Safety Sistas – Details, episodes & analysis

Olivia Bellas, a facilitator who empowers people to make sense of complex work, speaks with Íse about the importance of creating an environment with purpose to get the most out of meetings and gatherings. We explore the power of facilitation to create safety, empower people and make big change.

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About Olivia: A facilitator at the intersection of arts, digital, charity and government spaces, with a 25 year track record of leading social impact work through fundraising, designing and evaluating. Putting people first is at the heart of what Olivia does, to generate untapped insights. She reframes learning, development, relationship building - bringing distinctive value by merging traditional and digital practices. For more information see her website https://olivia-bellas.com/

Ise’s websites: murphymorris.co and isemurphy.com

In this episode I get to chat to Becca Wilusz, Assistant Director of Athletics / Game Operations & Championships at Duke University in North Carolina. Becca discusses her unusual career path into crowd safety at events, how she designs event plans, applies her background in biomedical engineering to planning, risk and data analysis and how her team work with students and student bodies to manage crowds. We only scratched the surface of Becca’s extensive experience and knowledge so I look forward to inviting her back very soon for part two. I hope you enjoy.

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This is my first Safety Sistas Solo episode and is an honest share about my intention on improving the industry, what I truly value, the systems that help me, understanding decision making, feeling incompetent, developing awareness, behaviour in the event control room, fear of rejection, being too hard on ourselves, and what happens when we trust ourselves. For more information on my work in crowd safety, see https://murphymorris.co LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isemurphymorris/

I meet with Emma Parkinson, who leads the MSc Crowded Places and Public Safety Management at Coventry University, works as a crowd safety manager on some of the world’s biggest events as well as studying a Professional Doctorate into learning from High Reliability Organisations such as nuclear, aviation and space.

We discuss our role behind the curtain in facilitating joy and escapism in events, the power of volunteers in a crowd safety management plan, respecting, training and briefing our staff appropriately and C3 - Command, Control/Coordinate and Communications.

Emma is one of the leading crowd safety practitioners in our industry and as you will hear, I am a big fan of her work, wisdom and passion for crowd safety.

Emma’s Linkedin

MSc Crowded Places and Public Safety Management

Ise’s Linkedin

Ise’s website

In this episode, I catch up with Becky Stevens, director of Hybred Events, on site at Lumiere Durham 2023, a biennial light art festival in the north of England. Becky shares insight into how we approach event control, discusses the importance of training for safety advisory groups and debunks the narrative of us being the “safety police”.

She shares her experience of having to manage an emergency evacuation of Bloc Weekend festival at London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as working on the famous Fatboy Slim concert on Brighton beach in 2002 that almost turned deadly. Hearing Becky’s experience of dealing with both these events is crucial learning for all event professionals and attendees to help develop awareness of how we can reduce risk in the future. Becky’s wisdom, experience and perspective taught me a lot and I hope you find this episode as insightful as I did. Hybred Events https://www.hybredevents.com/ Becky’s LinkedIn Ise’s website

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Welcome to my first in person podcast episode, where I sit down with Morten Therkildsen, Director of Safety at Roskilde Festival in Denmark. We caught up at the IBIT 2023 Conference in Cologne, where we were both speaking.

I represented the Global Crowd Management Alliance speaking about Zone Ex, and Morten spoke about the meaning of, and how we use the words Safety and Security, especially as in some languages they are the same word.

We spoke about some of the sessions we sat in, such as the Love Parade: Lessons Learned by Prof Doc Jurgen Gerlach and Figen Murray’s presentation about Martyn’s Law (Protect Duty). Our discussion continued into the importance and evolution of formal education, how the events industry should be classed as "high reliability organisation”, political influences, the definition and competency of “Crowd Managers”, proximate and distal risk and where we need to go next.

As this is recorded live in the RheinEnergies Stadium, there are background noises of talking, bottle crates and the Football Club’s mascot reminding us of session start times. This is a casual conversation between two members of the Global Crowd Management Alliance, hopefully demonstrating the importance of international exchange, something which IBIT and the GCMA champion and facilitate.

Morten’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mortentherkildsenrfx/

IBIT https://ibit23.de/UeBER-DAS-IBIT/

GCMA https://www.thegcma.com/

After the release of BBC’s File on 4 undercover investigation, on the 3 October 2023, into “sham training” in the security industry, Íse sits down with Ann Marie Chebib, Managing Director of Select Security and Secretary of UK Crowd Management Association and Global Crowd Management Alliance and KT Sonnen (from our first episode), COO of Invictus Professional Training and PhD student to frame this issue in the wider context of the industry. We take a step back to look at the bigger picture and understand the causes and conditions that come together to influence industry practice. Join me in learning insights from Anne Marie and KT to the reality of the industry, from the challenges we face to the evolution of our industry in professionalising and improving competency to keep people safe at events.

BBC News article: ⁠https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66923084⁠

Segment from Íse’s dissertation into legislation and regulation on crowd safety: https://www.isemurphy.com/legislation-regulation-and-crowd-safety/

Ann Marie Chebib: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-marie-chebib-86974849/

KT Sonnen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kt-sonnen/

Acronyms and initialisms:

AO = Awarding Organisation

SIA = ⁠Security Industry Authority ⁠

UKCMA = ⁠United Kingdom Crowd Management Association⁠

GCMA = ⁠Global Crowd Management Alliance⁠

NTIA = Night Time Industry Association

SGSA = Sports Ground Safety Authority

EIF = Event Industry Forum

Janthea Bridgen is CEO of Nipperbout, providing child care and children’s activities for the events industry. We talk about how she got to where she is today, what it takes to provide best practice and what challenges she faces in the industry. She shares fascinating insights in how she risk assesses events, debunks a theory that sometimes divides event safety teams and what she would like to see change in 10 years time. I learned so much from listening to Janthea and hope that you too can take home some of the wisdom she shares in how we can all work together to keep children safe at our events.

We couldn’t cover everything we wanted to in this episode and I will be inviting her back soon. Some of the things we are keen to cover next time are;

• the times during an event in crowds when the risk to losing a child increases
• the risks associated with toilets
• the risk of losing children via fire escapes

For more information on Janthea:

Website: https://www.nipperbout.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jantheabrigden/

For more information on Íse: Websites:

https://www.isemurphy.com/

https://murphymorris.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isemurphymorris/