Enterprise RACI: Effective Decision-Making At Scale

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Galen Low: Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.

Okay, today we are revisiting the venerable RACI chart — this time not as a simple vocabulary to define roles and responsibilities at the team level, but as a means of clarifying decision making at the enterprise level to remove expensive bottlenecks and unlock business growth. Back in the studio with me today is Cassie Solomon, an organizational change and digital transformation leader and author of "Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys To Making Change Work", a book that has been published by Wharton twice in 2013 and revised in 2020.

Cassie, thanks for coming back in the studio with me today. 

Cassie Solomon: Thank you so much, Galen. It's fantastic to be here, and I'm excited about this topic. 

Galen Low: I'm excited too and it's always a pleasure having you on the show. 

We're experimenting with a bit of a different format, so I thought maybe I'd just open with just what I call one hot question, and the question is this: how do executives react when you tell them that their multi-million dollar bottleneck can be solved with a flow diagram and a little chart with the letters R, A, C, and I strewn all about it?

Cassie Solomon: Well, I'm sorry, but I'm going to start by saying that I never say that to executives, because RACI isn't a silver bullet.

And I really don't want to give the impression to all of the project managers that are tuning in that they can pull RACI off the shelf and say, here's the answer to all of your problems, just trust me. Because there are no silver bullets in, as much as I love RACI, it doesn't do it by itself. I want to talk for just a second about the model in the book, "Leading Successful Change", that I wrote with my Wharton colleague, Greg Shea.

The model is called the 8 Levers of Change, and the theory is that you have to work with at least four of the eight before you can create successful change from any type. And one of those levers is decision making. So it's one of my favorite levers. It's really one of the most powerful levers in an organization.

The problem is it's invisible. You can show me your org chart. You can show me your budget. You can show me your compensation plan. You can't show me your decision making. We have not figured out a way to make that visible, but RACI is the best tool that we have. It's trying to negotiate roles and authority and empowerment and accountability. Without RACI, I think it's like, fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

So we use that to shine a light on these larger issues like decision making, but I think of it as like Pandora's box, right? It's this incredibly simple tool. You and I can teach anybody to do this tour in six minutes and another six minutes to practice and they're good to go, right? But what it opens up are conversations about where is the power, where's the authority in our organization? And those conversations are very powerful. They have incredible consequences. 

Galen Low: That's what I love about it. And like, when you said it's invisible, decision making is invisible, like, when I think back on it, that is the like, tone in the room when you start that conversation.

Everyone's going, oh, yeah, really? I thought that this, and you kind of like, surface all of this sort of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and just misaligned expectations. And you're like, aha! And you're right. It's so simple. 

Cassie Solomon: Well, and it's also like this word 'culture', right? If you start talking about decision making or culture, you're inviting a lot of rhetoric, a lot of very high conceptual language that doesn't actually mean the same thing to people.

So now we've had a great conversation about culture or we've had a great conversation about decision making. We have nothing actionable. We don't know what we're talking about. And we said, that was fantastic. Let's meet again and talk about decision making and culture. And that's not very satisfying. It doesn't make anything change.

Galen Low: Oh, absolutely. I love that. 

I would love to come back to the 8 levers at some point. I don't know if we'll have time to do it today, but we'll definitely have you back in the studio for that cause I think that's really, really interesting. Meantime, thank you for humoring me on that one hot question. It's not a silver bullet. It's not how you're presenting this. 

But I thought maybe we could just zoom out a little bit. Because I hopped in, but most people know RACI as just a simple vocabulary and technique to describe roles and responsibilities in a team context. R standing for Responsible, A stands for Accountable or Authorized, C stands for Consulted, and I stands for Informed.

Simple, right? But you use it at a pretty high level, at an enterprise level with some Fortune 500 companies, among others, and I don't know if a lot of people think of it that way. And I was just wondering, when did it occur to you that RACI could be used at the enterprise level with these large companies, Fortune 500 companies, and what kinds of problems has it solved for you? Or for them, I guess. 

