By Paul Foster | Founder & CEO, OnePlan
Paul Foster is the Founder & CEO of OnePlan, and was the Official Supporter of GIS Mapping & Digital Twin Software for Paris 2024. He has been involved in nine Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Stand outside any major venue during a large-scale event and you’ll see the result of months, sometimes years, of meticulous planning. What you won’t see is the friction that almost derailed it.
Here in Milan for the 2026 Winter Olympics, watching the Games take shape across multiple venues, I keep coming back to a deceptively simple question: what happens when every functional area does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and the result is still a problem?
This is the central challenge of large-scale event operations, and it’s one that most planning frameworks still don’t fully address.
The Crowd Barrier problem
Let me give you a concrete example. Branding on crowd barriers looks fantastic. Bold, colourful, highly visible, exactly what a sponsorship or marketing team wants to deliver. The barriers become a canvas.
The problem is physics. Standard crowd barriers are significantly lighter than most people assume. A branding panel stretched across one acts like a sail. In wind, or under crowd pressure, a branded barrier becomes a safety liability.
The marketing team isn’t wrong to want brand visibility. The safety team isn’t wrong to specify barriers at certain locations. The operations team isn’t wrong to approve the barrier placement. Everyone has done their job correctly. And yet, without a shared view of how these decisions interact, you end up with a conflict that only becomes visible on-site, at exactly the point when it’s hardest to fix.
This is not a hypothetical. It’s representative of dozens of cross-functional conflicts that emerge at major events every cycle.
Milano Cortina got it right
What struck me at the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena this week was a small but telling detail in the queue management system. Rather than wrapping crowd barriers in full branding panels, the team has deployed “barrier jackets”, partial coverings placed on selected barriers at deliberate intervals to deliver visual impact without compromising stability.
It’s an elegant solution, but what I respect most about it isn’t the design itself. It’s what the design tells you about the process behind it. Someone, or more likely, some system, enabled the marketing, safety, and operations teams to see the conflict early enough to solve it creatively, rather than reactively.
That’s the difference between good planning and great planning.
Why functional silos are the default, and the problem
An Olympic Organising Committee can contain dozens of functional areas: transport, security, accreditation, broadcast, medical, catering, sponsorship, ticketing, protocol, and many more. Each has its own leadership, its own objectives, its own operational logic.
This structure makes sense. Specialisation is how you manage complexity at scale. But it creates a fundamental tension: the decisions made within each functional area don’t exist in isolation. They exist in a shared physical and operational space, and they interact, often in ways no single team can fully anticipate.
The sponsorship team places a structure near a fire exit. The catering team positions equipment in a service corridor. The transport team schedules a logistics vehicle movement that coincides with peak spectator flow. None of these decisions is unreasonable in isolation. Together, they create a bottleneck, a hazard, or a delay.
In my experience across nine Olympic and Paralympic Games, the events that run most smoothly are not the ones where every team worked hardest in isolation. They’re the ones where every team had visibility of what the others were doing.
The Single Source of Truth Principle
A “single source of truth” sounds like a technology concept, it is. But it’s also, at its core, a planning philosophy.
The principle is straightforward: every team, at every level, should be working from the same underlying picture of the venue, the operations, and the constraints. Not a version of the picture. The picture.
When that’s in place, cross-functional conflicts don’t disappear, but they surface early, when solutions are still possible. The barrier jacket in Milan isn’t a workaround, it’s the result of a planning process that caught the conflict before it became a constraint.
When it’s not in place, you get the version of events that every experienced event professional recognises: a cascade of individually rational decisions that collectively create an operational problem, discovered on-site, solved under pressure, at significant cost.
What’s changed, and what hasn’t
The tools available to event planners have evolved substantially. Digital twin technology now allows organising teams to model venues in full before a single barrier is placed or a cable is run. Every functional area can operate within the same spatial model, and conflicts between their plans become visible before they become physical.
At OnePlan, this is what we’ve been building toward across multiple Games cycles. The platform we’ve developed as the IOC’s official Digital Twin Supplier isn’t primarily about technology. It’s about giving every team a shared operational reality to plan within, the same floor plan, the same constraint layer, the same picture of what everyone else is doing.
What hasn’t changed is the underlying challenge. Events bring together people with different objectives, different priorities, and different definitions of success. Coordinating them effectively has always required more than good intentions and regular meetings, it requires a shared foundation.
A question worth asking
If you’re involved in planning a major event, at any scale, the most useful question you can ask isn’t “is each team doing their job?” It’s “can each team see what the others are doing?”
The barrier jacket in Milan is a small thing. But small things, done right, are what large events are actually made of, and they only happen when everyone is working from the same plan.
