Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Escalation—Let’s Do it Right!
It is 8 p.m., and Alex has been pushing all day to get some comments from a technical expert on the pre-sales proposal he must submit to the customer by tomorrow morning. The technical expert refuses to provide comments, saying that he is too busy. Alex does not know what to do or who to ask for help. He opens his e-mail client to see who the technical expert reports to, sends out an e-mail asking for intervention and help, and finally goes home, hoping a response will come by the morning. Alex wakes up early the next morning and hurries to the office only to see no response; he is already late submitting the proposal.
What went wrong here? Why didn’t the expected response come?
Well, Alex works in a matrix organization, and the boss to whom he escalated was actually just a people manager. He did see the e-mail on his Blackberry but had no idea what to do with it. With good intention, he flagged it for follow up the next morning but got busy with other things and could only check with the expert in the afternoon, and by then it was already too late.
Although slightly exaggerated, this is a familiar scenario. Don’t we all face similar situations in our work lives when we want to escalate, we do escalate, yet nothing happens?
Let us take a deeper look at the phenomenon of escalation: what it is, when it is needed, how it is incorrectly …
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"I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations from beautiful minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things." - Dorothy Parker |