Every organisation has a normal way of doing things and an exception route for everything else. In a healthy business the exception route is used rarely, for the unusual and the urgent. In others, it quietly becomes the main road. A customer needs something slightly different, so someone asks the manager for a special approval. A supplier must be paid before the usual cycle, so someone phones the finance lead. A new hire needs access today, so someone sends a plea by message. Nothing gets done through the normal channel, and everybody knows it.
This piece looks at what it is like to work where the exception process is the only way to get anything done, and what that does to the people involved. It is a hypothesis built from general research on working conditions and on how approval routes are designed. It is not a survey of South African businesses, and the example below is illustrative.
When the exception becomes the process
An exception route exists because no standard process can anticipate everything. Done well, it lets a business respond to the genuinely unusual without breaking its rules. Done badly, it becomes the only route that works, and the standard process is left as a formality that everyone has learned to bypass.
This tends to happen gradually. The normal process is designed for the typical case, and the typical case turns out to cover less than expected. Every new customer type, product variation or urgent request that does not fit generates another exception. Because exceptions are decided by senior people, they accumulate on a few desks. The people who need things done learn whom to ask, rather than how the process works.
The wider pattern is described in how to diagnose a business that runs on exceptions and in why the official process is often not the real process. Here the interest is in the human experience of it.
An illustrative example
Consider a hypothetical South African engineering supplies company with a procurement team of four. The official purchasing policy requires three quotes and a manager's sign-off for any order above a modest limit. In practice, most urgent breakdown orders for customers cannot wait for three quotes. Over time, the team learns that "emergency" is the word that bypasses the policy. Soon almost every order is an emergency.
The buyers become skilled at framing requests so that they qualify. They learn which director is most likely to say yes on a Friday afternoon, and which needs a phone call rather than a message. A new colleague asks how the policy works and is told, with a shrug, to ask Thabo, who knows the right person. The policy has become a story that people tell new joiners, while the real process lives in relationships.
The business is not failing. Orders go out. But the buyers cannot plan their days, because any morning can be taken over by someone else's emergency. They cannot be sure what will be approved. They spend more effort on persuasion than on buying. And the directors are interrupted at all hours for decisions that a clearer rule could have settled in advance.
The names and details are invented to show a mechanism. They do not describe a real company.
What it costs people
The costs are not dramatic, which is partly why they last.
- Autonomy. If the right to act depends on asking a senior person each time, the employee's discretion is in effect borrowed. The UK Health and Safety Executive's control standard describes the aim of people feeling able to influence how they carry out their work.
- Predictability. The outcome of a request depends on who is asked and when. The HSE role standard asks organisations to keep the requirements they set clear and to give people information that helps them understand their responsibilities. A system run on exceptions cannot easily do either.
- Time. Persuading, chasing and waiting for approvals consume hours that never appear in a plan. The HSE demands standard speaks of workloads manageable within agreed hours, which unpredictable exception handling undermines.
- Fairness. People who know the right person get quick answers. People who do not, wait. The informal route favours the well-connected and the confident.
The World Health Organization's fact sheet on mental health at work lists lack of control over job design or workload and an unclear job role among the psychosocial risks to mental health. It does not say that exception-driven workplaces cause such harm, and that link should be treated as a plausible hypothesis only. But the conditions it names are the ones that exception-driven work can create.
Why the exception route gets overloaded
Three ordinary causes recur.
- The standard process is too narrow. It was designed for the typical case, and the business has changed. The fix is usually to widen the rule, not to widen the number of exceptions. The question of rules that cannot be bent is discussed in the employee who needs permission for every small fix.
- The standard process is too slow. If the normal route takes a week and the work needs a day, people will use the other one. Approvals that stall are a theme of why approval processes become bottlenecks.
- Decisions sit with too few people. When only two directors can approve anything unusual, they become the process. See the manager who can't act without the founder.
Microsoft's documentation on Power Automate approvals shows how approval routes can be defined in software: some approvals need everyone to approve, some only the first responder, and some go through approvers in sequence. These choices are design decisions. A business that has never decided who should decide, and in what order, often ends up with the informal version of the same thing, which is whoever answers their phone.
Making the exception an exception again
A business that wants to reduce its reliance on exceptions can proceed in stages.
- Log the exceptions for a month. Record what was requested, why it did not fit and who decided. Patterns tend to emerge quickly.
- Turn repeated exceptions into rules. If the same kind of request is approved ninety times out of a hundred, the rule is probably wrong, not the requests. Write a standing permission with a clear limit.
- Delegate the decisions that do not need a director. Define limits within which a manager or buyer may decide, and record the decision afterwards instead of seeking permission beforehand.
- Keep a real emergency path. A true emergency should have a short, well-known route with a named decision-maker, a deputy and a rule for recording what was done.
- Review the rules regularly. Processes drift. A short review each quarter keeps the standard route close to what the business actually needs.
The HSE standard on change recommends sharing information promptly and consulting staff properly when working practices change. The people who live with the exception route often know best why it exists, and including them tends to produce better rules.
The trade-offs
None of this is free of cost, and some of it can backfire.
- Exceptions carry information. A hands-on director who sees every unusual case learns a great deal about where the business is changing. Removing that flow can leave leaders less informed.
- Delegated limits can be abused or misjudged. More discretion brings the risk of poor decisions, and some people will prefer the safety of asking.
- Rules multiply. Turning every exception into a rule can produce a rulebook nobody reads. Some exceptions should remain exceptions.
- Informality has benefits. A phone call to someone who understands the situation is often faster and kinder than any form. A formal route should not destroy the cases where judgement and trust work well.
- Controls matter. Where exceptions bypass financial controls, tightening is sometimes the right answer, even if it feels like the opposite of autonomy.
Interpreting the pattern
The Mellorca reading is that, in some businesses, a heavy use of the exception route is a sign that the standard process no longer fits the work. Its effect on people is mostly felt as lost control over their own day and uncertainty over what will be approved. It is a hypothesis, to be checked with local evidence rather than assumed.
A practical test is to ask how many of last month's urgent approvals were genuinely unforeseeable. If most of them could have been predicted, the business has a rule that needs writing. If few could, the exception route is doing its job, and the effort is better spent making it quick and well known.
Sources and further reading
- Management Standards - Control - HSE (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Management Standards - Role - HSE (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Get started with Power Automate approvals - Power Automate (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Mental health at work (last verified 10 October 2026)
Related Mellorca reading
- What Changes When People Can See Their Own Numbers
- The Owner Who Can Finally Say No to Work
- What Real Delegation Requires From Systems