Events Are Being Rewritten—And You’re Probably Still Running the Old Playbook
In Her New Book, Sasha Frieze—the Wise UK Strategy Guru Rewrites What Event Leadership Really Means
Before she wrote the playbook, she lived inside the room.
Not a boardroom. Not a ballroom. A purple seventies living room in northern England, anchored by a Saarinen x Knoll Tulip table and a mother who filled it with musicians, neighbours, and strong opinions over weak tea. Her family believed in service without spectacle—organizing meals, coordinating hospital visits, quietly making things work behind the scenes.
Sasha Frieze didn’t know it then, but she was learning the emotional physics of gatherings. That people arrive unsure and leave aligned—or they don’t. That hospitality is not the same as production. That community isn’t decoration. It’s the work.
Years later, in the under-lit halls of conference venues, government buildings, and hybrid summits, those instincts would return. As an event strategist, she wasn’t there for the applause. She was there for the shift.
That’s why she wrote The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook. Not to tell event professionals how to run a smoother schedule—but to remind them that every event is its own small world. And it deserves leadership.
It takes a certain audacity to name your book The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook. Not Director. Not Producer. Chief. Sasha Frieze doesn’t shy away from the implication. She’s not branding. She’s asserting that live event strategy belongs in the C-suite, not the service hallway.
And she’s doing it at the precise moment when two powerful cultural forces are colliding—the experiential era, and the gathering economy. Brands don’t just want to host events anymore. They want to stage experiences to serve their interests. They want meaning, memory, movement. And they’re realizing that none of that happens without someone who can command the room, read its energy, and design for actual change.
You’ve been told to “own the room.” But chances are, you’re still running the run of show.
Who is Sasha Frieze? Maybe not so quiet in the wings.
Not a founder. Not a futurist. Not the face on a stage with a clicker and a quote from Brené Brown. She’s something harder to define—and more useful. She’s a strategist who’s spent decades behind the scenes of high-stakes rooms, asking sharper questions than most keynote speakers dare.
But the question remains: what does it actually mean to lead an event rather than simply execute one? For Frieze, it’s about stepping into the heart of the gathering, taking responsibility for both the intention and the outcome, and being unafraid to challenge assumptions that have long gone unexamined. Leadership, in this context, is less about hierarchy and more about willingness to shape the emotional and strategic landscape of the room.
The “not so” quiet mind in the wings who rewires the purpose of a gathering before anyone realizes it’s off course. A London-based advisor who’s shaped think tank summits, political convenings, NGO coalitions, trade shows, and mission-driven campaigns. The person you call when the room looks perfect, but no one knows what it’s for.
Sasha Frieze sees it every day: experienced event professionals with influence in their hands—but no real authority in the room. They’re planning the panels, cueing the lights, writing the welcome copy. But in many cases, strategy? That’s still sitting in another department. Another floor. Another salary band.
Her new book isn’t a guide. It’s a warning.
Because the event industry, for all its talk of transformation, still treats its smartest operators like stage managers. Frieze—part strategist, part fixer, part quiet dissident—has spent three decades stepping into the dead space between the script and the story, the run sheet and the reality, asking the one question few people want to hear: Why are we doing this? And who decided?
She’s not angry. She’s curious. Frieze’s work isn’t about calling out failure—it’s about surfacing what got missed in the rush to recap. One of her most requested offerings is The Event Health Check: a deep dive review for gatherings that picks apart what happened in the room, where it aligned, and where it didn’t. Not to assign blame, but to uncover truth. Because every event leaves behind a trail of signals. Most organizers are simply too exhausted—or too relieved—to follow it.
Some may criticize that there was a time when events were emotional engines. They moved people. They shaped culture. They shifted the tone of industries. Now they’re increasingly a hybrid of decor, tech platforms, and LinkedIn recaps. They’re nice. They’re efficient. They’re forgettable.
Frieze doesn’t want to run your next summit. She wants to interrogate your last one.
When she enters the room, she’s not asking where the AV table is. She’s looking for the person who set the brief. The person who called the gathering into being. And if that person isn’t in the room—or doesn’t know what outcome they’re designing for—then that’s the real problem.
