"Decision quality deteriorates when accountability is shared but authority is not.
A standard is not a moral statement. In a customer escalation where the facts are still changing, it is an agreement about what the system will do under pressure. Without that agreement, you get exceptions by persuasion instead of principle.
In a customer escalation where the facts are still changing, the fastest path is to skip the uncomfortable conversation. That buys speed today and inconsistency tomorrow. Write it down because otherwise two reasonable engineers will execute two different interpretations, and the system will call it “miscommunication.” Define the decision rights before the crisis, or the crisis will define them for you.
Eliot Jaques is useful here because it forces precision. Decide the default action and the condition that changes it. Make it specific enough that a peer can disagree.