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Why Risk Escalation Fails and How Control Replaces Transparency
- Julien Haye
- 6 hours ago
- 18 min read
Opening Signal: Leadership Framing
Risk escalation rarely breaks at the moment of reporting. It weakens much earlier, as everyday design choices start to reshape judgement under pressure. Capacity constraints, delivery incentives, and governance structures actively determine what gets surfaced, how it is framed, and when leaders see it, long before any formal escalation threshold is crossed.
In most organisations, issues are not ignored. They are handled. Teams stabilise delivery, build workarounds, and absorb disruption to keep objectives on track. Non-financial risk processes operate as designed. Issues are logged. Actions are assigned. Progress is reported. From a distance, the system looks orderly, disciplined, and in control.
At the point of delivery, the reality is sharper. Judgement is applied continuously to balance competing priorities, limited capacity, and unresolved uncertainty. Decisions are made about what can be contained locally and what must be elevated. Over time, these decisions are shaped less by formal escalation rules than by what the system rewards, tolerates, and quietly absorbs.
This creates a structural disconnect. Governance encounters risk through structured forums and summarised narratives. Delivery encounters risk through trade-offs, effort, and cumulative strain. Both perspectives are rational. Neither reflects poor intent. The problem is that escalation is often designed to connect these perspectives only after choice has narrowed.
This article examines escalation through that lens. It shows how organisational design weakens escalation even in well-run environments, how control mechanisms can replace transparency, and how leaders can redesign escalation to surface strain early enough to influence priorities rather than merely confirm outcomes. For the purpose of this article, escalation failure refers to the systematic delay or distortion of risk signals before they reach decision-makers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Reframing Risk Escalation as a Governance System Capability
Risk escalation is often treated as an individual behaviour. Attention focuses on whether people chose to escalate, waited too long, or failed to act at the right moment. That framing locates responsibility at the point of action and obscures the conditions that shaped it. In practice, escalation is not primarily a behavioural choice. It is an output of governance design.
Late escalation rarely stems from a single missed decision. It reflects accumulated system strain absorbed over time. Delivery pressure, remediation-first processes, fragmented ownership, and overloaded decision forums actively reshape how issues are handled. Risk is worked around, stabilised locally, and contained long enough for escalation to feel unnecessary or premature. When escalation finally occurs, options have narrowed and consequences have hardened.
This dynamic explains why organisations with experienced leaders and mature non-financial risk frameworks still struggle with escalation. Strong people adapt quickly to what systems reward. When governance emphasises containment, delivery continuity, and issue closure, escalation shifts later by default, even when formal processes remain unchanged. The problem is not capability or intent. It is the absence of escalation discipline built into governance design.
Reframed as a system capability, escalation serves several critical functions. First, it acts as a decision-quality signal. Early escalation surfaces uncertainty, dependency, and emerging exposure while strategic and operational choices remain reversible. When escalation arrives late, leaders continue to decide on partial information, despite the appearance of comprehensive reporting.
Escalation also operates as a capacity and prioritisation mechanism. It exposes where delivery is being sustained through workarounds, additional effort, or deferred risk. Without timely escalation, capacity constraints stay hidden and prioritisation happens implicitly through depletion rather than explicitly through choice.
Finally, escalation provides a feedback loop between delivery and governance. It connects operational reality with the assumptions, risk appetite, and trade-offs set at leadership level. When this loop weakens, governance tracks progress and remediation while strain accumulates elsewhere in the system.
Viewed this way, escalation is not a test of courage, willingness, or compliance. It is a test of whether governance structures surface stress early enough for leaders to act while meaningful choices still exist.
Read about why Leaders Don’t Experience Risk Culture
In a recent LinkedIn poll, 44% of respondents said executives experience risk culture very differently, or not at all the same, as delivery teams. Only 20% reported close alignment. The signal was not cultural failure, but perspective gap: governance sees reassurance, while delivery absorbs strain.
How Fatigue Distorts Escalation Signals
Fatigue and disengagement rarely stop escalation outright. In most organisations, issues continue to be logged, reported, and discussed through established processes. What changes under sustained pressure is the quality of what reaches decision-makers. Escalation does not disappear. It weakens.
As cognitive load increases, informal escalation thresholds rise. When time, attention, and decision bandwidth tighten, people become more selective about what they elevate. Ambiguous, emerging, or incomplete signals are deferred. Only issues that appear clear, contained, or undeniably severe make it through. This is not avoidance. It is prioritisation shaped by constraint.
