Stop RACIsm!
For those of you fortunate enough NOT to know about RACI matrices, you have permission to skip this article.
The rest of you poor devils have seen them, to your everlasting regret. You were probably forced into using them to “clarify roles” in your delivery teams. You have my sympathy.
Let’s stop it. RACI is an offspring of Taylor’s Scientific Management and does not work for anything but repeated simple tasks. It’s not helpful for creative work, and it’s certainly not Agile!
Scientific Slavery
About a century ago, new vista of management appeared on the horizon. It was pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor and became known as Scientific Management (recent research suggests it’s ideas are based on practices employed by US slavers!). The simplest way to grasp the concept is this: Tayorlism separates the thinking from the doing.
This might have made sense in the days of industrial revolution with vast foundries and factories, even though in practice it never worked as claimed and the original adopters soon dropped it. Yet through the power of propaganda, marketing, and outright lies it spread across the world like a parasitic infection, taking over its host, poisoning its mind and body.
Now, however this is just bullshit and stupidity, for many reasons, main of them being the complexity and creative nature of the work we do.
RACI is just a modernized version of this separation of thinking from doing. Under the RACI dogma, mankind is separated into the Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Insulted (actually Informed, but the whole concept is insulting really).
Who of us would want to be treated as a slave? Just being told what to do, then doing it all the time living in fear of being punished if we don’t do what has been ordered to us? From the organizational point of view, scientific management and command&control approach makes even less sense, for several reasons:
- The reality of today’s work is that nobody can produce anything valuable on his own — teams are needed. And these teams need to both think and do to work efficiently.
- Generally, we don’t like to be controlled. The effect it has on us is complacency — we stop thinking about what we are doing.
- Even if the thinker is the greatest thinker on the planet, he cannot be compared to a team of thinkers and doers who know the ultimate goal and can push forward the best solution.
- People just doing as ordered usually start (unknowingly) sabotaging the organization — by not thinking about broader consequences, by following orders exactly and by not making any decision at all.
On the other hand, we have endless amount of cases where self-contained teams of people delivered great results, whilst the people on the team being engaged, highly motivated and happier at work.
So, why do we still choose command&control? There are several reasons, some of the key ones:
- Based on Douglas McGregor’s work we see ourselves as the ones that are automatically motivated, wanting to do the best work we possibly can. And on the other hand we see others, especially our subordinates, as lazy and unwilling to do any work unless closely monitored and threatened.
- The command&control approach is more effective in the short term (and by short-term I mean a couple of months maximum).
- It is a result of our education, our childhood — essentially our historical burden that will take several generations to change (but we can try!).
Next time, when dealing with other people in your teams, your colleagues, your subordinates, ask yourself a simple question:
Is the way I am treating them the same way I would prefer to be treated?
And if the answer is NO, you gotta make a change, my friend, because you are thinking like a bigot, racist, plutocrat, or slave.
RACIsm
RACIsm, or the use of responsibility matrixes, is just another incarnation of Scientific Management ideas and concepts. The whole point of such a matrix being to identify people responsible for certain work and to separate those responsible (doers) from those accountable (thinkers). Take for example this definition of the RACI model:
Delegation is an essential part of a project manager’s role, so identifying roles and responsibilities early in a project is important. Applying the RACI model can help. As the project manager, it is important that you set the expectations of people involved in your project from the outset.
And here we see it again: project manager — the thinker is setting out expectations (or assigning roles) to others — the doers. Would the doers feel engaged? Would they go an extra mile to help others? They won’t.
Let’s stop RACIsm and all similar crap!
So, I urge you: stop using RACI matrixes and other zombie-tools derived from Scientific Management. In the long run, they will demoralize people, lead to the best ones leaving and generally to poor solutions and an awful culture at your workplace, filled with gossip, sabotage and internal squabbles.
Instead of traditional project management filled with managers and leads, build your work around self-organized teams with all the competencies to deliver inside them. Ensure they understand the problem and what difference would solving it make in the world and then step out of their way — providing guidance, help, consultations and connecting them to others as needed by them.
Instead of RACI matrices, try leveraging delegation boards or ladders of leadership — these work because they don’t separate people but rather bring them together to agree on how things should be done.
Scientific management, RACI matrixes, complicated hierarchies and likes of them don’t make for realistic results, great products and satisfied employees. Don’t try them.
Try agility instead. And don’t pollute it with relicts of a century old theory that in fact never worked and is probably based on approaches used by slavers some two centuries ago.
