CAQA Digital / The Paper That Never Left

Nobody can remember why this approval step exists

Most approval chains contain at least one link whose original justification has been lost entirely.

Ask around an institution about why a particular sign off is required and the answers tend to arrive in a predictable sequence. First, someone says it has always been that way. Then someone says it is a requirement, without being able to say whose. Then someone remembers, vaguely, an incident several years ago involving a person who has since left. Occasionally a genuine reason surfaces and turns out to be sound. More often what surfaces is a response to a one off problem that hardened into permanent practice, long outliving the circumstance that produced it.

The practical difficulty is that nobody wants to be the person who removes a step and is later blamed for whatever goes wrong. The asymmetry is brutal. Keeping an unnecessary step costs everyone a small amount of time forever, spread thinly enough that no individual feels it. Removing a necessary step costs one person their reputation, immediately and visibly. Rational people respond to that asymmetry by leaving everything in place, which is why chains accumulate links and almost never shed them.

A digitisation project is one of the few moments when the question can legitimately be asked, because the process is being opened up anyway. The useful discipline is to require a stated purpose for every step: what decision this person is making, what information they hold that nobody earlier held, and what would actually happen if the step were skipped. Steps that cannot answer are not automatically removed, but they are flagged, and someone senior has to decide to keep them on the record. That alone changes the balance considerably.