That’s what The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook is about. Not logistics. Not decor. Not vibe. Power. The invisible power that drives people into a room, sets the context, and determines whether anything real happens after the drinks are cleared.
Frieze, now in her fifties, is not the most visible name in the experience economy. But she’s one of the only ones saying the quiet part out loud: most events have no idea what they’re doing strategically—and no framework for finding out.
She’s not offering affirmations. She’s offering structure. A vocabulary. A set of tools for reclaiming the seat that event professionals were never officially offered, butoffered but always deserved.
The playbook is not full of rules. It’s full of decisions.
Decisions like: what’s the transformation you’re claiming to create? Who is that transformation really for? Who isn’t in the room? Why not? What’s going to happen six months after this event—and how will you know if it worked?
These aren’t easy questions. But they’re better than another brainstorm on icebreakers.
Frieze doesn’t say it, but you can feel it in every line of the book: you think you’re running the event, but you’re just decorating someone else’s strategy.
She’s here to flip that.
She grew up in a world where context and community mattered. Where a room wasn’t just a room, but a frame. Where design followed purpose. She studied religious studies at university—not to find answers, but to learn how people build meaning. Later, her early career in London media and ad agencies gave her a ringside seat to messaging, persuasion, and narrative architecture. But it was in events—first at IIR, then Informa—where she found the canvas big enough to blend the philosophical and the practical. Events weren’t just communications. They were belief systems, staged.
That same instinct carried her from the early years of her career in the London media world into the under-mapped space of B2B events, legal conferences, and policy summits—places where impact was supposed to happen, but rarely did.
What if Frieze wrote The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook to make herself obsolete? What if the real goal is for strategy to stop needing translators—for event professionals to stop waiting for permission and start speaking in outcomes from the very beginning?
The book isn’t trying to make you feel good. It’s trying to make you take yourself seriously.
It’s a call to action. A reminder that strategy doesn’t belong in someone else’s department. That the outcome of an event isn’t what happens on stage—it’s what moves when the room dissolves. And if Frieze has her way, the book will eventually become irrelevant. Because if the work gets absorbed into how we do events, if the role of Chief Event Officer becomes as obvious as stage lights or budget lines, then the frameworks won’t need repeating. They’ll just be how we lead. To see that live events are not productions. They’re propositions. Strategic, emotional, political propositions—about who gets heard, what gets remembered, and what gets acted on.
Frieze doesn’t need to be the keynote. She’d rather be the strategist who asked the question that saved your event before it flopped.
And if that sounds less glamorous than the gala, that’s fine. She never wanted the spotlight. She wanted the room to mean something.
And if you’re an event professional still chasing validation, still waiting for someone else to hand you strategy, maybe this isn’t your book.
But if you’re ready to stop executing and start leading, then this book is for you
.from Sasha Frieze’s The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook
1. Every Event Is Its Own Small World. Frieze doesn’t treat events as formats. She treats them as ecosystems—temporary communities that require clarity of purpose, structure, and emotional intention.
2. She Didn’t Write the Rules—She Wrote the Plays. This isn’t a manual. It’s a flexible framework that empowers live decision-making. It’s for leaders who don’t just plan, but adapt in real time.
3. The Real Strategy Happens Before the Doors Open. Sasha teaches event professionals to interrogate the purpose, power dynamics, and outcomes of a gathering before any signage goes up. No vibe without vision.
4. Postmortems Are Where the Learning Lives. Her signature offering isn’t just event design—it’s the Event Health Check. She helps teams understand what really happened in the room—and how to evolve.
5. The Best Event Pros Don’t Wait for Strategy. They Speak It. Frieze elevates the invisible instincts of planners into an executive vocabulary. She gives structure to what many pros already know—and haven’t had the authority to own.
6. She Wrote the Book to Make It Obsolete The goal of The Chief Event Officer’s Playbook is for its thinking to become so embedded that no one needs to reference it again. The book isn’t just a guide. It’s a transfer of power.