RACI Models for Stakeholders and Supporters

Many organizations use a model known as RACI to organize their decision-making. To summarize it briefly, RACI is an acronym that encapsulates each of these key roles:

Responsible
The person who fully understands the challenge and desired outcome, and who is accountable for the success of the effort. Without adequate incentive to make “winning” decisions or be accountable, this person serves more of a facilitative role. As the person who arguably is closest to the problem and the possibilities, they benefit from having the risk/reward of making the right decisions, or more likely, learning from decisions to get to the right decision.

Accountable (or the advisor)
The person (or people) who are positioned to understand the risk implications of different decisions, who have veto authority, and who are aware of how outcomes affect the company. I have found that while the CEO might be ultimately accountable for a decision, assigning them the explicit accountability role means they rarely have enough information to question the ideas of the driver. To this end, making them instead an advisor who can veto or challenge ideas sets them up as a contractive foil to the driver, and makes them less likely to blindly accept their recommendations or argue for argument’s sake.

Consulted (or contributors)
These are people who are responsible for actually developing solutions to challenges and seeing them implemented. They will certainly include the close collaborators we looked at previously. This category may also include those who are responsible for aspects of the solution that are dependent on, or highly related but adjacent to, the core solution (such as platform engineering or members of the legal team). Often contributors are actually those who inhabit the creation-oriented roles described earlier, such as drivers or navigators or critics.

Informed
This group tends to be overlooked and dismissed in the (mistaken) assumption that they are less important that the others. However, as we will see, and you likely have experienced, if those who should be informed don’t feel adequately prepared, they are likely to become bottlenecks or adversaries who need to be won over after the fact.

NOTE
You may have seen or read about this model as DACI instead of RACI. In a DACI model, the R becomes a D, for the decider or driver of the effort. Given the previous discussion of pairing or close collaboration, I use RACI’s “Responsible” category to avoid confusion about this role. In my experience, and in the experience of those I spoke with, the differences are negligible between the two sets of acronyms. The key is to assign different focuses to those who have a great deal of accountability for a solution, but little hands-on time or experience, and those who work on a problem directly. Having seen this model employed in many different settings, I have seen it provide healthy clarity around decisions and help teams work in smaller groups, with less friction with those who are interested and perhaps want to be more than informed.

Things to consider when assigning roles and putting the group together:

Expertise and skills
You need a variety but also need to cover what’s required to get the job done. Even if you can’t get full participation from someone with critical knowledge or abilities, see what time and attention you can get rather than trying to make do.
Ability to think on their feet versus “offline” and on their own
If the entire group loves to debate verbally and intensely, you may find that ideas are being chosen based on that public performance, without careful analysis. See who might be able to work offline or in writing to bring a different lens.
Language proficiency
If not everyone shares the same native language, see if you can get the group to use simple words and syntax, avoiding acronyms or abbreviations that won’t be well known.
By being thoughtful about how you place people in a team, and being prepared ahead of time, you can channel people’s energy more productively.