What is a showflow? A practical guide to the live-event running order
A showflow is the cue-level running order a production crew calls a live event from. This is what belongs in one, how it differs from an agenda, and how to build one that survives contact with a real show day.
What a showflow is
A showflow is the cue-level running order a production crew calls a live event from. It breaks the programme down past sessions into the individual actions that make each session happen — house lights to half, VT roll, mic 3 open, lower-third on — each with an owner, a department and a position in the sequence. The agenda tells an audience what is on. The showflow tells the crew what to do, and when.
The distinction matters because the two documents fail differently. An agenda that is slightly wrong is embarrassing. A showflow that is slightly wrong is a missed cue in front of a room.
A useful showflow is not a longer agenda. It is a different granularity. One 45-minute keynote might be a single agenda row and fifteen showflow cues — walk-on music, lights, VT, the speaker's first slide, the lower-third with their name, the Q&A mic runners, the walk-off. Each of those is somebody's job at a specific moment.
What belongs in a cue
Different productions use different columns, but the ones that earn their place are consistent. A cue that cannot be actioned by the person reading it is not a cue, it is a note.
- Cue number
- Sortable and stable. Decimals (47.0, 47.1) let you insert without renumbering the whole sheet — which you will, on the day.
- Action
- What happens, in the imperative, short enough to be read aloud over comms. "House to half", not "the house lights should be brought down to approximately fifty percent".
- Department
- Who owns it. LX, A/V, sound, GFX, stage, comms. Anyone scanning for their own cues should be able to filter to them.
- State
- Standby, GO, done. The single most-read column during a show, and the reason a showflow cannot live in a static document.
- Timing
- Planned, and — if you can — actual. The gap between the two is the only early warning you get that the day is drifting.
How to build one
The order of operations matters more than the tool. Build it in this sequence and the sheet tends to hold together; build it out of order and you spend show day reconciling.
Start from the programme, not a blank sheet
Every cue hangs off a session. If you author the showflow separately from the agenda, you have created a second version of the event that has to be kept in step by hand — and it will not be.
Model the gaps as real items
Changeovers, walk-ons, breaks and set changes are where events actually go wrong. Twelve unmodelled minutes between two sessions is twelve minutes nobody owns.
Assign a department to every cue
If a cue has no owner, it will be called by whoever notices — which on a bad day is nobody.
Rehearse the sheet, not just the show
Read it aloud in order before doors. Cues that are ambiguous when spoken are ambiguous on comms, and comms is where they will be heard.
Decide who can change it live
One person edits during the show. Everyone else raises. This is a discipline question, not a software one, and it is the difference between a running order and an argument.
Where showflows go wrong
Almost all of it comes down to copies. The running order exists in the showflow, in the agenda the audience sees, in the speaker packs, in the signage and in somebody's printout. Change one and the others are wrong until a human remembers to update them.
The second most common failure is granularity drift: a sheet that starts cue-level and degrades into session-level halfway through the afternoon, because the person building it ran out of time. A half-detailed showflow is more dangerous than an honest agenda, because the crew trusts it.
How EventBlok approaches this
Everything above applies whatever you use, including a spreadsheet. This section is what EventBlok specifically does, so you can judge whether it is relevant to you.
In EventBlok the showflow is a deeper view of the same programme the agenda publishes, rather than a separate document. Cues belong to sessions, so moving a session moves its cues with it, and the published agenda, speaker pages and signage read the same record. That is the whole design decision — there is no export step between planning and delivery, because there is nothing to export from one place to another.
You can see the running order view on the showflow page, and how the same change reaches other surfaces in how a change reaches every screen.
Plan the event. Publish the programme. Run the show.
One event spine, many views. Build the programme once, then give every person the right live view of it.