An event is a temporary organisation built to dissolve
Everything that makes ordinary organisations work, accumulated relationships, learned processes, redundancy in people, is unavailable. The whole thing is assembled and then taken apart.
A permanent organisation runs on things nobody notices. People know each other. Processes have been through several iterations. When somebody is absent, another person knows enough to cover. Mistakes surface over weeks and are absorbed. An event has none of that. It brings together contractors, volunteers, venue staff, performers and suppliers who have frequently never worked together, to execute something once, at a fixed time, in front of an audience, with no possibility of postponement once it has begun.
That structure explains most of what is distinctive about the work. Communication has to be explicit, because nothing can be assumed to be understood. Documentation matters more than in ordinary operations, because the knowledge lives in a temporary team. And single points of failure are everywhere by default, since almost every role is held by one person who has not done it here before.
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