Escalation Within Escalation

The decision an executive needs often sits behind someone else's yes, and that yes sometimes sits behind a third person's. Each person in the chain has reasons of their own, and the executive has to work through them from the bottom up while the person at the top, whose decision all of it serves, goes about other business.

Escalation showed that The Lam System for Political Interaction handles this without any new machinery: a sub-cycle is a cycle, it can fail at its own gate and escalate again, and the cycles unwind deepest first. That essay's example had one lever at the top. This one follows a maneuver with two levers declared at the outset, the first already played and read when the second stalls, and the stall running two levels down. Followed entry by entry, it shows the top lever's price being set at the bottom of the chain, where it first comes into view, and the lever already played still at work on the target, for more than one of his options, the whole time the record of its cycle is paused.

Declaring two levers at the top

Illustrative. The people and the hospital network are invented. Imogen Hale directs surgical services across a network of four hospitals. Outpatient orthopedic operations, the knee and hand procedures where the patient goes home the same evening, are booked into the main hospital's operating rooms, and when the emergency department needs a room, the outpatient cases are the ones that get bumped. Imogen wants to move them to Westbrook, the network's smallest hospital, which has operating rooms and no emergency department, with the budget for the work and the authority over its surgical schedule under her.

The cycle opens, and the Declare movement runs. Her interest is that budget and that authority. Detection names the chief operating officer, Bram Oyelaran, as the target, since the network's operating room capacity is his to allocate. The preferred position, in Imogen's terms, is that he moves the outpatient cases to Westbrook. He has two adverse alternatives, and he has said both are on his desk: keep the outpatient cases at the main hospital behind protected block time, or contract them to a private surgical center that has offered a price. The objective is that Bram moves the cases and the budget and authority come to her.

In Choose levers she declares two levers at once, each aimed at one alternative. The first answers protected block time: a year of the main hospital's cancellation records, showing that outpatient cases are what emergencies bump whenever they need a room. The second answers the private center: a plan showing that Westbrook can run the schedule safely with the network's own anesthesiologists, so the center offers nothing Bram cannot have inside the network. She declares both together because she knows what Bram is choosing between, which is the careful stance Stances Toward Uncertainty describes. Because each lever answers one alternative, each can be read the moment it lands.

The first lever lands

Test and act begins with the first lever. It needs the cancellation records, which belong to her department, and her standing with Bram. The gate passes. She takes Bram through the year of canceled cases, spending the records and her standing with him. In the Read movement Bram's perception comes back as the lever projected: he reads protected block time as a promise the emergency department will keep breaking.

Next she names what the second lever needs: the anesthesia department's written commitment to cover the Westbrook schedule. It is not among what she holds, and the gate fails.

At that failed gate Imogen has a real choice, and the per-lever reading is what lets her make it well. The first lever was read against protected block time, and only against it. It did nothing about the private center, and worse, it argued for taking the outpatient cases out of the main hospital, which is exactly what the center proposes. If she gave up the second lever now and let the first carry the cycle, Bram would be left choosing between Westbrook and a private center her own case had just helped. So she escalates, and the parent waits at its gate with one lever played and read and the other stalled.

Two gates down

The sub-cycle's interest is the written commitment and nothing else. Its target is the chief of anesthesiology, Selim Arslan, whose anesthesiologists would staff the schedule. His options are to commit them to Westbrook or keep them at the main hospital. Selim's concern is what happens after the operation: patients waking from anesthesia at a hospital with no emergency department. Imogen's lever on him is to show that Westbrook's recovery area will be staffed by nurses trained in recovery care until the last patient goes home, and it needs Westbrook nursing's commitment to staff recovery that way on every surgery day.

That commitment belongs to Westbrook's chief nursing officer, Ngozi Okeke. Imogen does not hold it, and the sub-cycle's gate fails in turn.

The choice comes around again, a level lower. Selim's cycle has one lever, and the last live lever in a cycle cannot be set aside on its own, so the exits are to escalate, to give the cycle up as having nothing left to do, or to abandon it. Imogen can now see something she could not see at the top: what the bottom of the chain is likely to cost. Ngozi's nurses are already stretched, and her answer will turn on her own budget. Imogen holds unallocated training funds in hers. She escalates a second time.

The third cycle runs whole. Its interest is exactly the recovery staffing commitment. Ngozi will either commit trained nurses to recovery on surgery days or keep them on the inpatient floors. Imogen's lever is to pay for recovery training for Westbrook nurses out of the surgical services budget, and it needs the training funds, which she holds. The gate passes, she makes the offer, and the funds are spent. Ngozi reads it as a new skill on her units at no cost to her budget, and commits. Her obtained utility is trained nurses she did not pay to train. The deepest cycle closes, and the commitment flows back.

Opened in full, the trace holds fifty-three entries: twenty-two in the cycle with Bram, seventeen in the cycle with Selim and fourteen in the cycle with Ngozi.

