IMEXscoop talks transformational events with event strategy consultant, author and IMEX speaker, Sasha Frieze.
If someone can only adopt one step straight away from your 10-step blueprint, which would you pick?
Define your transformation intent before anything else. Not your theme or your speaker lineup, but your why. What shift do you want in thinking, behavior or relationships? Everything else—content, experience, measurement—flows from that anchor. Without it, you're producing an event. With it, you're engineering change. That single discipline is what separates organisations that run events from those that use events to lead.
What surprises people most when mapping stakeholders visually?
Most people are surprised by the depth and nuance of insight that emerges. The map itself is unique to your market and a visual shorthand that often replaces a 20-slide deck. Looking through the lens of buyers (delegates), sellers (sponsors and exhibitors), VIPs and media is a learning process. Event professionals understand their market instinctively, but the Market Map turns that understanding into a shared tool the whole team can use.
What kinds of questions genuinely change how an organization plans and measures an event?
The four questions in the blueprint create a strategic framework for designing truly transformational events:
- Why are you creating this event?
- Who is the event for?
- What will the event experience be?
- How do you build impact beyond the event?
These questions force organisations out of logistics and into outcomes. That's the shift—from event producer to strategic leader.
What's one early-career lesson you still use today?
Never underestimate the power of the room. Early in my career, I watched a perfectly planned conference fall flat because the energy design was wrong—seating, sequencing, even the silences. The content was excellent, but transformation happens between people, not just on stage. I've carried that lesson through a thousand events. Your role isn't to fill a program; it's to design the transformation. Logistics enable. Experience transforms.
What does a Chief Event Officer's mindset look like in practice?
A Chief Event Officer enters every conversation asking one question: what transformation does this event create at the deepest level? Not "what's the format?" but "what changes if this event succeeds?" That mindset belongs at the strategy table, not the logistics desk. It measures outcomes, not outputs. And it earns influence by speaking the language of the business.
Sasha Frieze at IMEX
Books at IMEX
Sasha will be signing copies of her book, The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook.
Other books and authors at IMEX include
The Confident Kid Playbook, Marjie Hadad;
How to Pitch, Kendra Valentine;
The Experience Design Building Blocks, Pigalle Tavakkoli and
Henry Coutinho Mason, The Future Normal.
