C10 · PRACTICE GUIDE
Risk & Escalation
Make material customer risks visible, owned and resolvable.
An escalation creates a decision and coordination path when normal ownership cannot resolve a material risk. Severity should reflect customer impact, urgency and uncertainty. Keep facts, hypotheses and commitments distinct, and maintain one accountable coordinator.
Put it into practice
Describe the impact, affected outcome, time sensitivity and available evidence. Assign an owner and severity using explicit criteria.
Set a recovery plan, decision rights, communication cadence and next update time. Escalate the decision required, not only the problem.
Confirm recovery with the customer and complete a learning review. Update the relevant playbook or control.
What good evidence looks like
An impact statement, owner, timeline, decisions, recovery evidence and learning actions.
WATCH FOR
A common failure mode
Using escalation as a substitute for ownership or closing a case when activity ends but customer impact remains.
What to measure
Time to effective ownership, time to recovery and recurrence of the same failure pattern.
Practice guidance · Framework v1.0 · Published September 2026. Adapt the method to your business model, customer segment and decision authority.