Extreme weather, safety incidents and other unexpected situations can force festival organisations to make critical decisions within minutes. But crisis management goes far beyond deciding whether to stop a festival or evacuate an event.

How do you make the right decisions under intense time pressure? How do you work together with security services, authorities and other partners? And perhaps most importantly: how do you make sure your crew, artists and audience are properly informed and supported throughout the process? How do you maintain calm, clarity and teamwork when the pressure is high?

In this panel, we take a closer look at the different stages of crisis management: preparing, deciding, communicating, acting and evaluating. Through concrete experiences from the festival industry, we will explore what happens behind the scenes when an event is suddenly faced with a crisis, what challenges arise, and what lessons we can learn from these situations as a sector.

An honest and practical conversation about decision-making under pressure, teamwork, communication and the resilience of the events industry.