Ep. 10: RACI Is The Wrong Answer To The Right Question
About this episode:
Original Air Date: May 13, 2024The 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.
Downloadable tools from this episode:
“ocean metaphor”: The Ready’s Depthfinding framework
Mentioned in this episode:
“responsibility assignment matrixes” (such as RACI, DACI, DARCI)
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
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
We want to indulge in the what if-ness. Great. Now we're scenario planning and that's an actual thing that is valuable.
Rodney Evans:
That's an activity.
Sam Spurlin:
Not just like rubbing our worry beads about what might happen.
Rodney Evans:
You're very funny today, Sam.
[Intro music]
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy in the best shirt in America is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Rodney, you're just giving me a hard time because apparently I've already worn the shirt on multiple podcast episodes, so we've just decided it's my podcast blouse.
Rodney Evans:
It's because it's the best shirt.
Sam Spurlin:
And it makes me feel confident and I need to feel confident when I am here recording podcasts with my friend Rodney,
Rodney Evans:
And that's your special shirt to make special episodes. Welcome back to At Work with The Ready, a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work meets the present moment
Sam Spurlin:
In each episode we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into, either because it's awesome or because it's garbage and we pull it apart and we propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
Today, brought to you especially by our friend Sam, we're going to talk about RACIs and if you're like, I already know everything about RACIs. That's fine, but we're going to shit on a bunch of other stuff while we're at it, so stick around and before we do that, let's check in, eh?
Sam Spurlin:
Let's check in, in this now strangely Canadian-themed podcast episode that you've started us off...
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it took a Canadian turn at the end.
Sam Spurlin:
That's fine. We love our friends to the north.
Rodney Evans:
We do.
Sam Spurlin:
So checking question, something in your physical space around you, tell us what it is and why you have it nearby.
Rodney Evans:
Oh my gosh. There's so much stuff around me, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, this should be easy.
Rodney Evans:
Wait, I'm going to show you something because we're going to talk about this in the episode today.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, great.
Rodney Evans:
So we've been cooking on a metaphor about organizations and how they work, and when I was really deep in the thinking before I had talked to anybody about it, I made this with watercolor pencils that my mom gave me.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. Rodney's holding up...do you want to describe it for our audio-only listeners?
Rodney Evans:
No. They have to go to YouTube and see it. It's a watercolor of the ocean. And I didn't make it because I'm an exceptionally good watercolor artist. I made it because sometimes as I am trying to figure hard things out, doing something that is visual and creative and related to those things helps get me out of my too left-brained, too rational thing and into a different space where there's more possibility.
Sam Spurlin:
I love that. You know where that's going to look good.
Rodney Evans:
Where?
Sam Spurlin:
Photo of it in the back of your next book, or a book that you are probably going to write about this shit.
Rodney Evans:
Probably. Probably, eventually.
Sam Spurlin:
It'll be like, "Original by the author 10 years before the thing was written."
Rodney Evans:
It's like a cave painting.
Sam Spurlin:
And then you could maybe sell it. Yeah. Exactly.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I'm also going to tell my mom that I used her special... she's always giving me things to relax. She's always like, "Here's a Buddhist waterboard, here is a coloring book for adults." She's always like, "Why don't you calm down?" Here's a tool for your birthday that's slightly judgmental.
Sam Spurlin:
I don't have children, but it seems like a similar strategy for calming down like a toddler. "Here's some drawing tools. Go nuts. Leave me alone all day."
Rodney Evans:
Why don't we do crayons for a little bit?
Sam Spurlin:
It's good for every age.
Rodney Evans:
I love it.
Sam Spurlin:
All right, I'm going to stand up to grab my thing.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. In your new office coming at you from New York State, it's Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, he took it off a wall, folks.
Sam Spurlin:
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice I have a different background, but similar items because I didn't get rid of all my stuff when I moved. I just changed where I am. Anyway.
Rodney Evans:
Didn't get rid of your shirt. Mm-hmm.
Sam Spurlin:
There's a bunch of stuff on here. There's a cork board with pictures of me and my brothers and my wife, but the main thing on this cork board are all of the retreat pins that we've ever had at The Ready, except our latest one, I just realized. I just realized I don't know where that is. I got to find that.
Rodney Evans:
Sam, you got to get it. It's a tree.
Sam Spurlin:
Wait, no. Oh, I got it's right here. It's right here. Okay. All right. Anyway, every time we do a retreat, we have a pin that everybody who is at that retreat receives and I have been saving all of them and sticking them in this cork board, which hangs up in my office.
Rodney Evans:
That's so nice. Do you know how the pin tradition started? It was before my time.
Sam Spurlin:
It was before my time as well. I believe it started at Undercurrent, so I think it predates even The Ready.
