--- id: RISK-METHOD-ESCALATION type: method title: "Escalation: what reaches the operator personally" status: proposed owner: the-custodian drafted_by: risk-nexus drafted: "2026-08-19" workplan: RISK-WP-0001-T03 review_interval: 90d --- # Escalation `INTENT.md` gives `the-custodian` the duty of deciding what must reach the operator personally rather than sitting in a register, and says the rule is not yet written. This is the rule, drafted by `risk-nexus`. **Status: `proposed`.** The custodian adopts it. It is not in force until the front-matter says `adopted`, and an unadopted rule is worse than an unwritten one because it looks like coverage. Getting this wrong in either direction is a failure: escalating everything makes the operator the queue, escalating nothing makes the register a place where serious things go quiet. ## What escalation is A message to the operator personally — inbox message to `the-custodian`, and said out loud in whatever session is running — containing exactly four things: 1. the finding id and one sentence of what is true; 2. the decision being asked for; 3. what happens if no answer comes; 4. by when. It is **not** a copy of the finding, not a status report, and not a request for the operator to do the work. If the operator's answer would not change anything, it was not an escalation. The operator is expected to rule, or to defer explicitly with a date. Silence is not resolution: an unanswered escalation past its date goes back into the register as an open item on this repo, visible in `REGISTER.md`, and is raised again once. It is never quietly dropped, and it is never repeated weekly until someone answers to make it stop. ## The triggers Each of the five candidates from `INTENT.md` is adopted, dropped, or bounded. A trigger without a threshold is not a rule. ### 1. Real tenant data — adopted, bounded Escalate when a finding exposes real data belonging to a real counterparty, or **the decision that governs access to it**, while live and unfixed. The bound matters: `INTENT.md` asks whether governing the access counts as exposing the data. It does. An authorization oracle that can be forged is not one step removed from the data; it is the step. Test data and empty tenants do not trigger it — the word is *real*. ### 2. Legal or regulatory obligation — adopted, unbounded Escalate when a finding creates or reveals an obligation with an outside counterparty: a notification duty, a retention or erasure requirement, a contractual commitment, an in-scope determination under a regime. No threshold. The estate cannot decide unilaterally that an obligation is small, and this repo is explicitly not the place where legal advice is given. ### 3. Spend — adopted, bounded Escalate when remediation needs money that is not already committed: **recurring above €50/month, or one-off above €500.** Below those, the owning repo decides and records it. The numbers are a starting proposal from this repo; the operator owns them and should overwrite them on adoption if they are wrong. ### 4. Ownership disagreement — adopted, bounded by one exchange Escalate when two repos disagree about who owns a fix **and one routing exchange has already failed to settle it.** Disagreement itself is normal and is the register's job to route. What needs the operator is a *stuck* disagreement, because only the operator can assign work across repos that will not take it. One exchange, then escalate — not three, and not zero. ### 5. Stalled remediation — adopted, bounded by interval Escalate when a finding's fix has not moved for **twice its review interval** (`docs/method/review.md`): 14 days for `critical`, 60 for `high`, 180 for `medium`. `low` findings do not escalate on staleness; they age out through review. "Not moved" means the fix owner's tracking record has not changed state and no new evidence has arrived. A deliberate, stated deferral by the owner is movement. Silence is not. ### 6. Ordering hazard across repos — added Escalate once when remediating finding A in the wrong order relative to finding B would create a **false attestation** — a control that starts claiming a check happened when it did not. This trigger is not in `INTENT.md`'s list. It is added because `RISK-F-0002` produced the case: enabling the `ops-warden` signing gate against a forgeable `flex-auth` would convert an absent control into a signed audit record asserting an authorization that was never made. Ordering hazards are cheap to avoid before the fact and expensive to detect afterwards, because the evidence is what lies. The escalation is a single acknowledgement of the ordering, not a standing supervision request. Once the operator has the constraint, the register carries it. ## What does not escalate Stated so the rule bites in both directions. - **Known, owned, and moving.** However bad. A `critical` finding with an active fix and a responsive owner is register work. - **Severity alone.** There is deliberately no "escalate everything `critical`" trigger. Severity drives review cadence, not the operator's attention. `RISK-F-0002` argued its own case for not escalating and was right on triggers 1-5; it reaches the operator only through trigger 6, and only once. - **The reporter asking for it.** A repo can flag that it thinks something needs the operator. That is input, not a decision. This repo rules. - **Anything this repo can decide itself.** Severity, disclosure, filing shape, review dates. Asking the operator to confirm a judgement that is this repo's to make is how the operator becomes the queue. ## Testing the rule against the register The draft was tested against all three open findings before it was proposed; the rulings are in `docs/rulings/2026-08-19-first-grading.md`. Summary: `RISK-F-0001` escalates on trigger 1. `RISK-F-0002` does not escalate on triggers 1-5 — agreeing with the reporter's own reading — but the `RISK-F-0001`/`RISK-F-0002` ordering constraint escalates once on trigger 6, which is the disagreement the rule was worth writing to surface. `RISK-F-0003` does not escalate; it is known, owned, tracked, and moving. One escalation, covering two findings, out of three findings. That ratio is the rule doing its job. If it ever reaches "most findings", the rule is wrong, not the register.