You might think that escalations were needed to ensure that the constrained resources of an organisation were focused on the highest priority investments. The true purpose of escalations is to validate and confirm the status and importance of senior staff and executives, and re-enforce a high power distance index. Escalations are yet another sign of a risk averse failureship culture. Escalations are a symptom of multiple dysfunctional processes within the organisation. Escalations are not only symptoms, they are also the causes of dysfunction. Escalations disrupt and often prevent process improvement, especially the process improvement that would remove them. This reinforcing feedback loop means that escalations need to be addressed as the corrosive practice that they are before genuine improvement can occur.

Jabe Bloom interprets Elliot Jacques work on the levels of organisations showing that more senior individuals work further into the future. The levels of responsibility of a technology might be described as:

• Development team – The current sprint.
• Product Owner – The next sprint, ensuring stories are ready for the development team.
• Project Manager – Ensuring product owners and development teams are aligned for the current quarter.
• Programme Manager – Ensuring there are enough development teams (capacity) for the commitments made by the organisation in the next quarter.
• Head of department – Ensure that there is sufficient funding in place for the teams that are needed, and that the organisation is funding investments in technology and practices that it needs to improve.

The larger the organisation, the further into the future that the senior executives will be operating. The CEO of a start-up will be focused on funding for the next quarter. The CEO of a multi-national will be building relationships with governments for investments that will take place in decades to come (Oil pipelines, Theme Parks etc).

The head of department’s responsibility is to ensure that the organisation improves ready for the challenges it faces the following year. They should be building the organisation from six months to a year into the future. The problem is that it is difficult for senior executives to demonstrate their “power” when the results are shown in the future. They have a difficult task and getting people to engage in improvement processes is hard. By comparison, an escalation occurs in the present. It presents senior executives with the opportunity to demonstrate their power by “getting things done”. Escalations reinforce the power distance index that support the risk averse failureship culture. Ideally an escalation will allow one executive to prove to all involved that the work they are doing is more important than other executive’s work, and by association the executive is more important than other executives. Escalations are ambrosia for individuals in a risk averse failureship.

Escalations are a symptom of a number of organisation dysfunctions but they also act to perpetuate these dysfunctions, which include but are not limited to:

• Planning – Escalations often occur as the result of poor planning, preparation and communication on the part of individuals responsible for delivering an important outcome. They assume that the high status of their work justifies their lack of planning or notice to dependent teams. Furthermore, when they are given a date that is too late for their liking, they simply escalate. The impact of frequent escalations is that the teams delivering the work are themselves unable to plan which means they need to escalate to meet the demands of the individuals escalating against them. The result is an organisation that is unable to plan and which has a severely damaged ability to deliver value.
• Productivity – In Lean terms, escalations are the ultimate task switching. They are muda, or waste, as the teams switch from one investment to another and then switch back again.
• Stress – Even worse than planning and productivity, escalations have the same stressful impact as a severe production incidents.
  • Individuals involved in an escalation are forced to drop their work, focus on the escalated issue, and then pick up the work they were doing before. This is not as easy as it sounds as most work done in modern organisations require collaboration between team members and teams. Escalations disrupt that collaboration.
  • Individuals involved in an escalation are expected to work “above and beyond” to resolve the situation, working extended hours, weekends, and cancelling planned events and even holidays. This is the perfect situation for people who want to raise their status and are prepared to work long hours.
  • Escalations can damage relationships, especially if the justification for the escalation is not considered fair.
  • A culture that tolerates frequent escalations leads to burn out and ultimately high staff turnover, with the most competent risk managed individuals leaving as they understand a better way is possible.

Escalations are toxic to an organisation. The reason that they happen is because the people who should be eradicating them are also the people who get validation and an ego boost from them.

Step one to eradicating escalations is to understand why they are occurring. It might be best to treat them as high severity events and perform a root cause analysis on each escalation. Knowing that they will be investigated might result in many of them disappearing altogether as the people that normally raise them would not like to be exposed as incompetent.

Once we understand that individuals in a risk averse failureship culture benefit from escalations in terms of status, lets understand what the real causes of escalations are:

1. Unexpected external events – A valid reason for an escalation. Examples include the Cloudstrike event and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In these cases, everyone in the organisation would understand the importance of addressing the event and escalation would not be necessary.
2. Anticipated external events – Not a valid reason for an escalation. Often, an organisation’s activity is dependent upon an external agent that they do not control. A decision by a customer, a ruling by a court, a directive from a regulator. In all these situations, the organisation can plan for the contingent event. Tools like Real Options, and Shell’s Scenario Planning made popular by Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline” are ideal for contingent planning. Organisations should build a proper risk register rather than engage in risk management theatre. A few examples of how to handle these events.
   • A customer might be about to sign a contract that has an impact on the work done in the next quarter. If the contract is not signed we go with “Plan A”, and if the contract is signed we go with “Plan B”. We organise the work so that we can minimise the impact if we switch from “Plan A” to “Plan B”.
   • It was not possible to recruit the necessary resources. Planning for the current period should be done based on current resources, not planned resources.
   • Key individuals left the organisation. Leaders should manage key man dependencies using a skills matrix. They can use the skills matrix to consider different scenarios regarding people leaving and ensure they are not exposed to gaps in knowledge and experience.
3. Unexpected internal event – Things happen that we cannot know when or how they will happen. A machine or a network might fail. A hacker might breach the security of the organisation. An incompetent provider (CloudStrike ?) might perform an unintended ransomware attack from inside the firewall. Escalations are not relevant for these types of situations, as they are operational “SEVERITY-1” events that all relevant persons should focus on resolving. Although unexpected, they should be planned for using Real Options, Scenario Planning and a proper risk register, especially if they have not occurred before in the organisation.
4. Planned internal event – Sometimes leadership will spring a change on the organisation like a merger that results in multiple escalations. The escalations are due to poor planning, poor communication and poor executions. If the leadership is not able to share the details, they can at least inform key individuals under an NDA (Non disclosure agreement) to plan and prepare communications.
5. Poor planning – The most common causes of escalations are poor planning, poor preparation and poor communication. Escalations due to poor planning are a symptom of poor leadership, poor management and poor collaboration. They are a symptom that people in the organisation are not competent and that leaders have not ensured that the people in their organisation are experienced to perform their responsibilities.

When an escalation occurs, perform a root cause analysis. If the cause is poor planning, no one involved in raising (teams), promoting (middle managers) or sanctioning (leaders) the escalation should receive a a pay rise, bonus or promotion as they have demonstrated that they are not competent in their current roles and should not be rewarded or considered for further responsibility until they have shown competence at their current level. The leadership should understand that they have failed, and should be coached to understand how to run an organisation using risk management techniques rather than status and ego driven power.

Always remember that the real purpose of escalations is to allow incompetent senior leadership to demonstrate their power.