Events, Crises and Elegant Solutions

Activity: Academic Talks or PresentationsConference PresentationResearch

Description

Every day, events professionals are faced with critical decisions to make, often with limited or no time or information, limited resources and potentially thousands of stakeholders involved. The decision made can involve essential safety aspects as well as considering the customer experience and brand reputation, which requires the decision maker to draw on their knowledge and experience across financial, marketing, operations and strategic aspects of the organisation, using heuristics to make these decisions quickly. There are sadly thousands of examples where these decisions have failed such as Hillsborough, Manchester Arena bombing, Roskilde, and thousands of near misses.

Given the importance and frequency of these decisions, there is surprisingly little written about this kind of situational judgement. My PhD research focuses on understanding and modelling this decision process, with specific application to the events context, to mitigate the risk of these situational decisions failing and the associated consequences.

Exploring the challenges of decision making in practice starts with application of the Ecological Rationality Model (Gigerenzer, 2021) to events and hospitality and considers the development of the Recognition-Primed Decision Model (Klein, 1993) as a potential framework for supporting effective decision making. The research seeks to evaluate practitioner strategies, heuristics, and attitude to risk using a multi-stage, mixed methods approach.

This session will explore the context and methodology for the research as well as the initial findings from phase 1 (survey), initial analysis and the first iteration of the applied Ecological Rationality model. This session will give attendees an awareness of the complexity of situational judgement in events, existing strategies being used in practice, and the development of good practice models using mixed methods approaches. There will also be consideration of how this research may inform practice-based skill development for students, enabling graduates to be effective decision makers in complex situations.
Period3 Jul 2024
Event titleAssociation of Event Management Education Forum 2024
Event typeConference
Degree of RecognitionNational