Governance
RAPID Decision Roles
A role-charting tool from Bain & Company that assigns five roles for any major decision, Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide, so that one named person owns the call and everyone else knows exactly how they are expected to contribute.
Also known as RAPID decision-making model, Bain RAPID (a registered trademark of Bain & Company), Who has the D?. First set out by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, Bain & Company in 2006; the primary source is cited in full below.
- Format
- Checklist / audit
- Level
- Corporate · Business unit · Team
- Best for
- Plan execution
- Decision stage
- Decide · Plan · Execute
- Difficulty
- Introductory
- Time to apply
- Half a day to chart a handful of critical decisions; weeks of follow-through to make the roles stick.
Plate · The model
The components
Recommend
Owns the process of gathering input, framing the options and proposing a course of action. A good Recommend does the analytical heavy lifting so the D can decide rather than re-investigate.
Signals of strength
Recommendations arrive as unweighted option lists with no proposal · Several rival recommenders lobby the decider separately · The decider repeats the recommender's analysis before deciding
Agree
Holds a formal veto over the recommendation, typically for legal, regulatory, safety or financial-control reasons. An Agree must negotiate with the Recommend until the proposal is acceptable, or escalate.
Signals of strength
Sign-off roles multiply until everyone senior has a veto · Vetoes appear late, after the recommendation is socialised · Agree is treated as a courtesy consultation and then overridden
Perform
Executes the decision once made. Perform is a named role precisely because decisions fail at implementation; the people doing the work need to be identified, and often consulted, before the call is made.
Signals of strength
Performers first hear of the decision when told to implement it · Execution stalls because feasibility was never tested with the doers · Decisions are quietly reworked during implementation
Input
Provides facts, evidence and judgement to the Recommend. Input is consulted and genuinely heard, and holds no veto. The recommender is free to weigh input and set some of it aside.
Signals of strength
Everyone is consulted on everything as a defensive habit · Input providers treat consultation as a vote · Consultation rounds are used to relitigate settled questions
Decide
The single person who makes the call and commits the organisation to act. The D owns the decision, resolves deadlock between Recommend and Agree, and is accountable for the outcome.
Signals of strength
Nobody in the room can name the decider without hesitating · The same decision is taken twice at different levels · Everything escalates to the chief executive by default
When it earns its keep
- Decisions that matter keep stalling, getting made twice at different levels, or unravelling at implementation, and nobody can say who actually owns the call.
- Responsibilities for ongoing work are already clear yet decisions still drag. RACI charts work, RAPID charts decisions; reach for RAPID when the question is who decides rather than who does.
- A reorganisation, merger or new operating model has redrawn reporting lines and the old informal understanding of decision rights no longer holds.
- The board and the executive keep colliding over the same territory and you need to make delegation explicit, decision by decision.
And when it doesn't
- The organisation makes decisions perfectly well and the real problem is decision quality or information. Role charts fix ambiguity about who; they do nothing for what or how well.
- You are mapping routine, repeating work rather than discrete decisions. That is RACI territory; forcing RAPID onto task lists produces a worse RACI.
- The culture runs on genuine consensus or consent-based governance and imposing a single decider would be a political act dressed as a tool. Decide that question first, openly.
- You are tempted to chart every decision in the business. RAPID pays for itself on the handful of critical, cross-functional decisions; charting trivia breeds bureaucracy and contempt for the tool.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A shortlist of the critical decisions that are stalling or going wrong, stated specifically ('approve the annual investment programme'), rather than as vague areas ('investment').
- An honest account of how each decision is made today: who was involved last time, where it slowed, where it was reopened.
- Clarity on any genuine veto holders, typically regulatory, legal, safety or financial sign-offs, as distinct from people who merely expect to be consulted.
- Sponsorship from whoever will have to enforce the chart when a bypassed executive objects, because someone will.
- 1
Pick the decisions that matter
Inventory the small number of decisions where value is created or destroyed and where ambiguity is causing delay, rework or conflict. RAPID is a precision tool. Applied to everything it becomes wallpaper.
- 2
Assign the D first
For each decision, name one person who decides. One. A committee as D is the ambiguity you started with wearing a lanyard. Place the D at the lowest level with the information and the accountability to make the call well.
- 3
Cast the remaining roles sparingly
Appoint a single Recommend to drive the analysis and proposal, grant Agree only to those with a genuine veto such as legal or regulatory sign-off, keep the Input list short and honest, and identify who will Perform. Note that the letters are a mnemonic rather than a sequence: in practice Input feeds Recommend, Agree tests the recommendation, the D makes the call and Perform then executes it.
- 4
Write it down and test it live
Run the next real instance of the decision against the chart. Watch where reality diverges: who inserted themselves, who was missed, where the D wobbled. Amend the chart from evidence, not from seniority.
- 5
Reset the surrounding behaviour
Change the meetings, papers and escalation routes to match the roles. Rogers and Blenko are clear that role clarity only sticks when the organisation's rhythms stop inviting everyone to everything.
Reading the result
A decision chart: for each critical decision, one named D, one Recommend, a short list of Inputs, any genuine Agrees, and the Performers, plus the changes to meetings and escalation routes needed to make the chart real.
- Read the chart by role, not by letter order. RAPID is a mnemonic rather than a sequence; the working order is Input, Recommend, Agree, Decide, Perform, and the D owns the call.
- Count the roles. More than one D, more than one Recommend, or a long Agree list means the ambiguity has been documented rather than removed.
