Deciding Fast & Slow with RAPID™️
Decisions can be of two main types, as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put it in the 1997 shareholders letter: type 1 decisions are irreversible and have a high impact (one-way doors); type 2 decisions are reversible and with low-medium impact. Type 1 decisions need to be carefully thought through. Type 2 decisions need to be rapidly decoded and executed, or they may act as a distraction in your daily personal/business existence.
Making decisions is an irrational process, even though we may like to believe this is not the case. Your past experiences, present state of mind and feelings, and future ambitions influence your decision-making process in ways you may underestimate or not be aware of. Most decisions in daily life are type 2: reversible, with low-medium impact. Especially if your time is in high demand, recognizing this type of decision and developing a “bias for action” when encountering them is a skill worth cultivating, like you would take care of your only ginger root in your vegetable garden. Say, you need to buy a new pair of shoes and you don’t know yet which pair.
Enter 2-3 stores, scan through the available shoes, try on the best 3 shoes you see in each store, and then make a decision without overthinking it. At an existential level, there are almost an infinite amount of shoes you could try on before making a decision. But there are diminishing returns to trying on shoes. Once you enter 2-3 stores selling the type of shoes you are looking for, you have exposed yourself to the vast majority of the choices you will find. If you buy a pair of shoes and you end up not liking them, you can always return them to the store. That’s a reversible choice. There is only a limited amount of cognitive energy you can allocate to decisions in your day. If you were to overthink such a reversible decision, you may have “wasted” some of that energy on a low-value activity.
Type 1 decisions are less frequent and have a much higher impact on your personal/business existence. Making decisions that are type 1 requires you to be in the correct state of mind and feeling. A state of mind that is open, focused, undistracted, decisive, and seeking contrarian evidence. You want to consider as many variables as you can when making type 1 decisions. And you want to take time.
Type 1 decisions do not require the same bias for action as type 2 decisions. They call for a “bias for gaining perspective”. This means looking at the decision from way above as if you were a conscious satellite orbiting the Earth. Type 1 decisions benefit from a “rational” approach. One such method (valid for group decisions) is the RAPID™️ framework by Bain & Company.
RAPID is a decision-making framework to define clear responsibilities in the decision-making process. Each letter in RAPID symbolizes a key decision-making role:
Recommend
Agree
Perform
Input
Decide
Each role is fundamental—not in a politically correct way. Each person involved in the roles takes full responsibility for it and commits to the decision-making process as if they were an army officer called upon in war times. Organizations are made of people. And if people are held responsible for their specific role in a decision, effectiveness may increase significantly. Having a clear accountability process is better than haphazardly going through a decision without full commitment.
In RAPID, the decision-making process likely happens in the following order:
The Recommend person defines the decision to be made and develops a proposed course of action (solution). The Input person/people’s views are carefully taken into account during this process.
The Agree person analyzes the recommendation, makes any amendments needed, and provides their thoughts/feelings/feedback on it. The decision either goes back to Recommend or is fully agreed by the Agree.
Once there is full buy-in from the Agree party/ies, the Decide comes into the picture. The role of the Decide person is to take into account all the inputs agreed upon in stages 1 and 2, and then make the final decision and commit the organization to action. The aim of the Decide is not to reach a consensus. That is extremely tough the majority of the time. The role of the “decide” is to truly account for every input received, and then make a decision.
Once the decision is made, action needs to take place. That’s the role of the Perform person/people. Their role is to perform any actions needed to actually implement the decision throughout the organization.
RAPID is an accountability framework rather than a complete decision-making process. For this reason, it could be applied together with a method such as the issue inventory in order to have a comprehensive model of decision-making in your organization. If you are part of a team, having a documented, clear framework for decision-making can be pivotal in your long-term success.
Decisions are everywhere, and the main enemy of decision-making is “the fog”. The kind of fog you feel when you are part of a team and you don’t know what to do when you are faced with a decision. If you commit to a mental model for decision making such as the RAPID + issue inventory, you remove “the fog”, and move towards the more desirable mental clarity and action-oriented mindset. This can be liberating for everyone on your team. You included.
