Escalations
If Escalation Depends on Knowing the Right Person, You Have an Opportunity to Improve the Process
Tribal knowledge may be doing the job of process — and it only works while the right people are available.
By Sam Vazquez — Operational Intelligence & Transformation Advisor
What creates unnecessary escalations?
Two different problems produce escalations. The first is genuine: the work needs a decision or authority the current owner does not have. The second is structural: the work cannot find its owner, so someone escalates to create movement.
The second kind is the expensive one, because it consumes senior attention to solve a routing problem.
- Tribal knowledge standing in for documented paths
- Ownership that is unclear at team boundaries
- Ticket bouncing between queues that each see partial scope
- Routing rules that no longer match the org
- Escalation criteria that are informal or inconsistently applied
- Decision rights that sit higher than the work requires
- Cross-functional dependencies with no agreed engagement path
- No automated trigger, so escalation depends on someone noticing
- Low visibility, so escalation becomes the only way to get status
Make the criteria explicit before automating the path
Escalation works when three things are written down: what conditions justify it, who holds the decision, and what happens if that person is unavailable. Most organizations have the third one only as a name people remember.
Once criteria exist, much of the escalation path can be triggered automatically on elapsed time, impact or dependency — which also removes the social cost that makes people delay escalating.
“How can we reduce escalation delays?”
Remove the judgment call about whether escalating is acceptable. When criteria are explicit and the trigger is automatic, escalation happens at the right moment instead of after someone decides it has waited long enough.
Then reduce the number of hops. Each additional hop adds context rebuilding, and context rebuilding is where most of the delay actually lives.
“Why does work bounce between teams?”
Because each team can see that the work is not theirs, and none can see who it belongs to. Boundary cases need an explicit default owner — someone accountable for placing the work even when it is ambiguous.
Questions leaders ask
What is escalation management?
The process that moves work to the right decision-maker when the current owner cannot resolve it — defined by criteria, decision rights, routing and visibility rather than by personal relationships.
How do you know escalation is being overused?
When escalations are used to obtain status rather than a decision, or when the same boundary produces repeated escalations, the underlying problem is usually visibility or ownership.
Can escalation be automated?
The trigger and routing can, once criteria are explicit. The decision should remain human; the delay in reaching that human should not.
Related reading
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