A reported electrical infrastructure risk was initially assessed through the electrical trade pathway, resulting in a recommendation for escalation to a higher-level specialist. Review of the available evidence identified an external physical obstruction as the likely underlying cause, allowing the issue to be redirected to an alternative specialist workstream and resolved without unnecessary escalation.
Or, what actually happened was:
There was a tree in the way.
Recently, a work order landed on my desk reporting that the power lines to a tenant’s property were too low.
I sent out one of my regular electricians.
At that point, I wasn’t looking for a solution. I wanted information.
Are the lines actually too low? Is there anything wrong with them? Are they damaged? Are they dangerous? And please, for the love of all things useful, send me good photos.
The email came back with a long technical report that, boiled down, basically said:
These power lines are a problem. Send a Level 2 electrician.
Oh dear.
A Level 2 job can get complicated quickly. Depending on what they find, we could be looking at a more complex electrical scope, coordination with the electricity network, potentially other trades, and an outage for the tenant while the work is completed.
So my brain had already started heading down that path.
Then I stopped and looked at the photos.
And the photos told a slightly different story.
To my admittedly non-electrician eyes, the cables themselves looked pretty good.
There was, however, a bloody great tree growing through the space they needed to occupy.
So I called the electrician.
“Hey mate. Is there actually anything wrong with the cables? Are they dangerous?”
No. The cables themselves looked okay.
“Okay… what happens if I just cut back the tree?”
“Oh yeah. You could just cut the tree.”
Right.
Excellent.
I’d sent an electrician to assess an electrical problem, so unsurprisingly, I’d received an electrical recommendation.
But before escalating up the electrical chain to a Level 2 electrician, there was another option:
Go sideways.
Enter the arborist#
I still wasn’t going to diagnose a tree from my desk based on some electrician’s photos.
I’m not an arborist either.
So I sent the photos to my arborist.
He had a look and essentially said:
Yeah, that should be fine. I can lop the tree — but I’ll go out and confirm.
Perfect.
The arborist attended, sent back much clearer photos, and provided a quote to cut the tree back.
The scope was straightforward.
It was approved.
The tree was lopped.
Done.
The work order came in on Monday and by Wednesday morning, the arborist had finished.
What could potentially have progressed into a much larger electrical project — involving a Level 2 electrician, potentially a roofer and other trades, coordination with the electricity network and disruption to the tenant’s power — had turned out to be a much simpler problem.
There was a tree in the way.
The electrician wasn’t wrong#
This is the important bit.
I work with subject-matter experts because they know things I don’t.
I am not going to look at a photograph of electrical infrastructure, declare myself an electrician, and start overruling the person who actually knows what they’re looking at.
That would be insane.
But the electrician and I have different jobs.
The electrician’s expertise helps me understand the electrical system and the risks within it.
My job is to understand enough of the whole problem to coordinate the right people towards the outcome.
And sometimes that means asking the SME one more question.
In this case:
Is there actually anything wrong with the cables?
That one question changed the direction of the work order.
Recommendations and root causes answer different questions#
A recommendation usually answers:
What should we do next?
Root-cause thinking asks:
Why is this happening in the first place?
Those questions can lead to exactly the same answer.
But they don’t always.
And that’s why I try not to process recommendations automatically.
I look at the report.
I look at the evidence.
I ask what we actually know.
I ask what outcome we’re trying to achieve.
And then I think about which expertise bank I need next.
Sometimes the answer really is to escalate vertically: electrician → Level 2 electrician → network provider.
But sometimes the better move is sideways:
Electrician → arborist.
That’s one of the things I find most interesting about project coordination.
You don’t need to personally hold all the expertise.
You need to know where the expertise lives, when you need it, and how the different pieces fit together.
Or, if we’d like to turn the tree back into project-management language:
Effective issue resolution requires distinguishing recommended corrective actions from underlying causal factors, and selecting the appropriate specialist pathway based on evidence rather than default escalation.
Which is accurate.
But I think the tree explained it better:
A recommendation tells you where someone thinks you should go next. It doesn’t necessarily tell you why you’re there.
Sometimes you don’t need to escalate.
Sometimes you need to sidestep.
Originally published on LinkedIn.