Signed while they were away

Some of the most contested decisions of the year get signed in the first fortnight of August, and it is not an accident.

The building is half empty until the second half of the month. Everyone knows who is away and roughly when they are back, because the out-of-office says so. And in every seat I have sat in, somebody has read that list the way a planner reads a media schedule: as a window.

The agency change the finance director has blocked twice. The rebrand the founder's brother dislikes. The pricing move the sales director would fight. The request goes in on the Sunday after the objector's flight, the deputy signs it by Thursday, and the email chain carries the word approved before anyone who would have said no has seen it.

I have done it, and so has almost everyone who has had to get a plan through a company. It works, in the sense that the signature arrives.

What it does not do is settle anything. The objection has not gone anywhere. It has been scheduled around. When the objector returns in September the decision is already moving, the money is partly spent, and the argument that was avoided in August is had in October instead, in front of more people, with the added charge that it was pushed through while they were away. The cheapest version of that fight was the one in a full room in June. The most expensive version is the one in a full room after the work has started.

So I have learned to read an August approval by what it avoided. A decision that could have passed in a full room did not need the empty one. A decision that needed the empty room to pass will need a full one to survive, and the full room is coming back on a date everyone already knows.