Cassie Solomon: This is a little bit embarrassing, Galen, because it took me a while. I have a whole RACI side of the practice. And then I have my other side, my organizational change and strategy side. And after a couple of years, it occurred to me that they actually belonged together. So for example, if we're doing a strategy project now, we say, okay, who owns which piece of this strategy?

How is the work going to get done? Where are the Rs and who has executive authority over it? Where are the decisions getting made? And we make people go through that exercise as part of transitioning to strategy execution, and it's magical. It's like, I get it. I get the part of this that I have to drive.

I think a lot of transformation projects really could benefit from that, that RACI tail end. And the other thing that I'm doing a lot with it, but again, not at the beginning is there are a lot of co-leadership positions in my world right now. And I see you can't negotiate, a shared job or a shared CEO if you don't have this language to talk about what's your work, what's my work, which decisions are shared, which decisions are yours. And then I've even brought it now into my executive coaching work and teach it to my individual clients, because this is a language that allows you to negotiate for the role that you want.

And then we joke that everyone is, wants fewer R's and less work and more authority, right? More A's, like that's not everybody. Sometimes people are just longing for clarity, but if you boil it down, when people come and say, I have all this responsibility and no authority, which they're like, ah, yes, there's a language for that.

That's what you want to go and negotiate now. Who do you have to negotiate with to get fewer R's and more A's? The other thing that has deeply occurred to us is that almost all change initiatives involve some kind of cross functional project team. If you're just changing inside your function, you can sit down with your own staff, that's not the case.

But at the enterprise level, the big change initiatives bring together all these different silos, and then they promptly get stuck. Because cross functional work is famously the most difficult work that you can do. It has all these special problems attached to it. And the reason that it has all of those issues is because the authority is no longer clear.

If I'm just working with my team, the authority is very clear, and I can make things move forward. But I'm working with all these peers, and all of their bosses are the, the ghosts in the machine outside the room, and I, everything bogs down. So it turns out to be very helpful in large scale change initiative work. 

Galen Low: I can definitely picture that because I'm thinking of, like just digital transformation initiatives and like you said, like strategy, it's crossing over teams and especially the way businesses are transforming now, like it creates overlap.

It's a cross functional business now because they need to transform by combining, different teams, different specialties. And that co-leadership thing, oh man, that resonates like so hard right now because I see it all the time, right? And everyone's either, tiptoeing around it or like head on colliding because, they both think or multiple people think that, they are in charge, they have ownership over this, they have authority over this thing. 

Not to mention the sort of just like team cultural differences, like just that, the hubris, right? So just like, I was the leader of my team, now I need to work with this other team. And it creates a lot of logjams. I've seen a lot of logjams in rather big businesses for exactly that. So I love that. 

Cassie Solomon: But I also want to say, I think that co-leadership model, when it's working, is a beautiful thing. And that's why people keep designing organizations that way.

They say, this job is so huge, or this change initiative is so huge, it needs to have two owners, or we need to have two people on the job. They're seeing its potential, but getting to that potential is a piece of work. 

Galen Low: Yeah, absolutely. That's why I love that you bake it into your executive coaching because, like, these are skills that everybody needs to learn.

We're not good at them yet. Everyone needs some help to get their head wrapped around it. A lot of us have been trained to climb the ladder or like, attain some kind of leadership role. Not everybody, but, it is this destination to be the de facto person at the head of a something.

Not like, heads, right? Not multiple, singular. So it really bends our brains when we have to think of it that way. Not to mention, like, I see organizations just, like, reorging all the time. They are reshuffling the deck all the time. And that cross functional team changes all the time. So, it really has to be a skill on speed, though.

Cassie Solomon: Exactly. We actually talk about the difference between vertical leadership, which is where you're inside your own function. And that's the one that we're trained to go after, as you said, like, I want to get better and better at my function. I want to get better at managing in my function. And someday my reward is going to be I'm going to get to the executive level.

And then Oh, big surprise. All your work is now going to be horizontal, and you're going to have to collaborate with your peers at the senior level. And your teams are going to have to collaborate with their teams, and nobody taught anyone how to be good, strong, horizontal leaders. It's just a separate set of skills.

