This article is part of the How Do YOU CM2? blog series in collaboration with the Institute for Process Excellence (IpX). Although I receive compensation for writing this series, I stand behind its content. I will continue to create and publish high-quality articles that I can fully endorse. Enjoy this new series, and please share your thoughts!
In my article on Conway’s Law, I describe the change process as the place where the right people come together. But there’s another side to this that many companies know well: each time something fails, another approval gets added to the process.
No one adds a signature just to make things harder. Each one is meant to prevent the latest mistake. A wrong part number reaches the factory, so now manufacturing engineering has to approve every change. A supplier misses an update, so purchasing needs to sign too. While at the time, every step seems reasonable. But ten years later, a simple drawing correction needs seven signatures, and no one remembers why most of them are needed.
Construction calls this safety clutter. In a 2025 RMIT paper by Huey Wen Lim, Helen Lingard and colleagues, a consultant says that after every incident or near miss, people add to the safety document, “but nobody ever takes anything out.” A few years later, it has 20, 30, or 50 pages.
If you look closer, many of these approvals are answering the wrong question. Not informing a supplier is about who needs to know, but an approval is about who needs to decide. In many cases, approvals are just notifications that ended up with a signature field.
What concerns me more is the effect on the people involved. Adding another signature tells the person before that their judgment isn’t trusted, and tells the next person that someone else already checked. In the end, responsibility gets spread so thin that no one truly owns the decision.
I think it’s better to focus on clear guardrails and building the knowledge of the people inside the process. Guardrails are set up front: which changes are low risk, what needs to be done before a change moves forward, and which impacts always go to a board. In CM2, the change review board sets the fast track criteria, and the Change Leader applies them. For low-risk changes, the creator who made the technical recommendation makes the business decision with the Change Leader. This only works if you invest in your people: creators who know where their item is used, and Change Leaders who understand what a change means for the factory, inventory, and service.
So after the next failure, before adding another check, ask what the person didn’t know and why. Was it a missing guardrail, or was it a gap in knowledge?
How many approvals in your change process can you trace back to one specific incident, and when did you last remove one? Let me know what you think.