Frustration Architecture
Approval Loop
Routine work has to be re-approved or re-justified — often by people without the context — until the team stops trying to do it well.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
From the book
An Approval Loop is what happens when work that is already finished, or work that the team has the authority to do, is sent back upstream to be approved again. Sometimes by the same person who approved it last week. Sometimes by someone three levels removed who has no context for the trade-off being made.
Each loop teaches the same lesson: the work isn't trusted, and neither is the person who did it. After enough loops, the most capable people start designing for the loop instead of the customer. The loop becomes the work.
The architecture is the loop, not the approver. The fix is rarely "a faster approver." The fix is to redraw the line of what does and doesn't need approval at all — and to put the line where the people doing the work can see it.
The diagnostic
If your team has stopped finishing work and started packaging work — pretty decks, defensive memos, multiple rounds of "socialisation" — before the actual work happens, you are inside an Approval Loop. The packaging is the symptom; the loop is the architecture.
The fix recipe
- 1
Audit every approval gate the work touches — list each one, who owns it, what risk it is meant to catch, and the last time it actually caught something.
- 2
Risk-tier the gates: which approvals exist for genuine compliance or safety, which exist for blame insurance, and which exist out of habit.
- 3
Remove or collapse the lowest-tier gates first; redraw the line where the people doing the work can see it and explain it to a peer.
- 4
Tell the room in Three Doors voice what changed and what no longer needs an approval, so the loop stops being recreated informally.
All five architectures
Most teams are living inside more than one at a time.
The diagnostic runs inside a workspace.
Public content ends here. The live tagging, clustering, and Three Doors decisions against each architecture happen once you stand up a workspace.
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.