I work with a lot of government departments. The "policy" is not a thing that can enforce itself, and often barely exists at all. Rarely is it actually written down!

Mostly these things boil down to a vetocracy where all managers in some hierarch must say 'yes', otherwise a single 'no' is a final 'no'.

Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say 'no'.

The manager in that office you worked in most likely made a decision themselves and didn't punt it up the hierarchy, and hence nobody told him 'no'.

The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.

PS: It's hilarious to see this effect play out as a consultant, because often I deal with different "randomly" selected subsets of the same organisation and the difference in their day-to-day can be stark. It just boils down to which managers take individual responsibility, and which regularly beg for permission to do their job. "No."

> The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.

Not particularly clever. My experience is that low-level team/line managers typically already have the authority to say "no" to their own people; but they don't want to take the blame for saying "no" (they want their team to like them!), so by punting the decision up the chain, they're effectively punting the blame for saying no up the chain (under the expectation that anything so punted will get a "no" response.)

Some this backfires, though: everyone above them says yes, and so they have to be the one to say no. (They may end up lying if asked, vaguely saying "someone important" said no.)

Sometimes this backfires badly: not only does everyone above them say yes, but someone somewhere up the chain loves the idea, and turns it into an "initiative" — i.e. something the line-level manager is now locked into doing.