A holiday in the run rate

The spike arrives next week, and I already know where it ends up.

Every year the National Day week does something to the numbers. Footfall up, orders up, the green products sold through by Wednesday, a daily figure that looks like the business has changed gear. Everyone in the building knows why. There was a holiday in it.

Then the week goes into the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet has no column for "there was a holiday in it". It has a column for the week's revenue and a formula that takes the last few weeks and calls the answer the run rate. By the middle of October the forecast has been refreshed, the run rate has absorbed the spike, and a public holiday has become a trend.

By late October, marketing is being measured against it. The week is soft against the run rate. Somebody asks what changed. Nothing changed. The comparison did.

I have sat on both sides of that table, and the strange part is that nobody decided any of it. Finance did not decide the holiday was growth. Marketing did not agree to be judged against it. The person who built the sheet was not thinking about a Tuesday at all. The formula labelled the spike, and a formula does not know what a flag is.

That is what the number hides. Everyone can see the spike. Nobody sees the label attached to it on the way into the model, or who was allowed to attach it.

A holiday is not a trend. The politics of measurement start with who gets to label a spike, and this year the labelling happens next week, in a cell nobody is watching.