Rodney Evans:
All right, well I'll have to ask Aaron about it. I'm going to see him in an hour. I'll do that.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, great. Ask him about it.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, great. And I'm going to ask the rest of you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast, five stars only please, for our egos and our moms and our sanity. Thank you very much.
Sam Spurlin:
All right, are we ready?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
To talk about RACIs and all-
Rodney Evans:
Let's fucking go, Sam.
The Pattern: RACIs promise clear decision-making, but create more problems than they solve
Sam Spurlin:
All right, so you said we are going to talk about RACIs. And in even saying that, I think we have made an assumption that people understand what this English word is, RACI, that has usages way outside of organizations, hopefully. It's an acronym, R-A-C-I, and it is a tool that many organizations use to try to get clear about who and how decisions are being made, who is responsible, and there's lots of different versions of it. RACI, DARCI, DACI, they're all variations on a theme where you try to take all of your people, stakeholders who may have feelings and opinions about what a decision should be and try to up front articulate where's everybody going to play? So who's responsible, who's accountable, who's being consulted, who's being informed. There are slight variations based on the specific kind that you're doing. I'm most familiar with RACI.
So we're going to talk about these, because I have never been on a project where RACIs were not a thing that predated us in an organization. And almost every single implementation I have seen of this tool and things like it has not been particularly good. The people who use it aren't stoked about it, yet also they seem very beholden to them and spend a lot of time creating them because I do think, as we will get into here, there's lots of reasons why our impulses are to make things like this and then hold them very dearly and we think there are probably better ways to go about doing this.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Cool.
Sam Spurlin:
What has your experience been with RACIs in organizations, either as a consultant or actually working in an organization where you had to use them?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it's mostly what you said and it's just the old "complicated solution for complex problems" thing. We'll talk about this, but I've definitely been in conversations about RACIs where the conversation itself was quite valuable mostly because there was articulation of what a decision was to begin with that was getting what would look like. It was like, "Oh, this is when we make a choice." Which even that in complexity can be... I struggle with that myself where I'm like, are we deciding something right now? IDK.
So I feel like I've been in RACI conversations that were valuable both because we're like, "Oh, we are talking about a decision or a set of decisions. That feels good." And some discussion about accountability openly in a group often does feel like a lot of progress compared to what usually happens, which is a lot of politicking and implicit nudging and then people being mad at each other and blaming each other just because things are unclear. So I do think that there are ancillary benefits to the RACI, but it doesn't actually do what it's advertised to do.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I'm glad you took that initial step into it, because I actually wanted to give some initial props around it because I think it is actually the impulse to get clear on something that is very unclear.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
That's right in our wheelhouse. We try to help organizations do that all the time, so I never want come down on an organization who is using RACIs because it may be the only thing they know and the thing that they are trying to solve is a valuable thing to try to get some clarity on. It all starts to fall apart in implementation though.
Rodney Evans:
You proposed this topic, have you seen something recently that made you want to talk about this?
Sam Spurlin:
Nothing that I will be so specific as to let people see themselves directly in this.
Rodney Evans:
You're not going to subtweet anyone on this podcast?
Sam Spurlin:
Honestly, it's the same every time in the sense that the exercise of creating the artifact becomes a bit of a MacGuffin in the sense now we're really all very concerned about making this artifact and losing sight of the conversation that we need to have to make the artifact and then once we've made the artifact, there's two ways it goes badly and I've seen both. One is we just throw it in a drawer and we never talk about it again. And honestly, sometimes that's the better result. We had some conversations, we wrote some things down, it was probably unnecessarily contentious, but we got through it and now we can ignore it and do the work. Or, we are extremely beholden to this thing that we wrote down, which we probably did at the beginning of a project that is very complex and our reality has changed around us, but gosh darn it, we spent six months making this DARCI, so we're going to stick to it.
I'm going to use RACI and DARCI interchangeably because I just want to give full credit. And then it becomes about the artifact, which is a distraction from the thing that you actually said earlier on. You said the conversation is the valuable thing and I 100% agree, to the extent that a RACI lets us have a good conversation about who actually needs to weigh in on this thing, then it's an actual useful tool.
Why RACIs force you to plan for every possibility upfront
Rodney Evans:
Cool. The other thing that, and then I promise we're for real going to dig into this pattern and what it is, but we're doing it, we're doing the work,
Sam Spurlin:
We're doing it right now. We're doing the thing,
Rodney Evans:
We're doing the thing,
Sam Spurlin:
We're having the conversation.
