Almost every company says it would like to communicate with more agility. The line shows up in briefs, plans, agency meetings and marketing transformation projects, usually accompanied by some expectation that technology, automation or new processes will get the work moving faster.
But there is one part of the operation that frequently goes untouched: the way decisions are made.
A team can cut the time needed to produce a given piece from hours to minutes, and it makes little difference if that piece still takes four days to travel through a chain of approvals. You can automate tasks, create templates, bring in artificial intelligence and improve practically every stage of production, but if every deliverable still depends on fragmented opinions from people whose responsibilities aren’t clearly different, the speed gained on one side disappears on the other.
The curious part is that we rarely call this a decision problem. We prefer to call it an “approval flow”.
Approval became a comfortable word for processes nobody designed.
Every organization needs controls.
There are brands operating in regulated sectors, projects with legal implications, sensitive information, complex products and decisions that genuinely need to pass through different competencies before reaching the public.
The problem isn’t approving.
It’s confusing the need for control with the need for opinion.
In many operations, a piece of work circulates among several people without it being clear what exactly each one is supposed to assess. Someone was meant to validate the legal side, but comments on the headline. Someone else was meant to check a technical detail, but suggests swapping the photograph. A leader who was copied in just for visibility decides to revisit the concept, and someone who never took part in the brief discovers the project when it should already be finished.
None of this happens because people are incompetent. It happens because the system turns everyone who receives a piece of work into a potential creative director.
Recent surveys of marketing workflows keep pointing to long approval chains, fragmented feedback and a lack of clarity about final authority as recurring obstacles for corporate teams.
So the more interesting question may not be how to get faster approvals.
It’s understanding why so many people need to approve the same thing.
The more subjective a decision looks, the more people tend to show up.
This phenomenon is especially strong in communication because almost everybody feels entitled to weigh in.
Few people walk into a technology meeting and say that, personally, they would have preferred a different database architecture. In a creative meeting, however, it is perfectly possible for ten people to have preferences about the color, the photograph, a word, the size of a headline or the way a sentence sounds.
Preferences are inevitable, but they shouldn’t carry the same weight as criteria.
When a team knows the objective, the audience, the constraints, the message that has to survive, the risks to avoid and who holds authority over each dimension of the decision, the conversation stops being a collection of tastes and becomes an assessment.
That difference saves far more time than it seems.
Because the biggest waste in a round of approvals isn’t the two days a piece sat still. It’s the rework caused by feedback that starts from different criteria, arrives at different moments and sometimes points in opposite directions.
There is a creative cost to that delay as well.
Ideas don’t necessarily get worse because they took longer to be approved, but they can lose context.
There are campaigns tied to a cultural conversation, opportunities that emerge from an event, competitive moves that demand a response and situations in which timing is part of the idea itself.
When an organization needs a week to decide whether it can join a conversation that lasts two days, no technology at the end of the chain can solve the problem.
And that tends to become more obvious as production accelerates.
Artificial intelligence is shrinking the time needed to execute a growing number of marketing tasks, but it doesn’t automatically shrink the time an organization takes to reach an agreement. If decision structures stay the same, we may end up in the curious situation where producing a campaign takes an hour and approving it takes a week.
In that scenario, the bottleneck stops being creative.
It’s organizational.
The solution isn’t removing people from the conversation, it’s giving them different roles.
A good decision system doesn’t have to concentrate everything in one person, nor turn speed into recklessness.
It has to make clear who contributes, who validates, who recommends and who decides.
It sounds basic, but there is an enormous difference between being consulted and holding a veto, just as there is between checking a piece of information and redefining a strategy.
When those roles blur, approval takes on a characteristic that is quite familiar in large organizations: nobody seems to have enough authority to say “this is approved”, but a lot of people have informal authority to say “I just have one comment”.
That “just one comment” may be one of the least studied units of time in corporate communication.
On its own it almost never looks significant. Multiplied by departments, versions, meetings, suppliers and projects, it becomes a considerable part of the operation.
Perhaps agility is less a question of speed and more a question of trust.
Companies tend to build many layers of approval when they don’t trust what came before enough.
If the brief is weak, someone has to fix it at the end. If the brand’s criteria aren’t clear, more people are called in to check. If responsibilities are vague, leaders step in to make sure nothing slips. If agency and client don’t share enough context, every delivery turns into another round of alignment.
That’s why simply cutting approvers can make the problem worse.
The smarter alternative is to improve whatever happens before them.
The better the diagnosis, the clearer the brief. The clearer the brief, the better the criteria. The better the criteria, the less subjective the assessment. And the less an organization depends on individual preferences to reach a decision, the less need there is to put fifteen people on the same email thread.
Perhaps the agility so many companies are looking for isn’t in a new tool, a new methodology or one more layer of automation.
It may be in a considerably less technological question:
who actually needs to decide this?
