Approval Chains

Approval chains are a common feature of finance and operations. Work moves forward only after it is reviewed, signed off, or acknowledged by a sequence of roles. Requests are submitted, routed, paused, returned, revised, and resubmitted. Each step exists to confirm that something is acceptable before it proceeds.

The process is often invisible until it slows down. An item sits in a queue. Someone is unavailable. A reminder is sent. A follow-up meeting is scheduled. Work resumes once approval is granted. The chain is rarely questioned. It is treated as the normal way work flows.

In many organizations, these chains grow over time. An approval is added after a mistake. Another is added after an audit finding. A senior review appears after a surprise outcome. The chain lengthens, but the basic motion stays the same. Work advances through permission rather than enforcement.

Approval chains are widely justified.

They are framed as control. They are described as risk management. They signal seriousness and accountability. More approvals are equated with more oversight. Senior involvement is treated as protection. The presence of multiple reviewers is taken as evidence that decisions are being made carefully.

Approval chains are also defended as necessary because systems are imperfect. Data may be incomplete. Context may be missing. Someone has to decide whether something looks right. Approval becomes the place where that decision lives. It feels responsible to slow things down and check.

This justification is rarely challenged because approvals appear to prevent failure.

What the chain depends on is less visible.

Correct outcomes depend on reviewers noticing issues. They depend on judgment exercised at each step. They depend on approvers understanding context that the system does not provide. They depend on availability, attention, and memory. If someone skims, delegates poorly, or approves by habit, errors pass through. If someone is absent, work stalls.

The chain works only when vigilance holds.

Every approval assumes that the person reviewing can detect what the system does not prevent. It assumes they know what to look for. It assumes they will intervene when something feels off. If attention lapses, the approval becomes a formality. If attention increases, throughput suffers.

Approval chains convert structural uncertainty into human effort.

The existence of the chain indicates that the system allows ambiguous or invalid states to exist. Instead of enforcing rules at the point of action, the system permits many possibilities and relies on later judgment to filter them out. The approval step compensates for that permissiveness.

This is not a failure of the people approving. It is a consequence of design.

When approvals are required to make outcomes correct, judgment has been left unfinished. Decisions that could have been encoded into rules, constraints, or validations remain open until someone reviews them. The chain becomes the place where that judgment is repeatedly exercised.

Under different conditions, approval chains would not exist in their current form.

If inputs were constrained so that only valid options could be submitted, many approvals would be unnecessary. If rules were enforced at entry, reviewers would not need to decide whether something is acceptable. If exceptions surfaced automatically at the moment they occurred, they would not need to be caught later.

In those conditions, approvals would shrink to true exceptions rather than routine gates. The chain would collapse because the system would already know what is allowed.

This does not require better approvers. It requires finished design.

The continued presence of approval chains diagnoses an unfinished system. It indicates that correctness depends on permission rather than enforcement. It shows that leadership has chosen review as a substitute for structure. As long as approvals remain necessary to prevent error, responsibility for control sits with people, not the system.