Decisions the group agreed to escalate, but where no one accepted the burden of transmission — agreed in the room, stranded in transit.
Direct Answer
Unrouted Escalations are decisions or questions the group agreed needed to go up the chain — to someone with more authority, more context, or a broader mandate — but where no one explicitly accepted responsibility for carrying them there. The escalation was acknowledged. The group agreed it couldn't be resolved at their level. But the step of naming who would route it, to whom, by when, and through what channel was never taken. The escalation is stranded. It will either be quietly forgotten, informally re-raised by whoever remembers it most clearly, or rediscovered in a future meeting when the gap it was meant to address has become a visible problem.
The most common reason is that agreeing to escalate feels like closing the item. Sam Kaner, in Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey-Bass, 2007), describes this as a confusion between the "world of ideas" — discussion, acknowledgement, and broad agreement — and the "world of action," which requires implementation mechanics. A group that agrees to escalate has crossed into the world of ideas: they have a shared understanding of what needs to happen. They have not crossed into the world of action, because no one has accepted the transmission burden. The escalation has no carrier.
Kaner's analysis of pseudo-solutions applies directly here. When a group fails to define "who will do it, by when, and with what resources," they create an outcome that looks closed in the room and is functionally open everywhere else. The escalation was agreed. Nobody owns routing it. Nobody takes responsibility. Nothing happens.
When a group concludes a topic is above their authority, they make one decision: that it needs to go up the chain. What they often skip is the meta-decision: who specifically is accepting the transmission burden, to which person or body, and by when. De Smet et al.'s Team Effectiveness Indicators framework (McKinsey, 2024) defines healthy decision closure as requiring a definitive summary of "what was decided, who owns the next step, and the rationale." Applied to escalation: the closure is not "we agreed to escalate." The closure is "Priya is taking this to the leadership team before Thursday with a one-paragraph framing of the decision they need to make."
Research on distributed team coordination reinforces why this matters in remote and hybrid settings. Without ambient follow-up, misaligned action items — those where owners and deadlines remain unspecified — are consistently identified as a primary driver of decision churn: the repeated revisiting of the same topics across multiple meeting transcripts. An unrouted escalation that lives in nobody's task list surfaces again three weeks later, in a context further from the original problem, requiring the group to reconstruct the background before they can even route it.
The cost of an unrouted escalation is not the cost of a delayed decision — it is the cost of a decision that never gets made. The question that required escalation doesn't disappear. It remains open, blocking whatever depends on its resolution. Teams work around it, make assumptions in its absence, or relitigate it informally at every related meeting. By the time the escalation is rediscovered and properly routed, the context has changed, the people involved have different information, and the cost of resolution is higher than it would have been had the escalation been routed immediately.
Unrouted escalations are a symptom of an accountability structure gap: the path from "we're stuck" to "someone with authority decides" is unclear. In organisations with defined escalation channels, the carrier role is obvious — there is a known person who routes things to a known forum. In organisations where authority and responsibility are ambiguous, escalations float. Unrouted Escalations surfaces this gap. The escalation count itself is less important than the pattern: teams that consistently produce unrouted escalations are operating without a clear escalation path, and the solution is structural rather than behavioral.
The research notes one terminological limit worth acknowledging: the failure to assign an owner is a universal failure mode for any action item or decision, not a feature unique to escalations. Kaner and McKinsey both treat it as a generic "partial closure" — the same consequences (churn, delay, rework) apply equally to unrouted actions and unrouted deferrals. Unrouted Escalations is a specific lens on a general problem, most useful when escalation-type failures are the dominant pattern in a team's meetings.
There is also a domain-specific caveat. David Snowden's Cynefin framework identifies a Complex domain where forcing a rigid "who, what, when" on a genuinely ambiguous problem can cause premature convergence. If a group escalated precisely because they didn't understand the problem well enough to define a next step, leaving the escalation slightly open may occasionally be a necessary period of "messy coherence" while patterns emerge — rather than a strict routing failure. Teams working in complex, emergent environments should apply this metric with that distinction in mind.
Both are forms of stranded coordination work, but stranded at different levels. A Zombie Topic is work the group deferred to itself — something it set aside with intent to return. An Unrouted Escalation is work the group explicitly acknowledged it couldn't resolve at its level and agreed to route upward — but then failed to route. Zombie Topics require the group to create a path to resolution internally. Unrouted Escalations require a carrier to transmit the question to the level where resolution is possible. If no carrier is named before the meeting ends, the escalation should be logged as Rework Risk.
Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S., & Berger, D. (2007). Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
De Smet, A., Hewes, C., & Weiss, L. (2024). Team Effectiveness Indicators. McKinsey & Company. (Decision closure; next-step ownership; transmission burden.)
Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76. (Cynefin framework; Complex domain; messy coherence.)
"When a group assumes a decision was made just because it was discussed, but fails to define who will do it, by when, and with what resources, they create a pseudo-solution where no one takes responsibility and nothing happens." — Sam Kaner
Unrouted Escalations are decisions or questions the group agreed needed to go up the chain — to someone with more authority, more context, or a broader mandate — but where no one explicitly accepted responsibility for carrying them there. The escalation was acknowledged. The group agreed it couldn't be resolved at their level. But the step of naming who would route it, to whom, by when, and through what channel was never taken. The escalation is stranded. It will either be quietly forgotten, informally re-raised by whoever remembers it most clearly, or rediscovered in a future meeting when the gap it was meant to address has become a visible problem.
Because agreeing to escalate feels like closing the item. Sam Kaner identifies this as a confusion between the world of ideas — discussion and shared acknowledgement — and the world of action, which requires implementation mechanics. The group crossed into the world of ideas when they agreed to escalate. They didn't cross into the world of action because no one accepted the transmission burden. Without a named carrier, the escalation has no mechanism to travel.
A Zombie Topic is work the group deferred to itself — set aside to return to later. An Unrouted Escalation is work the group explicitly agreed it couldn't resolve at its level and needed to send upward — but then failed to route. Zombie Topics need a path to resolution within the group. Unrouted Escalations need a carrier to transmit the question to the level where resolution is possible. If no carrier is named before the meeting ends, the escalation should be logged as Rework Risk.
Enforce the meta-decision before moving to the next agenda item: who specifically is accepting the transmission burden, to which person or body, and by when. Not "someone will flag this" — a named individual with a specific destination and a date. This is what McKinsey's Team Effectiveness Indicators framework defines as healthy decision closure: a definitive summary of who owns the next step. A thirty-second conversation at the end of the meeting creates a clear carrier. The alternative is a topic that resurfaces in three weeks with no context and no clear owner.
In genuinely complex environments — those that map to David Snowden's Cynefin Complex domain — forcing a rigid routing on a problem the group truly doesn't understand can cause premature convergence. If a group escalated because the problem itself is emergent, leaving the escalation slightly open while patterns develop may occasionally reflect appropriate judgment rather than a coordination failure. This is the exception. Most unrouted escalations reflect a skipped meta-decision, not a deliberate choice.
Items parked without a next step that will resurface in a future meeting
The likelihood that this meeting's delegations will execute cleanly
Topics that already came back after being stranded in a prior meeting
The per-meeting composite score including how escalations were handled
Understanding the structural causes of recurring agenda items
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ResearchWhy authority gaps go unnoticed in high-performing teams
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