Sustained pressure also narrows judgement. When delivery demands remain high over long periods, people default to familiar frames and past solutions. Risks are assessed quickly against what has worked before, using criteria centred on immediate manageability. Issues are handled in isolation rather than recognised as part of a growing pattern. Decision horizons shorten, and sensitivity to cumulative exposure declines.
The result is not silence, but distortion. Escalated issues arrive with simplified narratives and reduced context. Uncertainty is stripped out to save time and to signal control. Dependencies, trade-offs, and the capacity consumed to keep the issue contained are downplayed or omitted. What reaches governance looks stable, even as strain accumulates beneath the surface.
Disengagement further weakens the connection between ownership and escalation. When sustained effort delivers little visible impact, ownership becomes procedural. Issues are driven to completion within local boundaries, and escalation turns into a formal checkpoint rather than a request for prioritisation or support. Responsibility is discharged through action tracking, while accountability for system-level implications slowly erodes.
In these conditions, escalation continues to function on paper. Reports circulate. Issues are reviewed. Governance cycles proceed as planned. What decays is the meaning of escalation. Urgency softens, context thins, and accumulation goes unseen. By the time escalation forces decisive action, much of the organisation’s capacity has already been consumed keeping problems manageable.
Why Fix-It-First Behaviour Delays Risk Escalation Visibility
In many organisations, competence is demonstrated by fixing problems without disrupting others. Teams that stabilise issues quickly, protect delivery, and avoid escalation are seen as reliable and effective. This norm reinforces a fix-it-first response that feels professional and responsible. From an escalation perspective, it systematically delays visibility.
When containment becomes the primary signal of competence, escalation is deferred until local options are exhausted. Issues remain within teams, functions, or projects for as long as they appear manageable. Escalation is treated as a last resort rather than as an input into prioritisation or capacity decisions. This sequencing removes early insight into uncertainty, trade-offs, and emerging strain from leadership view.
Local optimisation deepens the problem. Each team resolves its own issues using available resources, workarounds, or informal agreements. These fixes improve immediate performance, yet they conceal how exposure is accumulating across the organisation. Dependencies stay hidden. Patterns fail to form. Each issue appears isolated because it is contained within its local boundary.
Workarounds are central to this dynamic. They consume time, attention, and specialist effort that rarely registers as risk exposure. Capacity is absorbed quietly to keep delivery on track, creating an appearance of resilience while reducing the organisation’s ability to respond to further disruption. Because these adjustments work in the short term, they reinforce the belief that escalation is unnecessary.
Over time, this reshapes how escalation is interpreted. Instead of signalling emerging constraint or the need for prioritisation, escalation becomes associated with loss of control or failure to cope. Issues are escalated only when containment breaks down, at which point options are limited and costs are higher.
The result is a widening gap between local success and enterprise awareness. Problems are solved repeatedly at the edges of the system while risk accumulates across it. When escalation finally reveals the scale of exposure, much of the organisation’s capacity has already been spent keeping issues manageable.
Case Study: Risk Escalation Failure in a Financial Services IT Outage
Consider a fictional financial services firm, "Phoenix Financial." The firm uses a widely adopted third-party security software across millions of employee devices.
The Local Fix: The IT Security team notices a slight bug in a new configuration update for the software. Instead of rolling it back immediately or escalating the potential impact to the C-suite, they decide to "fix it first" using a custom script to patch the issue locally on affected machines as they arise, preventing noise and potential delivery delays. They operate within their functional silo, proud of their self-sufficiency.
The Accumulated Risk: This "shadow work" consumes the team's capacity, and the script doesn't catch all instances. Over several weeks, minor, isolated crashes occur in different departments but are handled quietly by local IT support. No one connects the dots to the single, flawed update.
The Crisis Point: Eventually, a core trading system is hit by the bug on a busy Monday morning. The local fix fails. By the time leadership is informed, the problem has spread globally, causing an outage across critical trading platforms, halting operations, and resulting in millions in financial losses and reputational damage.
The outcome: The culture of containment meant that an early, manageable warning sign was hidden until it became a systemic, unmanageable failure. The initial local success masked the enterprise-wide vulnerability.
Red Flag Questions for Managers
Ask yourself these questions, and observe your team's responses:
🛑 Local Optimisation & Workarounds
"How many workarounds or unofficial scripts are we using daily to keep our core systems running?"