- Check the D sits where the information is. A D placed high for status reasons will either bottleneck or rubber-stamp.
A worked example
A housing association charts the decision to commit to a stock-wide retrofit programme
A housing association with 11,000 homes across the North West must decide whether to commit £60m over eight years to a decarbonisation retrofit programme. The last attempt at a programme decision took fourteen months, was reopened twice by the board, and left the asset team and the finance director publicly at odds. Before bringing the paper back, the chief executive charts the decision with RAPID.
- Recommend
- The director of assets owns the recommendation: one costed programme with phasing options, informed by stock condition data and pilot results. Previously three separate papers had come from assets, development and sustainability, and the board arbitrated between departments rather than deciding.
- Agree
- Two genuine vetoes only: the chief financial officer on funding capacity against lender covenants, and the director of compliance on building-safety interactions. The tenant panel and the development director, who both expected sign-off, are moved to Input, and the reasoning is explained to them rather than fudged.
- Perform
- Property services and procurement will deliver, largely through framework contractors. They are named early and consulted on deliverability of the phasing, because the previous programme's timetable was written by people who had never let a retrofit contract.
- Input
- The tenant panel on disruption and communication, the treasury adviser on funding structures, development on interaction with the new-build pipeline, and two peer associations that have run comparable programmes. Input is gathered once, by the recommender, on a stated timetable.
- Decide
- The board delegates the programme decision to the chief executive within an envelope agreed in the financial plan, and retains the D only for any commitment beyond that envelope. This is the reversal that matters: previously the board held every version of the decision and made none of them cleanly.
The read. The chart surfaces the real defect: the board was acting as a second Recommend and an unlimited Agree, so no proposal could ever be final. With one recommender, two named vetoes and a delegated D, the decision is made in nine weeks. The residual risk is honest too: the tenant panel has lost formal veto power, and the association is relying on the quality of consultation, not the chart, to keep its legitimacy.
Pitfalls
- Giving the D to a committee, or to two people 'jointly'. That restores the ambiguity the tool exists to remove.
- Letting the Agree role proliferate. Every added veto slows the decision and dilutes the D; reserve Agree for genuine legal, regulatory, safety or financial-control sign-offs.
- Mistaking the letters for a sequence and running the process R-A-P-I-D. Input comes early and Perform comes last; the acronym is memorable rather than chronological.
- Mirroring the org chart. Roles should follow the decision's information and accountability needs, which frequently means the D sits below the most senior person in the room.
- Publishing the chart and changing nothing else. If the same twelve people still attend the same approval meetings, the chart is decoration.
- Charting dozens of decisions in a workshop and filing the output. The tool earns its keep on the few decisions where delay and rework are demonstrably costing money.
What the critics say
The evidence base is proprietary. The performance claims rest on Bain's own surveys linking decision effectiveness to results, and there is little independent peer-reviewed testing of whether RAPID role-charting itself causes better outcomes rather than accompanying them.
Rogers, P. and Blenko, M. (2006) 'Who Has the D?', Harvard Business Review, January 2006; Blenko, M., Mankins, M. and Rogers, P. (2010) Decide & Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
The single-decider premise fits hierarchical organisations and sits awkwardly with self-managing and consent-based designs, where research suggests decision rights are deliberately distributed and a named D can re-concentrate authority the organisation had chosen to disperse.
Lee, M. Y. and Edmondson, A. C. (2017) 'Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing', Research in Organizational Behavior, 37, pp. 35-58.
Role clarity treats a symptom. Bain's own later work repositions role-charting as one element of a wider decision-effectiveness agenda covering quality, speed, yield and effort, an implicit concession that a chart alone does not fix misaligned incentives or poor information.
Blenko, M., Mankins, M. and Rogers, P. (2010) 'The Decision-Driven Organization', Harvard Business Review, 88(6), June 2010.
Run it as a workshop
Prepare a shortlist of the real decisions causing delay, rework or conflict before the room opens; RAPID pays for itself on a handful of critical decisions and turns into wallpaper if the group tries to chart everything. Bring the D role in mind for who has the information and accountability, not who is most senior.
Running order
| Confirm the shortlist of decisions worth charting | 15 min |
| Assign the D for each decision, one name only | 30 min |
| Cast Recommend, Agree, Input and Perform sparingly | 45 min |
| Stress-test the chart against the last real instance of each decision | 30 min |
| Agree what changes in meetings and escalation routes to make it real | 20 min |
| Total | 2h 20m |
You will need
- The decision shortlist, printed and visible throughout
- A RAPID grid, one row per decision, five role columns
- Coloured dots or initials to mark each role clearly
- A note of the last real instance of each decision, for the stress test
Traps to avoid
- Giving the D to a committee, or splitting it between two people 'to be fair'. That restores exactly the ambiguity the tool exists to remove.
- Letting the Agree list grow. Every added veto slows the decision; reserve it for genuine legal, regulatory, safety or financial-control sign-offs, and say so out loud when someone asks for one.
- Charting the letters as a sequence and working R-A-P-I-D in order round the room. Input comes early and Perform comes last; the acronym is memorable, not chronological.
- Publishing the finished chart and changing nothing else about how meetings run. If the same people still attend the same approval meetings afterwards, the chart is decoration.
Sources and further reading
- Rogers, P. and Blenko, M. (2006) 'Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance', Harvard Business Review, 84(1), January 2006. ↗
- Bain & Company, 'RAPID: Bain's tool to clarify decision accountability'. ↗
- Blenko, M., Mankins, M. and Rogers, P. (2010) Decide & Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.