Detachment can allow for better decision-making when unforeseen changes disrupt plans, industry experts agree. Photo Credit: iStock/Jacob Wackerhausen
Today, it's a typhoon, tomorrow it could be an earthquake, a war, geopolitical tensions, travel disruption, airline strikes or a fire at the hotel you’ve booked. With the global landscape constantly changing, it’s vital for event planners to have a plan C and even a plan D in place.
Being prepared and keeping calm in the face of an emergency or an unforeseen event was the theme of a recent webinar hosted by SITE.
The panel identified how planners are facing a ‘perma crisis’, with multiple risks all converging at the same time.
These are often being compounded by social media and misinformation, which can outpace the risks and create even more unrest and uncertainty. The panel identified several ways planners and event partners can counter this.
Predict, prevent, react
Detachment can be vital in times of crisis, giving planners the opportunity to look at the situation from afar and stay calm; if planners are panicking, everyone else is likely to follow suit. Predicting scenarios and having a plan or plans in place prior to anything happening is vital too.
“Relax and detach – energy can be more contagious than the flu,” said Nicholas Vargo, director, business continuity & crisis management at Hilton. “In crisis management, you have to be decisive – you're not going to debate what your actions are during the middle of a war. What you actually do is establish those decision thresholds before a crisis occurs.”
Vargo pointed to the Gen Z protests that occurred in Nepal last year, which prompted Hilton to identify potential threats to its assets through its risk intelligence capabilities.
“[We said] it’s very possible that this could be a threat to the building, and we need to consider locking the hotel and evacuating guests; that's a hard decision to make, but when you think about competing priorities, safety is always by design,” said Vargo. “The hotel already had the training, and knew how to evacuate the building so that’s exactly what we did.”
Get the whole story
When a situation is evolving in real time and at a rapid pace, Ellie Soucy, CEO and president at Incentive Meeting Services, offered insight into how planners need to not only get the whole story but also ensure it is from an original source. If there’s an information void, people will fill that space with their own narrative, so it’s vital for planners to get ahead of this and control the narrative.
“Is this a problem [happening now]? Is this a future problem?” she said. “Do I have 24 hours or do I need to deal with it now? When you’re handling complex issues, you don’t want to have misinformation. It’s about slowing down and ensuring you’ve got as much information as possible from the original source.”
Maintain guest confidence
What does effective crisis communication look like when plans have changed and how can planners maintain guest confidence without creating unnecessary alarm?
Freddy Muller, associate vice president, charter & incentive sales at Royal Caribbean and Silversea said it’s important to have an understanding of participants’ different needs before setting up a blanket form of communication.
“Almost every event conference has some kind of app, some kind of push notification but you need to make sure that the communication is not an alarming one, but more of an informative one,” he said. “But we start off with the meeting planner, and then the decision makers. It’s about laying out a framework detailing how to pivot or adjust to the situation.”