Good morning. The decision that keeps coming back to your desk is not difficult — it is unowned.
Decisions.
Decision Rights
Think of the decision that keeps reappearing on the agenda under a new owner — yours this month, a colleague's last month, nobody's the month before that: name the one person entitled to settle it without checking with anyone. If no name comes to you, the reason is almost never that the decision is hard; it is that nobody has ever written down who decides, who advises and who is simply going to be told.
In January 2006 Harvard Business Review published 'Who Has the D?', by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko, two Bain & Company partners who had spent years watching capable organisations stall — not on analysis, but on ambiguity about who was entitled to decide. Their instrument was RAPID: for any decision that matters, name who Recommends, who gives Input, who must Agree, who Decides and who Performs. The letters are deliberately not a sequence; the point is the roles, not the order. What the map does is unbundle one word — involved — that most companies use to mean five different things, and that unbundling ends the two failures it always produces: the decision nobody owns, which drifts through meetings and quietly dies, and the decision everybody owns, where consultation becomes veto and a single unconvinced colleague can stall a company for a month. Most people assign work with great care and authority never. Most managers assume that because a decision landed on their agenda, it is yours.
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