The New PM Triad: Orchestrating AI, Leveraging Diversity, and the Magic of the Human Connection – Interview with Peter Ivanov by Iwona Heyen

Project leaders – stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start orchestrating! In an era where global virtual teams and AI have become the norm, project managers must evolve from simply automating tasks to becoming true orchestrators of human talent and technology – driving productivity by a factor of ten. Peter Ivanov, creator of the award-winning 10 Big Rocks, unveils the future of project leadership and the secret to leading without authority. Discover how to build powerful team gravity through genuine heart-to-heart connections – and see the tangible results this approach delivers.

Your award-winning methodology, The 10 Big Rocks, provides a framework for building high-performing virtual teams. For a project manager launching a new, complex cross-border project, which of these Rocks is the most crucial to establish correctly from day one, and which one do you find is most often overlooked?

One thing that is critical is Big Rock no. 1 – personality and focus. Some project managers and managers in general ignore the factor of personality. I don’t see the people in virtual teams, why should I bother about who they are as individuals? Big mistake. When you are able to connect people on a human level, not just as experts and colleagues, but on a human level, you create this so-called gravity. I call the virtual team like an atom, where you have a nucleus and various particles flying around. In a virtual team, we aim to retain the gravity despite the distance.

The gravity between the individual team members, who are the particles in this model, is directed towards the nucleus, which is not the manager or the project manager – it is the team’s purpose and goal. And how to do this personality? Let the people present themselves as human beings. One way is to have a so-called life journey or lifeline, where people explain their highlights and lowlights, the moments of excellence. And if you do that, and everyone presents themselves – they first draw the charts, their life journey, and then they present it – something magical happens.

Sometimes there are tears, but people connect. Every one of us has moments of excellence, but also, we struggle. You just need to try this. This is one of the many tools where regularly, you as a project manager, have to provide time and space for people to connect on a human level. And then, mostly overlooked, I think, is communication. Big Rock no. 4 is structured communication. Sometimes the manager or project manager tends to talk most of the time, you know, knowing all the answers. You need to ensure that everyone on the team has a slot in order to present their ideas, their feedback, and so on. Google, in their big research called Google Project Aristotle, discovered that the highest-performing teams have an equal share of talking when they communicate.

You speak of creating Hybrid Power Teams where human talent and Artificial Intelligence can be 10x more productive. Moving beyond simple task automation, can you provide a concrete project management example of how this AI and people partnership can truly amplify a team’s creativity and strategic problem-solving abilities?

One of the easy ways to kind of see the power of AI is in resource allocation and even real-time resource allocation. If you fit your project plan into AI, for sure, you could simply upload it to ChatGPT, but maybe it’s not the safest way. You need to ensure you have a safe environment. But if you upload your project documentation, including the project plan and so on, into AI, and you simulate a risk – for example, a major supplier is failing – you could ask AI and generative AI and large language models to do the resource allocation in real time. And you will be amazed at how quickly it grasps all the relationships and comes up with the optimal solution. For sure, you need to do this in a secure way, as I said. Another way is you could define so-called personas with ChatGPT and large language models. You could personify all your stakeholders on the project.

There are already developed as well as specialized AI, also free-to-use custom GPTs for personas, where within a few tuning questions, you could simulate exactly your stakeholders on your project, like the finance director, the CEO of the company, and so on. And you would be surprised, with a little bit of tuning, how precisely they take the perspective. And then with the new multimodality, you could have a dialogue. You could have two people from the team and then an AI persona representing the finance director, and you could explore and rehearse your suggestions. So, this is one of the more visible ways to kind of tune stakeholder management. And you could come up with a million other ways to use AI for rehearsing, practicing, developing ideas, and so on.

By the way, there is a Chinese company, NetDragon, in the gaming business. The company has an AI CEO – it’s a female avatar, a virtual avatar. And for 2024, this AI CEO was nominated as Chinese Virtual Employee of the Year. It did amazing things, among others, it sent one million project reminders. Imagine how many project managers need to track and send that. You could use AI for very routine tasks like reminding, but also for more creative tasks – tuning and customizing stakeholder communication.

Agile methodologies often champion co-location for high-bandwidth communication. In your work on Agile Virtual Teams, you address scaling these practices across different time zones. What is the single biggest mindset shift a traditional Scrum Master or Project Manager must make to successfully foster speed, adaptability, and collaboration in a globally distributed agile team?

Get people together, that’s the only way. In your work with agile virtual teams, you address scaling these practices across different time zones. To make agile work virtually, not just for co-located teams, you need to establish a personal, human-to-human connection. This is very often overlooked, yet very easy to do, with a big leverage. I mentioned the live journey already. There is a method I call flash intro – four simple questions that you could use in the project kick-off or for a new team member, which again deliver miracles. Very simple questions about: siblings, hobbies as a child, what you are most proud of, and what else others should know about you. Maybe something exotic. Try these four questions. They are specially designed, firstly, to be easy to answer, and secondly, to force you to show some vulnerability – and you will see how easily you can create a connection between people. What is critical for agile and scrum working across time zones and internationally is to master the tools. Master the tools, like for whiteboarding – very important.

