Approved in July

In July, plans get approved faster.

A brief that would have taken three rounds in May goes through in one, because the person who would have asked the hard question is away, and the person covering for them does not want to be the reason it stalled. The email says approved. The team is pleased. The work starts.

Then the owner comes back, late August or early September, and reads it for the first time. Not angry. Just reading. And about half of what was approved in July gets reopened, politely, with a sentence that begins "I know this was signed off, but".

The team is now worse off than if it had waited. It has three weeks of work built on a decision that turns out not to have been one, and a September that was already short of weeks.

Nobody lied. The person who signed was allowed to sign. That is the trap. Permission to approve and ownership of the outcome are two different things, and in a quiet month they sit in different chairs. When nobody decides who really owns a plan, the default is that whoever is in the office does, until the day they do not.

An approval from the person who happened to be there is not a decision. It is a deferral with a signature on it.