RAPID Decision-Making

Organizations can use RAPID in different ways. Some implement it fully. Others adopt aspects of the tool. Still others use it to inspire and inform the creation of their own decision-making process.

Aspire Public Schools, an organization that opens and operates public charter schools in California, initially used RAPID as a diagnostic tool, and then began to use it to plan future decision making. As such, Aspire's experience provides a good look at how RAPID works in practice.

Founded in 1998, Aspire opened its first school in 1999 and grew quickly; by 2006, it was operating 17 schools across California, primarily serving low-income students. One of the hallmarks of Aspire's culture was the belief that everyone in the organization was accountable for the schools' performance – teachers, principals, staff at the national level – with no exceptions.

As Aspire grew, however, its leadership team – Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Don Shalvey, Chief Academic Officer (CAO) Elise Darwish, Chief Operating Officer (COO) Gloria Lee, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Mike Barr, and Vice President (VP) of Secondary Education Linda Frost – came to realize that just because everyone felt a sense of accountability did not mean that it was clear who was responsible for certain decisions and processes.

The team felt the effects of this confusion most acutely when it came to making decisions about Aspire's high schools. Aspire had originally focused on elementary and middle schools, and had achieved much success in those venues using a specific, outcomes-based and process-driven academic model. The organization had expanded into high schools as more of its middle-school students approached high-school age. But producing top-tier educational outcomes at the high-school level presented a whole new set of challenges. For example, high schools require curricula for many more subjects. And Aspire's high-school students had more issues in their lives influencing their academic performance.

Frost's position, vice president of secondary education, had been created to guide the holistic development of the high schools. But the addition of a new person to the leadership team blurred the boundaries (already informal) that existed around decision making. For example, CAO Darwish, who had created Aspire's successful K-8 academic model and process, believed that a similar classroom model and process could work well at the high-school level. However, it was unclear whether it was her role to run the classroom model at the high-school level. Frost, for her part, agreed about the value of the model, but found herself swamped with school-level issues and responsibilities, such as establishing a college-going culture, building relationships with local community colleges and businesses, and developing a standard model for the administration of the high schools in Aspire's portfolio. Both Darwish and Frost felt responsible for the high schools; both were working extremely hard. But in fact, neither felt as though there was enough focus on the academic model; their jobs overlapped in some areas, and left gaps in others. As a result, high-school outcomes were improving at a slower rate than K-8 performance.

The leadership team felt that RAPID could help them clarify the roles and responsibilities of the CAO and VP of secondary education positions. More broadly, they felt that RAPID could help them create an organization-wide decision-making process that would serve them well going forward, as Aspire continued to grow. And so, along with other members of Aspire's steering committee, they embarked upon a process to, in CEO Shalvey's words, "decide how to decide".

The process began with the CEO, the COO, and the CAO engaging in multiple, high-level conversations about what makes high schools successful. These initial conversations resulted in a strategic context for Aspire's organizational processes, as shown in Exhibit A. It became clear that, for Aspire, there were two different levels of success. There was success in the classroom, which included course materials, teaching methods, clear outcomes, and a process of testing and adaptation. And there was success across a school, which included the school's culture and operations.

Exhibit A: Aspire is unfiled in its vision for secondary school success

Subsequently, the COO, the CAO, and the VP of secondary education engaged in additional discussions to sort out the CAO and VP roles at a more granular level. They realized that being responsible for and making decisions about these two different spheres – in the classroom versus across the school – required two different skill sets, and that these two different skill sets naturally fit the CAO and the VP of secondary education.

This realization led the larger team to articulate an overall "accountability chain". They didn't want to lose the idea that everyone was accountable in their own way for something (and so could "own" Aspire's success). But they knew that they needed to set up some boundaries. This accountability chain, expressed in a chart, gave teachers responsibility for what happened in their classrooms, principals responsibility for what happened within their schools, the CAO responsibility for what happened within the classrooms across the whole network, and the VP of secondary education responsibility for what happened outside the classrooms in the high schools. It also clarified the responsibilities and boundaries that would accompany a planned new layer of positions – regional vice presidents (RVPs) – going forward.

At this point, it was actually relatively easy for the CAO and the VP of secondary education to begin using RAPID to make decisions. It was now possible to assign RAPID roles easily, because it was now easier to locate the decisions themselves (See Exhibit B). A few areas, such as the professional development of teachers, remained gray. These required using RAPID to drill down further in order to clarify what was needed to make a decision and why. But for the most part, decisions seemed to fit naturally into either the CAO or VP's court.

Exhibit B: Key Decisions regarding promoting success in the classroom and in schools

In general, as CEO Shalvey sees it, RAPID helped Aspire at a critical inflection point in its growth: "This tool was pretty important to us at the time because we were moving from having only a few senior staff who had worked together for a while to becoming a bigger organization with a matrix structure and more senior staff".

Shalvey explained that at a small size, Aspire could function as a team where "everybody was doing everybody's function, there was little clarity on whose responsibility something was, it was based more on who had bandwidth at that moment, it was 'bullpen by committee'". That approach wasn't sustainable as the organization grew, and in particular, as it expanded into a new area (high schools), which required new expertise. Now due to RAPID, Shalvey explained, "We have much greater clarity on roles. We feel we are much more transparent and accountable. If we were not using that tool today, we would be scrambling".