“Recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. … No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.”
Escalate True Misalignment
From Jeff Bezos’s 2016 Letter to Shareholders (Amazon, 2017), the fourth and last point in his “High-Velocity Decision Making” section.
The advice: when two teams want fundamentally different things, stop meeting about it and push the decision up to someone who sits over both of them. The reasoning is that more discussion can move parties who share a goal but disagree on tactics; it can’t move parties who disagree on the goal itself. If no one escalates, the decision still gets made, but by exhaustion: whoever has more stamina wins. Bezos calls that “an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing.”
The “true” qualifier matters. The previous point in the same section, disagree-and-commit, covers the common case where parties share the objective and one side just has stronger conviction about the path; the side without conviction defers, the work proceeds. Misalignment is the rarer case where the parties want different outcomes, and that one needs someone above both of them to make the call.