Least authority, whole audience

Yesterday fell on a Friday. In Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait that is a weekend day. In the UAE it was a working day.

So the org chart inverted for twenty-four hours, the way it always does when an occasion lands on the weekend.

Whoever is on the rota runs the brand. Usually that is the newest person on the team, at home, on a phone. The scheduled post goes out on time and nothing else is scheduled. The comments need an answer. Something sells out. A creator posts the code early. Someone with a following is annoyed in public.

Every one of those is a decision, and not one of them is a decision that person was hired to make. The people who are paid to make them are with their families, phones face down, correctly.

I have been on both sides of it. Senior enough to be the one not answering, junior enough to have been the one calling. The junior side is worse. You are not short of judgement. You are short of permission, so you do the safest thing available, which is nothing, and the nothing becomes the brand's answer for six hours.

On paper the decision rights sit at the top of the building. On the day they sit with the person who has the least authority in it.

Which is a planning problem rather than a staffing one. What an occasion on a weekend needs is a short list of decisions already taken, not a content calendar. The refund threshold. The line to use when stock runs out. The two subjects to answer and the one to leave alone. The name of the one person who may be woken.

Write the plan for the person who will be holding the phone. They are the only one working.