RIDE — Decision-Making Clarity for Change
For any change, name who Requests, who Inputs, who Decides, and who Executes.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
RIDE is a four-role decision-rights framework applied to organizational change. Before a change is discussed, you name who is requesting it, who gets to give input, who is the decider, and who will execute it. It resolves the core anxiety of participatory reorgs — people can engage honestly once they know whether they have a vote, a voice, or neither.
Origin
Helfand explicitly credits Pat Waters, the chief people officer at Procore (later at UKG), who taught it to her team. Helfand says she googled it, could find nothing written about it, and encouraged Waters to publish it. It is not in the first edition of Dynamic Reteaming; Helfand writes about it in her newer book.
Core principles
- 01Being clear on who the decision maker is in a change is really important.
- 02Some changes are open to discussion and some are not — say which, up front.
- 03Decision-making does not have to equal hierarchy; the person at the top need not always be the decider.
- 04Agency over how your part of the org evolves builds ownership and empowerment.
How to run it
- 1
R — Name the requester
Identify who is asking for the change. Frame the change as a current state and a future state, and be honest about whether that future state is up for discussion.
- 2
I — Name who gives input
Decide explicitly which people or teams get consulted, and on what. This is where a whiteboard reteaming session or a team retrospective fits.
Pro tip Teams often generate the best input on their own structure — e.g. a retrospective concluding they'd deliver at a better cadence as two teams instead of one.
- 3
D — Name the decider
State who makes the call. Be blunt where there is no participation: you are probably not going to hold a standup on whether the company should be acquired.
Watch out Silence on this point is what makes people feel a change was decided in a back room — even when it wasn't.
- 4
E — Name who executes
Decide who rolls the change out and how. Deciding is not the same as delivering; the rollout mechanism (an email versus a facilitated session) is itself a leadership choice.
Pro tip Ask yourself what kind of leader you want to be: is the reorg 'done by an email', or do you get people's input?
In the wild
Helfand's team-level illustration: a team runs a retrospective and concludes it would be more effective and deliver at a better cadence as two teams instead of one. Under RIDE, the team is the requester and holds input; a leader is the decider; the team and its leader execute.
→ The team gets real agency into how its part of the org evolves, which Helfand argues builds ownership in the company.
When Helfand was an IC at AppFolio, the company acquired a San Diego business to get years ahead in workflow software for law firms. She was not involved in that decision at all.
→ RIDE makes that legitimate and legible: the input role simply did not extend to the IC level, and saying so is more honest than pretending otherwise.
Common mistakes
Inviting input while quietly having already decided
Fake consultation is worse than none. If the future state is not up for discussion, say so — pretending otherwise burns trust for every future change.
Assuming decider always equals hierarchy
Defaulting the decision to the person at the top wastes the agency and context of the team doing the work. The decider role should be assigned deliberately, not inherited.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders and chiefs of staff running any org change where people are anxious about whether they have a say.
Not ideal for
Trivial, reversible team tweaks where formalizing four roles is heavier than the change itself.
From the transcript
“being clear on who the decision maker is in a change is really important”
“it's who's requesting the change who can give input to the change who's the decider on the change and who's going to execute on the…”
“you're gonna you're you're getting acquired like you're probably not going to have a standup meeting and talk about should we get acquired or not”
From the episode
The art and wisdom of changing teams
Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)