The symptom
Consider an organisation where a routine purchase, involving a modest amount of money, takes three weeks to approve. The instinctive assumption is bureaucratic overreach — too many people needing to sign off on something small. Examine the approval chain itself, though, and each of its four steps is completed within a day of being received. Nobody sat on the request. Every individual person acted promptly.
The three weeks live entirely in the gaps between steps — the time a request spends sitting in an inbox after one person has finished with it and before the next person has started. The process, measured step by step, looks fast. Measured as a whole, from the requester’s perspective, it is not.
The person waiting on the approval experiences none of the reassurance that “every step took under a day” would offer, because they don’t experience the process step by step — they experience it as one continuous three-week wait for a decision on something genuinely minor. That mismatch, between how the process is measured internally and how it’s actually lived by the person depending on it, is a recurring feature of exactly this kind of drawn-out approval chain.
What leaders usually conclude
The natural conclusion is that the approval chain has too many steps and needs simplifying. That may sometimes be true, but it misdiagnoses this particular case, where the steps themselves aren’t the problem — the queueing between them is. Removing a step from a four-step chain, if the real delay is in the gaps rather than the steps, would likely just relocate the same amount of waiting time into three gaps instead of four, with little change to the total.
It’s a natural mistake because the two explanations look identical from the outside — both a chain with too many steps and a chain with excessive queueing between steps produce the same visible symptom of a slow, multi-stage process. Distinguishing between them requires actually measuring the gaps, not just counting the steps, which is a check most organisations don’t routinely make because the step count is what’s visible on any process map, while the queueing time between steps usually isn’t tracked anywhere at all.
What the evidence suggests
This connects to a broader pattern identified by V. F. Ridgway’s research on performance measurement, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, which examined how organisations’ measurement choices shape behaviour — often in directions the measures’ designers never intended. Ridgway’s central caution was that indiscriminate reliance on quantitative measures produces effects the people relying on them don’t anticipate, precisely because a measure captures what’s easy to count rather than necessarily what matters. Measuring each approval step’s completion time, rather than the total elapsed time a request experiences, is a clean example: it produces a set of numbers that all look good — every step under a day — while the thing the organisation actually cares about, how long someone waits, goes untracked and, in this case, unnoticed for a long time.
This is a structural gap, not a case of anyone doing their job poorly. Each person completing their step within a day is genuinely responsive by any measure applied to their individual role. What’s missing is any measure applied to the process as a whole, from the point of view of the person waiting on it — and without that measure, the aggregate delay simply doesn’t show up anywhere leadership would naturally look.
Execution, more broadly, tends to run on a different rhythm than the planning and reporting cycles most strategy documents are built around. A quarterly strategy review measures outcomes at quarterly intervals; the actual work of execution happens in days and weeks, in exactly the kind of gaps this approval chain illustrates. When the only rhythm an organisation measures against is the reporting rhythm, the daily and weekly friction inside execution — the queueing, the waiting, the small delays that compound — has no natural point at which it becomes visible.
This matters more for some kinds of work than others. A single slow approval on a low-stakes purchase is a minor irritation. The same queueing dynamic, applied to approvals that gate a customer-facing commitment or a time-sensitive strategic decision, compounds into something considerably more consequential — and because the mechanism is identical in both cases, an organisation that tolerates the minor version has usually, without deciding to, also built the conditions for the costlier one.
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Questions worth considering
- Is the organisation measuring the thing a customer or colleague actually experiences, or is it measuring the steps of a process in isolation from each other?
- Where a process looks fast by every individual measure and still feels slow to the people going through it, has anyone looked at the total elapsed time rather than the sum of the parts?
- Does execution have its own rhythm of attention, separate from the cadence of quarterly strategic reporting — or does friction inside execution only become visible when it’s already accumulated?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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