So, I think understanding role and RACI is the language to understand role, and being able to negotiate role, is just critical for horizontal leaders. And we throw everyone into that deep end and say, paddle around and you're not going to get anywhere and you're going to die of frustration.

Aren't you glad you got here to your big promotion, right? This is the prize. You no longer have vertical authority much. You're going to get into the landscape of the fog of cross functional work. 

Galen Low: Well, that model is similar to the sort of T-shaped people model, right? Where, sometimes we're focused on like going deep, specializing in something versus, being more general, I guess, in our skills, but also like in our authority, our leadership skills. It's very interesting. 

All right, I'm going to wander back into RACI because I've got my own curiosities. You do a lot of work. It's like you said, you combined your practices. You had that epiphany. You're like, wait a minute, I do, consulting. I also teach RACI. Actually, these things can work together. I'm wondering if you could just give me an example, like walk me through a scenario. What's been your biggest enterprise RACI success story? 

Cassie Solomon: This was a very fun question to think about. This work draws me out to San Francisco every chance I get to work with high growth companies because there's this transitional moment when companies are scaling, when they can't work the way that they used to.

So the founders used to sit around the table and make all of the decisions themselves, and now they've been successful and they grow, and that's fantastic. But there are growing pains associated with that. And one of them is, just this role confusion. And we actually have an assessment where we say, are you having these symptoms?

And people are like, Oh my gosh, you just described our world. So there's a particular high growth startup that I'm thinking of. And we needed to go into the leaders and say, hey, you can't make decisions the way you used to. You're no longer at that size. You have to learn how to delegate decisions and empower people now that you are bigger.

And a lot of times as they grow, they bring in executives from larger companies. So you look at life sciences companies, they're going to bring in that person from Genentech and you look at healthcare companies, they're bringing in that person from Medtronic. And the large company person shows up like they're very excited and now I'm going to do the startup and they're doing really well, they're scaling.

And they say, Oh my gosh, this is a mess. This is like the wild, wild west, the way we operate around here. And that's usually the moment at which they find me. So this particular company, the leadership team was made up of the founders plus some of the newbies from the big companies. And they said, okay, that's our job.

We have to let go of some of the decision making, but then also at the department level, they really embraced using RACI and these negotiations. And one example that I love so much that I teach it is they said we want to take a look back at our annual sales meeting, which we just finished and which was so painful and we want to RACI the way we did it.

And use that tool to diagnose like, why was that so bad? And they saw lots of overlaps and lots of fights over authority when they looked back and they said, okay, now, while it's all fresh in our mind, we're going to create the RACI for next year's annual sales meeting. And we're going to transform all of those pain points into, smooth, clear assignments and that's what they did. The next year they ran their improved process and roles and they just had a much better experience. 

Galen Low: I love that. 

Cassie Solomon: I mentioned that company got sold to a global multinational and I am not sure what happened to all my good RACI work after that, I have to say, because they were actually acquired by a European multinational and they came back to me and they said, there is no empowerment.

There is only structure. I don't know if they were going to be able to keep going, but anyway, that's in organizational change. From a business standpoint, it was a huge win because they sold the company and everybody was very happy, but.

Galen Low: There you go. My experience with RACI has been sort of at a project team level, but I love this notion of like RACI for a meeting, but an important meeting, like a sort of pillar meeting.

That in order to have RACI for that meeting, you need to have the right RACI for all of the teams departments involved, all the leaders involved. You're working backwards from this, performance review because it is about, who owns what aspect of business performance. 

Cassie Solomon: And all of those really big efforts end up being deeply cross functional. And that was a cross functional team coming together and saying, why was that so painful? And how can we work together differently? 

Galen Low: I appreciate that they recognize that pain. 

Cassie Solomon: There's no lack of pain recognition out there in my experience. 

Galen Low: I suppose that's true. I suppose that's true. 

Cassie Solomon: My perspective is, the teams that are high performing and they're having a blast and they're growing the business, usually don't call me.

