Dare Obasanjo

Escalation isn’t a dirty word. Sometimes teams disagree because they have different priorities or weigh tradeoffs differently.

Asking leadership to weigh in with guidance is the right thing to do. Your job is to frame the options and reason for misalignment.

Indecision kills.

Feb 27, 2023 at 8:52pmWeb
Show threadTim KelloggFeb 27, 2023
@carnage4life i like to think of it as "empowering leadership". leadership is often so far from the details that they lose track of what's really going on. the difference between good and bad escalation is, "does it empower leadership?"
Show threadRobbie ColemanFeb 27, 2023
@carnage4life by keeping what I'm the subject matter expert for in context, I'm able to focus on offering facts and opinions on just those. This helps a lot when discussing things like resource contention.
Show threadJeff AtwoodFeb 27, 2023
@carnage4life deeply true. I describe it thusly: https://blog.codinghorror.com/go-that-way-really-fast/
Go That Way, Really Fast

When it comes to running Stack Overflow, the company, I take all my business advice from one person, and one person alone: Curtis Armstrong. More specifically, Curtis Armstrong as Charles De Mar from the 1985 absurdist teen comedy classic, Better Off Dead. When asked for advice on how to ski

Coding Horror
Show threadGeorge SudarkoffFeb 28, 2023
@carnage4life But it really should be called de-escalation
Show threadRay TraylorFeb 28, 2023
@carnage4life telling the other person this first helps and will perhaps solve the problem before telling the boss
Show threadSteve BennettFeb 28, 2023

@carnage4life I use issues escalated to me as an opportunity to share more of the context I have, with a view to the teams in question still coming to an agreement on the way forward.

It’s only on the rare occasions where I’ll actually make the decision myself.