Escalation
The process of routing a governance issue to a higher authority when it cannot be resolved within existing authority boundaries or when constraints are violated.
Escalation is the governance mechanism that ensures issues reach the right level of authority. When a constraint is violated, when a commitment is at risk, or when a decision exceeds someone's authority, the issue escalates — moving up the governance chain until someone with appropriate authority can act.
Effective escalation is neither too sensitive (escalating everything creates bottlenecks) nor too insensitive (failing to escalate critical issues creates risk). The challenge is calibration: knowing what warrants escalation and routing it to the right person.
Without structured escalation, organisations rely on informal networks — people knowing who to call. This works until it doesn't: when the key person is unavailable, when the issue crosses team boundaries, or when no one realises the issue is serious enough to escalate.
How Constellation handles this
Constellation provides structured escalation paths that route governance issues automatically based on domain, severity, and authority boundaries. No issue falls through the cracks because escalation is infrastructure, not improvisation.