Rodney Evans:
Are we making a decision right now? Is this it? Here's the other impulse that comes up with RACIs and DARCIs, and the DARE model, which I learned about in researching this episode is this, and I think this will feel familiar to people who have ever experienced life at work. It took me so much work to break myself of this habit. There is a thing that happens to us where it's like first we have to take an inventory of all of it. And it's like, whether you're talking about RACIs, or you're talking about project plans, or financial models, or strategies, or a lot of the other things that live at the surface of an organization, which I'm just going to throw out now we're calling that the Sunshine Zone. We're going to talk more about that later.
But think about the Sunshine Zone as the layer of the ocean that light touches that's visible from the surface. There's all this shit in the Sunshine Zone that are the physical assets and outputs of work. And often, when we want to make something in the Sunshine Zone like a decision matrix or a strategy deck, there is this impulse to first collect and document every decision, or every kind of decision, or every kind of work-
Sam Spurlin:
That we might need to make. Right?
Rodney Evans:
That we might need to make and classify them. And it's like, maybe you can tell me psychologically what that's about. I don't really understand it, but I know I have it too where it's like I'll look around my house and be like, I really need to clean the baseboards and then I'll go, I should make a list of every detailed type of cleaning that needs to be done this spring and it's like, or asshole, clean the baseboards. Because like, "Actually?"
Sam Spurlin:
I have an answer for us.
Rodney Evans:
Tell me.
Sam Spurlin:
If we lived in the 1600s, we'd be famous polymath scientists who spent their days collecting specimens of every animal they could find in making just crazy taxonomies of things. And that was valued back then, because we didn't know shit about shit. But now you're just a person procrastinating on the things that you actually have to do.
Rodney Evans:
You're just a person making lists instead of doing the thing that is the present tension or issue. Or the thing is, about things like the baseboards and the RACI is just taking care of the issue that is at issue might actually take care of a bunch of things or there might be a bunch of things that would make that list that will never become issues but we'll spend time litigating them because they're there.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I have a less tongue in cheek answer along those same lines, which is we all sense that we live on the edge of chaos. Our worlds, our organizations are chaos or at best just complex. And that's scary, and feels bad, and can be overwhelming if you sit in it. So doing things like writing down every decision we might need to make or making a three-year roadmap about how this really complex project is going to go feels like a valid response to the chaos. It's like putting on your armor so that you can go out into the world and survive, but that armor is just going to slow you down and make you more likely to be eaten by wolves.
What a RACI is actually for: clarifying who's responsible
Rodney Evans:
It's so true. It's so true. So Sam, what are RACIs meant to do? What's the problem that they're supposed to solve, in your experience?
Sam Spurlin:
They're supposed to do a lot of things, which is part of the problem. When you have a tool that has lots of different ends that it is supposed to meet, it tends to get diluted. But one of the main things is to create clarity about who is accountable for making a thing happen. Accountable is one word that you see a lot. Who is responsible? One of the interesting things about RACIs, and as you think more about these tools and research about them, it turns into an etymology sort of lesson.
Rodney Evans:
It really does. What do we mean by accountable?
Sam Spurlin:
Who do we actually mean by this word?
Rodney Evans:
What does responsible mean to you?
Sam Spurlin:
Which is a fun thing. I think etymology is fun, but also perhaps a distraction from what we're actually trying to do. But I think the main thing is we have really difficult things to move forward and if we don't get clear about how it's going to happen or who ultimately is going to care enough to make this thing happen, then it's in most cases not going to happen. And not out of maliciousness, but because within organizations when things don't clearly live in one zone, one function, they tend to fall between them. They fall through the cracks in ways that are kind of predictable. So I think the RACI is an attempt at let's head that off. We need somebody who is going to make this decision or make this thing happen. And then inevitably, because if it was a simple decision, we wouldn't even be talking about this. There are lots and lots of other people who have opinions about how that thing should be done and we try to parse them into different categories to create that clarity to be able to move forward on something.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I often think it's meant to solve a perceived accountability problem.
Sam Spurlin:
Perceived accountability problem. Say more.
Rodney Evans:
Well, I often find when leaders point to lack of accountability as a tension, it's a lagging symptom of a bunch of other things going on that usually, in my experience, have more to do with clarified authority and resourcing and information... What I hear a lot from leaders around accountability is they're not thinking like owners and they don't sweat the business and there's a lot of that stuff, but usually I find not very far underneath that is some real systemic stuff going on where people actually aren't clear on their roles or they're really under-resourced on their teams or they don't feel like they have the power to do the things and they would do them. I often think that a felt sense of lack of accountability is more to do with lack of clarity then laziness or interest or drive or anything else.
