Contest planning best begins AFTER the contest. Not after the contest to come, but after the last contest. Unless the contest plan is being engaged as a first time contest - what happens AFTER a concluded contest is very critical. Straight after a speech contest the lessons learned in planning are vividly learned.
Most of these learnings are those which we cannot plan for before the contest. In my case, it is discovering that in a pressure situation we find out about the value of debriefing very simple scenario's. I was caught by surprise that I had to explain how a contest draw works - because I had assumed that this is a fairly simple instruction. That assumption is wrong when someone new is involved. They are already caught up trying to learn a new system - and along I come ignoring that their mental bandwidth has been consumed because they have no idea of what they should be doing - it was not planned for before hand - and now a simple instruction is being given in a sea of confusion. Not good for me, not good for the people who are helping.
The people who are helping got determined in a hurry and confused because again there was insufficient planning to role play and understand the purpose of their role. So now there is pressure everywhere, pressure in being under prepared, pressure because the clock is moving to contest start time - and in a contest where disqualification over time is used - starting a contest late hardly sets a good example. We managed to start the contest on time - but the draw for the contest was being done minutes before doors were meant to be closed (7pm DOORS CLOSE SHARP) - again a little bit of the integrity of the contest can be lost by these minor details. These minor details begin to mushroom from a snowflake into a gigantic snowball. The purpose of planning is to keep problems to the scale of snowflakes.
Next one discovers that the Area Director has only been in the job one year - is learning on the fly and has no idea what he is doing. More importantly he is asking for help hither and tither and comes across and asks for help with his contest chair script about 20 minutes before the contest is set to begin. Luckily I had a contest script template with me - and so I gave it to him - while trying to man the ticket desk and get him to understand that he is supposed to engage in a contest briefing with his contestants and engage a draw. To make things worse - one contestant is in both contests - which means the draws need to be conducted one after the other - and having given this Area director the lifeblood of a script - he is more prepared to try to swot and study it - than he is in finding his contestants - and the other chair is new to a contest and is sweating bullets - now I have two chairs disappearing and reappearing and contestants that have gone into the room, some to a toilet, some asking others where they should be and getting misdirected by them.
For sure the pre-contest planning could take care of the confusion but no pre-contest planning can take account of what people do when the clock is ticking and simple instructions are not so simple after all. The pre-contest planning would reduce the sweating and panic, but it does not count for the peculiarities of human disposition when that disposition is dealing with something new. It is here that we discover holes in our contest planning and in our scouting of the contest location. This is the stuff that we learn AFTER the contest and that is why this learning from experience is absolutely essential for the next contest plan.
The major thing I learned is that aside from a reception desk at the contest - there needs to be a concierge at the contest - because what was happening was delegates were asking questions of event staff that got them distracted from what they were doing - and so even though the door people said they were checking for tickets - I am sure people got into the contest who did not have tickets, and that is because the door people were looking at the event staff trying to sort though questions, which were best directed to a concierge.
Worse still are the titles of the roles given to contest staff - fanciful titles that don't really explain the job being done. So the same title SAA is used without any reference to the job being done. So one of the things I am going to change is apply the actual role as the job title, though officially acknowledge the more fanciful title. These job descriptions and actual work specification need to be pre-determined and then run through. There was a moment where the ticket seller (cashier) was handling concierge questions and was no longer watching the money they were meant to collect - moreoever - now the person responsible for logging the attendance record and issuing a cash receipt - was covering for the cashier - and that is when people slipped through the door - because the door man was himself distracted by the resulting commotion.
Nothing prepare us more than a person who did not learn their role and have no idea what they are doing - and even as I ushered everybody in to start the contest, the extent of lessons kept on arising - this was not the gift that kept on giving, this was rush and fuss principally created by an Area Director who had abdicated their role and no was flying rogue in the contest. Even the simple instructions of who was going to award the certificates and implementing a new idea of a "talk show" nearly fell to pieces because the Area Director was not in the plan - how could he be - when he cancelled his invite to the preparation meeting, where all of this would have been made abundantly clear - so lesson here is to get this stuff done in way good time, and not during the contest itself - some of this comes to light as a contest is in motion - hence - planning for the next contest begins immediately AFTER the last contest. (unless it is a first time contest).
The contest organizer did a fabulous job of creating contest program and printing of forms and certificates, but her efforts were somewhat wasted because the work she did was not getting into the hands of delegates. This should have been handled by a specific coordinator - a greeter rather than a door man. So that is another lesson built in. As is the fact that two sofa sets were outside the contest lecture theater - which could have been used as a WELCOME area for the contestants by the respective chairs - even if one of the contestants is in both contests - the contest that was about to happen, is the party he should have been with.
This would also entail much better signage - and asking regular users of the institution to give up seating for the purposes of the contest. People are pretty obliging. I had come in real early and had we begun to set up an hour earlier life would have been more predictable and sweat free - we would also get people interested who were passing by - and people were curious just with a few little items initially placed on the registration table.
The other lessons are ones based on accidents. A concierge in the room was leaning on an item when it moved and made a loud distracting noise in the middle of a speech. I was surprised by an automatic door opener - as I settle back against the wall to listen to a contestant speak - it triggered the doors and now I was trying to physically close doors which were automatically opening - the purpose of being at the doors was to HAVE NOT DISTRACTIONS FOR THE SPEAKERS - to stop people coming in and out while a contest speech was happening. This shows that we could do with customer experience managers on the floor - taking note of processes and whose purpose is to note and measure the experience of guests of the contest. Such things can only noted AFTER a contest and that is why contest planning begins AFTER.
M.
No comments:
Post a Comment