The Elephant in the Classroom

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February is traditionally my "giving something back"month and last week saw me heading south to the University of the West of Scotland to do a lecture/workshop on event cancellation; followed by a drive through a snow storm this week to deliver one on Highland Games at Queen Margaret University.
For those of you who are AD's; cancelling a major event is thankfully rare; but if it happens to you; trust me, you better have a section in your event plan that will enable you to cope with it in an organised way. When the Police walked in to close down our 2009 Hogmanay Show due to a snow blizzard that had decided to change course; we got the news 7 hours before we were due to open our gates and welcome in 12,000 spectators. In many ways we were lucky to have so much time for that one; but our 2014 Hogmanay celebrations saw us dealing with the cancellation of our lunchtime show following a fatal road traffic accident outside Inverness Town House that morning. I have no doubt you can all think of scenarios that could cause a Games to be cancelled; I am not sure if you have thought about how you would go about it. The first rule of Crisis Management is always Containment - and by that I mean just like First Aid - your team's first job is to find a way to stop the problems which you now have to deal with from getting worse.  

With regard to my Highland Games talk - I gave the students my quick guide to the history of this global excuse to gather together and for a few hours simply forget all our woes and have some fun while we are still healthy enough to do so. While I was there I was introduced to Marjorie Brewster who published the research in 2009 which identified that 20% of Scotland's Highland Games had closed forever between 2000 and 2007. During the hour and a half that we spent together discussing what needs to be done to get from where we are today in Scotland to where we need to be; it was difficult to ignore all the evidence suggesting that there is a real possibility that more than a few Games may have already reached the point of no return over here.

Edited by Gerry Reynolds - 2/28/15 at 10:44am