9. Approval Inflation

“Every additional approval is a confession that the organisation no longer trusts its own decisions.”

Introduction

Most organisations believe they have an approval process. In reality, they have accumulated approvals over time without ever designing the process as a whole. Each signature was added to solve a particular problem, satisfy a particular executive or respond to a particular failure. No single approval appeared unreasonable in isolation. Yet when viewed collectively, they reveal something quite different: a decision architecture that has gradually substituted permission for judgement.

Approval is one of the least examined mechanisms in organisational governance. It is generally assumed that requiring more people to approve a decision improves its quality, reduces organisational risk and increases accountability. Consequently, whenever an incident occurs, the instinctive response is rarely to improve the quality of the decision itself. Instead, another reviewer, another committee or another executive is inserted into the approval chain. Governance becomes progressively thicker, while decision quality often remains unchanged.

The result is a phenomenon that may be described as Approval Inflation. Like monetary inflation, where increasing the quantity of currency reduces the value of each unit, increasing the number of approvals reduces the value of every individual approval. When everyone is expected to approve everything, approval itself ceases to communicate confidence, ownership or accountability. It becomes administrative currency whose abundance destroys its meaning.

Approval Was Never Intended to Replace Decision-Making

Approval performs an important organisational function when it is used sparingly. Certain decisions genuinely require explicit authority because they commit significant financial resources, alter organisational strategy or expose the enterprise to material risk. In these circumstances an approval represents more than consent. It represents the deliberate assumption of accountability by someone entrusted with organisational authority.

Difficulties emerge when approval expands beyond these exceptional circumstances and becomes the default response to uncertainty. Instead of designing policies that empower competent individuals to make routine decisions, organisations increasingly require permission for ordinary work. Managers begin approving travel requests, purchasing decisions, system changes, recruitment actions and countless operational activities that could have been resolved through predefined decision criteria. The approval becomes a substitute for organisational clarity.

This substitution has profound consequences. Decisions that should be routine are elevated unnecessarily, while senior managers become occupied with authorising matters that contribute little to organisational performance. Their calendars become filled with reviewing decisions that others were fully capable of making. Meanwhile, the genuinely strategic questions that require executive attention compete for increasingly limited time and cognitive capacity.

The Hidden Cost of Permission

Approval chains are usually justified as mechanisms for controlling risk, yet they often create risks that receive remarkably little attention. Every additional approval introduces waiting time, communication overhead and opportunities for misunderstanding. Documents circulate between individuals whose primary contribution is frequently to verify that someone else has already reviewed the proposal. Progress becomes dependent not upon organisational readiness but upon personal availability.

The most immediate consequence is slower organisational throughput. Projects wait for signatures. Procurement stalls while authorisations move through hierarchical layers. Recruitment decisions remain pending because a single executive is travelling. Customers experience delays that cannot easily be explained because the work itself has already been completed. The organisation begins confusing administrative latency with prudent governance.

Less visible, but equally damaging, is the behavioural effect. Individuals gradually stop exercising judgement because they know someone else will ultimately approve the outcome. Rather than asking whether a decision is sound, they ask whether it is likely to be approved. The intellectual effort shifts from analysing the decision to predicting the preferences of approvers. Good governance intended to improve decision quality inadvertently encourages political behaviour instead of professional judgement.

Why Approval Chains Continue to Grow

Approval Inflation rarely results from deliberate organisational design. It emerges incrementally through institutional memory. Every governance failure leaves behind a procedural residue. A project overruns its budget and finance introduces an additional approval. A procurement error occurs and legal review becomes mandatory. A technology implementation encounters difficulties and another executive is required to sign future projects. Each intervention appears rational because it addresses a recent failure.

What is seldom examined is whether the original problem arose because insufficient approvals existed. More often, the failure resulted from incomplete information, poor capability, weak policies or inadequate controls. None of these shortcomings is necessarily corrected by inserting another signature into the process. The approval merely becomes a visible demonstration that the organisation has responded.

