In every nonprofit larger than a conference room, decision making gets harder, slower, and messier over time. Who made that decision? Why wasn’t I involved? Did we even decide? Will we ever decide? Almost anyone who’s spent much time working in an organization can give examples of when a decision process was frustrating, or when it wasn’t clear there was any process at all.

Thinking through a decision-making process can’t guarantee wisdom, but it can set you up for success by answering critical questions that are on everyone’s mind:

  • What are we deciding? Is it one decision, or multiple smaller decisions?
  • Who should be involved and what role should they play?
  • How will we make the decision? What process will we use, what criteria will help us decide among options, and how will we communicate and follow through?
  • When does the decision need to get made?

This article focuses on a tool for addressing one of those questions: who should be involved and what role should they play? This decision-making tool is RAPID®, developed by Bain & Company and used by a range of nonprofits, including The Bridgespan Group, to make significant decisions.

RAPID is a way to assign roles in a decision process. It helps clarify who provides input to a decision, who shapes the decision and ultimately decides on it, and who carries out the decision once it is made. Over the years, we’ve helped scores of nonprofits and NGOs learn about RAPID and use it in their organizations. We’ve found it to be highly effective, and also easily adaptable to different situations, team sizes, and types of organizations. As discussed below, and in “Five Ways that Nonprofits Can Make Decision Making More Inclusive—and More Effective,” it can also be used to make decisions more inclusive.

Two important caveats. RAPID is an acronym—an easy way to think about five important roles in most decision processes (Recommend, Agree, Perform, provide Input, and Decide)—but the acronym doesn’t specify the order in which things should be done. And the name “RAPID” may imply that speed is paramount, but the intent of the tool is to help organizations make decisions with clarity and accountability—at the appropriate speed, not necessarily as quickly as it can.

Read the full article about the RAPID decision-making tool by Mike Ciccarone, Preeta Nayak, Yonatan Araia, and Bradley Seeman at The Bridgespan Group.