Tap the framework image to open and enlarge it.

Two breakout time blocks. Two choices in each block. Choose the conversations that best support where you are—and where you want to go next.

Careers rarely follow a straight line—and Zanorfa Lynch’s career across marketing, government and public service, strategic initiatives, and higher education demonstrates how a nontraditional path can become a professional advantage.

Through personal storytelling, audience reflection, and practical career-planning strategies, Zanorfa will help attendees recognize the transferable skills, relationships, projects, and stretch opportunities that can move with them across industries and career stages. She will also explore how professionals can lead through influence and collaboration without formal authority and reframe career changes as strengths rather than detours.

• Identify transferable skills that can create value across roles, industries, and career stages.
• Recognize how projects, special initiatives, and stretch opportunities can accelerate professional growth.
• Strengthen your ability to lead through influence, relationships, and collaboration.
• Begin viewing your career as an evolving portfolio of experiences, relationships, and skills—not simply a series of job titles.

Project professionals are trained to identify and manage risk. Russ Parker challenges attendees to turn that same thinking inward and consider what happens when one of the biggest risks to their professional growth is their own leadership development.

Russ reframes leadership development as a risk individuals can actively manage rather than something they must wait for an organization to provide. His approach combines familiar risk responses—Avoid, Transfer, Mitigate, and Accept—with a personal leadership diagnostic and leadership traits and principles drawn from his Marine Corps experience.

• Apply a project-risk mindset to your own leadership development.
• Identify your biggest personal leadership exposure.
• Examine leadership strengths and gaps using a practical diagnostic approach.
• Leave with one concrete action you can begin using to strengthen how you lead.

Some of the most important decisions happen before the meeting most people think is the meeting.

Kimberly Young’s session grew from an experience in which she entered a meeting expecting most of the major decisions to already be finalized. Instead, she found a whiteboard. The guardrails, technology, and plan were still being shaped—and the questions raised in that room ultimately influenced what leadership decided to do.

Her session explores what causes someone to become “the person to bring in” while scope is still forming, how to contribute once invited into those conversations, and how to build the credibility that leads to earlier involvement over time.

• Understand the behaviors that cause professionals to be invited into important conversations earlier.
• Build credibility so early involvement becomes part of how others experience working with you.
• Contribute effectively when scope, priorities, and solutions are still taking shape.
• Recognize incomplete scope earlier and operate further upstream rather than simply receiving decisions after they are made.

Organizations often begin transformation by asking questions such as: Which platform should we implement? Should we move to the cloud? How should we adopt AI?

Drawing on executive leadership experience leading enterprise transformations, Dan will explore why successful transformation begins with leadership, operational discipline, business alignment, and measurable outcomes—not technology itself. He will share five practical principles designed to reduce organizational friction, improve project outcomes, and keep transformation focused on producing real enterprise value.

• Reframe transformation around business outcomes rather than technology implementation.
• Understand how leadership and operational discipline influence transformation success.
• Reduce organizational friction by keeping projects and technology investments aligned to real business needs.
• Apply practical principles whether you lead projects, programs, PMOs, or technology teams.