Young Pros and Project Meta-conversation

This post is for young professionals in project settings and those who may be coaching them.  I use “coaching” here not in reference to “teaching” or “training” via pre-existing materials, syllabi, or frameworks.  Rather, it means collaboration and co-creation for development purposes, informed mainly and continuously by the partner’s lived experience and ideals. 

Generally, coaching partners want to add value for their current project teams and company; at the same time, they want to develop know-how pertinent to their ideals and career.  To reach these general goals, they typically bring to the coaching engagement a lot of ideas about specific sorts of know-how that they prioritize. In the coaching that I do, I typically find that these ideas are very good, and so our work together tends to start with them. 

In the last few years, these development goals that partners initially bring have changed radically. This post outlines that change.  As a way to understand them, it introduces the construct “project meta-conversation”.

Certified as a PMP in 2007, I began a coaching practice on project work in about 2013. Starting then – and for about the next ten years – the early- to mid-career professionals that I coached tended to want to know how to do the following.

• Initiate a Project –  Create vision, business case, value proposition, charter, life cycle

• Manage Agile Projects  –  Roles, Scrum, MVP/User Story/Product Backlog constructs, skills

• Manage Waterfall – Phases, PDCA, risk, scope, schedule, budget mgmt, WBS, CPM, EVA KPIs 

• Get a PMP

As can be seen, these priorities focused largely on achieving project team purposes. Young pros then wanted know-how for project management. 

Over the last three years, however, they come with very different ideas.  Today, their initial development goals look more like this. 

• Improve Relations with Boss (e.g. initiate, repair, enhance, exploit)

• Facilitate Joint Design (by project team and external stakeholders)

• Leverage AI appropriately (given current contexts, skills, career ideals)

• Get a (Better) Job

Young pros today still want to know how to manage, but managing projects seems less of a priority. Rather, they now seem to want to know how to manage “conversation around projects”  – conversations for design, for salary negotiation, for getting hired, and/or for research via AI. These are conversations, plural, that is, conversation threads and series. Moreover, they are conversations that are key to personal and professional success in which turn structure is not pre-set (as in, say, project walkthrus or agile retrospectives). 

These new goals can be seen as hierarchical. That is, young pros want to know-how to manage “conversation around projects” on different scales.

• Leverage AI appropriately - Internal monolog - individual scale

• Improving Relations with boss(es) – Dialog - interpersonal scale

• Facilitating Joint Design – Team Multi-log

• Get a (Better) Job - Enterprise Multi-log

 “Conversation around projects”  also seems to mean talk in or about key contexts of project work

• Improve Relations with boss(es) – project economic and political contexts 

• Facilitate Joint Design – project functional/technical contexts

• Leverage AI appropriately – cognitive/ethical contexts 

• Get a (Better) Job – personal and career contexts

This sort of talk contrasts with talk in or by a project team, about deliverables, processes, or methodologies. It is this more abstract sort of talk that I will call “Project Meta-conversation”. Broadly speaking, this is the know-how that young professionals seem to feel urgently in need of, and the know-how that I will be exploring outside this article in a series of posts here going forward. 

 My boutique coaching business is now changing rapidly to accommodate this generation of partners. In this new world, I have yet to discover “best practices in project meta-conversation”.  What I am finding useful, though, is what these partners are finding useful. Namely, there are certain ways that they can look at “project meta-conversation” that help them do better at it right now and that seem aligned with their long-term goals.  It is these useful “ways of looking at project meta-conversation" that I will be sharing here in a series of posts going forward. My hope is they may be useful to other young professionals in project settings and/or to their coaches.

Groups of Young Professionals in Meta-conversation