--- title: Nobody Is Going to Write Down What They Actually Want description: How do I work out what my boss actually wants from an event? An honest look at the unwritten goals behind Australian corporate event briefs, and the question that surfaces them. image: https://themelbeventco.com.au/hubfs/New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(5).png --- [Skip to content](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog/nobody-is-going-to-write-down-what-they-actually-want#main-content) [![The Melbourne Event Company](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/The%20Melb%20Event%20(1).png?width=200&height=200&name=The%20Melb%20Event%20(1).png)Homepage](https://www.themelbeventco.com.au) - [Home](https://themelbeventco.com.au) - [About Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/about-us) - [Services](https://themelbeventco.com.au/services-1) - [Tips & Tools](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog) - [Contact Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/contact-us-2) - 03 4827 9311 - [Home](https://themelbeventco.com.au) - [About Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/about-us) - [Services](https://themelbeventco.com.au/services-1) - [Tips & Tools](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog) - [Contact Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/contact-us-2) - 03 4827 9311 ![](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(5).png?width=1700&height=800&name=New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(5).png) Corporate Event Planning # Nobody Is Going to Write Down What They Actually Want ![Ilan](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/Untitled%20design%20(30).png?width=48&height=48&name=Untitled%20design%20(30).png) Ilan October 27, 2026 Years ago, early in my career, I ran an annual trivia night for a membership organisation. Members, volunteers, a thank you at the end of the year, same thing every twelve months. I ran it three years running and I could not have told you what it was for. Not the stated purpose. The stated purpose was easy. I mean the real one. The thing it was being measured against afterwards, in the thirty second conversation that decided whether I had done well. ## The brief The brief amounted to this. Organise the trivia night. You did it last year, you know what to do. Only thing is, you picked really loud venues. That last sentence was the whole thing, and I missed it completely. It isn't feedback about acoustics. Nobody has ever lost sleep over decibels. What it actually meant was that people couldn't hear each other, and hearing each other was apparently the point, which tells you the night was for conversation rather than atmosphere. That's a goal. It arrived dressed as a complaint about a venue. I heard a note. Find somewhere quieter. Which is a completely reasonable thing to hear, because it's word for word what was said. So I went and found quieter venues. Pubs with function rooms at the back, the sensible middle of the market, the thing that gets signed off every year at organisations like that one across the country. Turns out we didn't want pubs. We wanted our own meeting rooms. The ones upstairs. The ones where we did the board papers. ## I thought this was a terrible idea I did think that, and I said so, once, in the way you say things once when you are young enough to still be surprised. A trivia night under office fluorescents, in the room where people had sat through governance training in March. I was certain the members would hate it. I was optimising for the attendee experience, which was the job I had been given and the thing I assumed I would be judged on. The chief executive was certain it was right, and comfortably within what we could deliver on the budget we had. Neither of us was being stupid. She was optimising for something else, and that something else had not been said out loud, so I was throwing darts with the lights off. ## What I think it actually was It took me a few years and a few more jobs to put it together, and I'd now say it was cost discipline dressed up as intent. I also think she didn't want it to be resource intensive, because the night was one of forty things on her desk and anything that needed managing was a tax on her week. I think she wanted somewhere she could park. I think she did not want a late night. None of which was ever going to appear in a brief, because written down like that it sounds selfish. It isn't. It's a person with a job. And the genuine belief that the members would enjoy it sat alongside all of it quite happily. She needed to present as giving people what they wanted, and broadly speaking she was: the things the people want that also happen to suit her. That's the part the industry doesn't say out loud. A decent chunk of what your event is for is about the person signing it off, and that is normal rather than a scandal. Most of the time the unstated goal isn't being hidden from you. It is so obvious to the person holding it that it never occurs to them it needs saying. ## The ones that genuinely can't be said Sometimes it is deliberate, and those are harder. Later, somewhere else, I worked for someone whose events were, without exception, built around his own visibility. He would have hated that description and he would have meant it. He wanted the work to be brilliant and he wanted to be known as the person who had made it brilliant, and he wanted that recognition to arrive unprompted, as though the room had worked it out on its own. That goal can never be stated, because stating it destroys it. You cannot ask your event manager to engineer spontaneous admiration. The second it is in the brief it isn't spontaneous and everyone involved knows it. So it got designed around by inference, badly, by me, guessing. Which was a waste, because if he had just said it I could have built him a proper moment at the right point in the run sheet and made it serve the campaign at the same time. Unstated goals don't evaporate when nobody states them. They get met by accident or they don't get met at all. ## What actually helps Not a better briefing template. We have all seen the template. It has a box marked objectives, the box gets filled in with something like celebrate and thank our people, and everyone moves on satisfied that a process has occurred. The questions that get you somewhere are smaller, and most of them are about last time. What did you like about last year's. What would you change. Who specifically do you want to leave happy, by name. What would make you say afterwards that it went well. And, asked lightly: what time do you want to be in the car. That one is not a joke. If the honest answer is nine thirty, you have learned more about the shape of the night than any objectives box will give you. You still won't get the whole picture. You'll get more than you had, which is the realistic ceiling on this. ## What I'd do differently Build it the way they asked. Properly, without sulking, because a half hearted version of someone else's idea teaches you nothing and hands everyone an excuse. Then review it honestly afterwards, which is the bit I skipped for years. If the members love the meeting room, you have learned something real about what this group actually wants, and that is worth more than having been right. If they don't, you have evidence instead of a hunch, and nobody can say the brief wasn't delivered. This is the part of event management that never makes the job description. You are not delivering the brief. You are working out, over years and over several bosses, what the person who wrote it meant, and building up enough credit that eventually somebody tells you straight. I'm better at it than I was. 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