Now, before we jump in, though, there's a question that I have, and I love to ask this of all of our guests, and it's this: Dawn, what is the most valuable business lesson that you had to learn the hard way?

That is a great question.

I was scrolling through all the business lessons that I've learned over the past decades now [laughs] and I think, especially for this conversation and for the PM Happy Hour audience, the one that really stood out was when I was transitioning from being a consultant in a tech firm to a PMO leader inside an organization, a Fortune 500 organization.

I realized that my upbringing completely failed me, and my consulting work also failed me.

Because when you're a consultant, you're hired, let's say, by the hour to give advice for a certain gig, and so people expect you to be direct, professional, get the job done, period, move on.

Well, when I became an employee and an insider, that is not at all how people operated.

What's this about?

Well, what we did was we brought together 22 authors, including myself and my co-editor, Jan- Jerry Manis, from around the world, and we each wrote a chapter inspired by one of our favorite movies, with a lesson for what I call Project Land and Project People.

But what are some of the ways you would like readers to really apply some of the ways in which they can apply the knowledge in this book or apply the lessons learned in this book?

Yeah, that's exactly what we're hoping for.

And now we've got 22 clips that can be used for either before the situation happens.

Like, for example, we're going into the next phase.

It's going to be pretty intense.

This is the way we should make sure that we're communicating.

You know, let's talk about, let's show the movie clip from Top Gun.

is there anything else that's coming up for you right now, anything you wanted to share, anything I haven't asked you?

So do you mind if we talk a little bit about that book first?

That sounds great.

Yeah, so Project Land, the idea came in desperation, [laughs] when I was standing in front of a room full of wide-eyed professionals who were great at operations, but who were new to projects, and their boss had brought me in to help them understand the world of projects.

And I was desperately trying to explain how projects are different and why projects are so hard.

And so I blurted out, "Maybe we should call it something different.

How about Project Land?" And then about a week later I came back to the office to talk to the sponsor and debrief the feedback from the training and talk about next steps, and I was passing two of the gentlemen that were in the class.

And I wasn't really paying attention to what they were saying, you know, it was a private conversation, but one thing really stood out to me that made me stop in my tracks.

Mm-hmm.

Um, how do you describe that to people who don't know what that is?

Well, where it came from is, uh, was also by accident.

So basically, my whole life and career has been a series of accidents, but, you know, maybe it's all by design, you know, the screenwriters in the background doing their thing.

Um, but it was, it was by accident.

I was star- I was standing in the r- in front of a room full of professionals who were really worried because they had a new boss, and the new boss was saying, "You are gonna have to learn how to do projects." And she brought me in, 'cause she had worked with me before, to teach them about the basics of project management.

Now, they were all operations people.

They were all excellent.

What, what's your, I guess, your tips on communication, um, or effective communication? Because like I said, I feel a lot of the time we just pay lip service.

And that's observe, orient, decide, and act, and that was created by Colonel John Boyd, and I call it risk assessment at high speed.

Well, one thing about commitment that shows up a lot is that people aren't showing up.

So if people don't show up, the question is why, why is that? Is it that they're just protesting the project or you? Or is it that it's not a high priority for them? Is it that they don't believe in the project? What's really happening there? So if somebody isn't showing up, start to investigate that and figure out, well, what can you do about it or why is it happening? Because there could be some underlying sabotage, whether it's overt or covert, like in the movie.

And so what I tell project managers is listen to your intuition.

If something feels off, it absolutely could be even within members of your own team.

Well, the first question is, is there even a plan?

So it was a b- matter of building a mutual understanding, seeing the other side, creating shared goals, and a good project manager should be able to facilitate that.

So let's first ground ourselves in what we mean by a stakeholder.

So what can we learn from these movies here that are showing us chaos projects? What can we learn from that and apply to our very own projects? Is there anything?

Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, and I wanna highlight this, The Martian by James Evans on, on this one, because...

So Mark Watney, who is played by Matt Damon, he's a botanist and an, an engineer on NASA's mission to Mars, and a sandstorm ends up, you know, leaving him there stranded by himself.

So, now while we might not be on Mars by ourselves, one of the things that I love that James brings out here is he absolutely cannot stick to his original plan.

He cannot.

He...

[laughs]