Why daily work doesn't support the people held accountable
Sam Spurlin:
So why then does the RACI not create that clarity? It feels like, all right, we need to get clarity on stuff, so let's just write this shit down. Let's decide who decides and we'll just now we have a thing.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Well I think to me there's two roads that branch out from there. One is the Twilight zone. So this is the next layer... You guys, this is the metaphor, you're just going to keep hearing about it, so strap in, but there'll be explanations coming. But you're all smart, the people who listen to this show, so you'll get it. The Twilight Zone is the layer of the ocean underneath the Sunshine Zone. So if up there you have the RACI chart and your strategy deck and a bunch of other things we've talked about in the show. The Twilight Zone is the depth of the ocean that some light gets through. So there's some stuff that goes on there that's visible and there's some stuff that's invisible.
And usually, what I find, is things get very clear in the Sunshine Zone. We write down who is accountable, and then in the twilight zone we don't have any ways of working that bring that to life. So it's not like then there's attention paid to, okay, what is the operating rhythm? What is the resourcing? What are the skills? What are the ways of working that are needed for the person whose name is in that box on the spreadsheet to step into accountability? So that's one of the paths from accountability into nothing.
Sam Spurlin:
Which what's the other path?
Rodney Evans:
The other path, which is more midnight zone-y, so we're just getting right into it now.
Sam Spurlin:
So sunlight is the top, twilight is the middle, midnight now is below Twilight.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And midnight is where no light reaches, and this is where our individual experience, motivation, perspective, et cetera, lives. I find that, sometimes, when there is a declaration of accountability, because of people's lived experience working in fear-based cultures, there is a real hesitance to take on accountability, even if it is given. And I think there's a lot in there that happens, but I do feel like leaders who have a lot of power and just sort of intend to give it to someone or intend to be like, "You are now consecrated as the person accountable for this." Think that that's the end of the conversation. And for someone who has maybe struggled in the past with having a project fail or being held responsible for something they didn't have control over or had a toxic manager or been discriminated against or, or, or, or, or there's a lot that comes up for people that's not just like, "Thanks for the torch boss. Off I go out."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
You know what I mean?
Sam Spurlin:
I just pictured a literal torch in your hand and a little pickaxe helmet sort of situation. I don't know why that flashed so clearly in my eyes when you said that.
Rodney Evans:
That's so funny. I was thinking of the Olympic people.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, that makes more sense than what I had some sort of caving metaphor in my head.
Rodney Evans:
I was thinking you were doing a coal miner thing.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I think so.
Rodney Evans:
I get it.
Sam Spurlin:
Going down in the depths and need my torch so I can see what's happening. That makes a lot of sense, especially when you think about in a lot of organizations, I would have to imagine being the R in the RACI or the D in the DARCI is just like a death sentence. "Great. Now we have a piece of paper that says this is my fault when this thing doesn't actually go well. Great, I'm so glad we've done this." And no matter what I do, because it's a complex project, a complex problem, I think sometimes we forget that the default state of trying to do hard things is failure, I think.
We probably have a higher failure rate on trying to do big audacious things than we do success rate. But in most organizations, you can not say that. Everything has to be a success, even if we talk about how things are safe to try or we celebrate failure, fail fast. I've seen very few that truly kind of walk the talk on that. So RACIs just become your own arrest warrant. Walking around with, if this doesn't go well, now we know why.
Why splitting “responsible” and “accountable” sets up people to fail
Rodney Evans:
Now we know why. And this gets to part of what I object to in RACIs, and you can talk about DACIs, because I haven't worked with those directly, but the idea that those who are responsible and those who are accountable are different people? You are starting the game on the back foot. You're starting from there by being like, "Okay, so now I'm responsible. The people who are actually going to do the work to either make this a success or a failure. Now I either have to influence or manage or nudge or whatever. You're already setting it up that I have all of the blame coming my way and way less of the control over that outcome.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Are we selling some organizations short, potentially? So one way I could see this breaking a little bit better is if a RACI actually has some muscle behind it in the sense of, "If I am the responsible party here, then I should actually have authority to make things happen." So if I come to you and say, "Hey, I need help doing this thing." Or, "I need your team to do this." And we have a culture such that you either feel compelled, maybe, or you actually want to help me, is there, I guess, value in having somebody, one person who really gives a shit about how a thing goes? And sometimes I try to simplify the RACI down to like, is that just what we're doing? We're trying to say at least we have one person who is sweating whether or not this thing happens and we are trusting them to use their judgment to go and do that. Does that make sense?
Rodney Evans:
I think it makes sense rationally, but I don't know. I think my question is, is that more cold comfort? The one "chest to poke, one throat to choke" expressions that our clients love to use all day. There's so little work in a complex organization where that's actually true. That's like saying Source's success or failure is based on me. Like yes, do I feel ultimately responsible? I do. And I don't think anyone would say that I, in my role, for example, as someone who leads and stewards a thing am solely responsible. It's like there are a bunch of people who carry a bunch of things that have basically total authority over their work, that yeah, can you blame me if Ashley does a terrible job on the finances? I guess, but that feels really lazy.
