I first heard about it on Radar, Peter Hinssen’s podcast, which sent me looking for the original article.
In “The End of Role Clarity,” Clay Parker Jones, head of Organizational Design at Airbnb, makes a claim that at first glance runs against decades of organizational advice: role clarity isn’t the holy grail we make it out to be. It’s often a symptom of something else: too little trust, too little proximity, teams that are too large. Small teams with real relationships need less RACI, not more.
I recognize this from thirty years of work on agile, new ways of working, and team development.
The reflex I keep running into: something’s off, someone feels overlooked, a deadline gets missed, and the answer is “let’s write it down formally.” Who does what. Who decides. Who gets consulted.
The result is usually a matrix that looks fantastic on paper, and that nobody consults anymore after a few months.
The problem, in fact, rarely lived in the document. It lived in the relationship.
What I keep seeing in these engagements: as soon as trust grows, often through smaller, tighter-knit teams and simply talking to each other more often and more honestly, the need for the document itself evaporates. Nobody asks for the matrix anymore. People see what needs to happen, and more importantly: they know the colleague next to them will pick it up if needed.
That’s exactly where Parker Jones points too: role clarity only truly becomes an issue in large, distributed organizations where people no longer know each other well enough to improvise. Then you compensate for a lack of relationship with structure. That works, up to a point. But it’s a substitute, not a solution.
What I’d add myself: team size is an easy dial to turn. Building trust doesn’t come with a simple dial. Making teams smaller is something a manager can decide today. But trust doesn’t emerge just because it’s on the agenda. That takes time, work, repetition, and a few instances of the courage to say something that rubs against the grain, and then noticing it isn’t held against you.
Amy Edmondson, whom Parker Jones also cites in his article, calls this “permission for candor“: being able to speak across boundaries of status and expertise, without it costing you anything.
So yes, to smaller teams! But without investing in that underlying relationship, you just end up with a smaller team carrying the same amount of friction, only with fewer people to share the load.
One caveat, which Parker Jones himself also makes: there are contexts where role clarity isn’t a luxury but a necessity. Safety-critical environments, regulated sectors, large-scale production environments. There, you want the surgeon and the anesthesiologist to know exactly who does what. Most knowledge-work environments aren’t that. Yet the RACI matrices often hang on the wall there too, as if it were an operating room.
The question I’m left with: in your team, is role clarity there because the context demands it, or because nobody dared take the step to simply leave it to trust?
Gunter Loos is a consultant and facilitator at Beanmachine. He combines a background in computer science and anthropology with thirty years of experience in organizational change, agile ways of working, and team development — at organizations including Kind & Gezin, JiGSO, and SD Worx. He helps organizations and teams grow through facilitation, coaching, and down-to-earth project management.
