A decision keeps escalating.
So you do the obvious thing.
You clarify who owns it.
Name the decision-maker. Draw the line of authority. Give someone the call.
And it escalates anyway.
Because the problem was never ownership.
It was definition.
Look closely at the issue that keeps coming back, and it is usually not one decision. It is a bundle of unresolved questions wearing a single name.
Is this about principle or exception? Reversible or not? Does it set a precedent, or resolve a single case? Is it a local call, or a system-level one?
Until those questions are settled, every function answers them differently – and rationally.
Sales reads it as situational. Product reads it as systemic. Finance reads it as precedent-setting.
All three are right, by their own lights.
And the decision fragments between them.
Hand that decision an owner, and you have not fixed anything. You have appointed someone to carry a question no one has actually framed.
A clear owner of an unclear decision is not an authority.
They are a messenger.
Define the decision first – what kind of choice it really is – and ownership becomes almost obvious.
Leave it undefined, and every new escalation framework just relocates the same confusion.
The reflex is to ask who should decide.
The prior question is what is actually being decided.
Do decisions escalate in your organisation because authority is unclear – or because the decision itself has never been defined?
This question closes a chapter of The Architecture of Commercial Performance, where the thinking behind it is developed in full.
