Escalation
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Negotiation Anatomy™
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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.
At the very least an escalation will take time. It will languish in an inbox. It will comprise the un-knitted air of an un-returned phone call or an ignored chat. This process will last for days or weeks. Then, when the awaited answer arrives, it is never quite the one the enquirer seeks. She may seek further input from another colleague, initiating the launch sequence for an escalation circle. It may partially answer the question, or ambiguously, or in terms so vague that the enquirer isn't sure wheat to do next. and it may be so obviously couched in the language of slidery that the enquirer is sort afraid to take it at face value. “At this stage I would be inclined not to disagree with this view”
- Working theory: The very 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.