What RACI Gets Wrong About Accountability
Despite its broad acceptance, the RACI matrix faces legitimate criticism from practitioners and from peer-reviewed research. Here are the key concerns.
Structural criticisms
It carries assumptions that no longer hold. Responsibility charting grew out of the systems-analysis tradition of the late 1960s (Cleland & King, 1968), and the RACI coding itself reached a wide audience when the third edition of the PMBOK® Guide adopted it in 2004; the second edition had used PARIS instead (McGrath & Whitty, 2018). Both belong to a world where projects were assumed to have distinct checkpoints that could be mapped in advance. A RACI chart is a snapshot, and unless it is constantly revised it goes stale; in volatile, fast-moving contexts that lag is a liability rather than an asset.
The distinction between “accountable” and “responsible” is fundamentally confused. In a peer-reviewed analysis, McGrath and Whitty (2018) found that “the confusion between responsibility and accountability can be characterised as a failure to separate the obligation to satisfactorily perform a task (responsibility) from the liability to ensure that it is satisfactorily done (accountability).” Testing the point against PRINCE2, they reported “a difficulty in PRINCE2 with the difference in definition between accountability and responsibility”. Their framework also resolved what they call the difficulty of applying accountability in RACI tables. If a framework refined over many editions still had to work to keep the two terms apart, the teams filling in a matrix over an afternoon are unlikely to do better.
It conflicts with collective accountability models. The Scrum Guide (2020) deliberately makes accountability shared, stating that “the entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint.” This cuts against RACI’s usual insistence on single-point accountability.
The “single accountable person” is often a fiction. Heidi K. Gardner’s research on collaboration, published in Harvard Business Review (2015) and in her book Smart Collaboration (2017), draws a line between genuine collaboration and what she calls mere assembly, in which experts make individual contributions and someone pulls them all together. Her evidence comes from professional services firms, but the mechanism travels, and her later work extends it across industries (Gardner & Matviak, 2022). Once work is complex enough to demand several kinds of expertise, the people marked “consulted” are not advising from the sidelines; they are shaping the outcome. The chart that names one accountable person can then flatter the reality, because the ownership that matters is already shared whether the matrix admits it or not.
It creates false clarity. In practice we have seen teams complete their RACI matrix, feel they have achieved something, and then carry on with their own interpretations anyway. The matrix captures formal roles but ignores informal dynamics: the subject-matter influencers, the unofficial problem-solvers and the communication hubs who actually make projects work.
It inhibits initiative. By rigidly defining who is responsible for what, RACI can discourage team members from contributing outside their designated boxes. The very act of delineating boundaries creates them.
The deeper problem: RACI does not explain what accountability requires
The most significant gap in RACI is that it tells you who is accountable but says nothing about what accountability requires in practice. As Frisch and Greene (2016) note in Harvard Business Review, “the word ‘accountable’ can mean different things to different people.” Many interpret the “A” as merely the person who gets blamed if things go wrong, which is a recipe for dysfunction.
In reality, the kind of accountability that matters here is not passive ownership; it is active enablement. The PMBOK® Guide defines a sponsor as someone “accountable for enabling success” (emphasis added), not merely as someone who answers for outcomes once they arrive. This changes how accountability and responsibility must relate to each other.
What the accountable person must actually do
Peter Bregman (2016), writing in Harvard Business Review, argues that to foster accountability in others, leaders must be clear in five areas:
- Clear expectations: being explicit about the outcome, how success will be measured and how people should achieve the objective.
- Clear capability: ensuring those responsible have the skills and resources needed. If they don’t, the accountable person must either develop them or reassign the work.
- Clear measurement: establishing milestones and intervening early when targets slip, whether by brainstorming solutions, identifying fixes or redesigning schedules to get people back on track.
- Clear feedback: providing honest, fact-based communication about performance, delivered continuously rather than saved up.
- Clear consequences: both positive recognition for success and constructive redirection when needed.
These five elements work as a system. Miss any one, and accountability falls through that gap.
Authority must match accountability
Here’s the critical principle RACI ignores: holding someone accountable without giving them the necessary authority is demoralising and unproductive, and over time it poisons the working environment. When you make someone accountable, you must give them authority to match, including the power to supply resources, arrange training and create alignment among those who are responsible.
As Neal Whitten (1999) puts it, “the project manager drives ownership of decisions to the level where the accountability of the decision must lie.” An accountable person who takes the role seriously does not sit back and wait for results. The job is to remove obstacles, provide resources, open routes for responsible parties to work together, monitor milestones and shield the team from organisational politics.
Put simply: you can delegate responsibility, but within any one level of an organisation you cannot delegate accountability, and that kind of accountability includes creating the conditions for success.
The Contract Game, issued as a template
There is a name for what happens when authority and responsibility come apart. Craig Larman and Bas Vodde called it the Contract Game (Larman & Vodde, 2010). One party holds the authority to define what gets built; another carries the responsibility for building it. Neither owns the whole problem. The side with the authority tends to ask for more, because it does not carry the cost of delivery. The side carrying the work tends to ask for less, because it bears the risk without controlling the scope. Every exchange becomes a negotiation, and when the result disappoints, each side has a ready account of whose fault it was.
The important part is that this is not a people problem. It does not yield to better relationships, clearer communication or better hiring. It is produced by the structure, and only a change to the structure resolves it.
Which raises an uncomfortable question about RACI. The matrix is sold as the cure for exactly this confusion. But consider what its central move actually is: it distinguishes the A from the R, and though the two can sit in one cell, the convention pushes them apart and then circulates that separation as the agreed design of the work. RACI does not merely fail to prevent the Contract Game. Used this way, it is the Contract Game printed as a template. Nothing in the method forces that, since you can put the A and the R in one cell, but the convention pulls them apart, and the chart then formalises the split rather than diagnosing it.
This is why the familiar advice to make sure the A is clear misses the point. A clearer A does not, by itself, close the gap between authority and responsibility; at best it surfaces the gap, and too often it just records it more precisely. Handing someone the letter without the authority to act on it is how organisations manufacture the demoralised, unproductive accountability this article began with. The chart is not neutral about that outcome. It quietly takes a side.
References
- Bregman, P. (2016). “The Right Way to Hold People Accountable.” Harvard Business Review, 11 January. hbr.org
- Cleland, D.I. & King, W.R. (1968). Systems Analysis and Project Management. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Frisch, B. & Greene, C. (2016). “To Hold Someone Accountable, First Define What Accountable Means.” Harvard Business Review, 28 June. hbr.org
- Gardner, H.K. (2015). “When Senior Managers Won’t Collaborate.” Harvard Business Review, March issue. hbr.org
- Gardner, H.K. (2017). Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
- Gardner, H.K. & Matviak, I. (2022). Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
- Larman, C. & Vodde, B. (2010). Practices for Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum. Addison-Wesley. (The Contract Game, p. 106.)
- McGrath, S.K. & Whitty, S.J. (2018). “Accountability and responsibility defined.” International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 687–707. doi.org
- Project Management Institute (2017). A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), 6th Edition. Newtown Square: Project Management Institute. (Sponsor definition, Glossary.)
- Schwaber, K. & Sutherland, J. (2020). The Scrum Guide: The Definitive Guide to Scrum. scrumguides.org
- Whitten, N. (1999). “Duties of the Effective Project Manager.” PM Network, 13(9), 16. pmi.org