"When was the last time we experienced a production issue that we fixed without logging a formal ticket or incident report?"
"Are we consuming 'invisible capacity'—e.g., engineers staying late or using personal time—to resolve issues that never appear on our official timecards?"
"Do different teams seem to be solving very similar problems in isolation?"
🛑 Escalation Perceptions
"How do team members perceive escalation? Is it seen as a failure to manage or as a necessary input for prioritisation?"
"Do team members express reluctance or fear when considering raising an issue outside of the immediate team boundary?"
"Are issues only escalated when containment has completely failed, options are narrow, and costs are already high?"
🛑 Definition of Competence
"Do we implicitly praise the 'firefighters' who contain issues quickly over those who raise visibility for systemic fixes?"
"Is the quiet, self-sufficient team viewed as more competent and reliable than the one that brings risks to leadership's attention early?"
Our Risk Leadership Diagnostics help leaders identify behavioural blind spots and shape more accountable risk decisions.
How Non-Financial Risk Frameworks Delay Escalation by Design
Mature non-financial risk frameworks are built to deliver clarity, consistency, and accountability. They emphasise clear ownership, structured remediation, defined controls, and disciplined closure. These features are essential for operational stability and regulatory assurance. At the same time, they embed containment as the default response, which can delay early escalation.
Within these frameworks, ownership is primarily exercised through issue management. Once an issue is identified, attention moves quickly to remediation planning, action tracking, and evidence of progress. Although escalation can occur at any stage, governance attention and reporting structures concentrate on delivery confidence and remediation status. Escalation therefore gains traction most often when progress slows, thresholds are approached, or delivery certainty weakens, rather than when uncertainty or strain first appears. Issues remain managed locally for as long as they feel controllable, even as cumulative exposure grows.
Escalation thresholds reinforce this dynamic. They are commonly defined by impact measures such as financial loss, service disruption, regulatory breach, and, in some cases, formally recorded near misses. While necessary, these measures remain anchored to realised or near-realised outcomes. Near misses are usually treated as confirmation that controls worked, triggering review and refinement rather than forward-looking escalation. Little guidance exists on escalating based on trajectory, accumulation, or rising uncertainty. As a result, risks that are trending unfavourably remain below formal thresholds until containment becomes increasingly difficult.
Standardisation compounds the problem. Templates, taxonomies, and reporting formats improve comparability and efficiency, yet they also compress judgement. Uncertainty, context, and narrative detail are stripped out to produce clean, consistent outputs. Issues are categorised and scored in ways that support tracking and assurance, but obscure how pressure is building and where capacity is being consumed. What reaches governance is orderly and complete, but less informative about emerging strain.
As frameworks mature, closure becomes a dominant success signal. Metrics focus on issues closed, actions completed, and controls strengthened. This reinforces a progress narrative that favours resolution over visibility. Early escalation that highlights unresolved tension, trade-offs, or capacity constraints can sit uncomfortably alongside this narrative, even when it would materially improve decision quality.
The result is a structural paradox. The more mature the framework, the better it controls known risks, and the more effectively it contains emerging ones. These frameworks optimise for control, compliance, and auditability. They are less effective at surfacing early signals that would allow leaders to intervene while strategic and operational choices still exist.
In another poll, respondents identified the main causes of delayed escalation as too many priorities (31%), unclear thresholds (29%), and trying to fix issues first (28%). Very few cited refusal or reluctance. The pattern suggests escalation is delayed by friction and ambiguity, not by unwillingness.
Structural Factors That Block Escalation Without Fear
Escalation failures are often attributed to behaviour or culture. In practice, escalation is shaped far more reliably by structural conditions. When escalation is unclear, costly, or ineffective, people adapt to those constraints. The result is delayed visibility, even in organisations with strong intent and capable leaders.
Ambiguous escalation criteria are a common starting point. Many frameworks define escalation clearly once impact is evident, yet offer little guidance on how to escalate emerging issues that are uncertain, cumulative, or cross-cutting. In the absence of clear design, individuals rely on judgement to decide when escalation is justified. Under pressure, that judgement defaults to waiting for stronger evidence, shifting escalation later without any explicit decision to do so.
Signal quality degrades further when reporting systems generate excessive noise. High volumes of low-impact issues crowd escalation channels and dilute attention. Decision-makers struggle to distinguish early warning signals from routine operational detail. Teams respond rationally by reserving escalation for what stands out, compressing multiple emerging risks into fewer, later escalation events.
