Most organizations know the rules for getting things done: dedicated teams, formal progress reports, clear meeting agendas, structured oversight. Yet most struggle to follow these proven practices, not because of resistance or lack of knowledge, but because something about these “universal” best practices doesn’t quite fit. This session challenges our assumptions about best practices themselves, revealing how rigid adherence to conventional wisdom can prevent us from seeing what comes next.
Learn why organizations consistently struggle to adopt practices they know are valuable, and when that resistance signals a need to dig deeper rather than push harder. Through real-world examples, you’ll see how to distinguish between organizational resistance that needs to be overcome and resistance that’s revealing legitimate gaps in your frameworks. The leaders who read those signals correctly are the ones who know when to drive adoption forward and when to stop and ask whether the practice itself is the problem.
Walk away with practical approaches for knowing when to push best practice forward and when to envision what “best” could look like for your unique context, a sharper set of questions to ask before rolling out the next “proven” framework, and a clearer view of when the rules are working for you and when they’re holding you back.
The project manager role is changing faster than most PMO leaders can develop their teams. The skills that defined a strong PM five years ago, like disciplined planning, careful status reporting, and methodical risk tracking, are exactly the skills getting absorbed by tools, automated by AI, or devalued by leaders who want different things from the role. Meanwhile, the skills that will define a strong PM five years from now are the ones the market barely supplies, your training budget probably doesn’t cover, and your hiring pipeline isn’t yet built to find. You are responsible for developing the PMs you have and hiring the ones you need at a moment when both jobs are getting harder.
Most advice on this topic stops at “send them to training.” Training has a real role to play, but it can’t carry the weight PMO leaders have been placing on it. Real skill development for PMs in this environment is a system design question. The PMs on your team will get good at what their environment rewards them for getting good at, which means the work you assign, the conversations you model, the decisions you ask them to make, and the feedback you give are doing as much to shape their capability as any course they’ll attend. The PMO leaders who develop strong PMs in the next few years will be the ones who treat skill-building as something they design into the day-to-day, alongside the formal development their team is already getting.
This session offers a concrete playbook for upskilling the PMs already on your team and hiring for the skills the market doesn’t yet name well. Walk away with a clearer view of which capabilities matter most for the PMs of the next decade, a set of practical moves you can make this quarter to build those capabilities on the job, and a sharper framework for the next time you write a job description and realize the role you actually need doesn’t quite exist yet
Every PMO leader saw the same headline: 80% of project management tasks automated by 2030. And every PMO leader has been quietly asking the same questions ever since. Why do we exist if the work we coordinate gets coordinated by something else? What will we actually do? How will we add value when the things we used to be measured on are the things being automated away first?
The answers on offer have been mostly unhelpful. “Become a strategic partner.” “Focus on value, not metrics.” “Lead with influence.” True enough to nod at, but vague enough to leave PMO leaders without anything specific to do to prepare. We’re clear on what’s about to get removed from the role. We’re unsure of the new roles that will be created in its place. So this session does the work most conversations skip: it games out five possible futures for the project management profession, each one forcing a different answer to the question of what a PMO would have to be to add value. And each one gets sharper when you flip the question entirely: stop assuming the PMO must exist, ask what AI will actually do, then ask what’s left…and whether a PMO is the best way to deliver it.
That’s a harder question than anyone wants to admit, but it’s also where the real opportunity sits. There is a bright future for PMOs—just not for the ones waiting for something to become best practice before they try it. The PMOs that thrive in the next decade will be the ones willing to experiment now, while the shape of the profession is still being decided. Walk away with five futures worth preparing for, a clearer view of which assumptions in your current PMO won’t survive the transition, and a way to start running small experiments this quarter—before the answers calcify and your window to shape them closes.
You want your team to move faster. You’ve said so in every all-hands and offsite, every one-on-one. You’ve removed blockers and approved budget. You’ve told people to stop bringing you problems without solutions. And yet the work still drags. Your team is working hard, and somehow the output keeps slipping. Before you blame the talent pool, there’s a harder question worth asking: what if the barrier to execution is you?
Senior leaders rarely slow the work on purpose. They do it through patterns they don’t see: late-stage reversals that erase a quarter of work, unscheduled deep-dives that consume a team’s week, mixed messages on priorities that leave everyone hedging, and the inability to issue a credible no when one is needed. The leaders most likely to fall into these patterns are the ones who care most about the outcome. That’s exactly what makes the patterns so hard to spot from the inside.
This session names four specific leader behaviors that undermine execution, and gives you a way to recognize them in yourself before someone on your team has to. Walk away with a candid self-assessment you can run on your last 30 days of leadership, plus a clearer view of what to do instead the next time the work needs to move and you’re the one in the way.
You spent months building it. The intake process, the status template, the governance framework, the reporting dashboard—whichever artifact your PMO invested in this quarter. You ran the working sessions, gathered the input, refined the design, and rolled it out with training and documentation. And now you’re watching teams route around it or stop using it altogether. Worse, the feedback you’re getting isn’t useful: half the teams say it’s too heavy, the other half say it’s too light. A few have stopped engaging with the PMO altogether. The environment you dropped your artifact into is wired to reject it.
PMO output gets ignored for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the quality of the work. Templates compete with the dozen other places teams already report status, and governance frameworks land inside cultures wired to reward speed over rigor. Tools get adopted by the people who need them least and avoided by the people who need them most. When PMO leaders treat adoption as a training problem or a communication problem, they end up rebuilding the same artifact three times, each version slightly better and each version equally ignored.
This session gives you a way to diagnose why your PMO’s output keeps getting ignored, and a sharper approach for designing the next artifact so it gets used the first time. Walk away with a one-page diagnostic you can run on any artifact your PMO has shipped in the last year, plus a clearer view of which fixes are worth your team’s time and which are just polishing something the environment was never going to accept.
You did everything the playbook said to do. You secured executive sponsorship, built the comms plan, ran the training, hit the milestones. By every conventional measure, the change initiative was executed well. And yet six months later, the new process is half-adopted while the old workarounds creep back in, and someone in a leadership meeting is asking why the transformation hasn’t moved the numbers. If this pattern feels familiar, you’ve hit the limits of a playbook built for a different kind of change.
Most change frameworks were built for a world where change arrived in discrete, well-bounded waves. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Today’s transformations land inside organizations already running three other initiatives, with executive priorities shifting mid-flight. The new behaviors the change requires often clash with the same deadlines and performance metrics that propped up the old way of working in the first place. When change stalls in this environment, the cause shows up in the dozens of small calls people make every week about what to prioritize, who to involve, what to push back on, and what’s safe to try. Those calls still align with the old incentives, even after the new process launches.
This session shows you what drives stalled change in your organization and gives you a sharper way to diagnose the problem before it becomes a post-mortem. You’ll leave with a clearer read on the change you’re already managing and a sharper approach for the next transformation that can’t afford to stall.
