The approval nobody has ever refused

Somebody proposes automating a process, somebody else calls it risky, and the compromise is that a person will review the output. Everyone relaxes.

But a review only counts if the reviewer has time to look, enough information to disagree, and the standing to say no. Take one of those away and you’ve built a person-shaped delay in front of an automatic decision, plus somebody whose name is on it when it goes wrong.

There’s a cheap way to tell which one you have.

Count the rejections on the last two hundred approvals, or the last year, whichever is shorter. If they live in email and Slack rather than a system, skip the counting and ask the approver when they last saw one they’d have stopped. No answer means the step probably isn’t catching anything, though it may still be shaping what people submit, which is worth knowing before you remove it.