Escalation is one of the most reliable diagnostic signals available to anyone trying to understand how an organisation actually governs itself. Not the escalation process — the formal protocol that says when to escalate and to whom — but the escalation pattern: what actually gets escalated, at what frequency, from what levels, and with what outcome.
The diagnostic value of escalation patterns is that they are observable and difficult to distort. Decision rights can be documented aspirationally. Committee structures can be described in terms of how they are supposed to function. But escalation patterns are behavioural — they reflect what people actually do when they encounter ambiguity, risk, or decisions they are not confident making. The pattern reveals the governance architecture that is actually operating, underneath the one that is formally documented.
In an organisation with sound governance architecture, escalation is relatively infrequent and highly specific. When it occurs, it is because a decision has reached the edge of the authority assigned to a given level — a genuinely novel situation, a risk threshold that has been crossed, a cross-functional consequence that requires coordination above the decision maker’s level. The escalation produces a decision, the authority is exercised, and the matter resolves.
In an organisation with degraded governance architecture, the escalation pattern looks completely different. Escalation is frequent, often disproportionate to the significance of the decisions involved, and frequently unresolved — the decision arrives at a higher level, that level is also uncertain, and the decision either stalls or escalates further. The ExCo is making decisions that should be made two or three levels below it, not because the ExCo wants to be involved but because the levels below it don’t have the structural clarity to own them confidently.
The most diagnostic escalation pattern is what happens to decisions that escalate but don’t resolve. In a healthy governance architecture, unresolved escalations are rare — the structure provides the authority and the information needed to make the decision at the appropriate level. When unresolved escalations are common, it indicates that the governance architecture lacks either the authority clarity, the information architecture, or both to support decision-making at scale.
A second diagnostic pattern is what RT calls reverse escalation — situations where decisions that should be made at a higher level are being made at a lower one, not through formal delegation but through informal substitution. Senior leaders are unavailable, or the formal escalation path is too slow, or the culture has established that certain decisions just get made operationally and reported upward after the fact. This pattern is often invisible to the leaders at the top of the organisation because the decisions never reach them — but it represents a genuine accountability gap, and it accumulates risk silently.
The governance health question that escalation patterns answer is simple: is decision authority being exercised at the level it was designed to be exercised at, by the people it was designed to be exercised by, with the information and mandate required to make it stick? If the answer, read from the actual escalation pattern rather than the documented process, is no — the question is what structural condition is producing the mismatch. That structural condition is what RT’s Diagnostic is designed to surface. The escalation pattern is where the inquiry begins.
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