Approving knowingly

Before sending an email, publishing a document or deleting a file, Learnya asks for your consent. This approval is the last barrier between a mistake, or a manipulation, and its effects. It only works if it is really read.

• The action: send, publish, delete, modify.
• The target: to whom, where, which file.
• The content: what actually goes out, not what you thought you had asked for.
• The consistency: does it really follow from what you asked for?

If any of the four points is surprising, refuse. Refusing breaks nothing: the agent stops, you correct the request and you start again. An approval wrongly refused costs a minute, an approval wrongly given can cost far more.

When an assistant asks for ten approvals for a simple task, people end up clicking without reading. This is a configuration problem, not a discipline problem. If an assistant has tools it does not use, remove them in the console. Its approval requests then become rare, and so they get read.

1. Open the “Activity” screen and review the week’s approvals.
2. Spot the actions approved without any real decision, always the same ones.
3. Ask the administrator to remove the unnecessary tools from the assistants concerned.
4. Check the following week that the remaining requests are rare and useful.