You ran the team debrief. You sat in the room while the department heads walked through what held and what broke. You captured the near-misses. You wrote down the protocols worth keeping. You did the organizational work, and you did it well. There's one debrief you didn't run.The one where you're the only person in the…
Read MoreThe festival ended three to four weeks ago. The adrenaline is finally out of your system. Some of your team took vacation. A holiday weekend may have come and gone. The emotions have mostly settled. You still like your coworkers. And now, this week, the meetings are starting to populate again. This is the window…
Read MoreIt's the Sunday after wrap. It's 2pm. You're in your kitchen. The laundry basket has been at the foot of the bed for three weeks. The fridge contains seven half-eaten things you can't identify. The garden has gone feral. There is mail on the counter you stopped opening in week one of pre-production. You haven't…
Read MoreFive years ago, the festival industry talked about sustainability as a bonus. Today, it is infrastructure. Five years ago, AI in event operations was a curiosity. Today, it is operations. Five years ago, festival mental health was a hallway conversation. Today, it is staffing. The industry you trained for is…
Read MoreThirty-six seasons is a long time to do anything. It is long enough to see every kind of festival leader succeed and fail. Long enough to watch brilliant operators burn out in…
Read MoreIt is 2am -- or it is 5am, which is the same thing by that point in the production week. Something has changed. Not the thing you planned for. The other thing. The one that wasn't in any of the scenarios you mapped before the event opened. Your operations director is looking at…
Read MoreShe is not the one who sent the panicked email at midnight. She is not the one who snapped at a vendor in the production meeting. She is not the one who called in sick two weeks before gates open. She is the one who always delivers. The one who absorbs the tension so the rest of the team…
Read MoreYou have been doing this long enough to know that the hardest festivals to lead are never the ones where the stage collapses. They are the ones where you do. Not visibly. Not in front of anyone. But somewhere in the…
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