Keeping Audiences Safer!

Delivering safe events has always been a difficult balancing act owing to the need to equalise the total experience expected by the customer with the safety and resilience of the event, writes Prof Chris Kemp, pictured, CEO of Mind Over Matter Consultancy.

Thus, event producers and managers are walking a tightrope between reduced enjoyment and a decreased resilience in the security of the event environment. To compound this, there is always the thought in the back of event planner’s minds of ‘why should we have to change what we do’. This is human nature and based on the key tenets relating to our freedom, our norms and our values. However, the terrorist ideology is not emanating from same norms and values and thus their attack methodologies are based on the destabilisation of the holistic vision of freedom which sits at the very core of our society.

To create a situation in which we can deliver a high level of resilience in a time of such violence, perhaps we have to deconstruct and reengineer the way in which we create, manage and deliver events and look at them from a different perspective. What exactly is the outcome that we wish to achieve, and how do we reach it given the context and the environment in which we now work?

The lessons learned from Manchester, Paris and other event atrocities are not clear as the nagging question in everyone’s minds is ‘would we have done it any differently or any better has we known the possible consequences’. To piece back together a shattered event is difficult, because we are all conditioned to provide events as we always have because they have always worked like this. Thus, the two questions that we must ask ourselves are, is there another way to deliver these types of event? And, what would this look like?

To see the full article please click the link:

http://www.professionalsecurity.co.uk/news/interviews/safe-audiences/