Captains
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
A lot of us are familiar with decision-making frameworks like RAPID or RACI. They are useful tools for designing and assigning responsibilities on a project. In addition to kicking off a project, I sometimes use them when org design or project execution feels messy in order to help me debug what’s wrong. Putting names in boxes often helps me figure out where the mess is: too many people think they’re in charge, there’s no one in charge, the Responsible individual isn’t Consulting the right people, no one knows who the Approver is, etc.
That said, as someone who likes efficiency, I honestly get tired of all the letters. What’s the C? What’s the difference between the A and R? D vs P vs I? I swear that unless you worked at Bain (who created RAPID) you never remember what all the letters mean — you only remember the R.
And honestly, as a CEO or a company builder, you usually just want to make sure that each project has a clear owner and then hold that person responsible for everything after that — did they meet their goals? Did they inform the right people? Did they collaborate effectively? Said in RAPID or RACI terms, you honestly just want to assign the person in the R box and then make them fill out the rest of the matrix.
Enter Captains.
Captains is an ownership model we implemented at Lambda School that was suggested by the always brilliant Laura Reisert. We arrived at it through the following process:
