Redundancy is a safety staple in aviation: multiple independent checks catch rare faults. In leadership, however, each added approval creates a new coordination layer, a hidden decision‑flow friction that amplifies bias rather than mitigates it. The first reviewer brings a perspective, the second feels compelled to justify the first’s choice, and the third often defaults to the most recent recommendation to avoid conflict. This cascade turns a simple go/no‑go into a “who‑approved‑what‑first” puzzle, draining cognitive bandwidth and encouraging the “completion‑bias signoff” where teams rush to finish the paperwork instead of scrutinizing the underlying assumptions.

In a mid‑size tech firm, a product lead prepared a launch plan and secured sign‑off from the engineering director. The VP of Operations, uneasy about budget exposure, demanded an additional finance review. The CFO, seeing the finance sign‑off, automatically accepted the engineering endorsement without rereading the technical risks. The resulting release missed a critical security patch, leading to a breach that forced a costly emergency patch and tarnished the brand. The extra layer didn’t add safety; it created a blind spot where the last approver deferred to the previous one, magnifying the original oversight.

Leaders who treat redundancy as a cure for doubt end up breeding “approval inertia,” a slow‑moving fog that obscures risk, erodes accountability, and inflates timelines. The paradox is simple: the more gates you install, the less likely any gate will actually catch a problem, because each gate hands off responsibility rather than reinforcing it.