RACI roles vs. The Ready's Project Steward role
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I think that all makes sense. And the reason I asked that question is as I was reading more about RACI type things, reading more about, I think Apple has the Directly Responsible Individual. I think Compass has the Single Point of Accountability. As I was reading about those roles, I was actually thinking about the project steward role in how we work. And it's not that this person is in charge and calling all the shots, but there has been, I have found there to be a lot of value when I'm on a team and there is a steward, you trust that there's a lot of complexity in how this thing is going and we can't have everyone thinking about everything all the time.
It's really actually kind of calming to know, okay, there is a role who is sweating whether or not this stuff happens. But I think the main difference here in a system like ours is that we have all that twilight zone stuff for them to lean on. And what I'm talking about is an operating rhythm where the right conversations are happening at the right time, supportive relationships with your colleagues, getting feedback, all of the stuff that you need to manage complexity I think helps whoever's in that role of make sure things are moving in the right direction, which I think is a slightly healthier version than what we're talking about with a RACI.
Rodney Evans:
Well, I think that's a really good point, and I think if you use that example, something that we've learned a lot about at The Ready over the years is sort of this radical ownership thing is cool I guess, but for the people who are in those roles, in those, I'm calling them SPOAs now, I learned that today, In those SPOA roles, if you put people in a role like that without support and not just support that they ask for support, that it is felt that is needed across, You are going to create a situation where there is not psychological safety and where there are high degrees of overwork and burnout and heroics, you're basically saying to people, "The buck stops with you, figure it the fuck out", which is not how thriving organizations work.
So I think your point about the project steward is an interesting one. On the one hand, yes, it's cool to have someone who has the articulated role of keeping the project architecture in mind and one of the responsibilities of that role is to articulate to the center what they need from growth, from finance, from Tabea in her transfo role in order to do that well. It's not like, "You are the SPOA, figure it out." It's like, "You are the SPOA and part that means pulling what you need together to be successful."
Sam Spurlin:
Two things there that I love. One is that you just listed off major parts of The Ready and then Tabea, like she is just a function at The Ready.
Rodney Evans:
She is a function. She's a circle.
Sam Spurlin:
You said in her transfo circle role but we have a finance, we have growth, we have Tabea. And I'm just nodding along with you.
Rodney Evans:
I mean, Tabea's is a force, bro. She's a whole entity.
Sam Spurlin:
I agree. I agree. We do have a Tabea, thank Christ. Second, you made a really good point here, which is with our project steward role that we're kind of playing with here as a SPOA sort of idea, we actually have articulated specific responsibilities that they have, not just this kind of general, "Make sure it goes good, bro." But specific things that role is responsible for and there are some things in there like, "Make sure you have an op rhythm set up so that things are being handled." And I was just trying to dig into Murmur to go find the actual list, but it's a lot of not particularly glamorous stuff that actually you're responsible for. The non-glamorous stuff done well and done consistently is actually how you get complex work done, not individual heroics, individual expertise in its own silo. It's how do you bring together disparate parts over a period of time to actually get things done?
Rodney Evans:
Well, and what you're making me think about Sam is how much is written into the project steward role, and I remember drafting a lot of that language in Murmur, how much of that role is sweating the twilight zone? It's not about articulating that you're the final line of defense on the project, it's that if someone is going to be responsible for there being feedback, for having competent team members, for asking people on and off of projects, for holding a disciplined operating rhythm, for creating feedback loops with The Ready, we don't just hope for the best. We articulate what role is going to hold those ways of working for a team and it's the steward and I think there are teams where that's not true, but it starts with the steward unless and until it is given or taken by someone else. And that's a really important distinction.
Again, it's getting us out of that superficial level of just a thing is written down and into what are the ways of working it will take to bring it to life that are both visible and invisible and who is holding that? And what I haven't seen in a lot of conversations where clients are filling out a RACI or where I've been one of the people whose name is going into the RACI, what I haven't seen a lot of is the conversation about the twilight zone. Like, "Okay, Rodney being responsible for this product making it to market. What does that mean for our OS? What does that mean for our ways of working?" Sometimes it's like, "Do you need to hire?" But that's kind of it. It doesn't usually get a lot deeper than that. So yeah, I don't know where I was going. I just liked what you said. I got excited then I lost my train of thought.
Why RACIs stay surface-level and miss the deeper issues
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and I have also lost my train of thought, because as you know from our retreat a couple of weeks ago, I'm really excited by this ocean metaphor because there are a lot of things we can do with sea beasts and other parts of the ocean ecosystem, but one image that I just thought of, which I may or may not make the final draft is that if you have things in the sunlight zone, those visible type things, they are only valuable in so much as they are actually connected into the twilight zone.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
So I'm picturing jellyfish blob at the top in the sunlight zone, but its tentacles have to be going into the twilight zone for it to survive. Yeah, sure. Have an artifact where we've written down things about who's responsible and who's being consulted or whatever, but have the stuff going into the twilight zone around op rhythm, around how we have conversations, around how we steer or how we learn that allows us to actually operationalize that. Is that anything? Is that a thing?
