A couple weeks ago, the PMI Washington DC hosted a webinar by Agile practitioner Joe Luttrell. The talk was call “Project Management: The Ultimate Calling?”, and it blew me away. You can download the slides, but they don’t convey the full essence of his story.

What’s Happened Before
Take a look at these facts:

Granted, I took some liberty by adding in the the observations about the Agile PM movement, but the overlap is uncanny. CPM, the PMI, the PMBOK, even the Agile movement were motivated by a shakeup in the business economy, or to cut to the chase:

When the market suffered recession, the market reacted with a further maturing of project management.

What’s Next
Joe also offered an analysis of what the next innovation in project management might be, by taking a look at digital technology. While most futurists declare us to have entered into the Knowledge Age or the Information Age, Joe noticed emerging technologies are mostly centered around communication. The Cell phone, CD/DVD, PDA, internet, PDA phone, Wireless, intranets, and social media are all communication media. Granted, communication is how knowledge and information is created. But look closer, and you’ll see these technologies are also progressively more collaborative. It’s more than an information age we’ve stumbled into; it’s a “Collaboration Age”.

This collaboration dynamic is a having a game-changing dynamic on management. Work used to be done under a centralized control structure. From customer support call centers to outsourcing vendors to teleworking professionals, work is increasingly decentralized. As it becomes more distributed, collaboration becomes the power play that differentiates one team over another. In yesterday’s world, the one with the most control over resources was the winner. In today’s world, the one with the most distributed and collaborative power structure is the winner. Nobody is making serious money on social media, but everyone is raving about it…because we know that collaboration is the new killer app. Well isn’t that what project managers do? We corral a variety of players from all departments toward a common goal.

What Now?
Joe concluded by giving us 3 concrete techniques we can employ to become those collaborative project managers:

1. Progressive Collaboration – Working together is a fluid endeavor. You learn each other’s habits, styles, interests, and preferences. And as soon as you get to know one another, someone new has entered the project. You can’t figure this collaboration thing all at once. You have to adapt to people along the way, and you have to persist through the annoying personalities and awkward moments
2. Conflict Confrontation – Joe reminded us that there are 3 ways to resolve conflict: Compromise (lose-lose), Smoothing (avoidance), or Confrontation. I struggle with this. I am a people-pleaser by nature. Even though I know putting an awkward issue on the table is the most effective thing to do, I get anxious about it. I get it, but that doesn’t make it easy.
3. Decisive Facilitation – As you can imagine, “collaboration” does NOT mean sitting in a meeting for hours on end, listening to everyone ramble, and beloabor the points over and over. Instead, be an intentional leader of any meeting. Know what decisions need to be made, so that you can drive discussion towards that goal.

If you can’t tell, I’m inspired. We are about to ride a the wave of a collaboration revolution. Our teams are relying on us to be the leaders that guide them along that wave. If you commit to developing these three skills, then you be a project manager that helps to change the world.