Sometime in the next few hours, a head of state will hand the World Cup to a captain, and an event team will exhale.
FIFA confirmed weeks ago that the US president would attend the final and present the trophy. For the audience, that’s a photo. For the people delivering the event, it’s a second command structure landing on top of their own. A presidential visit brings the Secret Service, and the Secret Service does not integrate into your event plan. Your event plan integrates into theirs. Motorcade routes reshape road closures. Screening regimes change at doors you thought were settled. Sections of the venue lock and unlock on a schedule you’re told about, not consulted on. The precise minute the most photographed moment of the night occurs now depends on a protocol machine that answers to nobody in your organisation.
Most stakeholder theory quietly assumes you can manage everyone. Map them, engage them, keep them informed, move them up and to the right. I’ve written before that stakeholder management is most of the job. But some stakeholders break the matrix. You don’t manage a president’s security detail. You don’t negotiate with an aviation regulator about your drone show, or with a monarch’s household about timing. These are stakeholders you plan around, the way sailors plan around weather. Powerful, legitimate, immovable, and entirely indifferent to your Gantt chart.
The teams that handle this well share three habits, and none of them involve charm. They find the liaison early, because every immovable institution has one person whose job is the interface, and that relationship is worth more than any escalation path. They build slack around every interaction point, so a 20-minute protocol delay bends the run sheet instead of breaking it. And they keep a version of the plan that works if the VIP element changes at the last minute, because it can, for reasons no one will ever explain to you.
What they never do is resent it. The moment a delivery team starts treating the immovable stakeholder as an enemy, judgement degrades. The detail isn’t ruining your event. The detail is doing its project, which happens to intersect with yours at the trophy stand. The best security operations, like the one nobody noticed at The Open, succeed by being absorbed into the event’s fabric. Tonight, absorption runs the other way. The event bends around the security, and the professionalism lies in bending gracefully.
Somewhere on your project is a stakeholder whose approval process, security posture or statutory power outranks your plan. Stop trying to manage them. Find their liaison, pad the interface, and build the version of the night that survives their surprises.
Ben Webb is an Australian project manager and event delivery strategist. He was named AIPM Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about project management, event delivery and leadership at benwebb.au.
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