Why RACI Isn’t Creating Accountability—And the 5 Verbs That Actually Do | Robert Snyder

Paul, welcome to the Courage of a Leader podcast. This is where you hear real-life stories of top leaders achieving extraordinary results, and you get practical advice and techniques you can immediately apply for your own success. This is where you will get inspired and take bold, courageous action. I'm so glad you can join us. I'm your host, Amy Reilly. Now, are you ready to step into the full power of your leadership and achieve the results you care about most. Let's ignite the courage of a leader. Robert Snyder. Thank you for being on the Courage of a Leader podcast today.

I'm delighted to be here, Amy.

I'm glad this has been a long time coming, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I know it is going to make the listeners, the leaders listening, think. We are here to talk about a framework to create accountability. I want to first hear, why do we need a new framework or an approach, right? Like most leaders have accountability tools like RACI charts and such. Where are those breaking down?

I would ask you and your audience, how many times have you felt accountable for certain work without having the corresponding authority. For some of us it's a lot, and when that happens, it means someone else evidently has the authority without the accountability. Lucky them. So, why are we decoupling authority and accountability, and we're actually formalizing it because the org chart formalizes and defines authority without accountability. The racy matrix defines, formalizes accountability without authority. So we are purposefully, systematically, routinely, religiously decoupling authority and accountability.

Okay, form chart says one thing, racy chart says another.

That's right, that's right, and you can try to make them align, but that's impossible, and you are, you're using two frameworks that, again, you're formalizing the uncoupling, you're sending authority this direction and accountability this direction, it sets teams and individuals up for failure, so one recent statistic. Well, it's been a statistic for a while. Is project failure rates typically they're considered - I'm not going to quote any exact numbers, because it depends on who you ask - but generally, they're considered high and unacceptable. We just shouldn't be surprised that our project failure rates are high when we decouple authority and accountability, and now with AI, do we think this is going to help our authority and accountability problems? Because what are we willing to delegate, formally or informally? What do we want to delegate to AI? Is it authority? Is it accountability? Why are we letting humans off the hook, so the framework that we're going to talk about today fuses together authority and accountability, that is a recipe for success. It's a recipe for integrity and honesty, empathy, discipline, and trustworthiness. And so that's if I zoom out, what problem am I trying to solve with this framework, in the surrounding frameworks, my books, my public speaking, is to solve this trustworthiness problem, because we have not solved it yet.

Okay. Well, I know that is likely making listeners really curious about, okay, so what is in this new framework, this new approach? You've got five verbs for

us. Yes, yes. And I playfully compare them to the four adjectives of racy. Right, racey is four adjectives. What are we doing governing with adjectives? There's a form of speech in the English language that conveys action. That form of speech is a verb. We don't need 100 verbs. You don't need verb sprawl. So the five verbs are draft, review. revise, approve, distribute, and one thought process to get you from RACI to these five verbs is that anything you would govern with a RACI is going to involve four or more people, not a controversial or provocative statement. Then I would argue, well, anything that's going to involve four or more people is worth documenting. Gasp, anything, anything worth documenting is worth governing, not with adjectives, but with verbs that make it childproof, idiot-proof.

Yeah, a

narcissist proof that we're going to put this stuff on paper, so it is courageous, because you might have a narcissist, you might have a climber in your organization who's not really a leader, and you might have someone in your organization who kind of likes having the authority without having the accountability, and five verbs says we know this stuff is worth documenting, and we could talk about the documentation of verse folks, including, you know, untrustworthy folks hate documentation. So,

Robert, I want to underscore one thing: this does take courage, right? And another word that is coming to mind as you're describing this is clarity.

Yeah,

then verbs are going to be more clear about what we're actually going to go and do than these adjectives.

Yes,

and I'm also hearing more clarity that it's five verbs, it's not 20 verbs,

that's right.

