Designing for Human Behavior and Managing Live Event Risk Without Killing the Magic with Annie Quaile

I've got about 20 years of experience. I've worked in every aspect of entertainment that you can really imagine. So I've produced everything from live events at theme parks to festivals. I've even produced a film that I got an Emmy nomination for. What it comes down to is if you're cognizant about movement patterns and the way that humans think and their behaviors, that helps to mitigate a lot of the other issues. Hello, my name is Jason Reichel, and you're listening to Risk Management Brick by Brick. I'm fascinated with people who are helping build and maintain the physical world around us. On each episode of this podcast, we'll dive in with a risk manager, speak to them about how technology plays a role in this process. Hello, I'm Jason Reichel with Risk Management Brick by Brick. We're live at IAAPA 2025. Today we got Ann Quayle, an entertainment producer and event manager with over two decades designing experiences, events, all that. We're going to get into that, but really what I want to ask about and the things I'm interested about is how. How do you design for human behavior without killing the magic? Right? So that. That's kind of the theme of what I have in mind. So why don't we give a little bit about your background. How did you end up in this position in this industry? And then we'll go into the questions and answers. I mean, I started as an event manager, so as you mentioned, I've got about 20 years of experience. I've worked in every aspect of entertainment that you can really imagine. So I've produced everything from, you know, live events at theme parks to festivals to. I've even produced a film that I got an Emmy nomination for. So it runs the gamut. Thank you. I would say what started me on the risk management safety path was experiencing things early in my career that shouldn't have happened the way that they were happening, and not having the voice to stand up and speak up and say, this isn't okay, seeing where issues were going to arise. And when I did speak up, people didn't listen. And that continued to evolve through my career. The safety part really, I think, took a added interest after Pulse, the nightclub shooting here in Orlando, and how closely connected I felt not only with my community, but my connection with a lot of the people that would often frequent that, and the frustration on my side of just the fact that I know what went wrong and I know how things could have been different, and that it's just a matter of having a Conversation. My other side of my life is as a trained emergency responder. And so that side of learning about what to do in a critical situation has helped really frame a lot of what my philosophy is when it comes to safety at events. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that about Pulse. I think it's important to make our entertainment lives safer so that we can continue to enjoy that while risks continue to come at us. For operators listening, what's the biggest human behavior risk in live events? Like movement patterns, emotional surges, crowd misreads? What are some of the largest things that you think about when you're talking about human behavior? Led risk? I mean, I would say all of those, but I do think what it comes down to is if you're cognizant about movement patterns and the way that humans think and their behaviors, that helps to mitigate a lot of the other issues, whether it's a conference like iaapa. Right. And thinking about how those lines are going to queue up for things that they know are going to be popular and planning ahead for that, or considering what's people's reaction going to be if something unexpected happens and they're scared, where are they going to run, how are they going to react to that, and how you can mitigate those things. That is probably, I think, key number one. And when it comes to the entertainment side of things, there's often so many hands in the pot that I think where things fall apart is that nobody's talking to each other. And often we're not. No one's owning that piece of it. Yeah. Sometimes safety and creative are like oil and vinegar. Right. How do you support the creative and protect the flow and all that stuff? How does that work? How do you position yourself there? For me, particularly, it's relationship management and really building rapport with the people that I'm working with. It helps that I've been on both sides of it. So I think the way that both the promoter and the event people think, and I also think on the safety side of it. But my goal is never to mitigate the fun or mitigate the situation that they want to do. It's a matter of, let's look at this as how we can keep this as safe as possible. And so trying to be in the room as much as possible when conversations are happening, sending up a red flag early and saying, hey, here's my concern with this. How could we still make this happen, but pivot it slightly? Or may I make a suggestion as to how we can do this still effectively, but manage it In a way that's going to be less risky for us. So it really comes down to that relationship management with the people that I'm interacting with, and then the communication side of things. What are some early signals when you're planning flow and capacity that you look for? Like, when you think about, like, in this event, how people are going to act when they're scared, how do you understand those things? What is sort of the. The framework you use? That's a hard question to answer because part of it, I feel like, is it's innate to my. The way that I think medical training and all, not so much that I just think the way my brain thinks. I've done a lot of studying for human behavior, but I will say for anyone that's like, new in this industry and wants to understand that very early on in my life, I would just sit on benches and watch people. And that's where I really started to pay attention to how everyone kind of does the same thing the same way. So even just going into a facility, let's say, going into a theme park, sit on a bench for 15 minutes and watch the same thing happen over and over again. Regardless of who the person is, what their background is, their family makeup or whatever, you'll see that there's common behaviors. Yeah. Number one thing you'll see is someone go up to a cast member and say, where's the bathroom? While they're staying right in front of it. Right, Exactly. Yep. Everyone's going to ask, when the three o' clock parade. Yeah, don't have. Yeah, don't have the. Don't have. You have blinders on in this situation. But