10. RACI is The Wrong Answer To The Right Question

At Work with The Ready

The RACI matrix (as well its cousins DACI, DARCI, etc.) aims to neatly categorize stakeholders into roles—who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for every decision your team makes. We spend a lot of time filling out those RACI boxes, because it’s supposed to give us order and predictability—a single source of truth for all future choices.

We’re all about achieving real clarity, but we often see RACIs treated as a one-and-done exercise, rather than something that evolves with a team. People end up in the “R” or “A” space without having the actual authority to execute a role, and then we make those roles the fall guy for a system never set up for them to succeed.

In this episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore the good intentions that lead us to make RACIs in the first place, where they fall flat, and why decision making is always more complicated than what can be captured on a chart.

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Mentioned references:

• Responsibility assignment matrixes (such as RACI, DACI, and DARCI)
• DARE model
• MacGuffin
• DRI (Directly Responsible Individual)
• SPOA (Single Point of Accountability)
• "traditional consulting ep": AWWTR Ep. 8
• "future tension": BNW Ep. 16 with Thomas Thomison
• "scenario planning": BNW Ep. 34 with Kevin Kelly

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