You know, co-location creates this dynamic where people can be creative and build upon each other’s ideas, but that’s not a barrier. Using the new whiteboarding tools – all these Murals and even Zoom whiteboarding – have quite good features. I’m a big fan of Figma, one of the AI-enabled unicorns in the whiteboarding space. They provide a lot of functionality, which in some cases, and in more and more cases, allows you to be more productive virtually co-creating than online. For example, counting the votes – Figma does it for you. If you brainstorm and people need to vote and see which ideas get the most votes. So, master the tools. Whiteboarding is critical because it fosters and promotes co-creation instead of the top-down manager who “knows it all.” People need to be stimulated and engaged in order to deliver. And we have new tools, like for example Notion – this database where you can put your knowledge base, the processes, and relationships of your project. Another example could be Asana. Connecting these new tools for project management and knowledge management with AI agents gives an enormous productivity boost.

Reflecting on your extensive practical experience as an IT Services Manager leading teams of over 100 people across continents, what was a significant project challenge or failure you encountered, and how did that specific lesson directly shape the principles within your Virtual Power Teams methodology?

Here I have one example, which is a bit like my signature story that I tell in my keynote, but that was my first global project that I had to lead. I had led some infrastructure projects, some cross-department, cross-functional projects, but all of a sudden, in the year 2015, I had to lead a project which was establishing global shared services for a global company. I was responsible only for the European part. There was a global programme manager, and I was the European project manager who needed to transfer 30 countries in Europe from local IT services management to our global shared services centre in Kuala Lumpur. Initially, and that’s the failure and the mindset shift, I was very enthusiastic, very inspired because it was my first global project and on the global leadership agenda. But the first 30–60 days showed me that I was trying to be the smartest person in the room. I had been an expert so far and I knew all the answers. And now I was expecting, on this new level, to know all the answers and to somehow be smarter, tell people what to do.

This led to frustration on my side because people were not responding to my calls. So, I said to myself, what am I doing here? Instead of being a productivity-raising factor, I became a brake. It was clear I had to do it in a different way, and then the breakthrough came. We had a team meeting, and there was a new team member, Pilar from Spain, who suggested doing the life journey. And every one of us – we were five people – presented ourselves with a life journey. And all of a sudden, I realised how stupid it was of us to compete with these people. These were brilliant experts. And if we just connected our human capacity and our heart’s emotional capacity, we could achieve miracles. That was the first time when I didn’t say what we wanted to do – we did bottom-up goal setting and plan review. You don’t have to know all the answers.

Always try to come with the bottom-up approach. In this particular case, we gained momentum. I went to the project board and suggested that if we delivered this project three months earlier, all 30 people involved would go to Tenerife, Canary Islands. The board agreed. When I announced this to the team, the spirit changed in a second. And day after day, week after week, the suspense rose. By the 30th of December, the last parachuter from Uzbekistan landed on the island. We had a fantastic party. Enable people. Don’t be the smartest person in the room. As Steve Jobs said, if you are the smartest person in the room, you have a problem in terms of team performance. And then, have an inspiring goal for outstanding performance.

Project managers frequently operate in matrix organizations where they must lead and influence without direct formal authority. Based on your expertise, what is a counterintuitive yet highly effective strategy for a project manager to gain buy-in and drive project success in such an environment?

To lead without authority? It happens more and more in bigger projects, in global corporations where your project team members have their line managers who manage their pay and their career. You cannot hire or fire them. You cannot raise their salary. So, how to manage without authority? Again, the secret here, the key, is to create this gravity that I mentioned with the atom – to connect people regardless of the distance, regardless of which department they belong to, who their manager is – so that they have a strong attraction and connection to the nucleus, which is the project goal. But as I said, the nucleus is not the project manager, it is the project goal and purpose of the team. It is key to establish it bottom up. We have, of course, some tools and methods, but creating gravity is key. Personality.

As I mentioned, connect on a human level, connect heart to heart, not just brain to brain as experts. Another strategy, which is also a Big Rock from my 10 Big Rocks, is the strengths matrix. Make it explicit in order to lead without authority. People should feel like stars. And the way to do it is to discover their strengths. And there are, again, simple formats, simple coaching questions. They will peer coach each other, strengthen the relationship, and as a result, they will discover each other’s strengths. And if you put them in a strengths matrix, make it visible to everyone – instead of everyone feeling like in poor teams, where people feel anonymous and isolated – here you gain the opposite effect.

People feel like experts, like stars, because every one of us can bring some talent and skill to the team. And the more they work in their strength area, the more they feel in flow, the more productive they are. And also, if there is something you cannot do, you know who is best in this area or who has the strength – you can ask for help. So, on one hand, you foster gravity and human connection. On the other hand, you unleash productivity and performance because people are much more productive when they work in their strength area.

