If Every Decision Needs Permission, You Have a Queue

A lot of organizations say they want ownership, then require approval for almost every meaningful decision. Those don’t really work together. (The Best Engineers Don’t Wait for Permission was about what that does to people. This one is about the mechanics.)

At some point an approval process stops being governance and turns into a queue. Someone has a reasonable fix, but first they need a slot on someone’s calendar, or a review, or a deck so a room full of people can agree that the obvious thing is, in fact, the obvious thing. Each is a wait, and the waits add up.

Some scrutiny is warranted. A risky production change isn’t a tweak to internal tooling. Jeff Bezos’s 2015 shareholder letter makes the same distinction with one-way and two-way doors, and points out that big organizations tend to use the heavyweight process for everything anyway. That’s where the trouble starts.

After DuPont acquired Granular, I called it “a startup in the belly of a massive corporation.” Some of what came with it helped. Some of it slowed us down, and a lot of the work was keeping our startup speed.

Controls only ever get added. Each made sense the day it arrived, usually right after something went wrong, and nobody goes back to ask whether it still earns its keep. The line grows, people learn that waiting is safer than moving, and leaders wonder where the ownership went.

Figuring out which decisions actually need you is unglamorous work, and the answer is usually fewer than you’d guess. If everything still comes back to you, you’ve got a queue.