A rapid decision making framework looks impressive on a slide. On 20 April 2010, Deepwater Horizon burned in the Gulf of Mexico and eleven men died. Before the explosions, the crew argued over a negative pressure test while 1400 psi still sat on the drill pipe. The US Chemical Safety Board later found no Macondo-specific task risk assessments for the safety-critical work. That is where neat role charts run out of road.
A rapid decision making framework is a role map that assigns authority within a larger decision, but cannot tell you whether sufficient certainty exists to act on it. RAPID earns its keep only when the problem is a turf war. The moment managers treat the chart as the method, they buy order at the price of thought. That trade suits plenty of people because a tidy governance picture looks responsible in the minutes and never embarrasses the assumption that should have been challenged.
What the RAPID decision making framework actually fixes
Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko were right about the narrow problem. Their survey of more than 350 global organisations suggested that only about 15% practised effective decision making. I do not need much convincing. I have spent too much time in rooms where the first half of the meeting was consumed by a petty fight over who had the right to end the discussion. If that is the disease, RAPID is a useful medicine.
At Wyeth, it helped clear the committee fog around the Enbrel manufacturing decision. Fine. If people stop wasting an hour on who gets the last word, that is an improvement. If RAPID identifies the Decider and gets the meeting out of procedural mud, good. The trouble is what happens next. Governance consultancies can sell the workshop, and internal champions can unveil a fresh chart for the board. The paperwork looks sober enough for the file. None of that requires anyone to expose the belief carrying the decision.
Where the rapid decision making framework stopped at Macondo
Macondo failed because BP and Transocean left the live assumptions inside the negative-test procedure without an owner. The CSB investigation found each company presumed the other was responsible for a proper procedure. The crew was left to assemble meaning on the fly in a situation that had no business depending on improvisation.
The live assumption was that the well had been sealed. The crew saw zero flow on the kill line for thirty minutes and treated that as proof, even though pressure kept reappearing on the drill pipe. The CSB said they incorrectly rationalised the indicators. That is exactly the kind of moment a role chart cannot rescue. A box marked D does not force anyone to write down the assumption and test it before the next step. Nine minutes after hydrocarbons reached the rig, the first explosion came. Eleven men never went home.
I have seen gentler versions of the same failure in boardrooms. The governance paper is tidy, the authority is tidy, and the load-bearing assumption is still invisible. In my experience, this is the stage that flatters the wrong people. The file looks disciplined and the meeting chair feels progress, so advisers can say the process was followed. Once that happens, the safest career move is to defend the procedure rather than question the evidence. Reality, which is rude about these things, does not care how elegant the signature block looked.
Why RAPID has no place for assumptions
RAPID has letters for authority. It has no step for asking what would have to be true for this call to work. That question is where the decision becomes real. A team can survive some muddle over who speaks first. It does not survive a false belief that nobody bothered to name.
The role-map side of this problem has its own shape, and I have written about it in decision rights framework. The harder work starts before the room begins defending a preferred answer, because that is when people stop testing assumptions and start protecting them.
Why a rapid decision making framework still needs a stopping rule
RAPID can tell one person to decide. It cannot tell that person when enough work has been done. That is why executive teams buy a role framework and still stall. Someone has the D, yet nobody can say whether the evidence is sufficient for this decision, in this context, now. If you want the Grant Purdy shorthand, it is this: RAPID can tell you who signs, not whether the thing being signed deserves to live.
Without a stopping rule, the apparent speed of RAPID becomes another corporate parlour trick. The room can assign the D in ten minutes, then spend six weeks commissioning more paper because nobody has said which uncertainty actually matters. PMO teams can keep the workflow moving. Governance software vendors can keep the dashboard glowing. The Decider is still left holding a decision that has not earned commitment. I have watched this happen often enough to know that delay dressed up as diligence is still delay.
Roger Estall and I built the Universal Decision-Making Method, and later set it out in Deciding, because decisions need an ending. Start with Frame the decision. Then name the assumptions that matter and work toward Sufficient certainty for this case. If certainty is thin, I do not ask for a grand report to decorate the board pack. I ask for the one piece of information that will either support the call or break it. If it does neither, I change the option. A rapid decision making framework never gets you to that judgment.
Where I put RAPID in a real method
I use role clarity early, not as the finish. Name the Decider and the recommender if that stops the turf fight. Then do the real work in order. Recognise assumptions and reach Sufficient certainty. Design monitoring before you commit, then keep watching the decision while the context is still fresh enough to question and cheap enough to adjust.
RAPID is one of the cleaner decision-making frameworks because at least it is honest about being a role device. The trouble starts when people pretend the role device has done the deciding for them. That fantasy is useful to consultants and software vendors, especially the internal champions who want visible machinery instead of an awkward argument about evidence. It is not useful to the person who will carry the consequence. A neat role chart can still sit on top of an unowned assumption, and RAPID is perfectly capable of putting an orderly signature on a bad decision.
Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.
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