Most firms know what was decided. Far fewer know when it stopped being correct.

Decisions do not fail all at once. A committee makes a call. The memo is filed. The deal is marked. Then conditions change. Breach signals arrive. The refinance window compresses. Covenant pressure builds. The decision is still recorded as made. The exposure accumulates. No one is told.

That is how firms end up operating on calls that are no longer defensible — not because the committee made a bad decision, but because nothing connected what happened next to the decision that preceded it.

The difference between drift and a broken decision.

Drift means conditions changed. A broken decision means the committee’s call is no longer defensible given what those conditions are now. The distinction matters. Drift is descriptive — the world moved. A broken decision is prescriptive — the governance basis you recorded no longer holds, and something has to change.

Why most systems do not catch it.

Most monitoring tools are built around metrics. They track what changed, alert on movement, and show updated numbers. They do not ask what that movement does to the decision that was made before it.

That requires connecting two things most systems store separately: the committee call, and the current signal state. When those two things are connected, the system can say what most tools never say — that decision is no longer correct.

What materiality actually means here.

The committee made a low-severity call — monitor, stable, continue, watch. Conditions have since moved to a materially worse state. Breach pressure is present. Covenant status has deteriorated to critical. The refinance window has compressed to six months or fewer.

When those conditions arrive after the committee’s call — provably after, with timestamps — the decision is broken. The exposure clock starts there.

What the system has to show.

The original decision. What the committee called it, when, and on what basis.

The moment it stopped holding. The exact date conditions crossed the materiality threshold.

The exposure duration. How long the position has been running on a decision that is no longer correct.

What to do now. A specific recommended action, not just a note to re-evaluate.

The clear condition.

A broken decision does not clear when metrics improve. It clears when the committee reconvenes and makes a new call. That is how real governance works — the record, the materiality event, and the counter-decision, in sequence, with timestamps. Anything less is a spreadsheet of numbers that moved.