What an approval chain actually costs, why nobody in the room can answer that question, and what to do about the chain itself.
Your approval sits with four people for eleven days.
What does a day cost you?
Nobody in the room can answer that, and that is the problem.
Where the eleven days go
Almost never where people assume.
The time is not spent reading. It is spent waiting to be read: sitting in an inbox behind other things, waiting for a meeting that exists so several approvals can happen at once, waiting for one person's return from leave because no delegate was named.
The actual decision time in an eleven-day approval is usually under an hour, spread across four people.
Four people is a design choice
Each signature was added for a reason. Somebody was surprised once. A risk register asked for a control. A restructure left a role in the chain that no longer has a job in it.
Nobody adds a signature intending to add three days. Nobody removes one either, because removing a control requires arguing that the risk it covered is acceptable, and no one wants that sentence attached to their name.
So the chain only grows. Every organisation I have worked in has a chain like this, and every one of them can name the person who would object to shortening it.
Two questions that shorten it
Ask them about a specific approval, not about approvals in general.
First: which of these four can say no? Frequently the answer is one. The others are being informed, in a format that stops the work while they are informed.
Second: what happens if the third signature is a notification instead of a gate? Not removed. Notified, with a window to object. Most controls survive that translation intact and stop costing days.
Then say the weekly number
Once the chain has been examined, the number does the rest.
An eleven-day approval on work worth thirty thousand a week is a three-thousand-dollar signature routine, running every time. Say that in the room, without accusation, and watch how quickly a delegation gets written that has been discussed for a year.
The people in these chains are not obstructive. They have never been shown the price of the design, because nobody bills for it.
