What Event Planners Can Learn From Artists?

Adapted from a conversation featured in PCMA’s Convene Magazine, “Thinking Like an Artist.”

A few months ago, after my keynote at PCMA Convening LATAM in Quito, a planner stayed behind to talk. Their question was simple: “We’ve made our event more efficient every year. But why doesn’t it feel any different?”

That question is really about feeling – not efficiency. And here, event planners can learn from artists. As Walt Disney put it, “the most important aim of any of the fine arts is to get a purely emotional response from the beholder”. Artists don’t start with logistics. They start with intention – what they need to express, the question they’re trying to raise, the experience they want to create. Most event teams never ask that question, because efficiency is on the dashboard and intention isn’t. It quietly stops being the goal.

Why Most Events Start in the Wrong Place

Almost every event begins with logistics — venue, AV, catering, schedule — because that’s where the checklist lives. It’s concrete. It’s easy to assign, easy to track, easy to finish. Intention isn’t any of those things, so it gets skipped, and the event runs entirely on execution.

What event planners can learn from artists is what to do instead: start with why the thing needs to exist, before you plan how it runs.

Four Lessons From Thinking Like an Artist

1. Start With the Feeling — But Not the Way You’d Guess

Evoking feeling is close to the whole point of art. Ask any painter, filmmaker, or composer what they’re ultimately after, and somewhere in the answer is: I want you to feel something.

But here’s what’s easy to miss. Artists don’t start by asking what the viewer should feel. They start with something they need to express — a truth, a question, a tension they can’t leave unresolved. The feeling arrives as a consequence of that pursuit, not as its opening brief.

Event planners are in a similar and different position, and that’s exactly why the lesson is useful. When I ran an art and technology event series at Google For Entrepreneurs Campus in Madrid, the feeling I was designing for was “welcome”. Most of the artists and creatives walking into that room had never been inside a tech space before, and the easiest way to lose them in the first five minutes was to let it feel like they were guests in someone else’s building. So every decision – who spoke first, how the space was arranged, the tone of the opening remarks  – got tested against one question: will the creatives in this room feel that their work is being taken seriously here, not just tolerated? That’s a very different design brief than “make it a good event,” and it changed almost everything downstream.

So: name the feeling early, and be specific about it. Not “engaged” or “inspired” — those are the same word every event claims. Something precise enough to test decisions against. Then work backward. Every logistical decision gets checked against that feeling, not the other way around.

2. Learn to See the Negative Space

In art, there’s a concept called negative space — the space around and between a subject, not the subject itself. One way it’s taught: don’t draw the chair, draw the space around it. It’s the only way to break a mental model you didn’t know you had. We know what a chair looks like, but the space around it, we don’t — so we’re freer to actually see it.

Do the same with your event. Don’t start by picturing what a successful one looks like — you already carry a fixed image of that, and it will just reproduce last year’s version. Instead, map what it is not: not another dead half-hour between sessions, not another generic networking reception, not another agenda that could belong to any conference in your industry. Let the shape of what you’re building emerge from what you’re refusing to repeat. The blind spots show up faster in what you rule out than in what you set out to achieve.

I see this pattern in almost every organization I work with — the most useful planning conversation isn’t “what would make this great,” it’s “what would make this feel hollow.” If that reframe is worth trying with your own team, let’s connect.

3. Don’t Let Constraints Shrink Your Ambition

Artists routinely work with less money, less staff, and less time than most businesses ever will. It doesn’t stop them from creating experiences people remember for years. That should tell you something: meaningful and expensive are not the same category.

A bigger screen can impress an audience. Impressing someone isn’t the same as changing something in them. The Pixar animators who obsess over a three-second coin flip on screen aren’t spending more budget — they’re spending more attention.

This is maybe the most practical of the four lessons, because it’s the easiest to test. Take the part of your event with the smallest budget line — a name badge, a hallway, the walk from registration to the first session — and ask what it would take to make that moment feel considered, not just functional. Nothing about that requires a bigger line item. It requires deciding it matters.

4. Build In Room to Experiment

Artists are experimental in their ways. Very often they will have plans for executing a work but will leave room for trial and error. You don’t need to reinvent the entire event to think like an artist. You need one deliberate opening for the untested.

If your event runs on ten fixed decisions — venue, format, agenda structure, the rest — try treating one of them as unproven this year. Not the whole show. Just enough room to find out something you didn’t know before you started designing.

Where This Leads

None of these four lessons require a bigger budget or a creative department you don’t have. They require deciding, before you plan the first session, that the person attending is the point — not the logistics that get them there.

Before your next event, ask the question that started this piece: when people leave, what do we want them to feel? If nobody in the room can answer quickly, that’s not a logistics gap. It’s the actual work still waiting to be done.