Assign RACI roles explicitly — every task needs exactly one Accountable party

Why This Is a Rule

Ambiguous responsibility is the most common cause of collaborative task failure. "We're all working on this" means no one is accountable when it doesn't get done. The RACI framework eliminates this ambiguity by assigning one of four roles to every person-task combination:

Responsible (R): does the work. Can be multiple people. Accountable (A): owns the outcome. Must be exactly one person — if zero, no one owns it; if two, each assumes the other is handling it. Consulted (C): provides input before the work is done. Informed (I): notified after decisions are made.

The "exactly one Accountable" constraint is the critical structural requirement. It prevents the diffusion of responsibility that produces the bystander effect in teams: everyone assumes someone else is handling it, so no one does.

When This Fires

• At the start of any collaborative project or initiative
• When assigning tasks in a team context
• After discovering that a task fell through the cracks because "everyone thought someone else was doing it"
• During any planning session where multiple people will contribute to outcomes

Common Failure Mode

Assigning two people as Accountable: "Sarah and Jay are both accountable for the launch." This violates the single-A constraint and guarantees coordination friction: each assumes the other is tracking the critical path, both defer on decisions, and disagreements have no tiebreaker. One A, always.

The Protocol

For collaborative work: (1) List every task or deliverable. (2) For each task, assign each involved person a role: R, A, C, or I. (3) Verify the constraint: every task has exactly one A. If any task has zero A's → assign one. If any task has two A's → choose one and move the other to R or C. (4) Make the RACI visible to all parties. The assignment takes 10 minutes for a typical project and prevents weeks of ambiguous accountability.