New Orleans figured out how to move hundreds of people in one direction without a single manager. Your organization is still working on it.
Every scaling framework on the market is trying to solve one problem: how do you keep a large group aligned while leaving each person room to make decisions in real time?
A second line parade solves it every Sunday. Hundreds of people, no rehearsal, no backlog, no ceremony written in a guide. A Grand Marshal sets direction, reads the room, and trusts the ensemble to organize itself inside a shared structure everybody already knows.
This session takes that model apart and puts it back together as something a delivery organization can actually use. It is not a metaphor talk. The same coordination pattern held together a $386 million municipal portfolio across forty concurrent capital projects, under two regulators, and closed with a clean audit.
The tradition predates the Agile Manifesto by two hundred years and has a better track record.
Parades publish a route sheet so everyone knows where the procession stops. Same idea here. This is the 105‑minute workshop; the keynote follows the same line without stops four and five.
The room does not get eased into this. Where the venue allows, a live brass second line opens the session and the audience is on its feet inside five minutes.
An honest accounting of what fails when frameworks are installed as process instead of adopted as culture, and why adding ceremonies makes it worse.
Direction without micromanagement, improvisational checkpoints, and shared signals that let people read the situation and respond without waiting to be told.
The room learns the coordination pattern by doing it rather than hearing about it. No dance experience, no exposure, nobody put on the spot.
Small groups locate where their own delivery depends on permission rather than on shared signal, and redesign one handoff.
Groups bring back what they changed. The session can close with a second line to mark the learning, which audiences remember long after the slides.
Delivered at PMI Agile 2026 · Agility at Scale track · Gaylord National Resort, National Harbor
A leadership pattern that works at squad, program, and portfolio level, with the specific behaviours that make it hold.
How shared structure creates the psychological safety that lets teams respond under uncertainty instead of freezing.
Community-pattern strategies for bringing along people you have no authority over, drawn from parade culture and tested under regulatory oversight.
In the workshop version, every attendee leaves having reworked a real coordination point from their own organization.
The full argument and the story, built for a main stage or an opening session. Works in fixed theatre seating. The brass opening is available where the venue allows it.
Adds the movement activation and the small group mapping exercise. Requires:
Photographs from PMI Agile 2026. Two hundred project managers, on their feet, after lunch.
Dr. Diamond is a portfolio management executive and aerospace engineer who has built over $1 billion in portfolios worldwide, delivering full audit compliance in the United States and internationally across multiple concurrent capital projects.
She is also a New Orleans Baby Doll and a trained second line dance instructor, and the daughter of Billy Diamond, who led the Solid Senders, played bass on “The Fat Man” and “I’m Walking,” gave Antoine Domino the name Fats, learned trumpet from his cousin Louis Armstrong, and learned bass from Oscar “Papa” Celestin. Armstrong had himself played second cornet in Celestin’s band a generation earlier. Neither man held a title over the other. The craft moved by sponsorship, which is precisely the mechanism this session argues for.
The coordination model here is not research she read. It is the one she was raised inside and later used at scale.
She speaks internationally on execution, portfolio governance, and adaptive leadership, most recently in Kraków and at National Harbor.
Tell me about the room and I will tell you honestly whether this is the right session for it.
Or write directly to director@diamondpmoconsultants.com. Representation enquiries are handled by Category6 Speakers Bureau.