It's not all these things, right? Like, let's keep it simple, let's keep it straightforward, let's keep it clear, and let's document

it. Yes,

also adds to clarity,

and piggybacking on that word, clarity is because we're leaning into the documentation. We prevent over documentation because the moment the team is unable or unwilling to assign all five verbs, you now have license to say documentation is overkill. Gonna do this work at the pub, and let your management know, hey, documentation evidently is overkill. We can't pull people to have seats at the table to collaborate on this agreement, this decision bundle, if you will. So, documentation is overkill. A lot of people are worried about over documentation, but you know what? Your team should only be putting on paper what can withstand the rigor of five verbs. Everything else, like, we don't need to spend time in this episode going through what does four verbs look like, what does three verbs look like, what does like draft and then crickets like that shouldn't be a thing, so when you govern with five verbs, you establish this rhythm, and you back to your point about clarity, we are really, really distinguishing what do we do that's worth putting on paper that the next team will be really delighted that we put on paper versus everything else just to chat.

Yeah, got it. Documenting at the right level. Okay, Robert, we're going to go into the five verbs in more detail. First, let me tell listeners a little bit more about you. So, we are lucky to have Robert Snyder with us today. He's the founder and the president of Innovation Elegance. His 30 year career spans roles such as developer, project management, change management, sales enablement, and the performing arts. His career path includes corporate roles, consulting roles, startups, PMP, and agile certifications. He's performed in numerous vocal, dance, and theater ensembles, you'll hear how all his experiences come together in his thinking. I love it. Robert earned his BS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois and his MBA in strategy from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Robert has already published two books on innovation methodology, innovation elegance, transcending agile with ruthlessness and grace, and innovation portfolio, five verbs shape your team's legacy. And we're learning some key content from that one today. And there's more books in the works. We'll make sure to have the links in the show notes. Robert is always innovating. Thank you for being with us

again. Just delighted to be invited. All

right, let's start going in to the five verbs and why they work. Robert, how do they create accountability in practice?

They're a forcing function,

forcing

they dictate that we are going to shape a culture of collaboration, rhythm, pacing boundaries, fusing together authority and accountability. One quote I love to borrow and share is from Chris McChesney, who authored a book called The Four Disciplines of Execution. His quote is one of his quotes is executions to best friends are simplicity and transparency. Executions to best friends are simplicity and transparency so five verbs shapes habits shared habits also known as culture of muscle memory transparency vulnerability task conflict. You don't get to have personality conflict. Conflict test conflict is good, personality conflict not good, disagreeing absolutely. Okay, demonizing not okay. A boxing ring of ideas fantastic, boxing ring of people not fantastic. So, the five verbs, although it's meant to sound and feel incredibly superficial, and just the mechanics, I'm going to steal a quote from W. Clement Stone: small hinges swing large doors, small hinges swing large doors, and five verbs is a forcing function. It's a liberating structure. Those are two other formal concepts that your audience might like to explore and dig into what does it mean to be a forcing function, like the tail wagging the dog. What does it mean to be a liberating structure, just like in the dance world? If I can tiptoe into the performing arts, right, when you dance salsa, the forcing function is the footwork, quick, slow, quick, quick, slow, and that muscle memory helps free my mind to no longer have to look at my feet, so five verbs helps a team to no longer have to look at their feet. We've got the discipline down now. My eyes are up here with my dance partner, my colleagues. This is empathy, this is listening, this is spatial awareness, caring about what others think, because I have so much confidence in our team mechanics and rhythm and boundaries, and you know, although it's extremely formal and it's explicit, it is absolutely not rigid, because now that

it's on paper, we've reduced the cost to change our mind, so there's absolutely a cost profile related to the five verbs being unapologetic about documenting things, because once something is on paper, now we reduce the cost to change our mind, involve Judy in accounting, because we always forget Judy and accounting. The right documentation governed with five verbs is nothing short of a love letter to your future team. If you want to set your next team up for success, you will put the right things down on paper, governed with incredible robustness and unapologetic collaboration. And if you want to set up your next team for failure, you will keep your decisions locked up in your head, oh yeah, back of a napkin, buried in your email,