that's. That's where that instinct, I think, has come from, is that observation piece. And you gain a lot from the observation piece. Bring us a moment where smart planning kept a situation from escalating. What was the trigger and what intervention worked? Oh, that's a great question. There's an event that I've worked recently that's up near Atlanta, and it's a big community event that they put on that's grown rapidly. It's held at a very large venue, and I probably shouldn't say where it is. It's held by a lot of the community organizations that also include safety individuals. And it's a cool setup. The way that's set up. It's not a traditional type of event setup. The first year that I helped support it, I noticed that there was a lot of risks involved in it. There was access points that were limited. There was Restrictions for people with accessibility. There was a situation where if somebody were, say, an active shooter or something like that was going to come into the venue, it'd be very easy to be able to impact a lot of people in a very short amount of time. And so I had conversations, I spoke up with people that I felt I was less than qualified to speak up to, but said, hey, here's the things that I'm noticing. If as being on the other side of this and looking out, here's where I'm seeing that there's some concerns that I have, and here's how we can impact that. And this year, while there's still a lot of opportunities that they have, they made some pretty significant changes. They added three additional access points. They made some considerations for accessibility for people's wheelchairs and strollers and things like that. So it was a matter of kind of pointing out, hey, I don't know if you thought about this, but here's the barriers. And that becomes particularly challenging when you use venues that are not traditional venues or you use them in a different capacity, which we're doing more and more of in the event space. Right. We're creating experiences everywhere. Yeah. That experience piece, at the cost of safety seems to be a delicate balancing act right now that I'm seeing going across. How do you use tech in this? What role does tech play now? Are you using sensors and what comms? Like, what are the major innovations that in this area of event safety that are really making a difference? Any tech that I have been connected to for the most part would be communication technology. I think communication's come a long way since 20 years ago when I started. Right. The fact that we just had walkie talkies and stuff before. Right. I mean, and we still use walkie talkies. It's a great way to connect with people. But you also have text discord, WhatsApp. You have all kinds of ways to share concerns with people and get that information out. The other thing is, I think we do a better job as a community of partnering with our emergency response partners. Some communities do that incredibly well. Some have a lot of opportunity. Some venues do that very well and have a lot of opportunity. But there's a lot of tech resources that exist that can be integrated in there from that standpoint. So, for example, the community that I live in, which is just south of Atlanta, Atlanta Motor Speedway, or I guess it's Echo Park Speedway, now works very closely with the public safety in that county. And anytime there's a major event there, the Actual mobile response unit is out there with all kinds of weather, technology, active concerns that related to the police, everything. And it's all a hub that they could use as a way to communicate with everybody so they're integrated into that event. So that obviously increases the cost of the event passed off to the person who then is experiencing the event. Right. How do you manage the real need for safety, the desire for bigger and more novel events and the world we live in? Like, is it education that needs to happen to the buying audience of why your ticket went from $40 to $50 because of this stuff? Because I always go with like the example of like a wheelchair safety and stuff like wheelchair access points that also protects you in case something happens and those people need to exit in a specific way and aren't blocking up the way for able bodied people to be able to exit in the same way. So it's, it's good for everyone, you know, But a lot of people don't think of it that way. They just think about, oh well, someone's getting special treatment or these kind of things. So how do you educate the buyer in this experience? That's a hard thing to do. You know, nobody wants their prices to go up. I do think being transparent of where the costs come from is always a valuable piece to it, especially at a time where there's a lot of criticism around organizations that are not transparent about it. But also I do think if you're planning, planning early and you're talking with the promoter, you're talking with the venue, whoever it is that's putting on these events, I think a lot of that cost can be mitigated with just creative planning and having that conversation about how we can, you know, adjust our process in order to accommodate those things without necessarily spiking. So it's more like an order of operation. If you miss the order operation, then it can increase the cost. But if you kind of line it up properly, then it can maybe even reduce spend in a lot of ways. Yeah. If you're planning early, you're accommodating for your needs. If you're waiting until late in the game and you realize that you need security and safety and support, now you're paying probably an outside service to come in at a very expensive cost per head to check your bags and do those things that you, you know, yes, we want to have bags checked, but we could have had that integrated in a different way. Yeah, I'm just thinking of tons of questions I want to ask. Events never stick to script. What's your model for contingency planning so teams can adapt under pressure. I am the queen of contingency planning. So I have a plan for the thing that I know is going to go wrong, a plan for the thing that I know is not going to go the way I think it's going to go if it goes wrong. So usually I have five or six different ways that we can go about something in the event that come from man doing stage shows. That's what it feels like when you're in a stage show. Like, oh, this thing doesn't work. We're going to pivot all these. Yes. And it's really like, okay, how do we keep this seamless and what is our best direction to move if we're going to have this happen? And again, instinct and just observing people and learning over the years of all the production, I