Beyond the Chart: Six Powerful Things You Can Do with RACI 2.0

By Cassie Solomon, The New Group Consulting

Many people know RACI, because it’s been around since the 1950s, and it’s in wide use globally. Before project management software tools emerged (see our whitepaper, Digitizing RACI) most people created RACI charts in Excel. It was about time to update the tool, so we built a better RACI – RACI 2.0. This modernized version helps organizations address the complexity of work in the 21st century.

RACI 2.0 isn’t just a chart—it’s a mindset shift. It’s a practical framework to focus on and clarify roles, improve engagement, and empower teams.

This is the first in a series of blogs about the powerful ways that RACI can help you improve performance, decision-making, and empowerment in your organization

Here are six powerful ways that RACI 2.0 can transform the way your organization works.

1. Create high-performing cross functional teams.

Studies over the last few years estimate that knowledge workers spend between 40-60% of their time collaborating with colleagues – many from other departments. The percentage is even higher for certain roles, for example: HR, IT, and Project Management.[1] For these roles, collaboration time (spent in meetings, phone, email) is even higher, about 80%.

And although collaboration is intended to encourage innovation, increase speed to market, and smooth project execution, the reality is not so good.

In 2024, Gartner surveyed 400 business leaders and reported that 78% of them report experiencing what HBR calls “collaboration drag” – “too many meetings, too much peer feedback, unclear decision-making authority, and too much time spent getting buy-in from stakeholders.” [2]

RACI 2.0 is an essential language to help people understand how to be effective on these cross functional teams – who is assigned to do the work, which stakeholders are critical to include, and how and where the ultimate decisions will be made. See “Better Accountability for Cross Functional Teams” for ideas you can use right away.

2. Design Effective Meetings

According to research done by Slack, more than one in four desk workers – and over half (55%) of executives say they spend too much time in unproductive meetings.[3] Many of these are cross-functional meetings intended to enhance collaboration. But even if there are charters, agendas, and a strong team lead, unclear roles can still create meeting hell.

With RACI 2.0, you can design the meeting to involve stakeholders as needed – instead of having them at every meeting. You can negotiate decision-making authority up front. You can use meetings to drive accountability and action.

See “The Golden Ratio of Good Meetings – How to Make Your Meetings More Productive (and cut the number in half).”

3. Diagnose Your Decision-Making Culture

Many of our clients reach out to us because their employee engagement survey scores highlight frustration with decision-making. Your decision-making culture underscores everything about performance: how quickly you can bring new products to market, how quickly you can execute your strategy, how successfully you hit your revenue targets.

Yet decision-making is invisible and therefore difficult to diagnose. We set deadlines and milestones for project completion, but not for decisions. Where exactly did we get bogged down? Which areas take twice as long to respond with a decision, while others wait? Are the issues at the top, with senior leadership, or in the middle? And how is that impacting our poor cross-functional project teams?

Contact us to learn more about our new Decision-Making Audit, so that we can help you diagnose your decision-making culture, and design the solutions.

4. And then…Streamline your Decision-Making

The original RACI tool dictates that there is only one “A” for each project, which rarely happens in practice. Yes, there is usually one executive sponsor who is accountable for the ultimate success of the project. But below that level, there are countless decisions to be made along the way. At RACI 2.0 we define the “A” as Approver, a decision-making role which can appear many times and at many levels during the course of a project.

There are three ways to improve your speed-to-decision:

• reduce the number of Approvers (one is ideal, but if that’s not possible, fewer is always better) by negotiating a lower level of authority – the C role – for some departments or colleagues, and
• set deadlines for decision-making, just as you do for other milestones in the project, and
• then measure your time-to-decision performance against those deadlines. Identify your bottlenecks – and solve them.

5. Empower Your Workforce

When empowerment is done well, it moves decisions closer to “the edge” and increases speed of execution. But there is a lot of empty rhetoric associated with this concept. Too often executives (with the best of intentions) want to empower their teams – and then swoop back in when things go badly. We agree with McKinsey research that says,

“The basic problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what empowerment means, and what it requires of leaders. Many managers think delegating to others and empowering them means leaving them alone to make decisions; but successful empowerment requires involvement, it means being hands-on, not just directive … and providing guidance and guardrails.”[4]

See “Ready or Not: RACI and Empowerment” to understand our empowerment model, and to successfully create a genuinely empowered workforce.

6. Design the Jobs of the Future

In my view, one of the best books ever written about AI is “Power and Prediction” by the University of Toronto economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Ironically, it was published just before the advent of ChatGPT. They argue that AI’s true, transformative impact will come about because it will revolutionize the way we make decisions.

They write, “AI’s impact will be all about the things humans can do because they can make better decisions. It is not only about the technical challenge of collecting dta, building models, and generating predictions, but also about the organizational challenge of enabling the right humans to make the right decisions at the right time. And it is about the strategic challenge of identifying what can be done differently once better information is available.”[5]

RACI gives us a language to examine where fundamental shifts will happen in the way we work – who does the work, who is empowered to make the decision given almost infinite data, and how our systems will be transformed as a result.

 RACI 2.0 Can Help

If your team is stuck in role confusion, decision bottlenecks, or ineffective meetings, our RACI Consulting Services can help. We work directly with leaders and teams to apply RACI to real organizational challenges—from cross-functional collaboration to strategic decision-making to the future of work.

[1] https://www.gensler.com/press-releases/global-workplace-survey-findings?utm_source=chatgpt.com, https://useshiny.com/blog/cross-functional-team-management/?utm_source=chatgpt.com,
[2] https://hbr.org/2024/06/why-cross-functional-collaboration-stalls-and-how-to-fix-it?tpcc=orgsocial_edit&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
[3] https://slack.com/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-between-after-hours-work-and-decreased-productivity
[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/busting-a-management-myth-empowering-employees-doesnt-mean-leaving-them-alone
[5] “Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence” by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Harvard Business Review Press, 2022, page 16,