Shell out one percent of total event hours for the design.
technique — attributed to Ruud Janssen
Janssen's allocation rule is operational. One hundred people spending eight hours together equals eight hundred event hours. One percent of that is eight hours, which is what the design team should spend together in front of a big Event Canvas. Stand up at a wall, walk through every stakeholder's entry and exit behavior, articulate the value the design is supposed to create. The discipline matters because design time is almost always under-allocated. Teams spend hundreds of hours on logistics and minutes on design. Janssen's one-percent rule produces designs proportionate to the event's investment. The investment is small and the returned quality is large.
For event producers, corporate event leads, and agency producers thinking about how to allocate design time on a project. The technique is most useful as a budget argument when design time is being cut to save costs.
one-percent-rule, design-time, event-canvas, investment