can kind of anticipate where things are going to go sideways, but not always. It goes back to communication. Honestly, at the end of the day, I started my career very early by talking to everyone that could potentially be involved in something I was doing, whether they necessarily needed that information or not. Because it doesn't matter if it's somebody that's back of house that's helping to put a show on or it's the person at the front gate. Every certainty is good for everyone. Absolutely. Letting that person know at the front gate what the plan is and where we might have a challenge helps them to let us know if they see something that might be going awry. So I think it's important that everybody that's involved has a say and a stake in it and is, you know, knowledgeable and aware, and I think that helps avoid a lot of issues. How do you train people to pivot quickly without panic? Tell me more about what you're asking. When you say train, you're talking staff working in events. A lot of that, again, I think, goes back to communication. That's a great question. Communication. Yeah. I think it starts early. It starts when we're having that event meeting at the very beginning, and we're saying, here's the issues that are going to happen that we anticipate. Here's where we think things can go sideways, and then I think it's hard to train for that pivot. Do you run drills and things like that, typically for safety? Yeah, we usually do them with a venue, but let's say it's a promoter that's using a venue. We'll walk through some scenarios in those situations, and their event staff is Usually trained in those things, right? Yes. You have to still validate, don't you? Absolutely. What about when you're running events with volunteer staff or something like that? How does that change? Should it change the way that you approach that or do you need to treat them as if they're venue employees? As an example, like now, you absolutely should take into consideration there are volunteers because those are people that are probably not doing it every single day. And even if they may be trained, they're not doing it every day to get their hands. They're trying to get a discount ticket or something. Exactly. And usually volunteers aren't necessarily trusted to do some of the more in depth things. So they're put maybe on the front end. It's an easy thing to take tickets and check in people or whatever. That's also our first line of defense. Right. So those people are probably the least confident as volunteers of what they're looking for. And those are the most important people to make sure that they feel confident. One, to look for to how to get a hold of somebody if they need help and three, to feel empowered to be able to do that. I love that we talked about this, but really I wanted to dive into safety, production, creative teams collide. We talk a lot about this. In risk management in the construction space, it's project managers and the risk manager colliding and the event space it's the creative and the event manager or risk manager in those spaces. It's just such a big topic and I think you covered it very well by talking about you spent the time to understand what their objective is. Probably because you come from that side of the house as well, but their objective. And you're trying to support their objective in a way because they didn't put all this time and energy into something for it to go sideways. They want to see their thing come out. Is that empathy? Is that what that is? Is it leaning in with empathy to everyone around you? Because you can listen, but what's the thing that actually gets them engaged in the process? I probably wouldn't have called it empathy, but I do think you're right. That's probably what it is. Taking into consideration that everyone has a stake in this game and that it's important to them. What's important to them may not be as important to you, but it's important to them for a reason. Like I said, I do think that a lot of it comes from my background, but at the same time just hearing someone out and understanding why they're wanting to do things A certain way will help you be able to frame your alternative suggestion and response to it. How can risk managers and producers partner early to design safety into the experience instead of bolting it on at the end? So do you have a system that you deploy or framework you deploy in order to make sure that the safety and all of that's integrated from the very beginning of the project? I definitely try to. I think we have a long way to go as a general society when it comes to events for that to be naturally baked in because each venue can be so different. I dream for a day, and I think some of this exists, but I dream for a day where events and venues have kind of a standard operating procedure for things, and the variations are minimal. So those are already baked in. Those people are trained. They know exactly what to do. And to a certain extent, that exists. But we're in a space in our industry and in our time where, again, we're trying to get very creative in the way that we're doing things. And so from one event to the next, even in the same venue, it doesn't look the same. And that's where it becomes a little bit complicated. I, I, when I'm producing, I look at everything as we are making those plans, as to where are we putting ourselves at risk as an organization, where are we putting our audience at risk, where are we putting our clients at risk? And so just really kind of looking at a 360 every stage of the way and saying, okay, where are we potentially? Where could we be? So you basically are creating a risk log for all the different Personas, essentially. