DACI

Eight people talk for an hour and walk out with nothing decided. Every opinion got aired. What nobody knew was which of those opinions would become the conclusion, or who was supposed to reach it.

So the meeting ends on "let's pick this up again," and two weeks later the same conversation runs again. The cause isn't meeting technique, it's seating. When nobody has established who decides, who can reject, and who only supplies material, every statement carries the same weight — and eight statements of equal weight never add up to a conclusion.

Decision making covers several frameworks for writing that seating down in advance, and DACI is the one that takes a single decision as its unit. Unlike RACI, which splits roles across a whole project, or a single-threaded owner, who carries an entire project on one pair of shoulders, DACI is closer to a table you redraw for every agenda item.

Write the decision as one sentence, fill four seats with names underneath it, and leave the deadline and the outcome in the same document. The name comes from the initials of those four seats: Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed.

1. Driver — the one person who reaches the conclusion. Collecting input, cutting one way when the input splits, and writing the conclusion into the document all belong to this seat. With two drivers, each assumes the other will call it and the deadline goes by.
2. Approver — the person who can reject the driver's conclusion. This seat appears only when money or legal exposure is involved. Shrinking the free plan's storage means rewriting the terms of service, so legal sits here. Plenty of decisions have no approver, and an empty seat is fine; filling it for the sake of symmetry splits the driver's authority in two.
3. Contributor — the people who supply the raw material. They get no vote, but they are guaranteed a place to speak: the engineer who knows the billing change takes four days, the salesperson who knows how many accounts signed on that condition.
4. Informed — the people who only need the result. Nobody asks their opinion, but they hear the outcome the day it lands. Leave this seat empty and someone says "I never heard that was decided" a month later, which is usually a request to reopen it.

There is an order to filling it in. Narrow the decision to one sentence that can be answered yes or no. "Cut free plan storage from 2GB to 500MB" works; "improve the pricing plan" produces no conclusion no matter how carefully the four seats get filled. Then pick the driver, and walk through the stakeholders — everyone affected by the outcome or able to affect it — putting anyone whose own work changes into Contributor and anyone who only needs to know into Informed. The dividing line is that change, not seniority. Last comes the deadline; without one, input keeps arriving and the driver keeps waiting for it.

The table is not the output of the meeting, it is the ticket in. Circulate the filled document first, then hold the meeting, then write the conclusion and the reasoning back into the same document and send it to everyone in the Informed row.

It fits a single hard-to-reverse decision with a lot of people attached. The two-way door test, which says easily reversed decisions should be made fast, draws the boundary. Button copy can be undone tomorrow, so drawing the table costs more than making the call; a pricing model takes months to unwind, and that is exactly when who decided it and on what grounds turns into a question later.

It also fits decisions that cross departments. When product, engineering, sales, and legal are all attached, no driver emerges by default, and that is where bikeshedding — time piling onto the most trivial item on the agenda — shows up worst. With the driver written down, an hour-long argument about naming closes in ten minutes.

There are two limits.

1. The table does not make the decision. If the driver has no appetite for cutting one way, the same meeting runs twice more with the seats neatly labeled. That is why it is paired with disagree and commit, the rule that you argue before the decision and execute together after it. Without that pairing, the Contributor seat turns into a veto seat.
2. Used on everything, it costs more than it saves. Writing the document and circulating it runs about thirty minutes, so ten decisions in a week means the week goes to deciding rather than working. When a team sets its collaboration mode, it draws a line for how big a decision has to be before it gets a table.

"Let's fill in the DACI before we book the meeting. Right now we don't even know who decides."

Meeting now would pile up opinions without producing a conclusion.

"I'm a contributor on this one. I'll give you the numbers, but Mia makes the call."

A declaration that they will follow the conclusion even if their input isn't taken.

"Shouldn't legal be the approver here? The terms of service wording changes."

Pointing out that a seat with rejection power was left off.

This is how it ran at Pagedeck when the team decided whether to shrink free plan storage. Mia put "cut storage from 2GB to 500MB" at the top of the document and wrote her own name in the driver seat. The terms of service had to change, so Grace was the approver; Theo, Sofia, and Noa were the contributors; everyone else was informed.

The input split. Sofia said existing accounts would churn, and Theo said two weeks of work would cover it. In the old days this is where "let's pick it up again" would have landed, but with a driver named, Mia cut it on the Friday deadline: existing signups keep the old limit, new signups get the new one. Sofia never agreed with that, and she still rewrote the sales deck against it the following week.

The most common mistake is reading the driver as whoever holds the most seniority in the room. The word decision carries authority with it, so the assumption is natural. What the seat actually asks for is understanding of the issue and the time to carry it to the end. Put the chief executive in the driver seat on every table and that person is holding fifteen of them at once, gets to none of them by Friday, decisions slide anyway, and the team concludes that tables don't work.

Reading a filled-in table as agreement is the other common one. Names on a page look like consent. The framework doesn't manufacture agreement — it makes a conclusion possible while disagreement is still in the room, and the Contributor column is a speaking slot rather than a signature line. When that difference goes unsaid, a contributor whose view lost reopens the decision with "I never agreed to this," and one call takes three weeks.