Rodney Evans:
Is that a thing? I mean, yes. Look, I think that we haven't talked a lot about sea beasts, but the point that you're making that is absolutely bang on, and the reason for creating the metaphor, is there is nothing in a system of work that does not have components at all three depths if it is meant to actually impact the operation. There are things that don't exist at all three depths all the time, but for them to function, it's like there is no reason to have a fantastic operating rhythm really without any clarified strategy, because at some point, no matter how well you're working together, what are you trying to do? What is the articulated thing that you're aiming for?
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and I totally agree, and I bet you there's bidirectionality there too. Having a good operating rhythm gives you the space to do the strategy work.
Rodney Evans:
A hundred percent, and having a great strategy, like we said in our last episode about trad consulting, having a great strategy doesn't do fuck all in the twilight zone or the midnight zone. All you got is a deck, bro. You have no operations to bring that to life and you have no sense of how the individuals who will or will not operationalize those words on a PowerPoint feel are motivated, are able to contribute, are perceiving, et cetera, et cetera, and a RACI is no different. It's all the same thing, which is the asset isn't the work, the asset is just the asset.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. All sunlight, no twilight.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that's right. And I think that, like a lot of things you and I have talked about on this show, part of why things like the RACI, and RACIs particularly, persist is because it's actually the easier work to do. It's the easiest work to get into a room and just try to predict the future and then write a bunch of stuff down and then be like, "Bye."
Sam Spurlin:
It's the best kind of easy work in that it feels hard. Then we get to convince ourselves that it's the real stuff. Right?
Rodney Evans:
The best kind of easy work in that it feels hard is the smartest thing you've ever said maybe to me. Ding, you're smarter in New York. Look at you.
Sam Spurlin:
It's this fresh northern air.
Rodney Evans:
Fresh northern air.
Sam Spurlin:
I'm out of the swamp now, and here I am just breathing in mountain air.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's so right though, Sam. It persists because it keeps us in the sunshine zone where we're writing it down. It feels like it's hard, but it's all predictive so it can't actually be wrong yet. And it allows us to avoid both the conversations about how we would actually make these decisions or do this work or be accountable or do the informing. Have you ever noticed that when they talk about inform, nobody ever says like, "Well, how would that work?" Okay, so there's all these stakeholders in the I column of the RACI, okay, cool, so what does that mean? What does it mean to inform them? Send a bunch of emails that nobody reads?
Sam Spurlin:
At the end?
Rodney Evans:
At the end?
Sam Spurlin:
In the beginning, the middle?
Rodney Evans:
In the middle. Win hearts and minds? I don't fucking know. What does it mean to inform? It's like nobody gets into the granularity of like, well, what would an informed stakeholder know or do or say? What would the interactions be to get them to that state? Nobody gets into the how of that. They just go, "We really wrote down those stakeholders that need to be informed and it feels good because we wrote them all down. We argued about them and then we got done."
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and that granularity is probably, for the most part, inherently unknowable until we actually start the work.
Rodney Evans:
A hundred percent.
Sam Spurlin:
That's the whole start by starting glib thing that we say all the time, actually, I think has a lot of wisdom in it because so much of the stuff that actually matters can not actually yet be perceived until we actually get started.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. The other thing that bugs me about RACIs is that they feel like one and done in a way that we've talked about the ways that they make people feel more comfortable, but also I just think it is very complexity foolish to feel like a decision is now or never before we get into the work. And so, there's so little at the beginning of a project when you're standing at the beginning of a path up the mountain, there's so little that you actually know. And this idea, I think it's actually full of hubris, both to think that you can predict what's going to happen on the journey and determine now how you're going to decide or more accurately who is going to decide what later.
And also, it puts too much pressure on predicting the future when actually you could just be like, what kind of accountability or authority do we need to get started? Sam's going to set up the meetings? Okay. That might be it. That might be as much as we need to actually get going. And then let's decide who decides as there are decisions to make rather than spending all of this juice upfront to try to categorize decisions that we may never need to make and create a false sense of urgency that, well, we can't do any work until we know this. And it's like, of course we can. Of course we can.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it's a flavor of binary thinking that we see everywhere. Now or never. Well, no, it's ongoing. Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Almost nothing is now or never in my experience, almost nothing.
What to start doing instead of RACIs
Sam Spurlin:
So we're not here to just beat up on things that we don't love.