Fragmented ownership across risk domains compounds the problem. Non-financial risks frequently span functions, systems, and third parties, yet ownership is assigned within functional boundaries. Each owner escalates within their remit, while no one holds accountability for aggregation. The organisation receives partial signals that appear manageable in isolation, while systemic exposure remains obscured.
Incentives reinforce these dynamics. Performance measures often prioritise delivery certainty, milestone achievement, and issue closure. Escalation that introduces uncertainty, reprioritisation, or delay sits uncomfortably alongside these signals. Without any explicit discouragement, the system rewards continuity and containment over early visibility of strain.
Governance cadence adds a final constraint. Risks evolve continuously, while escalation pathways align to fixed committee cycles and reporting timetables. Issues are batched to fit governance rhythms, reducing urgency and distorting momentum. By the time escalation reaches formal forums, context has shifted and options have narrowed.
None of these dynamics depend on fear or reluctance. They arise because people respond logically to what the system rewards, absorbs, and delays. Escalation weakens not through silence, but through design choices that make early visibility harder than continued containment.
👉If you're interested in applying these principles in your organisation, Explore our Risk Culture & Leadership Solutions
Identifying the Root Causes of Weak Escalation
Weak escalation is often identified through outcomes. Incidents surface late, issues appear suddenly severe, or governance is surprised by the scale of exposure. These symptoms are visible, yet they explain little about where escalation actually weakened. Effective diagnosis requires shifting attention away from individual actions and toward the points in the system where visibility is consistently lost.
One clear indicator is repeated delay until remediation falters. Where escalation occurs only after delivery confidence erodes, milestones slip, or actions are repeatedly reworked, the problem is not responsiveness. It indicates that escalation has become implicitly tied to remediation performance rather than to emerging uncertainty or capacity strain. The system confers legitimacy on escalation only once control begins to fail.
Another indicator is abrupt threshold crossing. When risks appear to move from low impact to critical within a single reporting cycle, this typically reflects gradual accumulation that was not surfaced progressively. Escalation criteria anchored to outcome severity obscure trajectory, aggregation, and momentum. Early signals were present, yet the framework offered no meaningful route for their elevation.
A further diagnostic signal emerges when similar issues are repeatedly reported as contained across multiple teams. References to local fixes, workarounds, or temporary stabilisation point to fragmented ownership. Each team manages its own exposure effectively, yet no one holds accountability for recognising the collective pattern. Escalation weakens at the boundaries between domains rather than within them.
Governance interactions provide an additional lens. When issues reaching senior forums are consistently polished, resolved in tone, and low in expressed uncertainty, escalation has been filtered to meet expectations. Context is stripped out to signal control and progress. Lost in the process are insights into trade-offs made, capacity consumed, and residual fragility.
Together, these patterns point to root causes embedded in system design. Escalation criteria fail to accommodate emerging and cross-cutting risks. Ownership structures prevent aggregation. Capacity saturation remains invisible because it is absorbed informally. Incentives reward continuity over transparency. Governance cadence lags the pace at which risk actually develops.
Viewed through this lens, diagnosis shifts from asking who failed to escalate to understanding which design choices repeatedly delay visibility. That shift is essential if escalation is to function as a reliable system capability rather than a recurring behavioural concern.
How to Fix Escalation Structurally
Restoring effective escalation does not require changing attitudes or retraining behaviour. It requires correcting the structural signals that determine when escalation is legitimate and useful. When escalation is designed as an interruption or an admission of failure, it is delayed. When it is designed as a decision input, it becomes part of normal delivery.
The first correction is to reposition escalation as a capacity signal rather than a loss of control. Early escalation should surface where delivery is being sustained through additional effort, workarounds, or deferred risk. That information enables leaders to make explicit prioritisation decisions. Without it, capacity constraints remain invisible and are resolved implicitly through overextension rather than deliberately through choice.
Escalation must also occur before remediation is exhausted. In many frameworks, escalation gains traction only once delivery confidence weakens or actions stall. This sequencing removes escalation from early decision-making. Allowing escalation at the point where uncertainty, dependency, or trade-offs first emerge enables governance to influence direction while options remain open, rather than reacting once containment has failed.
