DACI, RACI, RAPID, and PANDA: ways of assigning roles and responsibilities

I'm writing some things about decision-making at the moment, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the idea of clarity.

Ben Templeton recently shared some thoughts about his perspective on clarity and how it can suck the joy out of creative projects, "one person’s useful specificity is another person’s reason to go elsewhere. Striving for total clarity is time consuming, difficult but can also wring all the joy out of a project."

I don't disagree with that. But one of the things I see again and again is projects that go off the rails not because things were too clear, but because they weren’t clear...at all. Especially when it comes to roles and responsibilities.

Too often, it's unclear who’s meant to be doing what, decisions get reopened, unexpected people suddenly start steering, nobody’s sure who’s leading, who should be consulted, or who’s actually doing the work.

There is huge value in people knowing who is doing what on a project and where responsibilities lie.

And by that I mean things like who is making decisions, who is doing the work, who needs to feed in to the discussions or be kept up to date.

In my experience when there is clarity about this sort of stuff everyone has a much better time, the work moves faster, people feel less frustrated, fewer things fall between the cracks, and the outcomes tend to be better.

This sort of stuff also matter on a micro, situational level. I suspect the lack of it is why so many meetings feels confusing, or annoying.

Why role clarity matters

This kind of role-focused approach isn’t new and it’s not about bureaucracy or rigid job descriptions. It’s about creating clarity in collaboration environments when the normal distribution of responsibilities can become confused or needs redefining.

Tools like Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats assign people temporary thinking roles (e.g emotional, logical, creative) to sidestep unproductive group dynamics and help ideas flow. Agile teams define who owns the product vision, who facilitates the process, and who delivers the work, not to box people in but to reduce friction.

The point of all this is that clearly defined roles create safe 'containers'. They let people know how to contribute, when to step forward, and when to step back. In complex or creative work, that clarity doesn’t limit people, it often frees them. It takes away that anxious sense that everyone has to worry about everything because it’s unclear who’s actually responsible for what. Often in cultural organisations, especially when it comes to digital work, I've noticed that vaguely defined roles and responsibilities are at the root of a lot of frustration.

Three useful frameworks for project roles

There are a few simple, well-worn approaches that can help specifically with the typical key responsibilities that come up on projects.

They’re not perfect, but they’re useful especially when decision-making gets murky and responsibilities start to blur.