Organizational Article
Organizational Effectiveness Blog Post

A syndrome has a negative connotation. It stands for adverse behavioral tendency, disposition or condition. The escalation syndrome has been highlighted in organizational behavioral science and organizational development practice some years back. It refers to a situation where an individual or a group of individuals continue to expend much-needed resources in the vain hope of achieving a desired result even when the situation is dire. The 'hope' that things may turn out as desired would lead to committing more resources, thus escalating a worse or hopeless situation. Effective performance management systems would stymie the escalation syndrome.
A team of organization consultants who spend unbudgetted time on a project—perhaps made complicated by their clients—in the hope that things would turn out right, are trapping themselves in the 'escalation syndrome.' Top executives who keep allocating resources on a failing project in the vain hope of reviving it—when there is little chance of turning things around—are probably exposing themselves to the escalation syndrome.

In certain cultures where little respect is paid to time management, when a group of staff members working on a task is putting in more than required time—probably being held back by some superiors, or by other team members delaying some inputs or making unneccessary demands on the team, you could see that they are exposing themselves to the escalation syndrome. This will likely be so if the group's mission is being hindered or being compromised with the 'felt need' to keep wasting more and more time. Junior consultants who keep wrestling with an assignment they are ill-equipped to execute, believing that they would soon figure things out, even when—to all intent and purposes—they are somehow clueless, are being trapped into the escalation syndrome.
One way to deal with the escalation syndrome is to have a specific deadline (in time), a firm milestone (or target) and a spending or resource ceiling (in terms of financial or resource allocation) attached to specific performance metrics. This should be done at the onset, and in fact, pre-planned, agreed and, in certain cases, formalized. So, when a team of junior consultants have been assigned a project, they should—at the onset—decide and agree the time frame to sort it out, and adopt key steps and deliverables with sppecific time line. They should, for example, include why and when they would need and seek the guidance and technical support of their supervising consultant or assignment manager.
Furthermore, insightful organizational culture assessment, and proper team leadership training and coaching will go a long way to efectively deal with the escalation syndrome. Doing this is particularly important in leadership organizations.