Learning Center / Directing an Outcome with Software

Course 3 · Lesson 4 of 5

Where a person must sign

A landlord's block manager can arrange repairs, call contractors and authorise spending up to three hundred pounds. Above that figure, the landlord decides. The line is not arbitrary. Below it, decisions are routine and reversible. Above it, the money matters and so does the landlord's relationship with the tenants.

Every outcome has places where a person must sign. Deciding where they are is not bureaucracy. It is the design of the thing.

Four kinds of moment

*Authorising an act that cannot be undone.* Filing a return. Signing a contract. Sending a notice. Instructing a solicitor. Once done, it is done, and somebody's name is on it.

*Taking a professional position.* An accountant's treatment of an expense, an architect's certification, a surveyor's valuation. Somebody is putting their competence behind a judgement.

*Spending above a threshold.* The figure matters less than the fact that a line exists, and that everybody knows where it is.

*Anything involving a person's relationship or reputation.* Apologising to a client, refusing a booking, raising a price, ending an engagement.

What makes an approval real

An approval is real when the person signing could have said no, understood what they were saying yes to, and had the information to decide in one sitting.

Four things belong in a request for approval, every time:

1. *The question. One sentence, one decision. May this renewal be offered at the higher rent?*
2. *The material.* The item itself, attached and readable. Not a summary of the item.
3. *The consequence of being wrong.* What happens if this is approved and turns out badly.
4. *The cost of waiting.* What happens if no answer arrives, and by when one is needed.

A request missing the fourth item trains everybody to sit on approvals, because nothing says when they matter.

Approval is not notification

Notifications say what has happened. Approvals ask what should happen. Mixing them produces the commonest failure in this area: a wall of messages that look alike, where the one that needed an answer was three screens down.

If something has been approved and the person who approved it did not read it, the approval did not happen. The signature exists. The decision does not.

The two ways approval goes wrong

*A rubber stamp.* The person signs because signing is easier than reading. The tell is speed: approvals returned in seconds, always in the affirmative. The fix is fewer, better requests with the material attached, so a person can genuinely decide. If everything needs a signature, nothing gets one that means anything.

*A signature removed by mistake.* Somebody decides that the approval step is a delay and takes it out, and an act that needed a mandate is now happening without one. This is the more serious error and the harder one to notice, because everything keeps running.

Where to put the line

Two questions decide most cases.

If this went wrong, who would have to answer for it? That person signs, or the person they have explicitly mandated signs.

Could a reasonable person have known this was coming? If the decision is routine, knowable in advance and reversible, it belongs below the line, with the machinery. If it is unusual, consequential or irreversible, it belongs above it.

Then write the line down. A threshold that lives in somebody's head is not a mandate. It is a convention, and conventions are exactly what get overridden at half past five on a Friday.