Approvals that do not kill the work

Nothing good has ever been improved by its eleventh reviewer, and every organisation knows this while maintaining eleven reviewers.

Written by the Colleviate Strategy desk

Approval processes are where brave work becomes safe work, not through a decision anybody made but through accumulation. Each individual comment is reasonable. The sum is a campaign nobody will notice.

One decider

Name the person who decides before the work is made. Everyone else contributes a view, which the decider may take or leave. Consensus review guarantees the lowest common denominator, because the only version everybody can agree on is the version that risks nothing.

Feedback against the brief, not against taste

"I do not like the blue" is a preference. "This does not say the one thing we agreed to say" is feedback. Require every request to name the objective it serves, and a large share of comments disappear before they are sent, which is the point.

One round, everybody together

Serial review is the real killer: creative goes to one person, is amended, goes to the next, who objects to the amendment. Get everyone in one room or one document at the same time, resolve contradictions there, and send a single consolidated response.

Protect the thing that makes it work

Most work has one element doing the heavy lifting: an uncomfortable line, an unusual visual, a joke. It will attract the most comments, because it is the most noticeable. Decide at briefing which parts are permanent, so the discussion in week six is about whether evidence has changed rather than whether somebody has got used to it. That argument is in audacity and tenacity.

Late objections

Somebody senior who was not in the process will object at the end. The fix is structural: get them into the brief approval, where their input is cheap, rather than the final review, where it costs a reshoot.