You advocate for using a team’s diversity strategically to enter new markets and unite global talent. Could you share a specific tactic or an example where a project manager successfully leveraged the multicultural talent on their team not just for inclusivity, but as a direct competitive advantage to achieve a challenging project goal?

I have a clear example. A few years back, I was asked for help by the HR director of a global company in a global project. The company was selling baby food, and they had the following issue. They had Chinese traders buying their products in six countries globally, like Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, and so on, and selling them on Alibaba. The vice president of business development asked the six general managers of these countries to put all this business volume together so procurement could make a deal with Alibaba. But sometimes big egos are involved. Very busy people – the general managers. So, nothing happened. Six, twelve months passed, and nothing happened. What to do? Let’s build a project and create a virtual power team, very diverse apparently, from all these six countries, in order to nail the problem. What we did in this particular case – we went for Big Rock no. 8, diversity, or the power of diversity. We had a workshop in Amsterdam, just one day, with these very highly paid and busy people. Among different things, we did the mentioned life journey, and they connected on a human level. And then we distilled the project culture, the team culture, on three scales: leadership, decision making, and conflict.

On leadership, you have two extremes – hierarchical versus egalitarian culture. In conflict, you have avoiding conflict versus confrontational culture. And on decision making, the classical top-down versus consensual decision making. So, I asked the team for each of the three scales to discuss and come to a conclusion: what is the optimal position on our scale? Are we more hierarchical and the boss decides, or will we be more egalitarian and discuss more? If you ask the team to decide, this is already enabling. And in this particular case, the aha moment for this team was that they said, until we reach the project mandate, we will be more egalitarian.

We will involve the Chinese and shape it together. But once the project mandate is there – this high-level project definition – now this is the brief, go on and deliver. And then everyone on this team (10 people: the six general managers, supply chain managers, finance director, HR) committed to what they could do in order to support the chosen culture. It may not be the most comfortable one they felt with, but what can I do to support the culture, and what can our leaders do upfront in order to enable this culture? We did this for the three scales, and then they delivered on time. It was an 18-month project. They had 1% productivity negotiated with Alibaba, which resulted in €80 million in profitability. So, you see, it’s not rocket science, but involving and engaging the team, shaping it together, respecting the different cultures, and connecting on a human level – you will get a significant result.

With your focus on the Age of AI and your blog posts on future skills, how do you see the role of the human project manager evolving? As AI increasingly handles scheduling, risk analysis, and resource allocation, what will become the new Top 3 Critical Skills that define an outstanding project leader?

I think number one is the ability to establish a human connection. I iterated several times how you can provide time and space for people to connect on a human level and how you can develop your empathic skills and develop deep human connection with your project team, with your stakeholders, with the external suppliers – also being stakeholders. We will have more time for this because many of the routine tasks will be done by AI, and we can invest this time in building relationships and human connections. Number two is orchestrating AI, orchestrating AI agents. It is already so easy to create an agent. The role of the project manager is to orchestrate them.

Some will be more pragmatic, sending reminders and reallocating risks. Some will be more creative, like stakeholder communication. You will have multiple agents working on multiple problems simultaneously. The technology is already there, and it takes only human language and you being brave enough to take the first step, experiment, and use your creativity to apply it to your challenges. Orchestrating the agents starts today. The technology is there, and you will feel the productivity. Skill number three is the ability to co-create with a team and also now the ability to involve AI in the team and co-create together – people and AI. I mentioned the whiteboarding tools.

There are also processes for brainstorming that stimulate and optimise the brainstorming. There will be less top-down and more bottom-up, more co-creation. So, everything that the project manager creates can be a team effort with AI input.

Your keynotes promise tangible results, from embedding AI into workflows to fostering a high-performance culture. For a project manager who is inspired by your ideas but faces sceptical senior leadership, what is the first, low-risk, high-impact step from your leadership frameworks they could implement to tangibly demonstrate the value of investing in virtual team excellence?

I said a lot about building virtual teams and partnering with AI, but I would like to highlight – experiment with AI. I’m sure you already use ChatGPT; do more, experiment with the tools, and always start with a project management problem. Don’t just do it for the sake of fun. You can play with the image-building models, for example, the new Nano Banana is amazing.

You can update any picture; the new View model or Sora can create beautiful videos, so you can have great fun. But start with a project management problem – a simple one – and try to fix it. Not with a single prompt, but maybe by building a custom GPT, maybe by building an agent. Use tools like Zapier, for example, that can connect multiple tools. Zapier can connect 8,000 tools – your CRM, your ERP, etc. – and orchestrate them. Experiment with the tools, solving a simple project management problem. In the past, we were so dependent on IT to create and program things. If it’s a little bit more complex, you can use these no-code tools like Repl.it, for example, and you can build a simple application or app that can solve your problem. Embrace AI, experiment with it, embrace the global talent around.

Don’t be shy. If you don’t have the resources next door, you can connect global talent – people spread around the globe. I wish you all the best on your journey, embracing AI and building powerful teams.