RAPID Decision-Making

Getting the Most Out of RAPID

What follows are some of lessons we've learned through our own experiences using RAPID and also from our observation and study of other organizations that have worked with the tool.

Make the case for the tool before you introduce it. Act like an "R". Tell the organization what you want to do and why. Share your view that the current team can make decisions more effectively and efficiently. Lay out the process and tell people where they will or will not be involved. Make sure that everyone understands the tool.

Carve off a few key decisions to start. Picking a handful of decisions that are causing the most pain can be a great way to start. You'll get support to relieve the pain.

Don't put more than a dozen such decisions on the list at the outset, or the process will stall. Your organization won't miss the irony if the exercise to improve decision making suffers analysis paralysis. But if you can fix the critical decisions, then everyone will know that you can fix others too. If your team finds the process useful, they will incorporate it into how they work. It will become part of their toolkit for running their parts of the organization.

Make a plan, and pace yourself and your organization. Implementation of this tool is worth getting right, so lay out a formal work plan for the process. Since doing this goes to the core of how you work, it will be important to invite key points of view as you create the plan. RAPID-guided decisions that result in big changes will need managing, so you need to know when you will be making key decisions and putting them into action.

Understand that many people will need to adjust to the roles they are assigned in the RAPID process, and anticipate anxiety. The process of assigning roles ("R," "I," and so forth) is best done iteratively and expeditiously. However, without firm leadership, this phase of decision making can be interminable and explosive. Managing inclusion can be tricky, not least because people can feel excluded or alienated if they are no longer going to be involved in decisions in the way they had thought they were. Others can be vulnerable because their power is exposed.

As one ED told us, at the beginning, when people realized what role they were now expected to play, they would express anxiety, asking, "So I am responsible for this myself?" And even when reassured that this would in fact be their decision, staff members would still show up in her office asking, "You're sure you are OK with me making this decision?"

Understand that RAPID is not a communication tool. It is a simple way to diagnose and prescribe how to make decisions. It does not tell you how to communicate those decisions once they are made. At one Justice Project staff meeting, someone asked: "So which of these people [those with an "R," "A," "P," "I," or "D"] is responsible for communicating the decision to those of us who aren't involved in the decision making but need to know?" The ED of the Justice Project was quick to clarify that none of these roles explicitly had this responsibility, and that this was something that needed to be determined outside of the RAPID process.

Once RAPID is being used, step back and review the whole. Take the time to get some distance and see if it all fits together. Does the new way of making key decisions make sense? Do responsibilities and accountabilities match roles? Does the work balance fairly? Do you have buy-in from the key leaders? How does it feel? Are you looking forward to 8:30 tomorrow morning?