RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide)

RAPID is a decision-rights framework developed by the consulting firm Bain & Company. The letters stand for five roles in a decision — Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, and Decide. Recommend is the role that drives the process, gathers input, generates options, and puts forward a clear recommendation. Agree is a role that must formally sign off on the recommendation, in effect a veto right, and is assigned sparingly. Perform is the role accountable for carrying out the decision once it is made. Input provides data, expertise, and operational reality to inform the recommendation, but holds no veto. Decide is the single role with the authority to make the call and accountability for the outcome. One important caveat about the name: RAPID is a loose mnemonic, not a sequence — the letters do not describe the order in which the steps happen, since in practice the Decide step comes last.

RAPID matters because it makes decision rights explicit in exactly the situations where they tend to blur: weighty, cross-functional decisions with many stakeholders. It prevents the two classic failure modes — everyone decides, which produces politics and paralysis, and no one decides, which produces drift and rework. By naming a single Decide role, distinguishing the people who must Agree from those who merely give Input, and identifying who will Perform the work, RAPID compresses decision cycle time and raises decision quality. It is especially useful when a decision spans several teams, because it forces an organization to separate advice from authority, and authority from execution, rather than leaving all three tangled in a long meeting with no clear owner.

RAPID, DACI, and RACI all assign roles, but they differ in scope and in how many roles they carry. RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is a general responsibility matrix for tasks, anchored by a single Accountable owner; it is not built specifically for decisions. DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) is decision-focused but lightweight, splitting ownership into a Driver who runs the process and one Approver who decides. RAPID is the heaviest of the three and the most decision-specific: it adds an Agree role — a formal sign-off or veto that DACI and RACI do not name — and a Perform role that makes execution accountability explicit. So RAPID suits complex decisions where a veto right and a clear handoff to execution genuinely need to be spelled out.

Choosing among them is a question of weight. For a quick decision where the main confusion is who decides, DACI's two-role split is often enough. For mapping responsibilities across the many tasks of a project, RACI is the right tool. For a major, cross-functional decision — a market entry, a large investment, a pricing strategy — RAPID's extra roles pay off, because the Agree role names who can block, the Input role names who advises without blocking, and the Perform role names who owns the follow-through. What all three share is the insistence on a single decider: RAPID's Decide, DACI's Approver, RACI's Accountable. RAPID's contribution is to surround that decider with explicit agreement, input, and execution rights for decisions too consequential to leave implicit.

Using RAPID well begins with assigning the Decide role to exactly one person — the framework collapses the moment two people share it. Be stingy with the Agree role, because every veto right you hand out adds friction and slows the decision; reserve it for stakeholders whose sign-off is truly required, such as legal or finance on decisions that touch their domains. Make the Recommend role a real owner of the process with the time to gather input and shape options. Time-box the Input contributions so advice informs the recommendation without dragging it out, and name the Perform role early so the handoff to execution is clear before the decision lands. Above all, remember the letters are a mnemonic, not a running order.

The failures are over-assigning Agree rights until the decision needs a parade of sign-offs and stalls; sharing or leaving vague the Decide role so accountability dissolves; confusing Input (advice, no veto) with Agree (formal sign-off) and giving advisors blocking power they should not have; and reading the acronym as a sequence and trying to run the steps in letter order. The discipline is to keep one clear Decider, a tight set of Agree rights, well-defined Input, and an explicit Perform owner — using RAPID's structure to make a complex decision fast and accountable rather than turning it into a heavier bureaucracy than the choice deserves.

RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) is Bain & Company's decision-rights framework assigning five roles per decision, with one Decide role and letters that form a loose mnemonic, not a sequence.

Etymology: source.

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

View interest-over-time on Google Trends →

Areas of marketing where rapid (recommend, agree, perform, input, decide) is a core concern: