Antonym of 'Cascade'

Question

In our company, at the beginning of year, we have what is known as Goals Cascading. Essentially, the senior most people in the firm set goals for the entire firm and then the people at the next level set their own goals for their respective divisions which are aligned with the goals of their seniors. This process continues until we reach the level of an individual employee.

At the end of year, there is a review process on how well we did on our goals. This basically works the other way round. Individuals' reviews are collated to form teams' reviews which are further collated all the way upwards till there is a review of the entire firm on how well we did to achieve the goals set by us.

Now, my question. How do I complete this sentence with a suitable word:

At the beginning of year we have Goals Cascading and at the end of year we have Review -----------.

I can think of words like collation and assimilation except that they don't give an idea of something moving up.

Any other ways of writing the same sentence while still using the phrase 'goals cascading' and the word 'review' in it.

Answer 1

If you want to keep it simple, then you could say that Cascading is used in the sense of "coming down from above", so perhaps you could say Ascending.

Cascade can also imply something coming from one tier down to the next, to the next and so on.

In software engineering, a behaviour that is transmitted up to the next layer, up to the next and so on is often described as Bubbling. It's probably as good a metaphor as Cascading in your context, especially if you imagine smaller bubbles coalescing to form larger ones on their way up through the hierarchy.

So: Cascading Goals and Bubbling Reviews.

Answer 2

"Roll-up" is generally used in these contexts. For e.g., reporting structure rolls up into Ms.xyz.

Similarly goals should roll-up into the top guy's goals.

Answer 3

What you call "Goal Cascading" is what is also known as "Top-down goal setting", so the end-of-year process could be called "Bottom-up results reporting"

It's not very elegant but it is also not contrived.

Answer 4

I´d call it aggregation or accumulation.

The reasons is my understanding of the process: A collection of small/low-level reviews are aggregated or accumulated into vewer higher-level reviews. Accumulated, if they are just colelcted and put together, and aggregated, if they are condensed in a way that the amount of information passed on does not grow with every level, but is "averaged".

Answer 5

Reminds me of the terms fan-out and fan-in from Electronics Engineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-out

Alternatively, how about "Snowball"? "Goals cascade out and reviews snowball in."

Answer 6

At the beginning of year we have Goals Cascading and at the end of year we have Review ----------- .

The only words I can think of that seem to fit your criteria are capping and possibly culmination. A more practical candidate would be consolidation.

Answer 7

I have two options:

1. In keeping with the metaphor of movement out and down, and then back up:

   At the end of the year we have Review Assembling.

   Considering that goals are going to be stacked on top of goals, this also expresses the interconnections of the entire network of goals.

2. In keeping specifically with the metaphor of movement up and down:

   At the end of the year we have Review Tiering.

   This suggests a stacking upwards of reviews coming from different corporate substrata.

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NB: In the language of the statement, you have "Goals Cascading", a plural noun followed by a participle which functions as an adjective. "Review (Word needed)" uses a noun followed by a participle that functions as a verb, as in,

"It's December. Let's do some review tiering".

This changes the structure used in "Goals Cascading" (noun, adjective). To maintain a parallel structure, you could consider,

At the beginning of year we have Goals Cascading and at the end of year we have Reviews ----------- .

Answer 8

If you are thinking of something like a waterfall when you say "Cascade" (and using the words "up" and "down"), then its pretty clear there can be no exact antonym for that, because gravity only runs one way.

The closest thing nature has to that is the concept of water seeping back up. There is also the little-used term resurgence which is occasionally used to designate an underground river that comes back up to the surface. Its a nifty word, so I'd consider using it in this case.

However, if you are thinking of cascade in the sense of something that spreads out from one node to all the other connected nodes, then the opposite tends to be to filter or funnel things back from many nodes to a single one.

Answer 9

The process of things moving in the direction counter to what you refer to as cascade is conventionally, escalate (upflow) in workflow terms.

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[EDIT]

If initial attempts to resolve a user's problem are unsuccessful, most support groups have policies ... As you learned in Chapter 4, incident escalation is a normal process in which a problem is transferred to a higher level ... _{A Guide to Computer User Support for Help Desk & Support Specialists}