A routine exception waits for an executive. A manager escalates a decision they should be able to make. A team invents its own approval path because the official one is either missing or too slow to use. The company does not have a speed problem. It has an authority problem.
Every bottleneck is a missing answer.
Who can decide this, on what evidence, within what threshold, and by when? If any of those four answers is unclear, work will wait, escalate, or proceed without approval. All three outcomes look different in a report, but they share the same cause.
More approvals do not create more control.
Adding a review step to a broken decision path only moves the bottleneck. Governed authority means naming routine decisions and their owners, defining the exceptions that genuinely need escalation, and making the evidence for each decision visible before it is requested.
Test authority with a real case.
Take one stalled decision from the last month and trace it: who held it, what evidence was missing, what threshold would have allowed it to move, and who should have owned the exception. That single trace usually reveals whether the fix is a clearer rule, a better record, or a different owner — and it avoids a company-wide approval redesign.