Stop doing this: adding a human review step

It's a well-meant mistake. That's exactly why it sticks around. Every team that makes it can explain why, and the explanation holds up right until the system has to survive its second year.

"A human reviews it" is where automation designs go to die. An approval step with no thought behind it becomes a rubber stamp within a month, and then you have the cost of a review with none of the protection.

RUBBER STAMPS FORM FAST

Give someone a hundred items a day where ninety-eight are fine and they will approve all hundred by Thursday. That's not carelessness, it's a rational response to a signal with no information in it. The design is at fault, not the reviewer.

So the honest question isn't whether to have review, it's what fraction the reviewer can meaningfully attend to. If the system can't identify the interesting ten percent, it's asking a person to do a job it hasn't equipped them for.

REVIEW THE UNCERTAIN, NOT THE SAMPLE

Random sampling feels rigorous and finds nothing. What works is routing by uncertainty: send the cases where the system's confidence is low, where the amount is unusual, where inputs disagree. Then a queue of thirty items genuinely contains thirty decisions.

This needs the system to have a calibrated notion of its own uncertainty, which is real work and the actual engineering in most of these projects. Skip it and you're back to sampling.

This is where the reconciliation spreadsheet comes from. Somebody built it once to settle an argument. Now roughly 6,000 open cases depends on a file with one author, no tests, and a filename ending in _v4_final.

MAKE THE REVIEW TEACH THE SYSTEM

A reviewer who overturns a decision knows something the system doesn't. If that only produces a corrected record, you've thrown the valuable part away. Capture the reason as structured data and the exception rate should fall over time.

It also gives you a measurement worth watching: overturn rate by category. Rising means something's drifted. Falling to zero means you can widen what gets handled automatically. Unlike most automation metrics, both directions are actionable.

The bill shows up in the handover notes: nine paragraphs on which of two systems to trust for a given case record. When a statutory clock was missed because the case had two owners, it took two days to work out what had actually happened, in what order.

WHERE IT GOES WRONG

• A hundred items a day where ninety-eight are fine, approved in a batch by Thursday.
• Random sampling instead of routing by uncertainty, so review finds nothing.
• Overturns recorded as corrections with no reason, throwing away the only useful signal.
• An approval step added to satisfy an audit requirement, with nobody measuring whether it does anything.

Route by uncertainty, and capture why the reviewer disagreed.

THE REPLACEMENT

The fix isn't more discipline. Discipline wears off. The fix is a structure where the wrong thing can't be said, so nobody has to remember the rule at 3am.