Most event-planning chaos is not a strategy problem. It is an information problem. The booth number lives in one person's inbox, the shipping tracking is in a text thread, the speaking-session time is in somebody's memory, and the badge list is on a laptop that is currently on a plane. Nobody can find anything, so everybody asks the one person who knows, and that person spends the week before the show as a human search engine instead of a planner. We have seen this play out at company after company, and the fix is almost always the same.
The fix is the least glamorous idea in event operations, which also happens to be the most valuable: put everything about an event in one living place, and make that place the answer to every quick question.