Climbing back

Close and carry forward now runs at each level in turn, and each cycle hands back to the one above it. Every handback is a check that needs no judgment. Selim's gate asked for Westbrook nursing's commitment under that name, and that commitment is what flowed back from Ngozi's cycle, so control returns, the gate tests again and passes. Imogen shows Selim the committed staffing schedule and the commitment is spent. He reads recovery at Westbrook as safe for his patients, and commits his anesthesiologists. His gain is fixed block time that the emergency department cannot take from them. The cycle closes and the cover commitment flows back.

The same check runs one level up. Bram's gate asked for the cover commitment, and it is held. The parent resumes, passes its gate, and the Westbrook plan goes to Bram with anesthesia's commitment attached. He reads Westbrook as offering what the private center offers, with the income kept inside the network, which is what the second lever projected. With both levers read, Bram selects: the outpatient cases move to Westbrook. His gain is the main operating rooms back for emergency work and the outpatient income kept in the network. The cycle closes, and the budget and the authority flow back to Imogen.

Counted, she began with three things: the cancellation records, her standing with Bram and the training funds. She spent five, including the two commitments, and four flowed back, the two commitments and the two things she opened the cycle for. She ends holding the Westbrook budget and the authority over its schedule. Each commitment was counted in once, at a close, and out once, at an execution.

Each level hands up something else

Neither commitment reached the top as it came up. Ngozi's commitment was spent in Selim's cycle to buy his, and Selim's was spent in Bram's. Each level passed up what it had bought with what it received, so the chain of resources is a chain of exchanges, one per level, each with its own target weighing a different matter. Ngozi was deciding about her nurses, Selim about his patients' safety, Bram about his operating rooms and the private center. None of the three decisions mentions the others, and every one of them had to be read on its own terms.

The top lever's price was paid at the bottom of that chain. What Bram's second lever cost Imogen, in the end, was training funds given to a chief nursing officer he never dealt with. Nothing at the top showed that price. When the gate failed in Bram's cycle she knew she needed Selim's commitment, and had no way of knowing it would come down to a training budget at Westbrook. The decision to escalate at the top was made without knowing the cost, which came into view only one level down. The system puts the same choice in front of her at every failed gate, so she decided to go on twice, and the second time she knew more.

Had Ngozi refused, Imogen could not have dropped the second lever from where she stood. She would have given up Ngozi's cycle, returning control to Selim's at its failed gate, then given up Selim's, returning control to Bram's, and only there set the second lever aside and let the first carry the cycle, with a reading she already knew pointed partly toward the private center. Each step up passes back through a gate the descent failed.

What the parent was doing while it waited

In the record Bram's cycle stood still. Its last entry before the descent is the escalation, and its next is the handback, with thirty-one entries from the two cycles below written between them.

Bram himself went on as usual, and the cancellation case, landed and read, went on working in his mind for the weeks it took to settle things with Selim and Ngozi. A lever, once played, keeps arguing for whatever it supports, and this one supported moving the outpatient cases out of the main hospital by any route. It weakened protected block time, which Imogen wanted, and it strengthened the private center's pitch, which she did not. Had the center's sales director visited Bram during those weeks, the visit would have found him already persuaded that the cases had to move, and the record would show nothing of it.

The record holds Bram's reading of the first lever as Imogen wrote it, when she wrote it. It has no entry for a reading growing older. Whether the reading still held when the parent resumed is her judgment, made again as she put the second lever to him, and the deeper the escalation, the longer that reading sits untested while the target goes on with his week. A single level of escalation leaves that gap too. Two levels make it longer, since the parent now waits on two other people's calendars before it can resume.

The stance she took decided where the gap fell. Had she named everything both levers needed before testing either gate, the batched stance, she would have found the missing commitment before Bram heard anything, run the whole descent, and then played the two levers close together, with no weeks between them. Selim and Ngozi would then have learned of the plan before Bram did, and if Ngozi had refused, Imogen would have rethought it with nothing yet spent on Bram. She chose to play the first lever while she was sure of it, and accepted that it would be on its own for as long as the descent took.

What the maneuver teaches

How deep to go is the actor's call, and it is easy to think of it as a matter of effort, of how far an actor will go to fetch something. Two levels down it changed more than the effort. The price of a lever is set wherever the chain bottoms out, so Imogen made the decision to escalate twice, once without the price and once with it, and the record shows both. Each level turned what came up into something else to send up, so the commitment Bram's lever spent was never the one Ngozi released, and three people with three separate decisions each gained something they valued. Retreat would have climbed back through every level the descent had opened. Meanwhile the lever already played kept working on Bram, on behalf of any alternative it did not tell apart from hers, for as long as the descent took.

Imogen could see all of this afterward because the record kept each cycle at its address, each reading as she wrote it and each resource counted in and out where it moved. The next time a lever of hers needs anesthesia's cover, the record already holds what Selim weighed, what answered him, and who held it.