Every approval committee has that one process that treats picking a task-management tool with the same rigor as a merger. The instinct behind it seems sound — caution never looked like a flaw. In practice, it’s the opposite: treating every decision as if it could break the company is what breaks the company’s speed. And slowness on the wrong decisions costs just as much as haste on the right ones — it just never shows up as a loss on the quarterly report.
The mistake is rarely a lack of criteria — it’s the wrong criteria. Most companies sort “big” decisions from “small” ones by dollar value or by how senior the signer is. Neither measures what actually matters: how easy it is to undo the decision if it turns out to be wrong.
Two decisions, the same six-week ritual
Picture a mid-size company where every decision above a symbolic threshold goes through the same committee: a form, three signatures, one monthly approval meeting. In a single quarter, that committee reviews two proposals. The first comes from the marketing director: test a new homepage for two weeks, reverting if conversion doesn’t improve — a decision any developer could undo with one deploy. The second comes from operations: sign a five-year lease for a new distribution center, with a steep early-termination penalty and custom machinery installed in month one.
Both enter the same queue, get the same form, wait for the same monthly meeting. The new homepage doesn’t go live until six weeks after it was proposed — six weeks during which the company kept converting worse than it could have. The distribution-center lease, meanwhile, gets approved in the same meeting in fifteen minutes, because by then everyone is tired of slow decisions and the document “looks” well prepared. The cheap, reversible decision took six weeks. The expensive, irreversible one took fifteen minutes. The committee wasn’t being rigorous — it was being random, just dressed up as process.
Apparent risk is not the same as real risk
That’s the distinction missing from most decision processes. Apparent risk is how uncomfortable a decision feels the moment it’s made — whether it involves visible money, whether it could draw public criticism, whether it breaks from routine. Real risk is the cost of being wrong while the decision stays in effect, multiplied by how hard it is to reverse. The two rarely line up. Testing a new homepage feels risky because it’s visible and new — but it’s cheap to undo. Signing a multi-year lease feels safe because it’s routine for an experienced department — but it’s expensive and slow to undo if the assumption behind it changes.
As João Paulo Batistella, an innovation executive and former CEO of EISA, argues, the biggest barrier to deciding fast is rarely technical — it’s political: a one-size-fits-all committee protects whoever signs, because spreading a decision across several signatures also spreads the blame if it goes wrong. The problem is that protection has a price, and the whole company pays it — in speed lost on exactly the decisions that never should have entered the committee’s queue.
The two-question test before you book the meeting
Before deciding how much rigor a decision deserves, two questions are enough. First: if this decision turns out to be wrong, can it be undone tomorrow at low cost? Second: while it’s in effect and wrong — even briefly, until it’s reversed — is the damage tolerable? If the answer to both is yes, the decision is reversible in practice, not just in theory: it can be made by one person, today, with no committee. If either answer is no — it can’t be undone, or the damage while wrong is too high — that’s when it’s worth gathering people, asking for data, spending the six weeks.
One caveat: this test isn’t a license to decide everything on impulse. It exists precisely to free up leadership’s time and attention for the few decisions that genuinely close a door — reserving expensive analysis for where it pays off, instead of spreading it evenly over everything that crosses an approval desk.
Before your next approval meeting, ask the question out loud: does this decision close a door, or does it just open a window you can close again tomorrow? If it opens a window, decide alone, today. If it closes a door, that’s exactly where the full committee earns its keep — not on everything that reaches it out of habit.
Real control over risk was never about how many signatures a form requires. It comes from knowing, before the meeting even starts, which of the two doors is actually in front of you.
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