Observable condition
A staff member needs a purchase approved, access granted, a customer exception accepted, a leave request signed off or a routine change authorised. The request itself is clear, but work stops while someone asks: Who approves this? The answer may depend on who is available, who handled the last case or who remembers an unwritten rule.
Realisation
Repeated approval questions are easy to treat as a communication problem. But when the same uncertainty appears across teams and request types, it can indicate that decision authority is not built into the operating process. People are being asked to discover governance at the moment they need it.
Identification
This is a decision-rights and approval-workflow design problem.
Diagnosis
The underlying mechanism is usually a combination of unclear process ownership, approval thresholds that live in memory, role changes that were never reflected in workflows and exceptions that have accumulated without an explicit rule. ISO process-approach guidance emphasises defined process ownership, responsibility and authority because a process needs accountable owners and managed interactions. When those controls are absent, staff compensate with messages, meetings and informal escalation.
Commercial impact
The value wrapper is cycle time, employee capacity, governance and scalability. Work waits even when the substantive decision is simple. Managers become interruption points. Similar requests may receive different treatment. As the organisation grows, the number of people who need to know the unwritten approval map grows with it.
Common misidentification
The default response is often to publish an org chart or remind employees to ask their manager. An org chart shows reporting relationships; it does not necessarily define who may approve a specific decision, at which threshold, under which conditions or what should happen when the normal approver is unavailable.
Possibility
A stronger model makes decision rights part of the workflow. The request type, amount, risk level, business unit or exception class can determine the correct approver and escalation path. Staff should not need institutional memory to discover the next step.
Intervention
Take a sample of recent approval-dependent requests and map what actually happened. For each one, record who initiated it, what decision was required, who was asked, how the approver was chosen, how long the request waited and what happened when the normal route failed. Use the evidence to define approval rules before automating them.
Practical diagnostic questions
- Which recurring requests generate “who approves this?” questions?
- Are approval rights explicit by request type, value, risk or exception?
- Does the workflow know the approver, or do employees have to find one?
- What happens when the normal approver is unavailable?
- Are managers approving decisions that could safely be delegated?
Bottom line
If staff regularly need to ask who approves what, governance is probably living in people rather than in the operating design.