Most event plans are built around the thing going ahead. The good ones are also built around it not going ahead – and around the harder question almost nobody asks until it’s too late: how does everyone get home if it all stops at once?
It’s an old festival nightmare, and it keeps recurring because the lesson keeps not landing. A music festival runs beautifully right up until the closing act, when heavy rain turns the access roads to mud and shuts them. Thousands of people are suddenly stranded, miles from any transport, with no food, water or shelter, stuck overnight. The event itself was a success. The exit was a disaster. And in the memory of everyone who was there, the exit is the event.
That scenario is exactly why, heading into the 2026 festival season, experienced organisers were obsessing over the unglamorous fine print – weather-triggered cancellation terms, force majeure clauses, contingency for the day Mother Nature decides otherwise. Not because they’re pessimists. Because they’ve learned that an event isn’t delivered when the headline act finishes. It’s delivered when the last attendee is safely home.
This is the part of event delivery that the excitement tends to skip. All the energy goes into the show – the line-up, the staging, the experience. Far less goes into the boring, vital question of egress: how do tens of thousands of people leave, safely, possibly in bad weather, possibly all at once, possibly when the one road out has just become unusable? The arrival is planned to death. The departure, and especially the emergency departure, is too often an afterthought. And it’s the afterthought that strands people in a field overnight.
I think this generalises to every project with a defined end. We pour our planning into the launch, the go-live, the opening – the moment of arrival – and we under-plan the wind-down, the rollback, the what-if-we-have-to-stop. What happens if we have to pull the launch halfway through? How do we get users, data, money, people safely back to a known state if the thing fails partway? That’s the project equivalent of the road out of the festival, and the teams who haven’t planned it are the teams who get stranded in the mud.
The discipline is to plan the exit with the same seriousness as the entrance. Before the event, before the launch, before the go-live, ask the unglamorous questions. If this has to stop suddenly, what’s the plan? If conditions turn against us, what’s the trigger to act and who pulls it? How does everyone – and everything – get safely back to solid ground? And crucially, have we written that into the contracts and the plans now, while it’s cheap, rather than improvising it in the rain when it’s catastrophic?
There’s a reason the veterans care about those cancellation clauses and contingency plans more than the newcomers do. The newcomers are still planning the show. The veterans have already watched a show go perfectly and end in chaos, and they know the difference was never the event. It was the exit.
So whatever you’re delivering, plan how it ends as carefully as how it begins – including the ending nobody wants. Build the road out before you need it. Because your event, and your project, isn’t finished when the last act plays. It’s finished when everyone’s home safe, and that’s the part the amateurs forget until they’re standing in the mud with everyone else.
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