Rodney Evans:
It's so fun though.
Sam Spurlin:
Although it can be fun.
Rodney Evans:
I know.
Sam Spurlin:
And, to bring us back to something like we both talked about early on, is that the impulse to do something that looks like a RACI is actually quite positive. Making the implicit explicit. It's one of my favorite things to do with an organization. This is actually one of the rare situations where most organizations take it to 11. I spent a lot of time trying to get orgs to write down things that are just implicit and actually articulate them. And for whatever reason in this domain, everyone just goes hog wild.
Rodney Evans:
Goes sideways.
Sam Spurlin:
So what should a leader or an organization be thinking about doing instead if they're on board with everything that we've just been talking about, about how RACIs leave us wanting.
Tip 1: Focus on the present, don’t "future-tension"
Rodney Evans:
First of all, in the group that is actually making decisions about the project, start with what the present decisions are and the present tensions and don't get into future tensioning. That's the easiest one is just say out loud what we don't have to decide right now. And then for real, don't decide it right now. Just be like, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. There's a reason that there's an expression like that. We don't need to cross that bridge right now.
Sam Spurlin:
We didn't make it up.
Rodney Evans:
We didn't make that up.
Sam Spurlin:
We didn't make it up.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, it was already there.
Sam Spurlin:
It's an easy one in that it's simple, but it's not easy in the sense that when teams actually start noticing when they're future tensioning, they start realizing like, "Holy shit , we do this all the time."
Rodney Evans:
All the time.
Sam Spurlin:
We are always future tensioning. So once you start to see it, you can't unsee it in a, I think a useful and fun way, but.
Rodney Evans:
I agree. And I think in teams that are varsity around this, I have this experience at The Ready, there are times where people will go, I'm future tensioning right now, but I just need to say this out loud. And that's fine as long as we are aware of what we're doing and that it's not actually something that we need to solve.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. And what you're not saying is we don't need to worry about things that do actually have a long lead time or do actually require planning. I think that is the kind of overly simplistic pushback on the don't future tension thing, but do you have any sort of voiceover that you generally give? If somebody is like, well, what do you mean to not think about the future? That's how we actually make sure we don't get into a bad situation.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think just noticing the difference between long lead time and anxiety is real because it's like anxiety sounds like what if and worst case scenario, long lead time sounds like it's going to take us six months to choose a vendor so we need to start that now.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And as you said, the what if thing I just realized too, if we want to indulge in the what-ifness, great, now we're scenario planning and that's an actual thing that is valuable.
Rodney Evans:
That's an activity,
Sam Spurlin:
Not just like rubbing our worry beads about what might happen.
Rodney Evans:
You're very funny today, Sam. Okay. What ideas do you have for the people's?
Tip 2: Create space for ongoing decision making
Sam Spurlin:
I think I just want to put a little bit of finer point on some of the things we've been saying throughout which I'm, in my mind, calling it an arena. So create an arena for good project execution and ongoing decision making. I think RACIs become this thing that are filled with import, because it is the one time that we have actually come together to think about how we actually want to do a thing. So we pour way too much importance into that. What if we had rhythms and rituals and moments where we knew we would come together as a project team and have a conversation like, Hey, how'd we do in the last month on the things we said were important? Oh we did real bad. What are we going to do differently? What are we going to move forward? What are we going to change? Maybe someone else needs to step into this role.
There's so many levers to pull if you are used to having a continuous conversation that ebbs and flows about how things are going. And I think a lot of times when I see in this kind of fetishization of RACIs is because we have none of that. This is our one shot, now I've got the piece of paper and we're going to just go until we either succeed if we're lucky or fail if we're not. There's just so much more to be done to give yourself better odds.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. That's so smart.
Sam Spurlin:
All right, Rodney, hit me with your next idea.
Tip 3: Break large decisions into several smaller ones
Rodney Evans:
My next idea is rather than imagining a huge decision in the future and how we might handle it, try to break large decisions down into small decisions. And I thought a lot about this actually while I was reading the research. There is a thing here that is very related to the binary thinking and the urgency thinking and the, "We won't get another chance to do this." Thinking that is related to this, which is if you are in a situation where you're like, "Let's see if we can break this very complex decision that we are not comfortable making into a smaller, more time bound, more experimental, more safe to try thing." And there are forces that are like, "No." I would investigate those forces.
And what I mean by that is I've been in situations where, for example, we were exploring a partnership and it's been very like, we're either going to do a blood oath on the full moon or we're going to do nothing. And I'm like, that's going to be nothing for me dog. It's like if you are pushing for an all or nothing mentality around complex decisions, investigate what the fuck else is going on there because there is something else going on there that is untoward.
Sam Spurlin:
Take note of all of the blood oaths that you're being pressured to make and question and the look behind that curtain a little bit.
