Decision-Making: How RAPID, DACI and RACI Help Teams Move Forward

A meeting ends with everyone agreeing. A week later, nothing has happened - because the room agreed on the plan, and never agreed on who owned what happened next.

This video covers three frameworks that make those expectations explicit, treating each as the answer to a different problem rather than interchangeable jargon.

RAPID, created by Bain & Company and set out in Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko's 2006 Harvard Business Review article 'Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance', assigns five roles - Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide - for when decision authority itself is unclear, worked through an illustrative technology-supplier selection.

DACI, built by Atlassian and published in its own Team Playbook, names a Driver to keep a decision moving and a single Approver to make it, alongside Contributors and the Informed, for when a decision keeps stalling - worked through an illustrative product-launch postponement.

RACI assigns Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles to tasks and deliverables once a decision is already made, for unclear ownership during delivery.

The video also covers the common failure mode of stacking too many Agree or Approver roles, turning a decision process into a chain of vetoes, and closes with a diagnostic: which of the three problems - unclear authority, a stalled decision, or unclear task ownership - a team actually has, matched to the framework built for it.

Both worked examples are stand-in scenarios, not real, named companies.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.