Approval — Who Accepts This?
The third discipline: which outputs may be applied automatically, which need one reviewer, and which need two. Five chapters.
3. Standards, not plausibility
The failure mode here is specific, and it does not feel like failure.
AI output arrives well-formatted, internally consistent, and confident. A reviewer without a written standard falls back on the only test available — does this seem right? — and fluent wrong work passes that test easily.
| Against plausibility | Against a standard | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | Does this seem right? | Does this meet the stated criteria? |
| Passes | Anything fluent | Only what qualifies |
| Fails silently | Constantly | Rarely — a criterion is either met or not |
| Requires | Nothing written | The standard, written before the work |
A criterion that cannot be checked mechanically will drift. If the reviewer must exercise judgment about what the standard means, they will exercise it differently on a Friday than on a Monday — and differently again at volume.
High-reliability organizations describe this as reluctance to simplify. The pressure in an AI-augmented workflow runs the other way: the tidy version arrives pre-formatted, and accepting it is the cheapest available action.