The RACI framework maps out who has what rights (and who doesn’t have rights at all) when it comes to decision making and task execution. For each important area of decision making and task execution in your organization, it breaks down rights along the lines of: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. In this post I focus on how it is used to assign decision making rights.
Mapping out your decision making rights is about moving work up so that you make the best decisions for your organization and avoid the pain of preventable missteps, all of which cost you a lot of work later. It’s the best advice we often find hard to take.
Do it and it will help you answer very practical questions like: Who can authorize this work? Who should be invited to this discovery session? What constraints bind our decision space? What upstream inputs impact our decision? Who will be impacted by our decision?
Responsible
The decision maker. One name only is best practice. The Responsible party can always delegate supporting work to other stakeholders. If you feel it requires two names or even three names - ask yourself: are you clear on who is really responsible for this? If you are, and it is multiple people, consider breaking out the row into multiple rows where rights are more specific and map to one name. Remember when multiple people are responsible, no one is responsible.
Accountable
The ultimate owner. The person who will need to stand up and explain the decision and justify it if it comes under scrutiny either internally or externally. This person has the ultimate authority over the decision and can validate the decision proposed by the Responsible or overrule it. Overruling however should be rare because the Accountable should have been consulted throughout the process. For any decision, you can only have one person Accountable. As with responsibility, shared accountability is non-accountability.
Consulted
Anyone who must have an opportunity to provide input before a decision is made. This is not a list of people who may be consulted, it is the list of people who must be consulted. There are often stakeholders from different areas in this box, especially if it is a complex, organization wide decision. The list should include all those who bring unique, valuable perspectives that can materially impact the decision. This is not a laundry list of people who have 2 cents to add - make the list too long and the decision making process will get bloated and likely stall.
Informed
Anyone who needs to be informed about the decision made (because the downstream impacts affect their work). Anyone with Consulted rights is automatically included in the Informed list. Err on the side of being inclusive for this one since sharing results is a light lift.
Take your vitamins
Many organizations understand the importance of mapping out decision making rights, but they don’t do it. Why? It’s the age-old challenge of mustering the discipline and the attention to map out something that is complex on the promise of efficiency and significantly reduced pain down the road. The decision is obvious on paper, but hard to follow through on in practice.
Getting pen to paper can be hard because it’s often not clear how an organization wants to or should structure their decision making and it requires the attention and time of leadership (which is rarely easy to get), to figure it out. Shining a light on these questions can also be very sensitive when they butt up against considerations of power, inclusion, and silos within the organization. Making explicit who has what rights and who does not is deep work and can carry a lot of emotional weight. For these reasons, and others, organizations often limp along with a high level of uncertainty, operating under implicit norms rather than stated rules and procedures. They can survive this way, but it comes with a high tax:
- Paralysis when key business decisions are not made because no one knows who is responsible and accountable
- Point solutions that don’t actually solve anything
- Point solutions that break other critical things
- Suboptimal solutions that leave your best options on the table
- Frustration about being excluded from providing input or hearing about results that often boils over into the personal
Just get started
My advice is start small. You can choose the level of detail that fits your organization. You don’t need to map out every decision making area - just start with the most important ones. The ones that impact you in big ways, lock you into commitments for a long time, have a habit of flaring up on a regular basis, etc.
The most important thing is to start and to build the discipline of mapping decision rights out. Force the awkward conversations and the decisions about decision making before you are in a crisis moment. With this habit in place, you can then go broader and deeper across the organization.
It’s also important to note that there is an order of operations here: You can’t fill in the RACI until you’ve figured out how you want to run your business. Then you can fill it out. Then you need to socialize it as it only yields benefits when your team is aware of it and understands there is an expectation that it will be used. Then you need to have your team print it out and tack it behind their monitors and actually look at it and act on it when they approach key business decisions.
The alternative is don’t do it - and forever be picking up the pieces downstream when critical stakeholders find out they weren’t included in decisions they are close to, or worse yet that decisions don’t get made at all, or even worse yet that “solutions” break more than they fix.
