At some point, people stopped asking for permission.
Not all at once. Not in a rebellious way. It just… faded.
Someone would notice a small problem and fix it. Another person would improve something that had been annoying them for months. Features appeared without tickets. Changes shipped without announcements.
Nothing broke.
This made a few people nervous.
In theory, permission exists to prevent chaos. In practice, it often exists because doing things used to be expensive. Changing software meant risk, coordination, and a long list of things that could go wrong.
When that cost drops, permission starts to feel strange.
Why schedule a meeting when you can try something and see if it works? Why write a proposal when you can build a prototype before lunch? Why wait for approval when undoing a mistake takes five minutes?
The organisations that noticed this adapted quietly. They didn't declare new roles or rewrite handbooks. They just stopped punishing initiative.
The ones that didn't notice added more process.
Eventually, a pattern emerged. The people closest to the product were making the decisions, not because they were told to, but because it was the shortest path between problem and solution.
Nobody announced a revolution. Nobody needed to.
When the distance between idea and implementation collapses, permission becomes friction. And friction has a way of being engineered out, whether you meant to or not.