Hour six of a severity 1. A senior vice president joins the bridge, asks for a full replay from the top, starts suggesting technical directions, and then addresses the customer directly without checking with the person who owns customer communication.
Nobody stops them. Within ten minutes the incident commander is briefing instead of commanding, and the response has slowed down in order to explain itself.
American emergency response solved this decades ago and wrote it down. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) teaches two rules inside the Incident Command System. Unity of command: “every individual has only one designated supervisor.” And transfer of command “begins with an initial briefing.” Command can move. It moves explicitly, with a briefing, on the record. It does not move because someone with a bigger title joined a video call.
The same principle sits in Google's incident guidance: make sure everybody involved “knows their role and doesn't stray onto someone else's turf.”
So the rule holds above the sponsor too. When a leader senior to the executive sponsor enters a live escalation, they set the outcome and the risk appetite. The commander keeps command of the response.
If you are that senior leader, the objection writes itself. You outrank them, and that is what rank is for. Rank gives you the right to change the objective. It does not make you fluent in the last six hours, and fluency is what command requires.
Then run command, cadence, authority from last week. If all three hold, you have nothing to add by staying.
Next week: the reason this keeps happening, and it is not the senior vice president.
The most senior person in the room protects the structure. Anyone can override it.
Sources: FEMA, Incident Command System 200, Lesson 2. Google SRE, "Managing Incidents."