Escalation

The costliest minutes of any incident are the ones spent deciding whether it is serious enough to wake someone up. Escalation exists to remove that judgement call from the night shift: when a threshold is crossed, the incident moves up, by procedure rather than by courage. For executives the stake is simple — whether they hear about a major event in 30 minutes or after it has reached customers and the press. A clear escalation path is what turns a monitoring alert into a leadership decision in time.

In practice, escalation is a short table in the incident or crisis plan: levels, thresholds, who is informed, and how fast. A typical scheme has three levels — the duty team resolves routine incidents; anything expected to exceed, say, 2 hours of downtime for a critical service goes to the department head; a projected breach of the recovery time objective (RTO) or any safety, data or reputational impact convenes the crisis team. When a key supplier declares force majeure, the contract owner does not weigh options alone: the threshold of a single-source supplier stopped for more than 24 hours sends it upward the same day. Contact chains are tested quarterly, including at night and on weekends.

The typical failure is escalation by mood: thresholds exist, but people negotiate them each time, hoping to fix things quietly before anyone notices. The result is that leadership learns about incidents late and from the wrong sources. In the ERGP programme, escalation design is covered in module M4, Crisis management and decision making.