A few days ago, another intern and myself got invited to a pre-planning session by one of my bosses. She and another one of my bosses were involved in a preliminary planning session for the iHeart Radio Music Festival, the biggest event of the year for the company. This multi-day festival in Las Vegas takes place once a year in the fall, and hosts some of the biggest artists of this day in age from various different genres including pop, rap, country, and more. It is my department's job to plan the logistics of the entire festival, including everything from meet and greets, artist conflicts, charity work, location issues, merchandise, and basically anything you can think of. Obviously an insane amount of planning must go into to something of this nature to make sure it runs smoothly, which is why they referred to this small meeting as "the planning of the planning".
They went at it the old fashioned way, with big sheets of paper taped to the walls and multi-colored markers, and started making long lists of anything that came to mind that would need to be discussed or decided on later in time. To be honest I did not understand a lot of what they were saying as they were talking a lot about specific people/ charities whom I do not know or things that had taken place at past festivals, but it was still very interesting to experience this behind the scenes action up close.
My bosses did make a point to explain to us why the meeting was so important. Their biggest take away from years and years of putting this festival together is that no amount of planning is too small. It is so important to take the time to anticipate what could go wrong and mull over every detail. Inevitably, things will pop up that cannot be planned, and people are forced to deal with the task at hand however they see fit at the time. But, just for this reason, everything that possibly can be foreseen must be planned, so that while the problems that arise are being dealt with, the rest of the show is prepared and can go on.
Your internship sounds amazing and fun! I agree with your bosses' beliefs that planning must be done carefully and that it is important to anticipate certain situations and have solutions ready at hand. I just learned recently at my internship that sometimes ER doctors must consider every type of diagnosis. I hope you have fun at the iHeart Radio Music Festival!
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