Every leadership book tells you not to delay decisions – that it’s better to make a decision than not, that there’s no perfect decision, and that you probably have most of the information you need now to make a decision.

This is great advice, but what if it’s not clear who is supposed to be making the decision? More often than not, what slows teams down is not an unwillingness to make a decision, but a lack of clarity of how you’ll make the decision, who needs to be involved, and who has the final say.

I’m a big fan of using simple frameworks in companies and teams, because they give everyone a common vocabulary and a shared understanding. One of my favorite frameworks for decision making is DACI. It stands for:

D: Driver – responsible for driving and project-managing the decision process.

A: Approver – is going to have final say in making the decision. In smaller decisions.

C: Contributor(s) – the people who need to be involved in the process, and need to have input.

I: Informed – who needs to be informed of the decision once it’s made?

You can use this framework to clarify both who owns day-to-day decisions, and who owns one-off decisions. Before you dive into a decision, stop the team, and take 5 or 10 minutes to discuss who will be the Driver, the Approver, the Contributors, and who needs to be Informed. When you skip this step, often the team will run in circles with no-one wanting to make the final call, or several people arguing about the decision but getting nowhere.

There’s a caveat to the framework (as there often is) – some decisions are shared. For example, the VP Engineering and VP Product often need to agree on key product features or product direction. It’s ok to have two approvers on really important decisions, but you need to have an escalation path – be crystal clear on what happens when you reach an impasse, how and when to escalate, and who to escalate to to break the tie.

You’ll know that everyone’s in bought into the framework when you hear someone from your team stop the conversation and say “Hey, who’s the D on this?”. In business, clarity is everything, and it’s lack of clarity that will slow you down. Simple, lightweight frameworks can keep you operating at speed as you scale.