My brother, Chris, just turned over the keys for the USS West Virginia (a nuclear submarine) to its new Captain during a moving ritual celebration called a Change of Command. As the program states, the Change of Command is a transfer of “total responsibility, authority, and accountability from one individual to another. The heart of the ceremony is the formal reading of official orders by both the relieving officer and the officer being relieved:

“I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved.”

And its over, 2 and a half years of being absolutely and completely accountable for one of the most complicated collections of machinery in the history of the world and of the 130+ officers and seamen on the submarine.

The work, the roles, the responsibilities of each and every man are carefully delineated. No room for ambiguity.

While in Georgia during the celebration of the event, LinkedIn told me that a colleague had a new position, a job title I had never heard before. I thought it was a made up title (though Google has since relieved me of that misapprehension) and was struck by contrast in official and formal duties with the emergent and informal roles in the networks that I write about so enthusiastically. Do made-up job titles come with a bounded set of job responsibilities and expectations?

And what happens when a project group forms? How do those in the project articulate their assumed responsibilities and overlaps? It feels counter to the spirit of self-generating networks to get all explicit about who does what, but I’ve recently seen some local volunteer groups falter because it was not clear, for a given task or project:

• Who was Responsible for each of the necessary tasks required (and who was responsible for coordinating those tasks)?
• Who was Accountable to the group for ensuring that the goals were met?
• Who was needed to Support each task, and the project as a whole?
• Who was available to Consult to those responsible for the task?
• Who needed to be kept Informed of the tasks process, issues, and status?

The acronym of these bolded letters — RASCI — may be know to many as a fundamental organizational development tool that I think is probably underutilized in the context of working in both ad hoc as well as formal production-oriented networks. Not that we all need the degree of specificity for maintaining a smoothly running submarine underwater for 2 months or more, but we do need to internalize the RASCI questions when we start a job, a task, and assign ourselves a title that we think corresponds with a role.