---
id: "cp-sops-still-valuable"
type: "counter-perspective"
source_timestamps: ["Enrichment: Counter-Perspectives §4"]
tags: ["counter-perspective", "knowledge-management", "sops", "maintainability"]
related: ["contrarian-experts-cannot-document", "framework-scenario-based-extraction", "action-use-transcripts-as-context"]
sources: ["agentic"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-new-27-teach-ai-your-decisions"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/06/teach-your-ai-how-you-make-decisions"
sourceTitle: "Teach Your AI How You Make Decisions"
---
# Counter: Traditional SOPs and Documentation Still Have Value

**Counterpoint to the source's contrarian stance:** The article's "do not ask experts to document their judgment" ([[contrarian-experts-cannot-document]]) reflects frustration with conventional SOPs and wikis. Yet regulated industries (finance, healthcare, aviation) rely on detailed procedures, checklists, and documented standards as a proven, compliance-grade way to encode judgment.

**Knowledge-management view:** Well-designed SOPs, decision trees, and playbooks — combined with iterative refinement — can capture much of the necessary judgment. Expert panels ([[framework-scenario-based-extraction]]) should *feed back into* structured documentation rather than entirely replace it.

**Implication:** A hybrid approach (panels + structured SOPs/decision trees) may be more maintainable at scale. Over-reliance on raw transcripts ([[action-use-transcripts-as-context]]) without abstraction risks unwieldy, hard-to-maintain context files — directly relevant to [[question-maintaining-codified-judgment]].