Building Resilience Engineering into Music Festival Operations.

Resilience engineering for music festival operations is more than just a buzz phrase; it is a useful operational philosophy. By incorporating this into planning, festival entities can anticipate, respond, and adapt whilst continuing to operate safely. What do organisers need to consider when adopting resilience engineering for their event operations and planning.

Whilst festival organisers like to identify and eliminate every potential risk associated with running their events, a preferable philosophy would be to assume that unexpected occurrences will take place. With many events under threat from extreme weather, crowd control challenges, security and contractor issues, building resilience can improve safety, financial stability and operational continuity. Resilience engineering helps festival organisers to plan for continued safe operations when things do inevitably go wrong.

Resilience Engineering Principles.
The incorporation of resilience engineering into the music festival planning environment relies on four key principles to be considered. Firstly, organisers must try and anticipate what could happen which typically could include artist cancellations, adverse weather, power failures, traffic gridlock, supply chain failures, or network outages for example. Secondly, organisers should continuously monitor normal live operations and quickly identify emerging problems which can include crowd density issues, queue lengths, security incidents, power consumption, network performance and weather forecasts for example. Thirdly organisers must develop flexible operational responses rather than rigid procedures and this can include dynamic gate management, evacuation route changes, flexible volunteer deployment, backup communication systems, switching power generators and offering alternative payment methods for example. Finally, organisers should ensure they learn from their experiences to build future resilience. Learning opportunities can include understanding near misses, minor failures, crowd behaviour observations, public complaints, and supplier delays, for example.

Festival Planning and Building Redundancy.
Understanding the key principles of resilience engineering can ensure that organisers incorporate anticipation, continuous monitoring, flexible responses, and organisational learning into their planning processes. The key to building this is identifying the most critical functions that require some kind of backup redundancy. This would typically include aspects like main stage power, communications infrastructure, medical facilities, internet connectivity, cashless payment availability, water supplies, lighting and command and control systems, for example. It is not about duplicating functions but building a backup redundancy ability for these critical functions so that single points of failure are avoided.

Training and Organisational Culture.
Having the ability to better withstand disruptions helps to protect festival-goers, staff and volunteers, which is always a priority for organisers. This requires organisers to build more adaptive teams where staff are cross trained in multiple aspects of operations and logistics management. Building the ability for the delegation of key decision making ensures that they are decentralised and empowered staff can make faster decisions. Staff and volunteers will always go through some training prior to the event live dates, but organisers should incorporate more scenario-based training exercises which reinforce a better understanding of potential threats. Part of building resilience engineering into a festival's operations may require them to adopt a different culture where people can report mistakes without the fear of blame or retribution. They should be encouraged to report any concerns early and share information openly to boost team collaboration. Staff should be encouraged to continuously improve their performance, and organisers should always seek innovation from everyone working for the festival entity.

Testing and Implementation.
The planning process for festivals using resilience engineering principles should include the stress testing of key functions to reveal any hidden vulnerabilities. A variety of exercises can be conducted to test the infrastructure and preparedness of operations. This may include testing a complete power loss, main stage evacuation, communication or connectivity failure, contractor insolvency, or a cyberattack for example. Rather than testing these in isolation, organisers should try combining failures to make exercises and testing more realistic. Well planned resilience engineered festivals can implement the four key principles and monitor performance against targets using KPI measurements on an ongoing basis. Advancements in technology are helping festival organisers to better implement resilience engineering into their operations. AI assisted crowd prediction systems and predictive weather forecasts all help to make events safer. The introduction of more smart power monitoring systems is improving efficiency as well as ensuring that a measured and usable power source is always available.

For festival organisers planning their next event using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, site planning, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by geralt! via Pixabay

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