Over time these responses accumulate without ever being retired. Organisations conduct annual budget reviews but rarely conduct approval reviews. Existing approval requirements become inherited assumptions rather than conscious design decisions. Employees no longer know why particular approvals exist; they simply know that obtaining them is necessary. Governance begins preserving historical anxieties long after the original risks have disappeared.

This explains why mature organisations often possess extraordinarily complex approval matrices whose origins nobody can fully explain. Every approval represents a historical compromise that survived because removing it appeared riskier than questioning it. Complexity therefore grows asymmetrically. Approvals are easy to add but remarkably difficult to remove.

Diffused Accountability

Perhaps the greatest irony of Approval Inflation is that it weakens the very accountability it seeks to strengthen. Conventional thinking assumes that involving more approvers distributes organisational confidence. In practice it frequently distributes organisational ambiguity.

When six individuals approve the same decision, it becomes increasingly unclear who actually decided. Each approver naturally assumes that someone else examined aspects beyond their own expertise. Finance assumes legal reviewed the contractual implications. Legal assumes the operational manager validated the implementation. Operational management assumes risk assessed the exposure. Risk assumes executive management evaluated strategic alignment. Responsibility becomes fragmented into partial observations that never combine into coherent ownership.

When outcomes prove successful, every approver can legitimately claim involvement. When outcomes fail, responsibility becomes difficult to identify because no single individual perceived themselves as the decision-maker. The organisation has created the appearance of collective accountability while eliminating individual accountability.

Effective governance depends upon identifiable decision rights. Someone should know they are responsible for making the decision, while others contribute advice, evidence or specialist knowledge. Approval Inflation obscures these distinctions by transforming contributors into nominal decision-makers and decision-makers into coordinators of signatures.

Designing Decisions Instead of Collecting Signatures

Reducing Approval Inflation does not imply eliminating approvals altogether. Rather, it requires distinguishing between decisions that genuinely require authorisation and decisions that merely require guidance. The objective is not fewer controls but better decision architecture.

Policies exist precisely because they eliminate the need for repeated approvals. A well-designed policy resolves predictable questions before they arise, allowing competent individuals to proceed without seeking permission for every routine action. Standards perform a similar function for technical decisions by reducing variability without requiring continuous management intervention. Controls provide confidence that decisions are executed consistently without demanding executive participation in every transaction.

The result is an organisation where authority is deliberately distributed rather than reluctantly delegated. Senior leaders spend their attention on genuinely strategic decisions because routine operational judgement has already been embedded within governance mechanisms. Approval becomes the exception rather than the operating model.

This transition requires organisations to replace permission-based governance with principle-based governance. Instead of asking, “Who needs to approve this?”, they begin asking, “Who is best positioned to make this decision, and what information would enable them to do so confidently?” The latter question produces governance that scales. The former produces bureaucracy.

Conclusion

Approval Inflation is not fundamentally about signatures, workflows or software. It reflects a deeper organisational belief that decisions become safer simply because more people have participated in authorising them. While this belief appears intuitively attractive, it often produces the opposite outcome. Decision quality becomes diluted, accountability becomes dispersed and organisational responsiveness steadily declines.

Healthy organisations recognise that approval is a scarce governance instrument whose value depends upon its selective use. Every approval should correspond to a genuine transfer of organisational authority, not merely another checkpoint in an inherited administrative ritual. Where policies provide clarity, standards create consistency and controls generate confidence, many approvals become unnecessary because the organisation has already expressed its intent before the decision is required.

Approval Inflation therefore reveals a broader truth about governance itself. Organisations rarely become more effective by inserting additional permission into their decision processes. They become more effective by designing governance that allows capable people to decide with confidence, knowing that authority, information and accountability have already been aligned. Approval is valuable precisely because it is exceptional. Once it becomes routine, it ceases to be governance and becomes merely delay.