There is something I especially love about working as an on-site producer: if I have done my job well, the participants have no idea how many things happened behind the scenes.
They see the transfer waiting on time, the room ready, the food arriving, the class beginning and someone who always knows how to answer their questions.
What they do not see is everything that happened to make those moments possible.
What happens behind the scenes
They do not see the supplier who called that morning to announce a change, the room whose air conditioning stopped working, the driver who was delayed, the participant who needed a solution we had not anticipated or the dozens of small details that must be remembered at every moment.
And the truth? At a retreat, something almost always goes wrong.
It may be something small, or it may require changing the entire plan. You cannot control the weather, flights, suppliers or everything that happens along the way. What you can control is how you respond.
Experience shows in the moment that matters
That is exactly where I feel my on-site experience truly comes into play.
There is no time to panic or start looking for someone to blame. You need to understand what happened, find a solution, speak to the right people and make sure the group can continue its day as normally as possible.
For me, if the participants continue enjoying themselves and never feel that there was a moment of chaos, we succeeded.
Let the teacher be the teacher
That is also one of the things I want to give every teacher who leads a retreat with me: the freedom to be the teacher. To teach, connect with the participants and be present in the experience she created instead of managing suppliers, checking rooms or solving problems.
Good production is not only about knowing how to plan everything in advance.
It is about knowing what to do when nothing goes exactly according to plan.
In the end, the small things no one sees are exactly what allow everyone to feel that everything simply… works.
When production is done well, the magic lives in what the participants never even need to know happened.
Maya