What Hundreds of Monthly Approvals Actually Look Like

There's a version of this problem that's easy to miss because it doesn't look like a problem.

The approvals are getting done. Requests are moving. Nobody is filing complaints. From the outside, the process works.

What's harder to see is what it's costing — and what it's quietly getting wrong.

A threshold most teams cross without realizing it

Early on, approvals are manageable. A handful a week. The right people see them, know the context, make a call.

That works because the volume is low enough for humans to carry it. Memory fills in what the process doesn't document. Approvers know the history. Exceptions get handled by whoever has the judgment to handle them.

Then the organization scales. More headcount, more systems, more workflow types. New hire approvals, access requests, budget sign-offs, vendor reviews, policy exceptions, change management tickets — all running at once, across teams that don't always talk to each other.

At some point, the volume stops being manageable the old way. It just doesn't announce when that happened.

What starts to go wrong

The first thing to go is context.

Requests that used to come in with full background start arriving thin — a forwarded email, a half-filled form, a ticket with a status and not much else. Approvers make calls anyway, because they have to. They fill in the gaps with judgment.

McKinsey found that executives spend roughly 37% of their time on decisions, and most say the majority of that time is used ineffectively. That's not a surprising finding to anyone who's watched a senior leader spend forty minutes tracking down context for a decision that should have taken five.

The second thing to go is consistency.

Not dramatically. Gradually. The same request type gets handled differently depending on who's in queue, what day it is, which approver caught it. Exceptions get granted. Precedents get set that nobody intended to set. And because nothing broke loudly, nobody flags it as a problem.

The audit question nobody budgets for

Here's what volume does that's hardest to see coming.

Every approval is also a record. At low volume, that record lives somewhere — a Slack thread, an email chain, someone's memory. Good enough.

At hundreds a month, those records are scattered across every system the organization runs. When a compliance question surfaces, or audit season arrives, the work of pulling that picture together starts from zero every time.

We've seen teams spend weeks reconstructing decisions that should have been documented in real time. The audit prep problem isn't really an audit problem. It's what happens when volume scaled and the record-keeping didn't.

Is the process producing consistent decisions — or just producing decisions?

That question doesn't feel urgent at low volume. It becomes urgent later, usually when the pressure goes up — a compliance review, a regulatory question, a new stakeholder who wants to understand how decisions actually get made.

What they find is that the process that looked reliable was partly reliable and partly running on the institutional knowledge of whoever had been around longest.

That's not a people problem. The people are doing exactly what the process asks them to do.

It's a design problem. And it's one that's much easier to solve before the organization fully depends on the process than after.