Decision-making glossary
RAPID decision framework
The RAPID decision framework is Bain & Company’s method for assigning decision roles: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide. One person decides, one recommends, a few people with a formal requirement to check must agree, others give input, and the people who will carry out the decision are named up front. The letters are not a sequence.
Bain partners Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko wrote about clear decision roles in “Who Has the D?”, a 2006 Harvard Business Review article, and Bain describes RAPID as its own tool. The recommender drives the process, gathers input and brings a proposal to the decider, who makes the final call and commits the organization to act.
The Agree role is the one people misread. It is not general sign-off. It belongs to people who must confirm that the recommendation meets a hard requirement, such as a legal or regulatory one. Handing out too many Agrees recreates the consensus problem the framework is meant to fix.
Compared with DACI, RAPID separates the person who recommends from the person who decides, and it names who will carry the decision out. Like DACI, it settles who decides, not what was decided or why, so the result still needs to be written down somewhere.
Sources: Bain & Company, “RAPID Decision Making” · Paul Rogers and Marcia W. Blenko, “Who Has the D?”, Harvard Business Review (2006)