By Mary Tucker | Senior Communications and Content Manager | IAEE
Live events move fast, but disruptions can move even faster. A power outage, security incident, weather event or even a simple miscommunication can throw an entire exhibition into chaos within minutes. When that happens, the difference between a smooth response and a mad scramble often comes down to what happened before the event ever opened its doors.
IAEE’s webinar, 3 Ways Event Teams Can Improve Emergency Preparedness, will present a set of actionable strategies designed to help teams get ahead of disruption rather than react to it. Attendees will learn how to build stronger messaging and information sharing plans that hold up once an event is underway, along with methods for defining who owns which decisions and when issues should be escalated up the chain. The session will also look at how organizers, venues, vendors, exhibitors and leadership can get on the same page well before showtime, so that everyone knows their role if plans suddenly change.
Presenter Bob Mellinger, CBCV is the Founder and CEO of Attainium Corp. With more than 30 years of experience helping associations, event organizations and corporations strengthen their readiness, Bob has seen firsthand how the right planning can turn confusion into coordinated action.
In this Q&A, Bob shares a few insights into why preparedness planning matters more than ever and what event teams commonly overlook.
What drew you to focus specifically on preparedness for exhibitions and events teams?
Bob: Events are interesting because you’ve got so many different people and organizations that have to come together to make them work. You’ve got the organizer, the venue, security, exhibitors, vendors, service providers – all with different responsibilities.
When everything is going according to plan, that can work beautifully. It’s when something unexpected happens that you really find out how well all those pieces fit together.
Everybody involved may be very good at what they do. They may even have good plans and procedures. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’re prepared to respond together. That’s what makes exhibitions and events particularly interesting from a preparedness standpoint.
What is the most common breakdown you see when a disruption hits during a live event – is it usually a communication problem, a decision-making problem or something else entirely?
Bob: Usually, it’s not just one thing. And that’s really part of the problem.
You might have someone who knows something but hasn’t gotten that information to the right people. Somebody else is waiting for a decision. And somebody else thinks the problem has already been resolved.
Pretty soon you’ve got a bunch of very capable people responding based on different information, different assumptions and sometimes even different priorities.
The disruption may have started the incident, but the confusion can make it a whole lot harder to manage.
You’ll be covering communication planning as one of three key areas. What’s one communication mistake you see event teams make over and over?
Bob: Thinking that communication is mostly about getting a message out.
It’s a two-way street. The people responding need good information from the people directing the response. But the people making decisions also need information coming back from the people who are closest to what’s actually happening.
You can send every message successfully and still have a communication problem. If people are working from different information or different assumptions, you haven’t necessarily created the shared understanding you need.
Clarifying decision-making roles and escalation responsibilities sounds straightforward on paper, but you’ve noted it often isn’t in practice. Why do organizations struggle with this, even when they think they’ve already defined it?
Bob: Because “Who’s in charge?” and “Who makes this decision?” aren’t always the same question.
Think about an event. One decision may belong to the organizer. Another may belong to the venue. Something involving security or life safety may belong somewhere else entirely. And another decision may need to go all the way to executive leadership.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, that’s pretty normal.
The problem comes when people aren’t sure where a particular decision belongs, or when it needs to be escalated. You really don’t want to be figuring that out for the first time when the decision has suddenly become urgent.
Stakeholder alignment involves a lot of moving parts between organizers, venues, vendors, exhibitors and leadership. What does “strong alignment” actually look like when things go wrong in real time?
Bob: I don’t think strong alignment means everybody is doing the same thing. They shouldn’t be. They have different jobs and different responsibilities.
What matters is whether those different pieces fit together.
Do we have the same basic understanding of what’s happening? Do we agree on the immediate priorities? Do we know who’s making which decisions? Do we understand what the other people involved need from us and what we need from them?
You can have a group of very capable people all doing reasonable things and still end up with an uncoordinated response. Alignment is what helps turn all of those individual actions into a coordinated one.
What is one thing attendees will learn from this webinar that they can do differently the very next time they’re planning an event?
Bob: Have a conversation. Seriously.
One of the things I’m not going to tell people is that they need to go back and create another plan or another document.
I’m going to give them some questions they can take back and talk through with the people involved in their next event. Get the right people together for 20 or 30 minutes, put a real upcoming event in the middle of the conversation and ask some good questions.
Odds are you’re going to uncover a few assumptions, gaps or different expectations that nobody realized were there.
That’s preparedness too.