knowledge in the brain, right, rather than out there in the record

button of your latest AI flavor of the month. So the five verbs provides the discipline for teams to really formalize. Hey, what do we do? What are these decisions? What are these decision bundles that are worth organizing, synchronizing, standardizing? So we minimize reinventing the wheel, and we could tiptoe into the distinction between infinite activity, because organizations that are addicted to meetings and emails, they're wallowing in infinite activity, and the five verbs helps us shape what I'll call finite productivity. How many things are worth documenting or governing with five verbs? A lot, but it's finite, it's explicit, it's not rigid, and so I think this is an incredibly valuable culture construct for teams is to formalize what does success look like, what does done look like, and that requires you to define what is your finite productivity and distinguish that from your infinite activity.

I love what you just said there. Finite productivity, defining what success looks like. Your analogy about the rhythm of the dance step, right? And what the five verbs can create that rhythm, and that allows the meaningful and transparent people interaction. Can you bring that to life with us, Robert, with a simple example of taking an initiative through draft, review, revise, approve, distribute.

So, at the highest level, if I try to build a hierarchy of this portfolio, and I'll call it a decision portfolio, at the highest level. I'm going to categorize it as project specific and project independent. I also could subdivide it: people, process, technology.

Okay,

within technology, I could partition it, design, build, test.

Either all of the initiatives, bundles of work to which we could apply the five firms.

This, these are all the categories, the different ways we can, we can organize, slice and dice these decision bundles.

Okay,

and so, because I want to give you the higher level categories instead of immediately going down to the most granular. Level that I speak to, that's in my books. Should I take an example?

Yes.

Okay, so I'll just brainstorm five things that are worth governing with five verbs.

Okay, great.

Your roadmap, your project charter, your future state process flow your GUI design your training materials, and again, that's just five, and again, there's just under 60 of these items,

so those would those be examples of decision bundles?

Yes, exactly. Project Charter, Project Charter specifies 10 things, 20 things, 30 things, and again, that detail is in my book. But for purpose of today, let's just stay at the single bundle called a project charter, and sorry, my mind's wandering into this acronym called

VUCA. Yes,

so it stands for Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous, and there's a whole lot of copying out going on, like, oh, it's just a VUCA environment. Yes, the outside world's a crazy place, but within your walls, where you're paying people, you are paying them to improve certainty and confidence, you are paying them to simplify things to reduce ambiguity. So, anytime someone go ahead,

yeah, yeah, I was going to say to, to create, revise, and approve like their next experiment to find out what's working in this VUCA world.

When someone throws up their hands and surrenders to Vuca says, well, it's just an uncertain world. I love to play the game called What are the chances? So,

okay, What are

the chances that your next project needs a project charter? Pretty high. What are the chances that your next project is going to impact a process that you probably need to document the future state process? Pretty high. What are the chances that your new project, your next project, is going to affect your database model and database structure pretty high? What are the chances that your project, like, justifies a weekly status report? Pretty high, rinse, repeat, you get the idea. So, no, that's

no, those questions really just helped Robert and the VUCA-ness of our world creates more of a case for documenting, like, what variables are we playing with and not playing with, and what's working and what's not working.

Don't surrender to Google,

just throw some gum at the wall. Yeah,

that's right, that's right, that's right.

Okay,

so hopefully I gave you some examples of what do teams need to collaborate on that's worth documenting, if you want the ambiguity. I mean, Racy, Racy doesn't tell you the dependencies, Racy doesn't tell you the duration, Racy doesn't tell you whether that information is worth documenting or not. Make it explicit. So,

Robert, I want to, I want to make sure I'm getting the hierarchy, if you will.

