The Record Says - by Tim Irving - Zero Sev Zero Subscribe Sign in The Record Says Every organisation has a sentence it cannot put in a document. This is how you find yours. Tim Irving Aug 17, 2026 2 Share The hands went up before I finished. Not straight away. There was a gap of about four seconds between the sentence and the first one, which is roughly how long it takes to decide you disagree with someone with enough standing that disagreeing carries a cost. Then a second. Then three more, stacked in the participant list, waiting. I was on a call with a room full of incident commanders. The subject was political incidents, by which I mean the ones where the severity arrives before the impact assessment does. What I said was this: in a political incident it is easier not to fight it. Take the escalation. Run the room like you didn’t. Pay lip service to the executive right up until the point they leave the bridge. I have said less popular things in that forum. I have not said one that produced a quieter four seconds. They waited. That is the part worth recording. Nobody interrupted, nobody typed in the chat, and the hands stayed up while I finished a spiel that had another two minutes in it. This is a room of people trained to hold position under pressure and let the commander finish. They applied the training to me. Then it came back, and it was not tactics. It was principle. Push back. Hold the line. Defend the process. The severity matrix exists for a reason, and the reason is that somebody has to be willing to say no to a senior person while the phone is ringing. What I had not expected was who it came from. Not the new ones. They said it the way you say something about a thing being taken from you. I thought they had it precisely wrong. I still do. Here is what I had done before I stopped doing it. I fought them. Every time. I had the matrix, and the matrix was clear, and I could show you the row and the column and the impact definition that put the thing at a three. This is not difficult work. Anybody can read a table. What I did not understand for a long time is that nobody I was arguing with was reading it, or had ever read it, or had at any point agreed to be bound by it. So it goes to the manager. The manager takes it up. It comes back down a different pipe entirely and it arrives mid-incident, from a skip two levels removed, and it is four words long. Just do it, please. You are on a bridge with fourteen people and an unhealthy service. You have spent forty minutes of the incident on the severity field. And you are going to lose the forty-first as well, because the answer was always going to be yes, and the only thing your forty minutes bought was a record of you being difficult about it. Then the hallway. Days later, no meeting invite, no thread. Someone stops you near the kitchen and says you should just do what is asked. Friendly. Actually friendly, which is the part that stays with you. They are not delivering a reprimand, they are doing you a favour, passing on something said about you in a room you were not in. It arrives in myriad channels, that irritation. Never the one you fought in. I used to read this as a failure of the framework. It is not that. They were never working to our severity matrix. They had a pressing need and an escalation of their own and a matter to deal with, and they had learned that the smaller the number the faster their matter moved. That is not a misunderstanding of the process. That is a corre