Planning vs. Design: The Gap Nobody Named for Me
I started working events when I was 17 years old. I'm 42 now. That's 25 years in this industry and somewhere north of 2,000 events. I've got the certifications to prove I know what I'm talking about, CMP and CED, but honestly, most of what I know didn't come from a textbook or an exam. It came from being in the room, over and over, and paying attention to what worked and what absolutely did not.
And I want to be real about that second part, because I don't think people talk about it enough. I've learned way more from the events that went sideways than the ones that went great. Probably more, if I'm honest with myself. The wins feel good, but the failures are the ones that actually teach you something, because they force you to go figure out why. Every framework I use today exists because something didn't work, and I got stubborn about understanding why not.
The gap nobody named for me
There's a version of every event professional who walks into a project with the run of show locked; the vendors confirmed, the timeline color coded and bulletproof. That person is good at their job. Stakeholders trust them. Nothing falls through the cracks. And then the event ends, and somebody asks, so what did we actually get out of this? I've been that person. More than once, early in my career, I hit every logistical mark and still watched an event land flat, and I didn't have the language yet to explain why.
Most events are planned well and designed accidentally. The logistics are airtight. The intention behind them never got built in the first place. That's the gap that quietly stalls out a lot of careers, and it's the one I've spent 25 years trying to close, in my own work first.
A big turning point for me was going back to grad school for a degree in Creativity. I didn't go in expecting it to change how I saw the world; I just wanted the tools. But it cracked something open. Suddenly I wasn't looking at an event through one lens, the planner's lens, I was looking at it through a dozen. Psychology, behavior, design thinking, systems. That's really where a lot of my frameworks started, not in an event debrief, but in a classroom asking questions I'd never been trained to ask.
Alongside that, I went deep into the neuroscience of learning and education. Understanding how the brain actually takes in information, how much emotion drives what people pay attention to and remember, and how memories actually get formed, that changed how I think about every event I touch. It's not enough to hit the business goals on a slide. If you're not designing with the actual human sitting in the room in mind, the way they'll experience and recall what happened, you're leaving the thing that really moves the needle on the table. That's the bridge I keep coming back to. Business goals on one side, real human experience on the other, and my job is building what actually connects them.
Building my own playbook
Then I started my own business. And I'll tell you, nothing will humble you and sharpen you at the same time quite like entrepreneurship. When you're building your own thing, there's no borrowing someone else's playbook and hoping it fits. There's no team above you to catch what you miss. I had to build my own systems from the ground up, test them on real clients with real money on the line, and figure out fast what actually held up and what just sounded good in a proposal. That's where SPARK came from, one of the frameworks I built out of necessity when I opened DMP Creative and realized the tools I'd been handed just weren't enough for what I was trying to do. SPARK is the framework I still use today and am excited to share in From Planner to Strategist, to turn a planning checklist into an intentional, designed experience.
Getting labeled "challenging”
All of that, the extra lenses, the neuroscience, the frameworks I was building out of necessity, changed how I showed up in a room. I started asking different questions in planning meetings. Not what time does registration open, but why are we doing this session at all, and what do we actually want people to feel or remember when they walk out. Planning asks what needs to happen. Design asks why, and how do we know it worked. Most event professionals never get taught to ask that second question, not because they can't, but because nobody hands them the framework for it.
Early on, asking it got me labeled as “challenging”. My leaders weren't used to someone pushing back on a decision. They just wanted me to “do it the way they’ve always done it”. But the outcomes kept speaking for themselves, so I kept asking. It took me a while to realize what I was doing wasn't being difficult. I was challenging what was comfortable, not what worked. Those are not the same thing, and most rooms treat them like they are.
Why this became a career problem, not just a skills gap
Here's the part nobody says out loud, so I will. The professionals who get handed bigger budgets, bigger stages, and an actual seat in the strategy conversation are rarely the ones with the most polished run of show. They're the ones who can sit in a room with leadership and explain, in language leadership cares about, why an event was built the way it was and what it delivered against the business. I've watched that play out time and again from both sides of the table.
That's not a personality trait. It's not some people “just have it”. It's a specific, learnable shift in how you think about your own work, from executor to strategist, from order taker to the person leaders turn to when it's time to make the real calls. That shift takes confidence. It also takes language, a way to ask the hard questions and challenge what's comfortable without just being difficult for the sake of it. That's the piece I care most about handing over now.
I'm also kind of stubborn about how I hand it over. 25 years of trial, error, and pattern recognition doesn't help anybody if it stays complicated. My whole approach is making this stuff plain and usable, real tools you can pick up and actually apply, not theory that sounds smart in a session and disappears the second you're back at your desk. If it can't survive contact with your actual job, I'm not teaching it.
That's exactly why PCMA asked me to build their newest Institute course, From Planner to Strategist: An Applied Event Design Course. It's built for anyone ready to make that shift, from executing events to designing them on purpose, taught by someone who's gotten it wrong plenty of times, been called difficult more than once, and still thinks it was worth it.
I'm not handing anyone a theory I read about. I'm handing over what survived 25 years of getting it wrong until I got it right, broken down into something you can actually pick up and use on your very next event.
If that’s the shift you're ready to make, I'd love to have you in the room.
From Planner to Strategist: An Applied Event Design Course
