Specification
Setting authority
The three tiers, who agrees them, and why the middle tier is where the design effort goes.
Authority is agreed before a worker starts, with the people who carry the risk rather than the people who want the throughput. It has exactly three tiers and no others.
The first tier is what the worker does alone. Keep it narrow at the start. The third tier is what it may never touch, and it is enforced rather than requested. The second tier is the interesting one: the actions a worker may prepare and propose, but which do not move until a named person approves them.
Most of the design work sits in that second tier. Too wide and the approver becomes a rubber stamp, which is worse than no control at all. Too narrow and the worker cannot carry anything through. The test is whether the approver has enough context, in the request itself, to make a real decision in under a minute.