Life's upset is biased by the people that need me who are not those people. 

Galen Low: Well, I mean, there's sometimes, just this acceptance of "growing pains", which is a very vague word that we use to describe. Growth is hard, or M&A is hard, scaling is hard, but it doesn't really get to the root of it.

Like, the actual pain of like, oh man, we have a sales meeting, and like, it's a gong show because nobody knows who owns what and who makes decisions, and then nothing happens afterwards, and you're like, Ouch, it shouldn't be this way. 

Cassie Solomon: There's actually a fantastic book, which I teach called Growing Pains, and we can post it in the show notes. It's an old book, but it's in its 5th edition, and it does a great job of breaking down exactly what happens, what are the symptoms, and the evolution of a company through those stages. 

Galen Low: I was super interested in that. Absolutely. 

I wonder if we could flip it around, you told me about a great success story, but what's been your biggest enterprise RACI failure, I guess, like what would have had to have gone right in order for it not to have gone wrong?

Cassie Solomon: One of the things I say when I'm teaching at Wharton is no one ever writes up their sale change initiatives, right? If you go out to find examples of successful change all over HBR, all over McKinsey, all over the internet, now try to go find the failures. Oh, they're invisible. We're not going to talk about them.

And yet, so we're not learning from each other. It is just terrible. Anyway. So I, at some level, I love this painful question. So about two years ago, we were called into a global life sciences company into their R&D division. And they had been doing a change initiative for three years around empowering people.

And the reason, and I think this is fascinating is because they really wanted to speed up innovation. And they recognized that their, culture was heavily regulated industry, very bureaucratic, and they were really worried about the competition and speed. And this is a theme. It's a really common thing.

So they asked us to come in and do focus groups to see how was this change initiative going, and then make recommendations based on what we learned. And this a little bit goes back to the eight levers of change, because like many not so successful change initiatives, they were over indexing on training and lectures and developing the individuals.

Like, I will help you Galen become a more empowered person, and then I will declare a victory. And people were appreciative, but they basically said, look, we're just not walking the talk. That's the talk. But then I get back to work and it's, the day to day experience hasn't changed at all. So we sat down and said, look, you guys need a bit of a redesign.

We use RACI to define empowerment. It's really simple. Empowerment is how many A's can you take off of the plate and push down or out into the organization? So if you use that kind of rubric to say how empowered are people through the lens of RACI, you start having some really real conversations. And one of the things that I want to point out is that empowerment is not like playing a musical solo, right?

So their approach, which was about helping all the individuals become empowered, was like saying, we're going to get you better at, playing that flute solo. Empowerment is always at a minimum, a duet. And more often, it's actually more like an ensemble. So if you are getting more power, where is it coming from, right?

Are you getting more from your boss? That's the conversation you need. Is your cross functional team getting more power to make decisions from the initiative sponsor? Are individuals on that team getting more power from their managers? So, am I going to empower my peers? And say, Galen, you have the aid for this and I don't need it anymore, I'll stand down in the interest of speed and effectiveness.

So that's a trust issue. So, if you keep all the power in the legacy structure, it doesn't matter how much rhetoric you pour on the flames, you're not going to get to the changes. And I'm calling this one a failure because they just didn't want to go there, right? They said, no, we're going to double down on individual excellence and empowerment.

And I think that people just got more cynical, right? After year three, they just said, thank you, that's fantastic. That's a great aspiration, but it's not my issue all by myself. I can't solve this as an individual. So that was my failure. 

Galen Low: I love your power model because I never really thought about empowerment that way.

Obviously it has the word power in it, but even just like where my head went was like, okay, yeah, finite amount of energy in the universe, right? It's never going to change so you need to like reshuffle. It's not about, you can't create a bunch of leaders and then not let them lead, which I think is where that sort of disengagement would have happened in that scenario. But also you keep coming back to this word negotiation in RACI, which I love because I hadn't really thought of it that way, but every conversation about RACI is everyone's jockeying a little bit, but productively, right? 