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, for me, it's probably mostly a mental risk log until I need to fly it up the right chains. But identifying those areas where we have a gaffe and then bringing those up as we need to and speaking up and when it's particularly important, really putting my foot down about, you know, we need to address this or it's going to be a problem. So let's play a game of risky or too risky. And then I want to get one line, one sentence, one paragraph about why you chose the way you chose it. So opening doors before staff are in position. Risky or too risky? Too risky. Why? Staff are your safety, your line of defense. They're the ones that know what are going on. And if you don't have those people in the right positions, then you are, you know, know, putting yourself at risk. I'll give a quick example of that. I know you said one line. AstroWorld is a great example of that. They didn't have enough people in the right places. People stormed the gates from the start of that event. It was a disaster and it only spiraled from there. Once that starts to happen, you can't go backwards. You can only change from going forward or what the outcome might be. Yeah. Let's talk about AI for a second. So we rely solely on AI based crowd density predictions versus behavioral predictions or actually going there. Riskier. Too risky to rely on modeled out data versus seeing the place yourself. I don't think it's too risky. I do think you still need to lean on some of that data. But the data is coming from research that we've already done. We've seen some really great information that's out there and it's pretty reliable. But I think we also need to recognize that we're still in the early stages of AI and a human needs to take a look at that data and say, does this make sense? I agree with you. Allowing performers to improvise movement paths in tight spaces, too risky? Is that something that often people want to be able to do is move around freely in space? Is that something you have to educate people on? I imagine as an improviser that would be annoying to me. Yes. I think you can kind of preempt some of that and you can also kind of anticipate what they're going to want to do. Watch a video of what they've done before. Right. But in general, having them want to move around or be free to do things creates a lot of issues. Not only on a stage because of the way you might need to build out a stage, but if they want to go out in the crowd. Now you've got somebody that a lot of people want to touch and hang out with and whatever, and that's putting them at risk, which is putting our security at risk, which is putting our staff at risk, which is putting our attendees at risk. So as a previous rock musician, that's, that's a real thing where they were like, you can't do, you can't go to around. I'm like, but that's what I, that's what I do. How, you know, not allowed to do that anymore. Running a show during lightning with only a verbal warning system. Risky. Have you been in extreme weather situations? I, I've been in some pretty bad weather situations where we've had to shut things down. Actually, my very first job as an event manager was at Wet N Wild. May it rest in peace. It's been torn down. It's now Volcano Bay. Basically, if you've ever been in that park or for anybody that's listening, it's been in that park. There's nowhere to go and hide when you're in a water park. Maybe the newer one I've been in, Volcano Bay, is probably a little bit better, but we used to have to shut a lot down because of that, and you just had to wait for it to pass. I remember summer nights events where our very large metal structures, metal, you know, umbrellas were flying through the air like they were toothpicks. And it was like, oh, this is not, this is not safe. I volunteered for a summer at this place called Slitterbahn, which is a famous water park, when I was a college student in Austin. When it stormed, it was like, oh, this is real scary. I started my career here in Florida and in Orlando in particular, you can set your watch to most of the storms. So 3 to 4 o', clock, it's going to rain every day. Those are storms you, for the most part, don't have to worry about. And it looks really scary and then it's passed. But there's those ones that kind of come out of nowhere that you've really got to worry about. We talked about this too. We hit so much good stuff, but letting volunteers handle guest flow without formal training, too risky. We talked about that. Looking ahead, how do you see human behavior shaping the future of event safety? How do you see us becoming smarter about this and how do you see events changing? I think our customers are smarter, Sadly, I think we live in a lot more fear today than we did in the past. You know, we grew up in innocent times, if you will. So I do think that our customers demand more of it and are looking for it. And so I think that forces us to be more thoughtful about it. I think it's still going to take the industry some time to make those pivots. Some being more forward, some being more open minded. Sadly, I think we're at a point still where we are reactionary to the problems as opposed to proactive about it. And we're reactionary either because it happened to us or because someone we knew, you know, it happened to a venue near us or something. And so then we panic and say, okay, well, we have to have a plan for an active shooter. We have to have a plan for a weather disaster. Well, we never thought this would happen. And so I think that that human behavior shift and that demand for information and that demand for safety and the accessibility of information for people to find out what you're doing from that standpoint will force our changes. For operators flying home from iaapa, what's the Monday morning action plan that meaningfully improves crowd safety without slowing operations? What's something that they should put into place if you're doing events, if you're doing any kind of stuff like that, what's something that's like the A that they should be working on, they're not doing it already. Their safety person should be in every conversation, even if they don't think they need to be. A lot of times in risk management, the risk manager and the safety manager are now partners In a lot of environments I'm in. Yeah, I think. And so, you know, in that case, I think it's bringing other people into the fold. It's the simple conversations of letting people know this is what our plan is, this is why we're doing it. It's not just about we're going to do this, but why we're doing it to help them understand that context so that they have the strength and flow foresight to be able to say, okay, something's not right here. Or can I ask this question because I think this might be a concern. What's crazy about all of that is in a world where you have AI and we have all this stuff, really, it still comes down to human communication. Absolutely. And making sure that is the basis of what everything else is based on. I really appreciate you. Thank you for stopping by and I look forward to speaking again. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice meeting you. Risk Management Brick Bag by Brick is brought to you by trustlayer. Find out how trustlayer manages risk so that the people can build the physical world around us. Head over to Trustlayer I.O. and then make sure to subscribe to Risk Management brick by brick on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. On behalf of the Trust Layer team, thank you for listening.