New Orleans figured out how to move hundreds of people in one direction without a single manager. Your organization is still working on it.
For transformation leads, PMO directors, and delivery executives whose framework rollout stalled after the training ended. This session moves an organization from waiting for permission to moving on signal.
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.
Underneath the parade is the mechanism that actually moves the craft. Louis Armstrong played second cornet in Papa Celestin’s band. A generation later that same circle put a bass in Billy Diamond’s hands, and he passed it forward again. Cousins, neighbors, and bandmates, not reporting lines. Nobody held a title over anybody. Capability moved by sponsorship, and it moved faster because of it. That is the pattern this session hands to a delivery organization.
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 took a creative approach to Agile that I had not seen before. Connecting New Orleans second line traditions to how teams coordinate made the ideas stick in a way a standard framework session would not have.”
Kristen D. Barr, PMP, CSM, ICP-ACCCEO and Founder, Versatility“In sadness, you still lead, all the while knowing your community is behind you, and the celebratory music is soon to follow.”
Kadiata DiopIntegrations Manager, Mirus“My favorite session explored how New Orleans second line parades connect to adaptive leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. The highlight was having a live jazz band play while we got up and danced around the room, creating our own second line parade. It made the lesson interactive, memorable, and so much fun.”
Amaya PryorTechnical Coordinator, City of MidlandI run portfolios for a living. More than a billion dollars of them, in the United States and across Europe, including a $386 million municipal recovery portfolio with forty concurrent projects, two regulators watching, and a clean audit at close.
I am also a New Orleans Baby Doll and a trained second line dance instructor. My father was Billy Diamond. He led the Solid Senders, played bass on “The Fat Man” and “I’m Walking,” and gave Antoine Domino the name Fats.
Louis Armstrong was family on my father’s side, as was John Porter, who played in Papa Celestin’s band, and the Andrews and Nelson families. On my mother’s side the cousins were Oscar “Papa” Celestin and Shirley Goodman of Shirley and Lee, a Celestin herself. My father is entombed in the Barbarin tomb, the Musicians’ Tomb, in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
That is not a list of famous names to me. That is both sides of my family, and that is who taught the people who taught me.
So the coordination model in this session is not research I read. It is the one I was raised inside, and then spent twenty seven years running at scale in rooms that had never heard a brass band.
If your framework rollout stalled, or your teams are escalating decisions that four people already know the answer to, that is the conversation I want to have with you.
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 inquiries are handled by Category6 Speakers Bureau.