To arrive at clarity because there's only so much power and responsibility to be doled out. You can't have everybody, accountable for everything that's going to be bloated, but I think that's a great sort of, failure story that everyone can learn from that.

Yeah, it's not just about individuals. This is a how it all works together. And to your point earlier, cross functionally sometimes like across teams, across different sort of team cultures. And it's hard and change has to happen in order to accommodate it. 

Cassie Solomon: Well, and I also think that was empowerment. There is all of this kind of normative stuff, right?

Like I want to be a good leader and I want to empower people. See what a good leader I am? I just told that cross functional team, you are empowered. Right? And then they go off and flail around. But I just said this literally yesterday. I said, we can't accomplish all of the role negotiation inside the team meeting.

We can knock off the easy stuff. Let's figure out the low hanging fruit. Let's, walk in prepared to talk about what has been painful in the past. And then some of the discrepancy, some of the negotiation, we're just going to escalate it. And then we're going to say to the boss, is it Galen or is it Cassie who has A on this?

There's a decision that we have to make. We want it to be one person. You impose that. And leaders are like, wait a minute, I was empowering my team. What am I doing stepping in here to clarify their roles? Does that make me a bad person? I'm like, no, that makes you a fantastic leader because you got to know when you step in and when you don't step in. And clarifying roles almost a hundred percent is when you step in when they can't do it on their own.

Galen Low: I like that idea that it's a continuous conversation. It's not just the RACI meeting and then the end. Very cool. 

Last question for you. For an enterprise that's struggling with key decisions getting passed, back and forth for months, where it's like creating limitations on how they're able to scale, what's something they can do right this very minute to start the conversation on enterprise RACI so that they can get themselves unstuck?

Cassie Solomon: Love that question. It reminds me of some work I did last year with a pretty big established tech company in California. So not a startup, no scale up issues, but their issue is that they, were really worried about their competition, stock prices slipping. And what they realized is it was just taking them too long to get their innovations out the door.

And they really suspected it was this cross functional team issue that we've been talking about. And so we went in there and did a bunch of RACI conversations and talking, but we also said, Hey, let's do some decision audits, which is this weird thing that we invented that I kind of love along those principles of making something visible.

We said, give us one project that you don't think went well and give us a project that you think was just fantastic. And we will track through like flowchart, the decision making through the project and see what happened. And at the problematic project, the one that was too slow, we identified two points in the flowchart where they lost three or four months.

And the first one was because of cross functional disagreements. And the second one wasn't quite that long. It was when a senior leader stepped in and reshaped things at the wrong moment. Happened late in the process. And the result of that was they missed their revenue goals for that rollout and they missed the rollout by six months.

So that was shocking. I mean, that was insightful in that bad way that like people were like, Oh, this is a terrible look at what just happened. We don't even want to share this very broadly. We feel so bad about it. And I was thinking, okay, that's going to be tough to sell in the market, but it's a really worthwhile exercise.

And then you can contrast it with the successful project and say, well, how come that project seemed to sail through without any decision making blocks along the way? What did that one look like? What happened at these various kind of nodes in the flowchart? So I think that it's again, it's a tool that helps you diagnose, why am I getting stuck? Why are things not moving as I want them to? 

Galen Low: I love that idea. Decision flowchart. 

Cassie Solomon: But be careful who you show it to. 

Galen Low: Yeah, well, to your point, right? We don't like talking about our failures very much, but as a result, we're not learning together. So I think, if I had one wish for the business world, I'd be like, yeah, can we be a bit more open about our mistakes so that, that tide will lift all boats.

Cassie Solomon: You must sweeten the pot with the analysis of the project that went well, because you can learn also a great deal from your successes and it makes it palatable. So I'm a big fan of doing both. 

Galen Low: I love that. Very cool. Cassie, thank you so much for spending the time with me today. This has been so much fun, as always.

Cassie Solomon: Well, I hope we did it in our new format time. So it was wonderful to be with you and then we rattled through a lot of different topics. Thanks for having me. 

Galen Low: Alright folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like minded project management champions, come join our collective. Head over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.