Crises are part and parcel of event planning, and professionals must understand how best to reduce risk and ensure effective response strategies. Photo Credit: Adobe Stock/alphaspirit
Extreme weather events, protests, shootings, cyber-attacks and natural or human-made disasters are now a fact of life for event professionals.
It’s vital therefore for those in the industry to understand the key principles and best practices event professionals need to adopt to reduce risk and ensure safety and security. A recent webinar from PCMA examined this topic and provided insights on crisis management, risk mitigation, security operations and effective response strategies.
Maximise unified defences. “[An event] is not just your responsibility - there are going to be other people and a lot of them are not in the chain of command,” said Julia Kayyem, faculty chair, Harvard Kennedy School and former assistant secretary, Department of Homeland Security. “Are you assessing all the entities? This can help you to prepare and to defend to minimise losses. It’s about learning to ‘fail safer’ and maintaining the mission while reducing risk and vulnerability.”
Don’t depend too much on control measures; Jonathan Wackrow, COO of consultancy Teneo Risk & former special agent with the United States Secret Service, referenced the fallout from the Crowdstrike IT surge earlier this year to highlight the risk of placing too much pressure on a single point of failure. “If we are depending on one thing, what is the back-up plan,” he said. “Consider how to build resilience into our critical infrastructure to ensure this does not happen again.”
Be aware of what can happen in real-time. This results in more efficient scenario planning, enabling planners to move away from ‘getting too stuck on one thing’. Hayyem gave the example of what might have happened in the event of a potential heatwave during the recent Olympic Games hosted in Paris.
“[Many] homes in France don’t have air conditioning so that’s an issue if you have a heatwave,” she said. “If you have millions of people visiting, you need to look at these risks and [make necessary] changes - you want a system that has awareness of real-time. Then you can plan scenarios around when you would have no spectators, when you would issue alerts or when you would provide water facilities for example.”
Get more macro. According to Wackrow, corporates tend to have too much of a ‘micro sense’ approach to events. “If they’re in a hotel, or a ballroom in a building, they think in terms of something happening in that building, not consequences that radiate out from that event site that could have material impact,” he says.
“One of the biggest things that once affected a meeting in New York was a city-wide sanitation strike - there was nothing more off-putting than climbing over a mound of trash [at the venue]. It led to many event cancellations.” He advises thinking not just about the site itself but things that go beyond its walls; looking at the event from a macro point of view is therefore critically important.