#AIPM2019 Top Highlights Part 1: The Keynotes

Last week at the Australian Institute of Project Management National Conference in Melbourne, I launched the idea of "job hackathons". With the conference's theme of "Revolution", these events could support team engagement and business sustainability during technology change, including automation and artificial intelligence. I define a job hackathon as:

“A design sprint-like event where team members impacted by a restructure, business leaders, project managers, business SMEs, and HR experts, collaborate intensively on designing new job titles, Job descriptions, and job skill matrixes, with the goal of creating a future-focused functioning team structure by the end”. 

Though you may have missed my presentation, never fear! Lata got your back! I've popped a downloadable and printable "Job Hackathon Planning Workbook" up on our Passion Pioneers website, so head across and grab it and use it and share away.

There were more...

But I wasn't the only speaker. There were 62 speakers all up. Last year, I wrote 56 PAGES of handwritten-scrawl and condensed it into one (rather long) LinkedIn article. This year thankfully I only have 18 pages of written notes, and probably a couple more pages typed into my phone. So here it is - my key takeaways and highlights from #AIPM2019 National Conference. And this time around, I'm going to break it down in 3 articles:

1. The Keynotes
2. The Concurrents
3. The Workshops

So keep your eye out every Thursday morning for the next set of top takeaways.

The Keynotes

I'll never forget last year's keynote of Dr Louise Mahler with a room of 600 engineers and project managers singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow". This year's keynotes also did not disappoint.

Steve Sammartino

The power of emojis

Steve is a hilarious technologist and futurist and probably my biggest takeaway was that emojis are the #1 revolution of our day because language is the killer app of humanity. Our early civilisations communicated in picture form, and it seems we've come full circle as emojis cut across cultural and geographical barriers as a unifying global language. Which makes sense given that I know from my training and practice in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that we ALL make pictures in our heads to process meaning. Steve laid it out clear: "the human brain hasn't had a software update in 200,000 years." Damn, we buggy!

From text to voice

Steve also sees a future trend of communicating shifting from written to voice, which was music to my ears as I've had to start wearing glasses due to screen-time eye strain. Again, taking cues from NLP and the communication model, we know that 55% of the meaning of communication is physiology/body language, 38% tonality and only 7% words. Computers and AI have the words part downpat, we now progress to voice and amp up our tonality component, and when the real-life Terminator has been invented, computers will have the body language too!

Seriously, stop trying to reach perfection already!

As a Change Manager, I loved hearing Steve's success-story case studies of companies who have LET THE CUSTOMERS FINISH THE PRODUCT! Not only does the product get to market quicker, you actually end up with a better end product in the end. Please, I call out to all Change Managers - stop planning and delivering everything in advance. Have the courage to give co-creation a go - crowdsource the development of your change deliverables and materials and resources, WITH THE IMPACTED TEAMS. Which is exactly what my job hackathon idea is all about.

For more on Steve: www.stevesammartino.com

Todd Sampson

Todd's keynote closed the first full conference day, and through the day so many people had told me that's what they were looking forward too. I vaguely knew about Todd and his work, but given I haven't free-to-aired in years, I'd never actually seen any of his shows or documentaries. I won't go into everything he discussed about retraining your brain and turning the age 40+ concrete neural pathways myth on its head, but I really loved the simplicity of his model and the absolute alignment with what we do in coaching.

In Todd's words: the only difference between an ordinary brain and extraordinary brain is the gap within that can be accessed through:

• Forced adaptation - pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone (in coaching, this is about setting an inspiring vision that is both scary and exciting as exactly the same time).
• Visualisation - seeing and focusing on what you want (as above, our brain creates pictures all the time and our unconscious minds can't tell the difference between something that is reality and something that is vividly imagined. It's why you sometimes swear the dream was real, or you feel the emotions of joy, pain or fear when watching a movie. It ain't happening to you! But in a way... it is.).
• Emotional regulation - learning to manage your emotions (I'm assuming this isn't news to anyone, and yet still super tricky to do right!? In NLP and coaching we unpack the meaning causing the emotional triggers and offer new choices and states of feeling and meaning to access).

For more on Todd: https://www.toddsampson.com.au/

The key note about key notes

I won't go into anything that Todd shared from his experiments or documentaries because I'd need to put a #spoileralert on it and I would hate to ruin his keynote for future audiences. With any keynote, the content is only half the equation. The content does matter - a foundation of theory is important. But what keynotes really do is switch you on to new ways of thinking and feeling. It's not so much what you hear: it's the way you hear it, the way it's delivered, the awe and excitement it builds, and the impact that it leaves.

How do I know?

Because last year, I watched 600 engineers and project managers sing "Somewhere over the Rainbow". And enjoy doing it!!!

Lata Hamilton is the Founder and Head Coach of Passion Pioneers. Stay tuned for next week's instalment top takeouts of the Concurrent Sessions. And pop across to our website to discover how we can support your next workshop, training or conference as a speaker or facilitator.