containment, the capacity of a system to hold tension without it causing harm elsewhere.
- Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure (2011, Ashgate). On how the absence of consistent record-keeping lets organisations gradually drift away from their own norms, without anyone making a conscious decision to do so.
- Chris Argyris & Donald Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (1978, Addison-Wesley). On the gap between the theory an organisation says it follows and the practice it actually applies, and how documentation makes that gap visible.