The first extra review solved a problem.
Something unusual had happened. A customer challenged the decision. A delivery risk surfaced. New information changed the context. Bringing another leader into the discussion was sensible. The review worked.
So when something similar happened again, the organisation used the same response. Another review. Another stakeholder. Another senior leader brought in for reassurance.
Eventually, nobody remembered exactly why the additional step had been introduced. The review was simply part of how the work got done. No leadership team had formally redesigned the operating model. But the operating model had changed.
This is one of the patterns we are examining in our work on Execution Reliability: what happens when a useful exception is repeated often enough that the organisation begins depending on it?
The first exception may be exactly the right response
Consider a transformation programme. An important implementation decision has been delegated to the programme team. Then new regulatory information appears. The executive sponsor asks for one additional review before execution. That is not evidence of weak ownership. It may be excellent governance. The new information materially changed the risk.
Now consider what happens next. The next major decision goes through the same review even though the regulatory issue is absent. Another workstream adopts the approach. Stakeholders begin asking: "Has this gone through the executive review?" A template appears. The review gets a recurring calendar slot. Eventually, proceeding without it begins to feel irresponsible.
The review was created in response to an exception. Repetition has given it legitimacy. The organisation has crossed an important threshold.
How reinforcement becomes infrastructure
Our practitioner observations suggest that the shift is rarely dramatic. It can happen through a series of individually reasonable choices.
- An unusual event occurs and the organisation adds reinforcement
- The intervention helps, so the response is repeated
- Expectations begin forming around it - managers start anticipating the review
- Stakeholders expect to be consulted, teams prepare material for it
- The reinforcement appears in calendars, templates, governance decks and approval routines
- Removing it begins to feel riskier than keeping it
At that point, the burden of proof has reversed. The organisation no longer asks "Why do we still need this?" It asks "How do we know it is safe to remove it?" Research on organisational routines provides a useful parallel here: routines can evolve through repeated performance, not only through deliberate redesign (Feldman, 2000; Feldman & Pentland, 2003). We should not claim that finding directly establishes the executive decision mechanism - but the broader observation is relevant.
Three things that look identical on the calendar
An additional review can represent at least three very different organisational conditions.
Something unusual has happened. The intervention responds to a defined condition and has a reason. There should also be an endpoint. When the condition disappears, the reinforcement should reduce.
The organisation has learned something. Risk has genuinely increased, regulation has changed, or the consequences now extend across business units. Leadership deliberately adds a new control with a defined purpose. This is not compensation - it is operating-model redesign.
The additional step remains because the organisation has become dependent on what it provides - reassurance, authority, cross-functional coordination, senior judgement, or confidence that someone powerful will stand behind the outcome. Nobody has necessarily decided it belongs permanently. But execution increasingly relies on it.
All three situations can look like "another review." They require very different interventions.
The important signal is not extra effort. It is dependency.
This distinction prevents us from treating every period of intense effort as organisational weakness. Extraordinary effort is sometimes necessary. A product launch can demand it. A crisis can demand it. A new GCC mandate can require temporary global oversight. A first-time leader may need additional discussion while judgement develops.
The question is what happens over time. Does the reinforcement decrease as capability strengthens? Or does performance become increasingly dependent on the reinforcement being present?
One question has emerged independently across practitioner conversations and captures this distinction particularly well: "If we removed the extraordinary effort tomorrow, would the outcome still be predictable?" That may be a more useful test than asking whether people are working too hard. Effort itself is not the organisational signal. Dependency on extraordinary effort may be.
What happens to ownership
The formal decision owner may never change. But repeated reinforcement can alter what ownership means in practice.
A manager begins thinking: "I own the decision after the review." A stakeholder begins thinking: "The decision isn't really closed until the steering committee has seen it." A senior leader thinks: "I'm not approving anything. I'm just supporting the team." All three can be sincere. Yet the organisation has created a different decision path.
What was intended to be owner → execution becomes owner → review → reassurance → execution.
Once that pathway becomes normal, ownership starts adapting around it. This is why the question is not merely whether authority has been delegated. It is whether people can continue exercising that authority without recurring reinforcement.
Capability growing - or capability being propped up?
Support is part of capability building. A new leader should be able to seek advice. A team carrying a larger mandate may initially need closer executive involvement. The question is what the support produces.
If capability is growing, we should eventually see some reduction in the reinforcement required. The team handles a similar decision with less support. Judgement becomes stronger. The executive can step further away.
