When Everything Is a Priority, Nothing Gets Done
They had a strategy.
A master timeline.
Even a program plan.
But three months into prep, things were drifting.
One director was firefighting media access issues.
Another flagged that their venue ops team was stretched — again.
The sponsor rights list kept changing.
No one was quite sure who owned the “Legacy” deliverables.
The problem wasn’t effort.
It was structure.
More precisely — the lack of thinking structure at the top.
When Projects Start Without Logic
In major event leadership, decisions get made fast.
Budgets set. Teams hired. Scopes defined.
And once the projects roll, they rarely stop.
But here’s the trap: most leaders set up event programs by asking:
What needs to be done?
What’s the timeline?
Who’s available?
Fair. But not enough.
If you skip the step of classifying the type of work, you lose the logic.
And without logic, programs become overloaded, unbalanced, and reactive.
Because not all tasks are equal.
Some drive strategy.
Some build infrastructure.
Some shape experience.
Some move money.
If you treat them the same — you set up confusion.
The Shift: Five Task Types. One Model.
This is what Lesson 2 of the Event Planning Framework addresses.
Not operations. Not checklists.
But thinking.
It’s the clarity model used in high-performing event teams to sort work — before it piles up.
Because in any major event project, you’re not dealing with one kind of task.
You’re juggling five:
Event Leadership – Strategic clarity and stakeholder alignment
Event Management – Control, reporting, and coordination
Production – Physical delivery and readiness
Experience Design – Emotional impact and connection
Commercial – Revenue, visibility, and external partnerships
It’s not a theory. It’s how real major event programs and projects are structured in practice.
Real-World Example: Budget Blowup
Take this from a past project.
The LOC had a single “Production” workstream covering infrastructure, logistics, and fan zone operations.
Six weeks in, their budget doubled.
Why? Because half the tasks weren’t production — they were experience and commercial tasks pretending to be ops.
Fan zone activations weren’t budgeted for creative design.
Sponsor deliverables were scoped too late.
Access planning was happening in silos.
The event didn’t break — but it cost more, delivered less, and drained the team.
And it was all avoidable — if the task types were clarified before kickoff.
The Leadership Edge
Strong Event Leadership doesn’t just approve budgets or chase KPIs.
They design clarity.
They apply thinking models like this to:
Map the real shape of their projects
Assign the right ownership from Day 1
Align program timelines based on task-type logic
See overloads before they break teams
The moment you know whether a project is leadership-led, commercially driven, or delivery-focused — you lead it differently.
You ask better questions.
You budget more accurately.
You staff it smarter.
There is so much more. We are setting up a masterclass for major event program planning, live from September 1, 2025.
Lesson 2 in the full Major Events Planning Framework guide gives you:
✅ The 5 task types — with definitions, owners, and timing
✅ Examples of how they show up in real projects
✅ A test scenario (Accreditation) broken down by task type
✅ A practical checklist to audit your current projects
✅ The logic to build scalable programs and project plans that actually hold
Clarity is leadership’s real advantage.
Not dashboards. Not more tasks.
But the logic behind the work.