Business Resources: Cleaning up decision-making

by Talia Young

Decisions at Fishadelphia used to be very messy. It wasn’t clear who was supposed to make what decision, and sometimes I would contradict a decision someone else had made, which caused all sorts of problems. So we’re trying to move toward more tidy decision-making. This year, as part of their job descriptions, everyone got a table of their decision-making responsibilities and roles.  

There’s a lot of different frameworks and tools out there for making decisions and managing projects.  ou can read all about MOCHA and RACI and DACI. We ended up going with DACI, in truth, because it was the simplest and easiest for us to wrap our brains around. 

Here’s my DACI table from my job description (Executive Director).

When we have a new decision to make that might affect a lot of us, we hash out a DACI table for it. For example, we’re considering moving into a physical space in the next year. This would be a big move and have big implications for all of our programs. We decided on the following roles/responsibilities for that decision.

• D: Director of Strategy and Ops (in charge of moving it forward)

• A: Executive Director (has final say)

• C: All directors (expected to participate in process)

• I: Everyone on staff (impacts everyone)

We’re definitely still in a learning curve on this front, but it’s exciting to see these processes become clearer.