Yeah,

so like, if we have a change initiative, I don't know, we're going to change how we do onboarding, then for an initiative, there's not just one big draft review, revise, approve, distribute. There's the project charter. There's each process that we might be touching inside of changing our approach to how we bring employees into our company.

That's fair.

So, there's okay. There's going to be more than one set of the five verbs for this significant initiative,

and you're tiptoeing into again a subtle benefit of the five verbs, where it helps you avoid these decision bundles that are too big or too small.

Okay,

because you can have a project charter that tries to boil the ocean, and it gets stuck. It gets stuck in this decision pipeline, right. So, five verbs: if something gets caught, it helps you quickly recognize, up, something got caught, the symphony stuff, the

Robert. I just had the insight about untrustworthiness, right? So, like, sometimes when our politicians are making laws, they start to bundle things into the same piece of legislation, like we're going to get this through, we're going to have it ride the coattails of this other thing that the public or parties agree with, right. So, if we're starting, if we have something in front of us, documentation, and it's like we'd approve this, but we wouldn't approve this, right? So now that starts to make the case for separating that, you've got different scopes there.

Yes.

Okay.

So, yes, I, where you're going with that, I agree with that's not where I was going, but I like it.

Keep going. You're going, then, so the

right sizing also is that let's say you have a tiny project that you feel like, oh, this is overkill to blah blah blah blah blah to document

it, right? That's just for big projects,

exactly, exactly. Yeah, so understandable. So then, if a change is so petty that it feels like the overhead of five verbs is too much. Well, then bundle it with another project, so, so, five verbs again, perfection, precision of the bundle size, whether it's the document size or whether it's the project size, there's two different altitudes here. Five verbs doesn't aim for precision, it just helps you avoid the extremes, right? Because the extremes of a project that's too big or too small is a bad idea. A single document that is either too big or too small is a bad idea. So, over time, and pretty quickly, five verbs has this - it's again, it's a forcing function to detect what's too big, what's too small, and it helps you detect untrustworthiness, because imagine let's just take a process flow as an example. Okay, we've got a new project, we've got our current state process flow, and we sense that well, about 10% of this process is going to change, so you're assigning, you're assigning the future state process flow to Person A, the review and revise to person BCD, and you're assigning approved to person E. Well, anywhere along that rhythm, draft, review, revise, approve, distribute. If something gets caught, the right course of action is to just hand it off to the next person. The symphony must go on, but if something gets caught for five days, well, then you know person A wasn't the right person to draft the project charter, or the future, or the process flows, the people assigned review and revise, BCD. If they're dragging three days, five days, seven days, then you know something's wrong. This is something I took from a Northwestern University study on trust many years ago. The main takeaway from this study on trust, a vital topic, if you have trust issues with someone, I promise you it's some combination of their incompetence, dishonesty, low dependability, or malevolence. So, the five verbs helps you quickly detect, and I'm going to jump

to the music metaphor. You know what, Johnny doesn't play clarinet. Maybe Johnny would be better on saxophone or drums or publicity, but if something gets caught in this decision symphony, we can. We're now minimizing the cost to detect untrustworthiness, whatever it is, and we're minimizing the cost to reassign.

Okay, because the

typical team today, with its 100 verbs or it's four adjectives, it's really expensive to detect untrustworthiness and to reassign untrustworthiness. So that's one of the cost goals of the five verbs is to minimize the marginal cost to detect untrustworthiness, minimize the marginal cost to reassign, because now I can be incredibly polite and pragmatic to say, hey Susie, you missed your cue, we're not aiming for perfection, you can miss your cue once, all human, but to systemically or systematically miss your cue, then I know we've got the wrong assignments. Okay, whatever reason. So, fine,

we've got a red flag. Yeah,

so the five verbs helps us again. I'm gonna, I'm gonna phrase this in two careful ways.

