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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. We draw RACI charts, colour-coded governance diagrams, tiered meetings, thresholds, decision rights.
Yet projects still underperform for the same reason:
It’s not that teams escalate too late.
It’s that organisations listen too selectively.
Escalation isn’t a workflow. It’s a political marketplace for attention and only certain messages get bought. This blog explores why that happens, and introduces a new lens for understanding it: Signal Distortion Theory in Delivery Organisations.
Projects produce thousands of signals a week: delivery risk, supplier behaviour, cultural tension, design misalignment, cost pressure. But leaders cannot consume all available signals. So the organisation evolves a filtering mechanism: formal and informal for deciding what gets surfaced. In procurement- and delivery-heavy environments, those filters are shaped by three forces:
This is why some problems surface instantly, while others sink quietly until they explode.
Typical project commentary says “people escalate to protect themselves.”
True, but too shallow.
The deeper truth: Teams escalate what can be framed as someone else’s failure and bury what could be interpreted as their own uncertainty.
Failure vs. uncertainty explains more behaviour than blame avoidance alone.
These escalate well because they have a villain.
No villain = no escalation.
Just organisational silence.
These uncertainty signals are the things that kill mega-projects; not the obvious failures.
In large projects (>$200M), you see a consistent pattern:
Scale → Specialisation → Fragmentation → Narrative Control → Distorted Escalation
This creates the illusion of control, which is why leaders get blindsided by issues that lower-level staff have been living with for months.
Most governance models assume escalation is binary: raised or not raised. In practice, escalation behaves like a gradient:
Signals ignored by default because they’re inconvenient, unquantified, or political.
Handled within teams, often via workarounds that hide the signal from governance.
Hints, nudges, or carefully hedged comments in meetings.
Leaders often miss these entirely.
Formally put on risk logs, dashboards, PMO reports.
By this point the issue is mature, political, and expensive.
Raised at exec level with urgency because it can no longer be socially or politically contained.
Bad news climbs the gradient slowly, then all at once.
The tragedy: If organisations caught issues at 20–50%, 70% of crises would never form.
Every additional layer = another layer of narrative shaping.
Contracts incentivise information asymmetry, not transparency.
Careers hinge on delivering billion-dollar outcomes; fear suppresses weak signals.
Delivery environments don’t just struggle with escalation, they systematically produce blind spots. They suffer from distorted signal systems.
Instead of focusing on escalation paths, they focus on signal quality. Here’s what they do:
Monthly cross-functional reviews where teams present:
They triangulate: site data, contract data, field-level observations, and stakeholder sentiment.
In high-performing organisations, saying
“I’m not sure this will work”
is valued as much as
“We have a risk of 5% schedule impact.”
Most buried issues live at the intersection of engineering + procurement + delivery + client decision-making. Governance reviews must live there too.
A parallel path for ambiguous risks, which don’t require blame, metrics, or certainty. This is how you make silence impossible.
Most delivery environments don’t suffer from bad people or bad processes.
They suffer from distorted signal systems.
Fixing escalation dynamics isn’t about adding more meetings, more reports, or louder alarms.
It’s about decompressing truth, earlier and more safely.
In procurement- and delivery-intensive industries, that’s the closest thing you have to a superpower.
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