I was fortunate enough to be the Master of Ceremonies for TEDxMelbourne yesterday.

It was a great day. The theme was City2.0  With unprecedented urbanisation, how do we prepare for the cities of the future.

Unlike the usual TEDx event, we were streaming some of the feed from the New York event for 90 minutes. Now the technology was all sorted but with a big demand for the feed we knew that they may have been issues.

So we planned for it not to work. We also planned for our back up plan not to work. The event was too important to leave to chance so we had to assume that IT WILL NOT WORK.
When the time came, the stream was fantastic and then after about an hour it started to have buffering issues from the USA. As MC I was up and down as it worked, didn’t work, worked, didn’t. Finally we killed the stream and went with our back up plan (which ended up getting a better response).

What about with what you do Dear-Reader? Do you have a backup plan? Maybe even a back up for your back up? Whether it is a plan for the school holidays, a presentation to your boss or even a TEDxMelbourne presentation to 500 people, you need to plan for when it WILL NOT work.