Okay,

too many teams today are systemically tolerant of untrustworthiness. A team in motion is never fully in balance. It's really just constantly correcting for imbalance. So, a team is never fully trustworthy, but a mature, humble team with self-esteem is constantly correcting, tuning for untrustworthiness,

aligning. Okay,

we have to be cautious that at any moment we've got an assignment wrong. I don't care what the org chart says, I don't care what race right. Neither of these two frameworks should be sacred because of where our work cultures are today, where the job market is today.

My how-to brain wants to back up just a step here, Robert. So, for each, when we talk about assigning accountability, is there one name next to each verb,

so

responsible for draft, and Amy's responsible for review.

Here's what I'd recommend. That's typical.

Okay,

in general, as a default, I would assign draft to a junior person who doesn't invest in the game, and they don't have much bias. Yes, but they're good facilitator, they're pragmatic.

Okay, much bias, good facilitator, pragmatic. They're just trying to objectively synthesize, okay?

And they're optimizing globally for that decision bundle,

okay? And is it one name, is it one name, is it like I

can't just, I can't justify more than one name, it, I don't think it matters, but I can't, I can't encourage a second or third name, because there's plenty of room to assign, there's plenty of space to the next verb called review and revise,

yeah,

all right, so if you've got untrustworthy folks, they don't have the humility to assign them draft, okay? And they shouldn't have the authority to be assigned approved. So, by process of elimination, if you've got some less than trustworthy folks or incredibly biased folks, like this line of business wants ABC, and this line of business wants JKL. They're going to optimize locally,

pushing for their agenda. You

have to anticipate the silos, and you have to anticipate the narcissists.

Now, so someone might say, I'm not untrustworthy, I just didn't have all the information, or you know, this is a really risky situation, right? So I'm hesitant, I'm not taking the next step forward because worried about consequences are going in the wrong direction, right? I need more time to think this through, I can't just have five days to move, yeah.

So you're painting about three to five different branches off this,

okay?

So I'm not sure I'd be able to cover all of them, but yeah, so one scenario that you pointed out is if a person who's assigned review and revise is nervous about this, it probably means something upstream they had a problem with, and they still are not in agreement, they're not aligned with an upstream decision bundle, and now they're just downstream. I will say, because there's a, there's a Q rhyme here. If you are assigned review and revise, it means you get to have your say, even though you might not get your way,

because you're not approve,

because the person who's the tie breaker, the micro escalation point, and the sponsor for this decision bundle saying this is worth the rigor of five verbs, this is worthy, this is worth the documentation, they're assigned approve.

Yes. Okay,

so the person assigned approved, they're a micro sponsor, and we could get into the value of why are micro sponsors valuable, because the conventional role of project sponsor is too big, too big for one person. What are you going to do? You're going to break it up into smaller pieces. So five verbs also helps you avoid this perpetual problem of project sponsorship is just too big. The person assigned to prove they're the micro sponsor, they're the tie breaker, and they're a micro escalation point, so that we can anticipate that we had some differences of opinion. So we want to host healthy task conflict, because a team that has no disagreement is not really a team, right? So, again, so we're the five verbs is a subtle way to undermine personality conflict. Okay, so the five verbs, I will make a plug for a body, a part of my books that's outside the five verbs. I describe it in this way. You need lubrication in corporate America. We also call this discipline and empathy. How many teams need more discipline? All of us. How many teams need more empathy? All of us. And it's not a trade off. The worst teams have low discipline and low empathy. The best teams are high discipline and high empathy. So, the five verbs is the teeth, and where we were going, or where my mind was wandering, was tiptoeing into templates that are the empathy, the lubrication for this elegant expectation factory.

Empathy and templates tell us more about that

empathy. Do you want to rely on meetings for empathy? No. Do you want to rely on email? No. Do you want to rely on personalities, good and bad managers coming and going? No. So how do you codify and formalize something to not leave empathy to chance.

A

template, muscle

memory.

What's the language? What are the habits? What's the frequency? What are the questions? Because templates, templates are a form of Q and A. Templates are a form of prompting, where AI is all about prompt engineering. Yeah, I hope that this AI buzzword of prompt engineering helps humans ask better questions of other humans.

Yeah, so okay,

a template is a prompt, it's a Q and A, and so the right templates with thoughtful language forcing vulnerability, we don't leave empathy to chance

template for our interactions with our customers. We have a template for our interactions with internal customers.

Yeah, yeah, mostly on, am I scoping

this right? Okay,

our immediate colleagues within a team,

okay,

employees, consultants, so that we are constantly, again, to use a dance metaphor, are we stepping on each other's toes? Am I turning you too high? Am I setting you up for success, or am I making your life difficult? So you cannot leave this stuff to meetings, emails, and personalities. So now you're

giving me some words, Robert. If you and I are on the same team, and I feel like you're stepping into my, my lane, I've got language now for yes, that out,

yes, yes. Am I vulnerable and asking you, how would you like this? Is a specific tool that's outside the scope of the five herbs, but I think your tool that asks you every month, how would you like my meeting etiquette to change, if you'd like it to. How would you like my email etiquette to change? Third communication channel is documentation. How would you like my contribution to certain structured documentation to change? Those are the three communication channels. And so this template, it's empathy, and we don't leave it to chance. That's my goal. Is I do not want to leave empathy to chance. I don't want to leave discipline to chance. It's not rigid, it's the mechanics.

I mean, and that's a different perspective than like people have emotional intelligence, or they don't, and it's a really hard skill to build. And yeah, you're shocked that they're, yeah, you can have tools, you can have templates,

that's right. So, I'm a dance instructor, and I joke with my students, I only teach mechanics. If I had style skills, then maybe I would teach style, but really, style is on your terms. I am here to teach you the mechanics that are not on your terms. Salsa, quick, slow, quick, slow, not negotiable. All

right, I know that you have gotten listeners thinking. One last question for you, Robert. If there is a leader that has been inspired, engaged by the idea of the five verbs, how do they get started?

So, the low touch way is that they should check out my two books. There are free previews, but books are not expensive. There is an ebook version, and they should be available anywhere you buy your books online.

Great,

I do have YouTube videos. I don't host my own YouTube channel, but various audiences are posting sessions where I contribute to their stuff, so you can search for me on YouTube, and then finally just on LinkedIn. My books were published in 2024 and for better and for worse, working with editors, my material, the material in my books, has a certain political correctness and a modest amount of edge since then, untethered to editors, and now because now I'm doing so much public speaking that I've got visuals and slides that, because of the nature of public speaking, my materials, my LinkedIn posts that are laden with slides, it's much more edgy.

Okay,

that material is much edgier than my books. My books, you don't lose any substance, but it's very politically correct. And my LinkedIn posts are more in your face, edgy. They aim at some humor, or just say hi on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to have a one on one conversation with folks where something doesn't make sense, or they have questions, or they're skeptical, but just know that I'm bringing this material inspired by the basics of supply chain music, dance, theater, improv, the martial art of aikido. So this is not 400 level stuff. My secret power is the cross pollination of all of these things,

that's the 400 level stuff. So everybody, I want to end on this note. You can tell that Robert has been working with this approach, these five verbs for over 20 years, and he's got all the cross pollination and all the layers of benefits that come from using an approach like this, and I appreciate you sharing very candidly with us about what all you have learned over the last couple of decades.

My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, Amy.

Thank you so much for being on. Courage of a leader podcast. Thank you for listening to the Courage of a Leader podcast. If you'd like to further explore this episode's topic, please reach out to me through the Courage of a Leader website at www dot courageof aleader.com I'd love to hear from you. Please take the time to leave a review on iTunes, that helps us expand our reach and get more people fully stepping into their leadership potential. Until next time, be bold and be brave, because you've got the courage of a leader,