Team Decision Frameworks Differ in What They Cost to Run

The comparison tables look alike. RAPID against DACI against consent against consensus, each with a row for roles, a row for speed and a row for buy-in. They describe what each framework says about a single decision. They leave out the property that decides whether a team keeps using one: what it costs to run, decision after decision, at the volume the team actually decides.

A grid for every decision

A payments scale-up we worked with shows the gap. Its leadership team of eight adopted RAPID across the board, and for the first month every agenda item arrived with a grid naming who recommends, who agrees, who performs, who gives input and who decides. By the end of the quarter the team had filled in about forty of them. Most covered decisions it had made many times before: discount approvals above the sales director's limit, go or no-go calls on checkout releases, hires beyond the plan. Each grid named the same people in the same roles as the last one of its kind. The team was paying a per-decision price for answers that had not changed since the previous decision of the same type. By the second quarter the grids were filled in after the meeting, then not at all, and the team concluded that the framework had failed.

It had not failed at what it does. It had been run at a volume it was never priced for. Choosing a framework by where decisions break compares the models by the fault each one repairs. This note compares them on a second axis, the running cost, which explains why a framework that fits the fault can still be abandoned.

Four families, four price structures

Set side by side on cost, the familiar models fall into four families. They differ less in philosophy than in when the work is done and who does it:

• role grids such as RAPID and DACI, which cost a conversation per decision to cast the roles, and repay it with precision on the decision in front of them
• standing rules such as a decision-rights matrix or delegated limits, which cost one long negotiation and almost nothing per decision afterwards, until the organisation outgrows them
• process rules such as the advice process or consent, which cost the decider some legwork on each decision, spread across the colleagues it touches rather than the meeting
• group rules such as consensus or a majority vote, which cost nothing to set up and are paid for in meeting time, by everyone present, on every item

Where the bill lands

What separates them is where each bill lands. Role grids charge the preparation for the meeting. Standing rules charge the leadership team once, usually in an uncomfortable session about who holds which limit. Process rules charge the individual decider and the people they must consult. Group rules charge the room. A team that compares frameworks without asking which of its scarce resources each one spends is comparing them on the wrong page.

The cheapest framework for a single decision is often the most expensive one across a quarter. Consensus is the plainest case: free to adopt, then paid for in the room on every item, which is the pattern behind the consensus trap in team meetings. Role grids sit at the other end, dear on each decision and cheap only when there are few decisions to run them on.

If frameworks differ in price structure, the choice between them depends on what the team is buying. Two properties of its decisions do most of the work: how often a decision of the same kind comes back, and how much rides on getting it wrong.

Recurring and novel decisions

Recurring decisions are the natural territory of standing rules. When a decision returns every month with the same parties and the same trade-off, a rule written once removes it from the agenda entirely. Running a role grid on it each time buys nothing the rule does not already provide. Novel decisions are the reverse. A first market entry, a reorganisation, a platform change that crosses three functions: no standing rule anticipated them, and the cost of casting roles is small against what an unowned decision of that size would cost.

Stakes and reversibility

Stakes cut across both. A decision that is cheap to undo can go to an advice process or to whoever is closest to the work, because a wrong call costs little to correct, the reasoning set out in the cost of treating every decision alike. A decision that is expensive to undo justifies heavier machinery even when it recurs. That is why release decisions on a payments product often keep a named decider and an explicit agree role while everything around them runs on standing rules. Most leadership teams turn out to need a blend: standing rules for the bulk of their decisions, role grids for the few novel ones, and group rules for almost nothing.

Building the inventory

We start from the decisions a team made in a recent quarter, grouped by type rather than by date. Forty decisions usually collapse into ten or twelve types. For each type the team records three things: how often it came up, how many functions it touched, and how hard it would be to undo. That is the whole inventory, and it fits on one page.

The inventory assigns the families almost on its own. Types that recur and touch one or two functions become standing rules. Types that are rare and cross several functions keep a role grid. Types that are frequent, local and reversible go to an advice process, with the decider named and the people to consult listed. What remains is the short list that genuinely needs the room. Compared on running cost, team decision making frameworks stop being rivals and become a price list the team buys from, one decision type at a time.

The payments team, a quarter later

At the payments scale-up, the forty grids turned out to be eleven types. Seven became standing rules, among them discount approvals, which moved to a limit held by the sales director with a higher threshold held by the finance director. Two kept RAPID. Two went to an advice process. The next quarter carried six role grids instead of forty, and each of the six was filled in before the meeting rather than after it. A framework run on every decision is soon run on none of them. Run on six, it was read.

A framework run on every decision is soon run on none of them.

Standing rules need a date on them. They are priced on the organisation as it was when they were written, and they drift as it grows, the argument of decision rights in a scaling company need an expiry date. The inventory is worth repeating every two quarters, and the blend changes when the mix does.

Our engagements on this begin with the inventory rather than with a model. A quarter of decisions grouped into types, with frequency, reach and reversibility recorded for each, usually shows within one working session which decisions deserve machinery and which deserve a rule written once.

From there our consulting work inside the decision architecture pillar writes the standing rules and delegated limits with the team, and our training programmes build the habits the remaining frameworks depend on, from casting roles in minutes to running an advice process that is more than a courtesy. Team decision making frameworks compared on what they cost to run are chosen for the right decisions, and kept.