PMI Queensland | Upcoming Events Calendar

OVERVIEW

Riverfire looks, from the riverbank, like twenty minutes of fireworks. Behind it sits a year of planning, a stakeholder group of more than twenty agencies with no shared chain of command, and a set of decisions that must be made correctly under time pressure in front of hundreds of thousands of people. This session uses Riverfire by Australian Retirement Trust and the wider Brisbane Festival as a working case study in delivering a high-consequence project where the go-live is immovable, the risk profile is public and physical, and authority is distributed rather than held. 

The session is built around the tabletop exercise Brisbane Festival runs with its agency partners each year — a discussion-based rehearsal, involving no physical activity, in which participants talk through their roles and responses against hypothetical scenarios. Christophe will walk the audience through the exercise as it is actually run, then draw out the transferable practice. 

Outline of main points: 

• The event as a project:  the scale and constraints of the project — an immovable date, a public site, no rehearsal with a real audience, and no option to quietly slip the deadline. 

• The stakeholder map:  mapping more than twenty organisations, none of which reports to the others, and establishing who is consulted, who is informed, and who actually decides. 

• Thresholds over opinions:  converting judgement calls into objective, pre-agreed triggers, and setting the decision gates at which they are applied. 

• The tabletop:  how the exercise is designed, facilitated and used to find the seams between organisations before those seams are tested live. 

• The second problem:  what actually happens after the incident is resolved — re-entry, transport surge, public messaging, and the decision on whether to proceed at all. 

• Closing the loop:  the briefing cycle, the pre-recorded messaging library, and the final pre-event briefing. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Map decision authority, not just stakeholders. A RACI that names participants but leaves the decision-maker implicit will fail at the moment it matters. Riverfire planning works backwards from a single question — for each scenario, who has the authority to stop this? — and confirms the answer with each agency in advance.
• Replace judgement calls with pre-agreed, objective thresholds. Riverfire uses measurable triggers — a sustained wind speed above a defined limit cancels the display, full stop — so the critical-moment conversation is about observation and reporting, not about persuasion. Any project with a high-stakes go/no-go gate can borrow this.
• Rehearse the interfaces, because that is where plans break. Each agency's own procedures are usually sound; the failures live in the handoffs between them. A discussion-based tabletop is a cheap, low-risk way to expose those gaps, and it surfaces assumptions that no document review will catch. 
• Plan the recovery, not just the incident. Resolving an incident often creates the harder problem — crowds dispersed across the city, mass re-entry, transport queues, and a live decision on whether to proceed. Contingency planning that stops at 'incident resolved' is only half a plan. 
• Pre-build your communications and pre-assign the authority to use them. Riverfire holds a library of drafted, approved messages with defined triggers and a named authority to release them. Deciding what to say — and who may say it — is work that must be done before the pressure arrives, not during it. 

OUR SPEAKER

Christophe Broadway
Operations Manager | Brisbane Festival

Christophe Broadway is Operations Manager at Brisbane Festival, delivered by Major Brisbane Festivals Ltd — one of Australia's leading international arts festivals, which each September presents more than a thousand events across three weeks and draws audiences approaching one million people. 

Christophe is responsible for the operational planning and live, on-ground delivery of the Festival, including its Festival Village at South Bank and its signature free public event, Riverfire by Australian Retirement Trust. Riverfire is a city-scale undertaking rather than a fireworks display: a single evening that closes bridges, roads, bikeways and the Brisbane River itself, suspends CityCat and commercial river traffic, and depends on the coordinated action of more than twenty independent organisations. Among them are the Queensland Police Service, Queensland Ambulance Service, the Australian Defence Force, Maritime Safety Queensland, Resources Safety & Health Queensland, Translink, Queensland Rail, Brisbane City Council, South Bank Corporation, Arts Queensland, QPAC, the SES, the Coast Guard and counter-terrorism and transport resilience agencies. 

During delivery Christophe works on the ground, acting as the field link between Riverfire Control, the Police-led Metropolitan Emergency Coordination Centre and production teams positioned across South Bank, Kangaroo Point and the CBD. His planning work includes the multi-agency stakeholder briefing cycle and the annual scenario-based tabletop exercise through which agencies rehearse severe weather cancellation, crowd and security incidents, evacuation and re-entry, and on-water protest activity before the event goes live. 

He brings a long career in event and entertainment operations across South East Queensland. Prior to Brisbane Festival he held roles with the Gold Coast Show Society, Surfers Paradise Alliance and M2 Production, and ran his own consultancy, Broadway Production Management. His experience spans theme parks, theatre, major public events, entertainment management and business development. He was educated at Somerset College and is based on the Gold Coast. 

His professional focus is the set of disciplines that keep large, high-consequence public events safe and deliverable: clear decision rights across organisations that do not share a reporting line, objective and pre-agreed go/no-go thresholds, rehearsed escalation and communication protocols, and contingency planning that extends past the incident itself to the recovery that follows. 

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