Remember, remember: where did we decide that?
2026-11-05 · The Scrums team
Tonight is Bonfire Night in the UK, and its old rhyme begins "Remember, remember the fifth of November". Teams forget faster than they think. Here's how to make sure what your team decides can be found again.
"Remember, remember the fifth of November" begins the rhyme children in Britain still learn for Bonfire Night, more than four hundred years after the event it marks. It's a reminder that remembering usually needs some help.
Teams forget quickly. Ask anyone who has started a new job what was hardest about the first month, and "finding out why things are the way they are" comes near the top. The decision was made, but it was made in a call nobody recorded, or a chat thread nobody can find, or a document someone else wrote and nobody linked to.
Habits for a team that remembers
- Write decisions where the work happens. A decision in a page next to the project beats one buried in a chat channel.
- Keep meeting outcomes. A retro's topics and action items, and a poker session's estimates, are worth keeping beyond the meeting.
- Link instead of repeating. Point to the page that has the answer rather than rewriting it in chat.
- Make it searchable. If it can't be found, it might as well not exist.
Search in Scrums
Search at the top of the sidebar, or Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) from anywhere, looks across everything you can open:
- teams and organizations, and people;
- sessions, such as last month's retro or yesterday's poker;
- action items, wherever they were created;
- pages, by their titles and by what's written in them;
- channels and messages.
It also offers places to go and things to do, such as a new page, a call or your status. Move with the arrow keys and press Enter. Picking a person opens your direct message with them.
One search across meetings, pages, action items and chat.
Every finished retro, poker session and health check also saves its summary as a page that the team can edit, so meeting outcomes turn up in search with everything else.
Four hundred years on, people still remember the fifth of November because someone wrote it down in a form that was easy to repeat. Sign up, and give your team's decisions the same chance.