No Crystal Ball? No problem.

If we have learned anything in the last couple of years, we have learned that nothing is predictable. However, the inability to speak with precision and certainty about the future is no excuse for silence and inaction. It is more important to be creative and forge ahead than to be 100% right. Without this ability, the Hospitality and Tourism industry would have shut down completely in 2020.

As event professionals, we can’t afford to not take action, to not change things, to not keep putting one foot in front of the other when others are questioning their next move. I was part of a team planning an event for 2000+ people in-person throughout 2021 for a January 2022 event. During this time Covid-19 protocols were changing on a daily basis. This was affecting room setups, whether or not someone needed to prove their vaccine status or have a negative Covid test, whether or not the staff needed to be checking temperatures of the attendees upon entry, monitoring attendees for mask compliance, changing event schedules to accommodate for disinfectant dwell time on chairs and equipment, and other ever-changing CDC-recommended, headache-inducers which presented a merry-go-round of challenges for event planners.

Without the ability to be creative, flexible, and work with our venue to come up with alternatives during the planning process, we would have been dead in the water multiple times throughout the year. There was no way we were going to get things 100% right. If we set the chairs for 6-foot distancing, the next week the rule changed to three feet. If we reconfigured room diagrams for 3-foot distancing, the need to distance at all was removed entirely. And then, a resurgence…

Inaction, however, would have been an event-killer. It would have been an industry-killer for sure. We needed to continue to press onward, consider the risks, mitigate those risks, and keep our attendee’s safety and security at the forefront while planning amazing content, an outstanding and memorable experience, and monitoring the ever-changing pandemic.

The in-person event in January 2022 was one of our highest attended events in years. People were grateful to be back together again, learning from each other, seeing actual 3D people, touching merchandise, taking notes in a handbook, wearing a lanyard, standing in line, and talking to each other in the elevators.

Waiting around, doing nothing because we couldn’t make a decision without knowing what was ahead, without being able to be 100% secure in our direction, was not an option. Doing this could have led to our demise as an industry, or at the very least, set us back so far we would need a suped-up DeLorean with a flux capacitor to get us back to where we left off in March of 2020…

We must keep on keeping on as the saying goes.

Did you plan an event during the chaos of ever-changing protocols? I’d love to hear
your story. Email me or share with us here.

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