Introducing trajectory-based escalation alongside traditional thresholds is a further design shift. Impact thresholds capture severity at a moment in time. They do not capture momentum. Escalation should be triggered by patterns such as repeated near misses, increasing frequency, widening scope, or rising effort required to maintain stability. These signals reveal accumulating strain even when formal thresholds remain intact.
Escalation quality matters as much as timing. Escalation narratives should describe not only the issue and its status, but the capacity being consumed to contain it and the trade-offs being made. This moves escalation away from status reporting and toward decision enablement. Leaders gain visibility into what is being displaced, delayed, or weakened elsewhere in the system to sustain delivery.
Finally, escalation ownership must be explicit for risks that cut across domains. Where exposure spans technology, operations, third parties, or conduct, escalation cannot depend on fragmented functional ownership. Clear accountability is required to aggregate signals and elevate systemic exposure, even when no single issue appears critical in isolation.
Taken together, these changes reposition escalation as a tool for prioritisation rather than a disruption to delivery. Escalation stops being something to manage around and becomes a mechanism through which organisations allocate attention, capacity, and risk deliberately.
Embedding Escalation into NFR Frameworks
Strengthening escalation does not require dismantling existing non-financial risk frameworks. Most organisations have invested heavily in issue management, control assessment, and remediation discipline. The problem is not lack of structure. It is that escalation is embedded too late in the lifecycle and tied too closely to resolution rather than decision-making.
A critical adjustment is to separate issue ownership from escalation responsibility. Ownership should remain with those closest to the risk, accountable for assessment and remediation. Escalation responsibility should sit with a clearly defined role or forum tasked with aggregating signals, identifying patterns, and surfacing system-level exposure. This separation reduces the tendency to contain issues locally while waiting for clear failure to legitimise escalation.
Early escalation must also preserve uncertainty and context. Standardised templates support consistency and tracking, yet they often compress ambiguity, trade-offs, and emerging strain. Introducing escalation checkpoints that allow less structured narratives ensures governance sees how risk is evolving, not just how it is being managed. The aim is not completeness or polish, but timely visibility.
Frameworks also need to distinguish remediation progress from unresolved exposure. Actions can move on schedule while underlying risk remains elevated or capacity continues to be consumed to maintain stability. Tracking unresolved exposure alongside remediation activity prevents progress reporting from masking residual fragility. It enables leaders to judge whether effort is reducing risk or merely sustaining performance.
Escalation should then be explicitly anchored to risk appetite and capacity. Early escalation needs to signal when exposure is approaching appetite boundaries or when capacity is being stretched to hold outcomes steady. This linkage turns escalation into a mechanism for testing strategic assumptions and priorities, rather than a retrospective response to breaches.
With these adjustments, non-financial risk frameworks retain their discipline, auditability, and regulatory value while regaining strategic relevance. Escalation shifts from confirming progress after choices have narrowed to surfacing stress early enough to inform prioritisation and preserve options.
The Risk Within provides a roadmap for embedding psychological safety into risk management. It identifies critical touch points across the risk lifecycle and offers clear actions to align leadership, culture, and governance. It is designed to help risk functions integrate more deeply into the business and strengthen decision-making at every level.
Monitoring Early Warning Signals That Escalation Is Failing
Escalation failure is rarely sudden. It develops gradually as visibility erodes and strain is absorbed within delivery. By the time incidents occur or exposure becomes undeniable, the opportunity to intervene early has already passed. For boards and executives, effective oversight therefore depends on identifying signals that escalation is weakening before consequences materialise.
Traditional risk reporting tends to focus on outcomes and status. It confirms what has already happened rather than how risk is evolving. Monitoring escalation requires a different lens, one that looks for patterns indicating that issues are being contained locally, delayed in surfacing, or filtered to fit governance rhythms.
The indicators below provide a practical way to assess whether escalation is functioning as an early warning mechanism or whether it is degrading into a late-stage confirmation process. They are designed to reveal system strain and decision blind spots rather than individual performance gaps.
The table below summarises observable metrics boards can use to detect risk escalation failure early.
