The Freedom of Escalation

Collaborating with other people and teams is a key part of actually getting anything meaningful done, at least in an organisation of significant size. You want something, they want something, together you figure out how you can both get something and everyone walks away happy.

Until you run into the situation where the needs of the two parties are diametrically opposed and you've exhausted all the normal avenues for resolving the problem.

At that point, it's often best to fire off a signal flare and call for reinforcements.

The Chain of Command Is Real

I'm talking about escalation of course, which should be pretty obvious considering the title of this blog post.

The idea is that if you can't come to a decision about how to move forward with the other party amongst yourselves, you leverage the existing command hierarchy to make the decision instead.

This commonly manifests as getting your manager and the manager of whoever you've been negotiating with involved and basically delegating upwards, making the decision their problem.

If they can't come to a conclusion, the process continues until either a pair of people does come to a conclusion or the decision arrives at a single person who is directly responsible for both of the areas involved.

Yup, that means that it is possible for an escalation can reach all the way to the top of an organisation, aka to the CEO, and while that is probably going to be painful for everyone involved, it's still a valid end state.

At the end of the day the point is to get a binding decision that everyone else then abides by, ideally more quickly than would be possible by just continuing the discussion with the same group of people, probably wasting a bunch of time and effort.

It Exists For Exactly This Reason

Speaking of effort, escalating something properly does actually take some.

Despite what I said in the introduction to this blog post, it's not a magical signal flare that you can just fire into the sky whenever you want and have someone swoop down and rescue you from your predicament.

I mean, it's a little like that, but you have to do some preparation first.

Step one is to identify the right people to escalate the decision to.

Most of the time the decision makers are probably just the next link up in the management chain. That means your manager and the manager of any person who is currently involved in the conversation, though ideally you want to limit the escalation to as small a number of people as possible, because the more people get involved, the harder the next step becomes.

Something to note before I move on though is that the escalation is not always the next link in the management chain, especially if your organisation has craft specific reporting lines which are separate to the actual org units that deliver things.

For example, I'm a TPM and I have a manager, but a lot of the time the decisions that I am making or helping to make belong to the engineering team, which are not in my management chain.

As a result, I tend to escalate things to the resident Head of Engineering as opposed to my own manager, because that's where the decisions belong.

Moving on, step two is to concisely summarise the situation.

If you've been living and breathing a discussion for the last however long it can be easy to forget that other people, people who have perhaps only been tangentially involved, don't have as much context as you do.

When you escalate you need to be able to communicate as much of the relevant context as possible in a way that is quick and easy to consume.

That means you really need to pare everything back to the root decision that needs to be made, the options that are on the table, the trade-offs between those options and any additional information that is necessary to understand those trade-offs.

Additionally, that raw information needs to be written from the perspective of the person consuming it, who is likely to have a different view of the world as a result of their position. Basically, you need to speak their language, or the summarisation will be ultimately ineffective.

Also, make sure that whatever summary is created is done as a joint effort between the parties who are trying to make the decision. Even if you ignore the possibility of conscious manipulation of the situation (and you shouldn't), it's entirely possible for a trusted collaborator to unconsciously present the summarised information in a way that biases towards a specific direction.

Better to work together to avoid the situation entirely.

It's Not Free Though

As great as I've made escalation sound, it's not all fireworks and victory.

For example, I find there is an emotional toll that comes with escalating.

Escalating can feel like a failure. Like you couldn't collaborate properly and work with the other party to compromise and come to a conclusion that makes everyone equally unhappy, but still keeps the machine moving forward. That you had to run to an authority figure to fix the situation.

The other form of emotional toll here is the feeling that you're throwing work at someone else just because it got too hard for you to do it yourself. It doesn't feel great when someone does it to you, so it's easy to empathise with the person or people that you are escalating to and assume that they resent you for the situation.

Your mileage may vary of course, because I doubt your brain is as weird as mine is, but the important thing here is to temper the emotional toll of escalation by focusing on the bigger picture (i.e. quicker decision, less wasted effort, more time to do other things) as opposed to the localised feelings that it inspires.

In other words, learn to compartmentalise properly.

The other downside to escalation is that it can feel like it takes more work to escalate than to solve the problem yourself.

I've definitely experienced this first hand, where the number of conversations and summarisations and documents I had to get involved in as a result of an escalation felt like way more work than if I'd just compromised earlier.

Sometimes this is actually just a symptom of poor summarisation and communication during the escalation, where the information you provided was incomplete, unclear or just didn't speak the same language as the person consuming it.

Sometimes it's actually a symptom of a dysfunctional chain of command, where you have to keep explaining the situation over and over again or perhaps it keeps looping between various links in the chain, leading to even more wheel spinning.

The first case is at least something you can mitigate by focusing on the quality of the escalation, but I can't really help with the second one, because when you find yourself in that situation, you probably have bigger problems to deal with.

Useful Tools Rarely Are

Understanding how and when to escalate, and how to do it well, is a good tool to have in your belt, regardless of the role that you are currently filling.

Be careful though.

It's not a tool that you should use lightly, because the more you use it, the more of an adverse effect it will have, not only on your own ability to confidently make decisions, but on your perceived ability to make decisions.

That can easily escalate into a lack of trust in general, which is never fun to have to deal with professionally and can be a hole that is difficult to climb out of.

And there is always the risk someone will toss a grenade into that hole while you're trying to figure out how to get out.