For the past few months, my workplace has required us to fill out approval request forms every time we want to purchase something, plan a community event, or make any kind of formal decision. These forms are scattered in various drawers and folders in every room because we end up needing them so often. They document every move I make and who is ultimately responsible for it. Once I’ve carried out my plan, I submit the signed approval request, paper-clipped to an attendance sheet and an invoice and whatever other forms they ask of me, and it disappears behind the Wizard-of-Oz curtain where I assume it gets ruthlessly scrutinized.
At first, I complied with the forms begrudgingly. But once I got the hang of the process, I started to get a little burst of energy when my supervisor signed the form and I could point to exactly what it was I was trying to do. I started to appreciate the elegance of the form—the directness, the ownership, the proper categorization it necessitates.
Suddenly approval request forms were popping up everywhere in my imagination. I started to spin a world where we could use these forms whenever we ran into ambiguity or passivity in everyday-life types of communication. “Were you going to make dinner tonight or was I?” “Will you hold up your end of this biology group project or do we have to carry your weight?” “Will you help me get my oil changed but not do it for me but not be patronizing because you never taught me how to do it in the first place??”
It could look something like this.
Project Name: | Game night snacks |
Name of the Requester: | Leslie |
On behalf of (client’s name, if applicable): | Kiara (Leslie’s roommate, who always cleans up the snacks that Leslie and Kiara prepare for everyone) |
Description of Request: | Could Owen, Alex, and Joy please buy some snacks to bring to game night because Kiara and Leslie have provided the snacks every game night since the tradition’s commencement and are starting to get annoyed that the beneficiaries have not offered to contribute? |
Date Needed: | Wednesday, August 2 |
Signature: | |
To be completed by recipient:
Signature: |
Approve | Deny |
I’m not much for arguing. Most of the communication problems I’ve experienced have been underlying and squishy instead of outright and angry. What if I could slap down an approval request form every time I listen to someone passively skirt around the thing they’re really trying to say? What if I could fill out an approval request form of my own every time I felt myself getting ambiguous and avoidant? And think of all the catastrophes you could solve for your favorite TV show characters by simply inserting an approval request form every time they fail to tell their partner the OBVIOUS thing that’s going to make the whole show unravel.
A world where human communication completely relies on approval request forms, as you might have guessed, would have its drawbacks. For one thing, all of our inconsistencies and shortcomings would be digitized. Not only would we be able to point to everyone else’s mistakes and the day they made them; they would be able to point to ours.
Approval request forms would also eliminate our need for trust, as annoying and disappointing as it sometimes is. We wouldn’t need to worry that someone was going to mess up their simple task—buying the eggs—but we would never expect them to go as far as making us an omelet when we’re too busy to stop working for a few minutes. We would start treating people like one automated part of a decision-making faculty and not the complicated, contradictory, striving, worrying, thinking, feeling nexus of motives that we are. We would get stuff done. We would never achieve true independence or true interdependence.
I worked pretty hard to use active voice in college. I still spend an embarrassingly long time figuring out how to make a sentence active when leaving it passive and getting my point across would probably be a better use of my time. The English major world required me to pay attention to that kind of thing, but it also exposed me to the idea that active voice is not the gold standard for every cultural context. Some academic contexts value circular and indirect communication over communication that’s linear and direct. They recognize that sometimes we need more time and context before we can fully understand the nuance of a complex thing. Stating the point directly from A to Z would oversimplify something that’s meant to be robust and multifaceted.
I’m not totally over my desire for the occasional approval request form when communication feels messy and confrontation daunting. But I’m a little more willing to wade through ambiguous conversations or fragmented requests if it means I’m leaving more room for the full span of human relationships.

Michal graduated from Calvin in 2022 with a major in writing and a minor in global development studies. She’ll be working with a refugee resettlement organization in Hungary for the 2022-2023 year. She is always up for a spontaneous trip to the closest beach.