Table: Leading Indicators of Escalation Degradation
Early Warning Signal | Concrete Metrics to Monitor | What the System Appears to Say | What the Signal Actually Means |
Rising remediation activity with flat or rising exposure | • Number of open actions per issue • Average remediation effort (days / FTEs) • Exposure or risk rating trend | “Risk is being actively managed” | Effort is compensating for strain rather than reducing exposure |
Increasing time between issue identification and escalation | • Days from identification to first escalation • % of issues escalated only after delay or rework | “Issues are under control locally” | Informal escalation thresholds have drifted upward |
Repeated “contained” issues across teams or domains | • Count of similar issues across functions • % closed as locally resolved • Frequency of near misses | “Problems are isolated and resolved” | Aggregation failure is hiding systemic exposure |
Escalation clustering late in delivery cycles | • Timing of escalation vs milestones • % raised near committee or gate reviews | “Escalation is timely and governed” | Reporting cadence is shaping visibility, not risk momentum |
Stable reporting followed by sudden severity jumps | • Duration of unchanged ratings • Frequency of multi-level rating jumps • Incident severity vs prior assessments | “Risk profile is stable” | Accumulation and uncertainty were filtered out too early |
How Boards Should Use These Signals
These indicators are not measures of individual performance. They are measures of system health.
When several of these signals appear together, escalation is likely degrading even if formal reporting remains stable. The appropriate response is not to demand earlier escalation in abstract terms, but to examine whether escalation criteria, ownership design, incentives, and governance cadence are still fit for the organisation’s operating tempo.
Used consistently, this table allows boards and executives to detect weakening escalation before incidents force the issue, preserving choice rather than reacting to consequence.
When asked how escalation is treated in practice, 64% of respondents said it is viewed as a last resort, while only 5%saw it as a capacity signal. The implication is stark: most organisations say escalation is encouraged, yet design it as evidence that control has already been lost.
What Boards Should Ask Instead
Board discussions on escalation often default to procedural review. Was the issue escalated on time. Was the process followed. Was the right committee informed. These questions assess compliance after the fact. They do little to improve decision quality while meaningful choices are still available.
Redirecting governance attention requires boards to ask different questions. Not about whether escalation occurred, but about what escalation is revealing about how the organisation is actually managing risk under pressure.
The questions below help boards evaluate escalation effectiveness as a decision-quality mechanism rather than a compliance process. Board Directors should explicitly ask:
Where are teams absorbing risk to protect delivery? This surfaces where additional effort, workarounds, or informal trade-offs are being used to keep activity on track. It reveals pressure points that rarely appear in formal reporting.
What capacity is being consumed to keep issues off escalation? Stability often comes at a hidden cost. This question exposes whether resilience is being sustained through deliberate prioritisation or through quiet overextension of people, systems, or controls.
Which risks feel manageable today but would be expensive to surface? Some issues remain un-escalated because escalation would force difficult choices. Identifying these risks distinguishes genuine manageability from deferred consequence.
Where does escalation change priorities, and where does it merely inform? Escalation that increases awareness without altering sequencing, investment, or trade-offs does not improve outcomes. This question tests whether escalation is influencing decisions or simply updating dashboards.
These questions reposition escalation where it belongs. They anchor governance attention on decision quality, capacity limits, and trade-offs rather than retrospective assurance. When boards ask them consistently, escalation becomes an active input into leadership judgement rather than a late confirmation that options have already narrowed.
Closing: The Governing Insight
Escalation fails not because people are unwilling or unaware, but because organisations design systems that reward containment, absorb overload, and delay consequence. In these environments, risk does not disappear. It is stabilised locally, worked around, and normalised until options narrow and consequences harden.
Restoring effective escalation does not require cultural campaigns, speak-up rhetoric, or behavioural training. These approaches intervene at the point where system constraints are already fixed. They address symptoms rather than the design choices that shape escalation long before anyone decides whether to raise an issue.
What escalation requires instead is structural clarity about when and why it should occur, visibility into the capacity being consumed to maintain stability, and governance mechanisms that treat escalation as foresight rather than exception handling. Designed this way, escalation surfaces emerging strain early enough to inform prioritisation and strengthen decision quality without disrupting delivery.
This is where non-financial risk, governance, and execution genuinely align. Escalation preserves choice rather than confirming failure. It allows leaders to act while trade-offs still exist, instead of reacting once the organisation has already paid the price.
About the Author: Julien Haye
Managing Director of Aevitium LTD and former Chief Risk Officer with over 26 years of experience in global financial services and non-profit organisations. Known for his pragmatic, people-first approach, Julien specialises in transforming risk and compliance into strategic enablers. He is the author of The Risk Within: Cultivating Psychological Safety for Strategic Decision-Making and hosts the RiskMasters podcast, where he shares insights from risk leaders and change makers.