Today was day 1 of the PMI’s Leadership Institute Meeting (LIM) for the North America region. The LIM meetings are a place where volunteer leaders of PMI’s Chapters, SIGs, and Communities of Practice get together and trade notes about running their volunteer organizations. This year’s meeting is at the same Gaylord Palms Convention Center as last May’s Scrum Gathering that featured strong PMI collaboration.

Opportunity in Crisis
The morning started off with a motivational keynote by change management speaker Dr Gary Brant. He talked about finding the opportunity within any crisis. “In every tornado there is a golden opportunity. Your job as leader is to find it. Change is not the enemy; it is life. If you’re not changing, you’re dead.” He offered up a toolkit of principles to help do just that:

• Rule 1 for managing change – motivate the moderate 80%, ignore the rest
• Change can be hard. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable (this is a common quote among Agile PM circles)
• You can’t do it alone. Adversity can bring you closer together
• Rather than just managing your time, invest time into your people,
• Let go of “what if” and “if only”
• To lead change, be passionately patient
• Never give in. Believing the opportunity is there, will lead you to it

At one point he tried to get us to experience change by telling a room of 700 people to get up, switch to another seat far away, and introduce yourself to a stranger. The room was so packed, it was too hard for me to move, so I surrendered to my situational boundaries and just chatted with my neighbor. Nevertheless, the talk was filled with humorous anecodotes to underscore these principles. Very good.

What is a Project Management Community?
Next on deck, I facilitated a breakout session on “Community Engagement”. With all the changes in the PMI of late, I wanted to get a group discussion going about the purpose of a PM community. I asked the group to cover 3 questions in successive table discussions: (a) what is your mission? (b) What does success look like? (c) What is the next 1st step? There were over 50 people at the session, and many offered up some intriguing answers:

• Engagement from leaders to members is a prerequisite of community of engagement as a whole
• Promote professional success stories (e.g. because of my SIG membership, I located someone who led me to a job)
• Recognize tenured members & and high-performing volunteers
• Keep an eye towards perceived ROI of membership dues & volunteer time. Do members get more in value than what they put in?

It was a great discussion. For those of you who are community/chapter leaders, I have posted the detailed notes here.

Agile Awareness
There was also a chance to have lots of great discussion with other leaders. During the lunch and evening receptions, I chatted with tons of PMI leaders interested in Agile Project Management, and the mission of our Community to promote it. One SIG offered to host a webinar, and another chapter offered to coordinate an educational seminar. At one point, community mentor Dan Tuten told me a story that an Agile practioner on his project team, once skeptical of PMI, signed up as a PMI Agile Community member to ensure the Agile message was told properly. In my book , that constitutes a wide variety of community engagement.