The Myth of "It's in the Docs" — Why Most Teams Still Lose Context

Every team has heard (or said) it: "It's in the docs."

Sometimes it is.
Usually, it sort of is.
Often, it was — two reorganizations ago.

The truth is: even well-documented teams constantly lose context.

And the reason isn't laziness or bad intentions — it's the natural decay of fast-moving systems, mismatched tools, and the fact that most important knowledge isn't document-shaped.

🧠 Context is not documentation

Documentation tells you what.
Context tells you why.
And unless you're extremely disciplined, the why rarely gets written down.

Ask any developer who's joined a new team and tried to pick up an existing project:

• What does this service actually do?
• Who owns this API now?
• Why did we fork this instead of using the official lib?
• Is this still used, or just hasn't been deleted?

These aren't "documentation" questions — they're living system questions.

📉 Why traditional docs break down

Here's where even the best Confluence or Notion setups fall short:

Structure ≠ discoverability

Hierarchies and folders feel organized… until you have 500 pages and the search is fuzzy at best.

Time breaks everything

The page from six months ago might be well-written — but totally irrelevant. Or worse: partially outdated.

Docs reflect authorship, not reality

A doc often reflects the view of the person who wrote it. But they've since left the team… or changed context… or don't even know who owns that dependency now.

Cross-tool drift

Jira has tasks. GitHub has code. Confluence has some docs. Slack has decisions. Your "source of truth" is split across 4+ tools that don't talk to each other.

🔍 What teams really need: a sense of orientation

Not "perfect docs." Not "AI summaries."
Just a sense of what's where, who's involved, and how it fits together.

• What are the key systems, APIs, and workflows?
• Who owns them?
• What projects are active? What's dead code?
• Where are the blind spots?
• What changed recently?

Most onboarding struggles come down to this missing layer of orientation.

👋 So… what do we do about it?

You can't fix this with another doc template.

What you can do is:

• Surface existing knowledge across tools, without asking people to re-document it
• Track what's changing, what's decaying, and where the gaps are
• Give new teammates a real-time, contextual map — not a 40-page wiki dump

We're working on this problem with Decreen.
But even without fancy tooling, it helps to shift the goal from "Write better docs" to "Preserve useful context."

They're not the same thing.

TL;DR

If you feel like your team keeps losing context, even though "it's in the docs," you're not imagining it.

Most tools aren't built to preserve orientation, only information.
And information, without connection, fades fast.

Want to talk shop about how we're approaching this at Decreen — from entity extraction to drift tracking to onboarding task generation? Reach out or drop into our early access group →