A day off in one country

This week Egypt has a public holiday, the twenty-third of July, and nowhere else the team works has one.

That is the whole test. Most regional teams fail it every year without noticing they were being tested.

From the head office it looks like this. It is midweek. The calendar is open, and someone books the weekly review at eleven because eleven is when it is always booked. Nobody is being careless. The holiday is not on their calendar because their calendar belongs to the city they sit in, and the date means nothing there.

From Cairo it looks like this. The invite lands on a day off. The person reading it has two choices, and both are bad. Take the call from the kitchen and become the one who always takes the call, or decline it and become the one who was not there. The meeting itself hardly matters. What the invite says is that the team's week is drawn around one city, and the other cities are expected to fit.

I have sat on both sides of that desk, and the thing worth noticing is that both people are being reasonable. The person who sent the invite did not know. The person who received it cannot say so without sounding as if they are making a point, so they say nothing, and the invite goes out again next year.

Which is why the usual fix does not work. The usual fix is manners: an apology, a reminder to check, a call moved by a day. Manners repair the one meeting and leave the calendar exactly where it was.

The fix is structural. One shared calendar, every market's public holidays typed into it before the year starts, in front of everyone who books anything. It takes an afternoon and settles the question for a year.

It is also a structure decision. Structure decisions belong to nobody in particular, which is exactly why this one gets made by nobody.