Escalation
Process escalations
When a young negotiator engaged in a contractual workflow encounters a challenge beyond her mandate to approve she escalates. She may escalate upwards, to her own line manager, if it is a legal call beyond her pay-grade, or horizontally, to another risk controller, if the risk is not legal, but one of credit, market or trading risk.
Escalation, of either kind, is a key, and underestimated, feature of the negotiation process. It is rife with oubliettes, resentment and aggravation. It is redolent of, and apt to, generate the kind of emotions one experiences when one is being driven up the wall.
Working theory: the fact of an escalation—the very interposition of an approval step, in itself, in which one part of the meatware shunts a problem to another part of the meatware—causes more in aggregate delay, confusion, aggravation and second-order bureaucracy than is ever solved by the resolution it promises to deliver.
Sales escalations
Usually as a result of some wild goose chase convened by sales to chase illusory revenues, and the fact that they’ve come to you means they’ve failed to persuade a more cautious soul and they think you’re a soft touch.