Rodney Evans:
Look behind the curtain of now or never, all or nothing. There's something gross going on there and it shows up in decision making because it pushes people into action before there's clarity. And that is what I want people to tune into. Are there moments of urgent decisions? Yes. Are there times that windows close? Sure. And those are the edge cases, not the norm in the pace of doing business.
Tip 4: Decisions shouldn’t rest on just one person
Sam Spurlin:
I like that. I think it's really connected to the last thing that I wanted to say, which is something around it is beneficial to have a really filled toolbox with different ways of making decisions. We often just talk about decision-making as this thing that we do. We just decide. Right? But there's so many different ways to make decisions. We can vote. Somebody can just decide. We can do integrative decision making. We can use an advice process, we can use consent. There's so many different ways, and I think this is why I think we're always such an advocate that everybody in an organization, especially folks in leadership positions, should have some org design chops because it is really nice to realize that you have kind of a buffet of choices in front of you about how to make decisions.
So as an example, using something called an advice process to make a decision. So yeah, if somebody does have a very clear decision right around the thing, but because it's complex, because it's high stakes, we have articulated that they need to go get advice from other minimal but important roles before they make that. Yeah, that's RACI-ish, but it's actually quite simple and it's much more about creating guardrails that we can trust people to stay within rather than railroad you have to stay on and we have to define it very precisely upfront.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, absolutely. And as we've said before, there's no expectation that every piece of advice is integrated, which also isn't super clear in RACI. Like the C is not super clear-
Sam Spurlin:
If you consult, do you get to like-
Rodney Evans:
Do you get to say, "I consulted Sam then I ignored what he said." That's not always articulated.
Sam Spurlin:
I love, actually, that's one of my favorite things about the advice process is that if you're doing it right, it's truly advice. And I have loved examples in the past where somebody has asked for my advice on something and then been like, "Cool, I really appreciate advice and I'm not using it."
Rodney Evans:
Cool. Bye.
Sam Spurlin:
If it was somebody who I know is very good at their work, they're very much deeper into the work than I am. I don't know, maybe this is the midnight work of like de-centering your ego. I'm okay with my advice not being taken, probably not in every situation, but occasionally. That's, I think, a sign of health in a decision-making landscape.
Rodney Evans:
Absolutely. I love that. And the great thing about the advice process is as someone who gets a lot of advice, both internally and externally, you are always going to get oppositional advice. And the worst thing to do with oppositional advice is just meet in the middle. That is a race to mediocrity. So the great thing about advice process is getting real divergence and then being like, okay, now I have to use my own filters as the person with the most context to decide whether I'm going to listen to one of these two or make my own way. But what I'm not going to do, which again I see in bureaucracies that use tools like RACI is figure out how to integrate all of it until we have something so vague as to be non-controversial to everyone, at which point we have nothing of interest.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly.
Rodney and Sam’s closing takeaways on RACIs
Rodney Evans:
Okay, Sam, with one minute remaining. Closing round.
Sam Spurlin:
Closing round.
Rodney Evans:
What'd you notice, my dude?
Sam Spurlin:
What did I notice? What did I notice? RACIs are easy and fun to beat up on, but I noticed myself really wanting to honor that impulse because I do feel like that impulse to make a RACI, we can work with that. And I feel like sometimes I am so starved for even the tiniest glimpses of like, are we on the same page? Are we seeing the world the same way?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
There are lots of, "Let's make a RACI" energy in a lot of our clients, so I want to get really good at noticing it and then doing that judo move into something that is so much better and we're all going to like a lot more.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I noticed that your comment near the end about decision types really landed with me and the fact that there's so many decisions that should be executed quickly and without advice or management or layers or anything. And those sort of get swept up into the same methodology as decisions that are both more complicated and more complex is a real problem. And in some of the research that I read, there are reports that slowing decisions down actually degrades their quality, not the other way around. And so this idea that there are places to take our time and there are places to not, to just fuck around and find out a little bit was a real reflection as we were doing this.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool. All right, I think we should wrap here. And as you all know, we're always looking for new topics for the show. I can't come up with every single banger here. We need ideas.
Rodney Evans:
Sam's only got so many RACIs, guys.
Sam Spurlin:
We need ideas from other folks. And then you have one of those ideas, what we call an organizational pattern, you should shoot us a note at podcast [at] theready [dot] com.
Rodney Evans:
This show is engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by our dear friend and recent vacationer, Jack Van Amburg.
Sam Spurlin:
He's so chill.
Rodney Evans:
At Work with The Ready is created by The Ready-
Sam Spurlin:
He's so relaxed now.
Rodney Evans:
He's so chill, unlikely. We love you, but that's not your brand. Where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening.