BUS610: Business Intelligence and Analytics

Summary

Decision making can be challenging for nonprofit leadership teams. But using tools – like RAPID® – can help nonprofit leaders and managers identify the activities that must occur in order for a decision to be made well.

Without consulting any of the people who will actually have to do the work, an executive director promises an old friend that his organization will take on a complex project, leaving his staff feeling out of the loop and slightly disgruntled.

Twelve busy staff members spend multiple hours discussing a fairly minor issue – whether the organization should hire a summer intern – but no one is clear who has the final say, and every meeting ends without a decision.

Several organizations are working together to support a single initiative, but none of the partners fully understand where their responsibilities begin and end. When they disagree, who gets to decide?

Do any of these situations resonate? If so, you are far from alone. Decision making can be difficult for reasons ranging from vague reporting structures to the complexities that naturally arise when an organization is growing and more people have seats at the leadership table.

The result is often wasted time, confusion, and frustration. Individually, everyone's intentions are good, yet the whole performs poorly. And in the worst cases, decision-making difficulties can create a climate of mistrust, and even undermine an organization's mission.

What can be done? One way to address the issue is to diagnose the source of the problem by mapping out how difficult decisions are being made. Another is to map out how key decisions should be made going forward. There are a variety of tools available to facilitate these processes. Among them, we have found a tool called RAPID®, which was originally developed by Bain & Company as part of its decision-driven organization work, to be highly effective and easily adaptable to different situations, team sizes and types of organizations.

RAPID untangles the decision-making process – existing or upcoming – by identifying all of the various activities that must occur for a decision to be made well. The name is an acronym, with each letter standing for an activity associated with decision making. At the outset, for example, someone must recommend that a decision be made. Input will likely be required to inform the decision. Often, more than one person must approve the final call, but ultimately someone must have the authority to decide. Then, after a decision is made, it must be carried out, or performed.

The name, RAPID, does not suggest the order in which these activities occur; the reality is iterative, and "R-A-P-I-D" happens to be the easiest way to remember the activities. Additionally, in practice, the people involved may be assigned more than one letter and may also share responsibility for some activities. The person recommending the decision, for example, may also be among those who will "perform" once the decision is made. Similarly, authority for the "D" may reside with a single person, or with a group of people who vote on the issue, as is often the case with decision making at the board level.

Source: Jon Huggett and Caitrin Moran, https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/organizational-effectiveness/rapid-decision-making
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