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Projects don’t fail from lack of escalation—they fail from distorted signals. Explore how politics buries truth and how leaders can fix the signal system
In every major delivery environment, people talk endlessly about escalation paths. Organisations invest heavily in RACI charts, escalation paths, governance forums, and decision thresholds. On paper, accountability is clear.
Yet projects still fail for a familiar reason. It is not that teams escalate too late. It is that organisations listen selectively. Escalation is a competition for attention. Only certain messages make it through, while others are quietly filtered out.
Every project generates a constant stream of signals. Delivery risk, supplier behaviour, design misalignment, cost pressure, coordination gaps, cultural tension. Leaders cannot absorb all of them, so organisations develop filters that decide what is worth surfacing. In delivery environments, those filters are shaped by three forces:
This explains why some issues surface immediately while others sink quietly until they become unavoidable.
he key distinction is not good news versus bad news. It is failure versus uncertainty. Issues that escalate cleanly are those that can be framed as someone else’s failure:
These signals move upward because they come with a safe narrative. Uncertainty, by contrast, rarely escalates:
With no clear villain to point the finger and no clean story, these signals stall. Over time, they compound and create the conditions for major failure.
As projects grow, truth compresses.
Large delivery environments fragment work across functions, contractors, and reporting layers. Each layer interprets and reshapes information before passing it on. By the time signals reach senior decision-makers, they have been filtered for safety and coherence rather than accuracy.
This creates the illusion of control. Leaders are often blindsided not because problems emerged suddenly, but because uncertainty was never allowed to surface early.
High-maturity delivery organisations do not focus solely on escalation paths. They focus on signal quality.
They create space for uncertainty to be raised without blame. They treat supplier inputs as signals to be tested, not truths to be accepted. They pay attention to intersections between engineering, procurement, delivery, and client decision-making, where most buried issues live.
Most importantly, they act early, when issues are still ambiguous and cheap to resolve.
Closing thought: projects do not fail because escalation paths are unclear. They fail because uncertainty is filtered out. Organisations that learn to hear weak signals earlier gain a decisive advantage under delivery pressure.
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Projects don’t fail from lack of escalation—they fail from distorted signals. Explore how politics buries truth and how leaders can fix the signal system
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