There are books and dissertations a plenty on the values of democratic decision-making and the best way to go about it. You may have heard of RAPID or RACI, both of which are popular in traditional businesses. But there are many models you can look at to see what might suit you. 

For small teams, you could try RAD or DARE, while larger teams can try MOCHA. For organizations with teams that are often impacted by other people’s decisions, FINAL can be a good option. (And if you really want to rethink operations from the ground up, TEAL and Holacracy are commonly discussed.) Organizations like the Sustainable Economies Law Center are a great starting place if all of these acronyms are overwhelming.  

At The Appeal, we found different pieces of these models helpful, so we put them together to create our own. Our current framework is called OATS.

Why? To be honest, if you’re going to say this word over and over again, our thinking was, let’s at least make it cute.

Each letter of OATS stands for a role in executing a project or making a decision. While some projects/decisions may need every OATS role filled, others may not but generally, the ‘A’ and ‘S’ are always assigned.

Nobody wants to, or could, have every colleague agree on every decision an organization makes—and that’s not how The Appeal operates. (Well, not anymore. In those hazy early days, by default we tried to all completely agree on every decision we were making, from our social media strategy to fundraising materials, and realized within weeks that was a recipe for disaster.)

We focus on getting our team’s input on the strategy & business side of our organization. For editorial, while we collectively discuss and decide non-urgent pitches as a team, once a story is approved our workflow looks the same as any other newsroom: Writers are assigned an editor, they work on drafts, drafts move through fact checking and copy editing, and then get published. 

To figure out exactly what our team wanted input on, we asked them. We brainstormed critical decisions and asked, under each one, who should do the work and who should make the final decision. We found small groups were an easier way for our team to chat with each other and give input, since not everyone is comfortable sharing their thoughts with a big group, then we had each small group visually plot their thoughts.

Tools like Miro were really helpful throughout this process, since it gave our team an easy way to vote on each decision. 

We broke our categories out into:

• Finance
• Staff
• Operations
• Culture
• Strategy
• Fundraising & Ad hoc

If you already lead a small team, you could break this down further such as Budget, Project Approval, Project Management, etc. Here’s a Miro board template you can copy and use to survey your own team. (Open the Miro, go to Settings>Board>Make a copy.)

If you’re not a fan of dot voting, here are some helpful questions to ask your team, or even yourself:

• Who do you think should make X decision?
• Who should do all the research about X decision?
• Who should do the implementation of X decision?
• Do you, as a Y team member, want to do this work?
• Which of these do you, as a Y team member, want to do:
  1. Make the decision
  2. Approve a recommendation
  3. Be made aware of the decision
  4. Be left out of the decision

This seems obvious, but document, document, document. Once you know what framework you want to use, write down all the decisions you went through in Step 2, and align the dot voting/answers as best you can with the roles laid out in your model. For OATS, you can use this template.

At The Appeal, our OATS document, which memorializes who makes which decisions and how, is kept in its own Google Doc and replicated in a How We Work guidebook for all staff.

The more visual it is, the easier it will be to use. Here are some examples of graphic representation. Even if you don’t want to change how you make decisions, documenting who makes what decisions in a chart is a really helpful tool for practicing transparency and empowering staff on your team.

Here’s what one section of our OATS doc looks like, as well as an at-a-glance version, which helps give a top-line understanding of who is the decider (the OATS ‘S’) on key decisions:

Once you know who decides what, you can finally figure out how the deciders will actually make a decision—a key part of the process if the decider is more than one person. Common options are:

We know it’s unlikely we’ll get an emphatic “yes” from everyone every time we need to make a decision, so the bar we use is “Active Solidarity” (shoutout to Defector Media, who we borrowed this idea from). A decision is approved when everyone listed as a Sign-off supports a decision, even if it’s not their favorite. This is given through a physical or emoji thumbs up on Slack or explicitly saying or typing support in a Zoom chat.

It’s important to know what happens if a decision isn’t approved. At The Appeal, we go back and revise our recommendation based on the feedback we received, then seek Active Solidarity a second time. If it still can’t be reached, a vote for ⅔ approval is held—something we’ve only had to do on occasion.

Small Note: While most of our decisions are made with Active Solidarity, key decisions such as leadership changes, large expenses, and decisions about the organization’s future are made jointly by our staff and board of directors, so do require ⅔ approval. We get more into this in our guide to bylaws.

As you embark on this work, remember three key things: