DRI

For clear decision making and responsibility

Who’s accountable?

If you can’t answer that, your team is prone to consensus decision-making—which has a lot of downsides.

One of the downsides? A slow decision-making process.

For difficult and strategic decisions, where we have two or more possible decisions that are equally valid, a consensus will take forever. Take BBC meeting culture where it can take up to six meetings to make decisions. It’s just slow.

When Larry Page took over as CEO of Google, he immediately sent a company-wide email to disrupt the consensus culture, “Every meeting must have one clear-decision maker.” Larry said, “If there’s no decision-maker, the meeting shouldn’t happen.”

The alternative of consensus? Set a clear DRI.

DRI

DRI—Directly Responsible Individual, is the tool to make accountability clear. Apple coined the term, and a company like Gitlab is using it as part of their culture. Amazon also has the mantra: Disagree and commit, that is the team shouldn’t spend too much time to ensure everyone agree with the decision.