But if the same outcome continues requiring the same - or greater - reinforcement, something else may be happening.
The organisation may be successfully preserving performance without increasing its independent capacity to produce that performance. The dashboard remains green. The dependency underneath it grows.
Why dashboards often miss this
The most difficult compensating mechanisms to detect are often successful. The customer receives the product. The milestone is achieved. The programme remains green. What is less visible is what had to be added to preserve the outcome: more preparation, more stakeholders, another review, additional coordination, longer decision cycles, more senior attention, less willingness to proceed without reassurance.
The outcome has not deteriorated. The operating effort has. This creates an unusual management problem - the organisation can appear successful while becoming increasingly expensive to coordinate.
Research on operational workarounds offers a relevant parallel. Tucker and Edmondson (2003) found that frontline employees often solved immediate problems themselves so that work could continue - useful locally, but repeated workarounds could make underlying system problems less visible and reduce pressure for deeper organisational learning. The context differs from executive decision-making, so direct transfer is not claimed. But the question is relevant: can an organisation become so effective at compensating for a weakness that the weakness becomes harder to see?
Why embedded reinforcement becomes difficult to remove
Imagine suggesting: "We should remove this review." The natural executive response is: "What evidence do we have that performance will remain strong without it?" Usually, very little. The organisation has spent months generating evidence with the review. It has almost no recent evidence of performance without it.
Keeping the intervention therefore feels proven. Removing it feels experimental. This is one reason embedded compensation can persist long after its original trigger has disappeared. The intervention is no longer merely a meeting. Roles, expectations, behaviours and perceptions of risk have formed around it.
The cost is larger than another review
The additional meeting is only the visible cost. Repeated reinforcement can also affect:
- Decision speed - more steps sit between judgement and action
- Executive capacity - senior leaders become recurring components of ordinary execution
- Manager confidence - leaders get fewer opportunities to experience consequential decisions holding without reinforcement
- Stakeholder behaviour - people learn that apparently closed decisions remain reopenable
- Governance complexity - every successful exception becomes a candidate for another permanent control
- Organisational learning - the organisation becomes increasingly skilled at managing around the underlying condition rather than resolving it
Eventually, coordination itself can become part of the capability required to produce the outcome. That is a very different operating model from the one leadership may believe it has.
Five questions for an executive team
Take one recurring review, approval or checkpoint. Ask:
Why was this intervention originally introduced?
What specific event or risk created it?
Does that condition still exist?
Not historically - today.
What does the intervention actually provide now?
Expertise? Authority? Risk control? Coordination? Reassurance? These are different. The answer matters for what comes next.
Would the outcome remain predictable if the intervention were removed?
This is the critical test. If nobody knows, that itself is worth examining.
If not - what is the system currently relying on this intervention to compensate for?
That final question moves the conversation from meeting efficiency to operating design.
Our practitioner observations show recurring recognition of temporary interventions becoming normal operating behaviour. They also support a useful distinction between extraordinary effort itself and dependency on extraordinary effort.
Research on organisational routines supports the broader proposition that repeated behaviour can reshape how work gets done (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Research on workarounds shows how successful local compensation can preserve outcomes while making underlying system problems harder to address (Tucker & Edmondson, 2003; Tucker, 2016). We draw on these as adjacent findings rather than direct evidence for the executive decision mechanism.
What we have not established is that repeated executive reviews inevitably create dependency or weaken ownership. Some are necessary controls. Some are appropriate temporary support. Some may be embedded compensation. The research question is how to distinguish among them early enough to intervene intelligently.
Look at one review or approval that everyone now considers normal. If you removed the extraordinary reinforcement tomorrow, would the outcome still be predictable? If nobody knows, that may itself be worth examining.
Evidence basis
This Research Note draws on practitioner conversations and field observations from the Execution Reliability Observatory. External research is used to contextualise adjacent mechanisms; it is not presented as independent validation of the Execution Reliability model.
Feldman, M. S. (2000). Organisational routines as a source of continuous change. Organization Science, 11(6), 611–629.
Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organisational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94–118.
Tucker, A. L., & Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Why hospitals don't learn from failures: Organisational and psychological dynamics that inhibit system change. California Management Review, 45(2), 55–72.
Tucker, A. L. (2016). The impact of workaround difficulty on frontline employees' response to operational failures. Management Science, 62(4), 1124–1144.