Single point of failure

Anything the event owns one copy of, whose loss stops the whole thing rather than just making it worse. Borrowed from engineering, where it describes the one component whose failure takes a whole system down, and it transfers to events with almost no translation. At community scale the usual candidates are the venue, the AV or audio chain, the headline guest, the one volunteer who knows how a piece of gear works, and the sponsor payment the budget is leaning on. Notice how many of them are people rather than equipment. The practitioner habit is not to eliminate them, which is impossible, but to rank them, take the worst few, and write one plan B beside each with a named decider and a deadline. A plan B without a name and a date is a hope, not a plan.

Source: Reliability and systems engineering, applied to events as standard contingency practice. The event version, meaning a written plan B per single point of failure covering venue, headline guest, and AV, is documented in the course’s industry map §2.6 alongside the contingency budget line. The clearest worked example on record in this course’s sources is panelist Linda’s account, in Whova’s risk management episode, of an outdoor festival scheduled four weeks after 9/11: the team proceeded only because adequate safety measures were achievable, which meant partnering with police, fire, EMT, and local government for the manpower they did not have one copy of (Whova, 7 Risk Management Strategies for Event Planners).

First used in: 1.7 · Risk, rules, and safety.