Approval Bottleneck: If Everything Needs to Be Reviewed

I said last week I would come back to why the person closest to a lock like this is usually the last one who can see it.

One of the plant managers in my network was signing checks from $25 all the way up to $10,000. Every one of them crossed his desk. To him, every signature was the work getting done. And I, over the whole network, had not looked.

From the closest chair, a lock does not look like a lock. It looks like the job. Every time the work stops at your desk and you move it along, you have done something useful. You can spend years doing useful things that way and never once see the shape they make.

You cannot see the stall from the desk it stalls at.

This issue is the diagnosis, and only the diagnosis.

Why the closest chair sees least

Framework 15 in the book opens on a paradox: "the better you become at managing operations, the worse you become at seeing strategy."

I read something mechanical in that line. When work routes through one person, that person gets very good at moving it. Each release is quick. Each one is correct. Each one adds to the feeling that things are under control, and from where that person sits, they are. Nothing gets past them.

There is a second reason the closest person sees it last. The people around them adjust. They learn what goes to that desk and stop asking whether it should. After a while the route is just how the place works. Nobody remembers deciding it.

What the person at that desk cannot see is the queue they have turned into. The question nobody at that desk asks is why everything lands there at all. It never comes up, because the desk is too busy answering everything else.

The book uses the dance floor and the balcony for this. On the floor you see your partner and the couples right next to you. From the balcony you see the pattern: where the floor is crowded, where people keep bumping into each other, where the music has changed and nobody has noticed. The person who signs everything spends the whole day on the floor. And the floor is exactly where the pattern does not show.

The book also names why so many leaders stay down there: the operational view is where the urgent problems live. That matches everything I have seen. The urgent work is real, it is right in front of you, and it always comes with a deadline. The pattern comes with none, so it waits, and it can wait for years.

Every check, one pen

I was over a network of plants. In one of them, we had built controls around procurement, vendor setup and vendor payment. Each control had a reason behind it. A new vendor should not get set up without someone senior looking at it. A purchase should be checked against the budget. A payment should not go out without a signature.

Every one of those controls ended at the same person: the plant manager.

Those were the checks, $25 to $10,000. The $25 check and the $10,000 check crossed the same desk and got signed with the same pen.

On paper, it was a tight operation. Controls on the way in, controls on the way out, and budget-to-actual reviews on top. Nobody could say we were not watching the money.

Taken one at a time, each control made sense. The trouble was where all of them ended.

But if everything needs to be reviewed, then not everything will be reviewed. One person cannot look hard at every check. When all of it has to go through one desk, the big check and the small one compete for the same attention, and the small ones never stop coming.

The people who actually owned the accounts, the ones placing the orders and living with the spend, had no ownership of it. The budget-to-actual reviews showed them where the money had gone. None of the decisions were theirs to make.

I was over all of those plants. I had not taken care of how a key resource was being used. Few people mattered more to that operation than the plant manager, and his signature was going on $25 checks, inside a process I was responsible for. Nobody hid that from me. It was in plain view. I did not look, because a control that is doing its job never asks to be looked at.

That is the cost I carry from this one: a key person spending his attention where it did the least good, and me, above him, not seeing it.

Signed is not reviewed

Look at why each of us missed it.

The plant manager sat closest. From his chair, every check was a decision, and every decision was his job. Signing was what being responsible looked like. He had no reason to see the pile as a design problem, because to him it was simply the work, and he was doing the work.

The account owners sat one step away. They had the budget-to-actual numbers in front of them. But a report with no authority behind it trains people to watch. They were never asked to decide, so they never had a reason to look harder at what they were watching. None of that is a knock on them. They did exactly what the setup asked of them.

I sat furthest away, with the most authority to change it. I did not change it, because I was not looking.

That is the loop at the size of one plant. My not looking let the controls pile up on one desk. The pile kept the plant manager busy. A busy plant manager had no hour left to step back and question the setup. And the account owners never got the ownership that would have given them a reason to push back.

Every one of us had a fix within reach, and none of them would have worked alone. Give the plant manager help, more hours or a faster way to sign, and the loop just runs faster through him. Give the account owners another report, and they watch more closely while still deciding nothing. Put one more review on top at my end, and it lands on the same desk as everything else. Each fix touches one part and leaves the route untouched.

What half the CEOs import

In May 2025, PwC ran a pulse survey of 678 executives and board members. Fifty of them were CEOs. Half of those CEOs said they were changing how they make decisions by "inviting in outsiders to ask hard questions about their strategy and assumptions."

It is a small group, 50 people. I recognize the move all the same. You bring in an outsider when you suspect the view from your own chair is missing something. Nobody needs a stranger to point out what they can already see.

The people with the most authority in an operation are often the ones asking someone else to tell them what is in front of them. The book calls that compensating, and it is. It is also the corollary, acted out by people who can afford to act on it.

The same 50 CEOs pointed the same way twice more: 48% said they were building in more feedback loops, and 48% said they were revisiting strategic decisions more often. Both are ways of getting a second look at something you have stopped seeing.

One move this week

This one is a look, not a fix.

Pick one person in your operation whose desk everything seems to end at. It may be yours.

List every sign-off that lands there in a normal week. Write down what it is, the smallest dollar amount that reaches that desk, and the largest. Then show the list to someone who does not sit in that chair, and ask what jumps out at them.

Do not change anything yet. This week is about seeing the shape before anyone tries to fix it. If the smallest number on that list surprises you, that is the finding. If the person you show it to goes quiet, that is a finding too.

Still inside it

You cannot design the process while you are inside it.

That is not a comment on anyone's ability. It is a comment on position. The person signing everything stands in the one spot where the pattern cannot show, and everyone around them has a good reason to assume it is under control. The closer you sit, the more of the loop you are doing, and the less of it you can see.

Next issue: what still holds in the weeks you have nothing left to give it.

Oscar

Want to see which sign-offs in your operation all end at one desk? The Resilience Engine Systems Audit maps it: myresilienceengine.com/systems-audit