It Shouldn't Take Heroics

A few years ago I found myself staffing the mobile app help desk at a flagship event — 20,000 attendees, heavily promoted sessions, the kind of show where everything is supposed to run like clockwork. About thirty minutes before a major hackathon session was scheduled to start, attendees began lining up at the staircase leading to the room.

Security wasn't letting anyone up.

Because I was sitting behind an official-looking desk closest to the staircase, I became the de facto complaint department. I tried talking to the security guard directly. No luck — they were working off an old schedule, the stairs were roped off, and they weren't willing to leave their post or radio for clarification. Attendees were getting restless and he session clock was ticking.

I finally sent a WhatsApp to my manager, who came out, sorted it out with security, the stairs opened and the session started on time.

What stayed with me wasn't the resolution — it was everything that had to go right for it to work: I happened to be nearby, I happened to know who to contact, my manager happened to be reachable and close enough to intervene. Remove any one of those variables and a heavily-promoted session at a 20,000-person event starts late in front of a crowd of increasingly annoyed attendees.

The gap wasn't security and it wasn't my manager. It almost certainly started earlier — a session time or room location that changed somewhere upstream and the information didn't travel.

Logistics and security were each doing their jobs within their own lanes. What was missing was the collaborative structure that would have made the outcome between those lanes someone's explicit responsibility — so that when something changed, there was a defined person, a defined path, and a defined confirmation that the message was received.

When the structure isn't there

That kind of gap is what the Culture of Collaboration dimension of ACCORD is actually about. Not whether people like each other, not whether the team has good intentions — those things were true in that staircase situation and it still nearly went sideways. It's about whether the structures that enable people to act quickly, escalate clearly, and share ownership across workstreams actually exist.

Event delivery is inherently cross-functional. Marketing, operations, technology, venues, vendors, security, speakers, and leadership are all moving simultaneously — often with different information, different tools, and different assumptions about who's responsible for what.

Clear decision boundaries, so people know who can say yes and who needs to be consulted.
Shared timelines that create visibility across workstreams rather than just within them.
Escalation paths that feel like responsible action rather than going over someone's head.
And enough psychological safety that when someone notices something is wrong — a security guard with an old schedule, a handoff that didn't happen — they feel confident raising it rather than assuming someone else has it covered.

What tends to happen instead is that the gaps get absorbed. Someone picks up the slack. A capable person with a good manager and a WhatsApp connection saves the session. And because it worked out, nobody examines what made it precarious in the first place.

Collaboration doesn't emerge naturally from goodwill — it requires design.

That's the heroics trap. The event delivers, the team gets credit, and the structural gap that made it a near-miss stays invisible until the next time — when the right person might not be standing next to the right staircase.

Why goodwill isn't enough

Behavioral science also plays a role here, because it shapes how these structures need to be built.

People don't raise flags when they're uncertain whether it's their place to do so.
They don't escalate when escalation has historically been received as blame.
They don't surface problems early when the organizational norm has been to celebrate those who fix problems, not those who prevent them.

Culture of Collaboration isn't just about processes and org charts — it's about the conditions under which people are willing to act, speak up, and share ownership before something goes wrong rather than after.

Culture of Collaboration is the third dimension of the ACCORD framework, and in some ways the most foundational — because structure without buy-in doesn't function, and buy-in without structure doesn't last. When ownership is unclear, decisions stall or get made by whoever happens to be standing at the staircase. If escalation feels risky, problems stay invisible until they're unavoidable. And when our teams are siloed by workstream rather than connected by outcome, the gaps between them become the places where events quietly go sideways.

Building collaborative structure isn't a culture initiative. It's an operational one — and it starts with being honest about where the lanes are, who owns the intersections, and what happens when something changes.
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