There is a particular kind of Tuesday afternoon that Daniel Marsh knows well. A room somewhere — sometimes a glass-walled office in a mid-sized city, sometimes a converted warehouse on the edge of an industrial estate — where a capable, well-meaning team sits with a decision that should have been made three weeks ago, waiting for a signature that is itself waiting for another signature. The work is not blocked by bad intentions or laziness. It is blocked by architecture: the invisible scaffolding of approvals, sign-offs and escalations that the organisation built when it was young and small and has never quite dismantled since. Over six years of diagnostic consulting through WavePulseFlowPath, Marsh has watched this pattern arrive, reliably, somewhere between the fortieth and seventieth employee. It is one of the most consistent — and quietly costly — transitions in organisational life.
The structure that made sense at twenty ¶
At twenty people, an approval chain is rarely a formal system. It is, more honestly, a habit of conversation. The founder or director sits close enough to every meaningful decision that review happens naturally — in the kitchen, on a shared Slack channel, at the end of a stand-up. Trust is distributed by proximity. When Marsh works with organisations of this size, he finds that the approval process is often genuinely lean not because anyone designed it that way, but because the social fabric does the work that process would otherwise need to do. Everyone knows what matters to the person at the top, and they adjust accordingly. The danger is that this informal coherence feels like a system. It is not. It is a byproduct of smallness.
The fracture point: what changes at sixty ¶
The transition is rarely dramatic. Marsh describes it as a slow-motion accumulation. The company moves from twenty to thirty-five, and things still work, more or less. Then it reaches fifty, and there are new hires who never overlapped with the founding team, new managers who were promoted partly because they were trusted but partly because no one had time to think carefully about the transition, and suddenly the informal trust network has gaps in it. The founder can no longer be in every room. So the organisation does what feels safe: it adds checkpoints. A finance approval here, a legal sign-off there, a requirement that any commitment over a certain threshold goes to the leadership team. Each addition is sensible in isolation. In aggregate, by the time the company reaches sixty or seventy people, a decision that once took an afternoon can take three weeks and touch seven inboxes.
Three specific patterns Marsh sees most often ¶
The first is what he calls the legacy approval: a sign-off requirement added for a specific reason — a bad procurement decision, a contract dispute — that was never removed when the underlying risk changed. Organisations accumulate these like sediment. The second is the confidence gap: a mid-level manager who technically has authority but has learned, through a series of subtle corrections, that using that authority leads to awkward conversations upward, so they escalate anyway. The approval chain slows not because the rules require it but because the culture punishes independent judgment. The third pattern is structural ambiguity at the seam between functions — the point where, say, a product decision requires both a commercial and a technical sign-off, and no one has ever formally decided whose view takes precedence when they conflict. Decisions sit at these seams for days while both sides wait for the other to move first.
What a diagnostic actually involves ¶
When Marsh begins work with an organisation, he spends the first two to three weeks doing something that looks deceptively simple: mapping every approval touchpoint for a sample of twenty to thirty decisions taken in the previous quarter. He asks each person involved to note when they first received the request, when they acted on it, and why they sent it on rather than resolving it themselves. The results are almost always clarifying. In one engagement with a professional services firm in the north of England, the map revealed that a routine supplier contract — nothing unusual, well within precedent — had passed through nine people over nineteen days. Four of those people had added no material input; they were in the chain because they had always been in the chain. The map does not prescribe solutions. It makes the invisible visible, and that visibility alone shifts the conversation.
The principle of declared authority ¶
The most consistent structural fix Marsh recommends is what he calls declared authority: a written, explicit statement of what each role can decide, at what scale, without seeking further approval. Not a vague empowerment statement — something specific. A regional manager can commit to a supplier relationship worth up to forty thousand pounds per year without leadership review. A product lead can approve a scope change within a sprint without a change-control board if the change does not affect the client-facing deadline. The act of writing these down forces the organisation to have conversations it has been avoiding. Marsh notes that resistance to this process often reveals where the real problem lies: the leaders who are most reluctant to specify their teams' authority are frequently the same leaders whose inboxes are the bottlenecks.
Repairing the confidence gap ¶
Structural changes alone do not fix the confidence gap — the pattern where people escalate not because they must but because the culture has taught them it is safer. Marsh approaches this through what he describes as a calibration practice. For a period of roughly eight weeks, managers are asked to make a visible record of decisions they took independently and to share that record briefly in a regular team meeting. Leaders are asked to respond to those decisions in writing with a short note — not a score, but an honest reflection on whether they would have decided the same way and, if not, why not. The practice is uncomfortable at first. It requires leaders to articulate their reasoning rather than simply correcting outcomes. Over time, it builds a shared map of judgment — a collective understanding of where the organisation's decision-making instincts are aligned and where they genuinely diverge.
The question of speed versus quality ¶
There is a version of this conversation that treats approval chains purely as friction to be eliminated in the name of speed. Marsh is careful to resist that framing. Some approvals exist for good reasons — legal exposure, client relationships, financial controls — and removing them without thinking carefully about what they were protecting is how organisations end up with a different kind of expensive problem. The more useful question is not 'how do we make this faster' but 'what is this checkpoint actually for, and is it the most efficient way to achieve that purpose.' A legal review that used to require a two-week wait because all contracts went to the same overloaded partner can often be redesigned: a tiered system where standard contracts follow a pre-approved template and only genuinely novel terms require senior review. The outcome is not less rigor. It is rigor applied at the right scale.
Late autumn, in a consulting room above a street in Manchester, Daniel Marsh keeps a printed copy of one of those early decision maps pinned to the wall. Not as a trophy — more as a reminder that the organisations seeking his help are not broken. They are simply carrying structures built for a version of themselves that no longer exists. The work, as he sees it, is mostly an act of honest archaeology: finding what was laid down, understanding why, and deciding, carefully, what to keep.