Smarter approvals, faster decisions: what the best companies do
Frontier companies make decisions quickly without losing control. The secret isn’t more meetings or heavier oversight. It’s smarter approvals.
Research shows that when the information is closest to the people doing the work — the edge of the business — that’s usually where the decision should sit. The team member holding the client form, the salesperson with live data, the ops lead who knows what’s happening on the ground. That’s the edge.
Information technology (IT) pushes authority outward, while communication technology (CT) pulls it back to managers by making supervision easier. The best companies balance the two with guardrails: routine work flows smoothly, and only the tricky or risky cases go up for senior review.
Who should decide? Follow the information and the coordination
Every approval in your business boils down to two questions:
Who has the information? If the person at the edge has the data, context and tools, why wait for a manager? Example: if a supplier is already approved and the spend is under budget, that decision doesn’t need a chain of sign-offs.
How much coordination is needed? If a decision pulls in Finance, Legal, Compliance and IT, then central oversight makes sense. Example: accepting a new contract clause that changes liability terms.
Another way of looking at this — made famous at Amazon — is the “two-way vs one-way door” rule. If a choice is reversible, go fast and local. If it’s a one-way door, take more time and involve senior eyes.
The approval traps: do you spot these in your business?
Most firms carry around habits that waste time and add little value. If you notice any of these, it’s a sign the workflow needs redesign.
Rubber-stamp approvals. If managers always just click “approve,” then their time isn’t adding value. Those routine, low-risk cases should flow automatically. Save approvals for the calls that genuinely need judgement.
Too many hands in the chain. Each extra approver is another queue. Work that takes five minutes often sits for five days. More people doesn’t mean better control — it just means more waiting.
Requests that stall. Without deadlines or timeouts, simple requests vanish into inboxes until someone chases. Most tools already allow auto-escalation or auto-approval. The frontier firms actually use it.
No audit trail. Quick approvals in email or chat feel fast — until something goes wrong and nobody can show who agreed to what. Frontier firms log by default.
Guardrails in practice: how the best firms keep things moving
So what does this look like when done well? A few simple shifts make all the difference:
Separate reversible from one-way-door decisions. Push the reversible ones down to teams; reserve careful review for the handful that matter most.
Turn policies into rules. Routine cases can approve themselves if you set thresholds and ranges, with alerts only when rules are broken.
Pre-approve the common stuff. If it’s low risk and happens all the time, don’t waste time reviewing it case by case.
Give each decision an owner and a clock. No action? The system escalates or approves automatically.
Log everything. Speed is fine, but not without accountability.
Make coordination easier. Standard templates and hand-offs mean fewer bottlenecks.
Why now is the moment
The best companies decentralise where they can and centralise only where they must. That balance — autonomy at the edge with clear guardrails — helps them move faster, learn faster, and outpace rivals.
For smaller firms, AI and automation are a once-in-a-generation chance to fix these broken approval habits. Don’t just digitise the bottlenecks you already have. Use the moment to redesign: let routine decisions flow where the information is, build in simple guardrails, and save your managers for the calls that truly need them. That’s how the frontier companies already work — and it’s how any business can start, one workflow at a time.
