The week head office visits

When a large technology conference takes over Riyadh, and one is expected in the city this month, the hotels fill with people who do not live here.

Some of them are your own leadership.

That is the part nobody plans for. A conference brings a stage, a stand and a delegation, and it also brings the people two and three levels above the regional team into the same time zone for four days. They are in the country because the event is. While they are here the diary fills up with the hours that actually decide things: a breakfast, a coffee in a lobby, a car to the venue, a dinner that runs late.

I have sat on the local side of that week more than once, and the mistake I made early was to treat it as a consultation. I would arrive with options. Three routes, the arguments for each, a recommendation held lightly, because letting the visitor choose felt like respect.

What the visitor has is ninety minutes, four other markets in their head, and no appetite to arbitrate between three things they will not be here to run. Options are work. Work gets deferred. So the team that brings three routes leaves with a request for more detail and a promise to look again next quarter. Ramadan is expected to fall between now and then, and the summer sits behind it, so looking again means the autumn.

The team that brings one decision, already taken, leaves with a sponsor. Not because the decision was better. Because it needed a yes rather than a choice, and a yes fits inside the time available.

A visit is not a window to be consulted in. It is a window in which one thing can be ratified, and it closes when the flights leave on Thursday, whether anything was ratified or not.