One evening. Real strategies. Better connections.

The Professional Development Summit brings project managers, business professionals, and emerging leaders together in person. Come ready to step back from the daily fires and see your work with fresh perspectives.

What to Expect

Program 

Opening Keynote

The best project managers aren't the ones working hardest to prove themselves. They're the ones who engage others with calm and grounded presence, clarity and accountability. Using relatable stories and clear frameworks, Jason helps you see how showing up with peace (anchoring yourself in solid ground), presence (harnessing your attention for the people and moments that matter) and power (through clarity, agency, relation and empowerment) can help you catalyze remarkable outcomes, at work and at home.

Key Takeaways

1. Discover how performance-based work environments entangle our sense of worth with forces outside of our control, and how to re-anchor it in solid ground.
2. See how being more present for the moments and people that matter most helps you see more clearly and choose more confidently.
3. Learn how to convert grounded presence into catalytic power to achieve bold outcomes.

About the Speaker

Jason Carson Jason Carson is a certified executive coach, founder of Catalytic Clarity and creator of the Catalytic Leader model. After nearly 20 years in HR and talent management leadership roles at world-leading organizations like Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and KEEN Footwear, and as the sole provider for his family over the last 30 years, Jason knows first-hand the pressure of being the one everybody counts on. Today, he helps others create catalytic outcomes by leading with more peace, presence and power at work and at home. Jason holds a Bachelor’s degree in communications and an MBA in Organizational Behavior from BYU. He loves fly fishing, reading and playing the piano, guitar, ukulele and cajon. He and his wife, Kirsten, live in Provo and have four sons, three daughters-in-law, four grandsons and one mini goldendoodle.

Closing Keynote

Firefighting cultures are celebrated in many organizations. Late-night saves, last-minute fixes, and heroic recoveries become badges of honor. Behind the scenes, these patterns quietly destroy value, distort stakeholder expectations, and create long-term instability.

In this session, operations executive and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Rhonda Lea reveals what causes firefighting cultures and how to replace them with systems that deliver sustainable, scalable results.

Drawing from her executive leadership experience, Rhonda shows how project managers can become architects of stability rather than responders to chaos. Participants will learn how heroism masks systemic failure, how to diagnose breakdowns in communication and workflow, and how to build systems that produce consistent value well beyond the project timeline.

This session gives attendees the tools to shift organizational perception from "the project was delivered" to "the organization is now stronger."

Key Takeaways

1. Identify the structural causes of firefighting cultures.
2. Apply Lean principles to eliminate workflow volatility and chronic rework.
3. Build systems that improve predictability, communication, and stakeholder trust.
4. Reframe project success from short-term rescue to long-term value creation.

About the Speaker

Rhonda Lea is an operations executive, speaker, and founder of Scale The Chaos. She helps organizations replace chaos with systems that scale. She is a Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB) and the 2025 IAOTP Top Transformation Leader of the Year in Strategic Operations.

Rhonda has recovered $7M in lost revenue, doubled client revenue in four months, and expanded team capacity 200% across healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofit, finance, and franchise organizations.

She built her frameworks from the inside, running teams through real turnarounds. She co-founded theCaseWork™ to solve the profitability-tracking problems she kept seeing in professional-services firms, then built AI agents to make that system run itself. She has also navigated the toxic leadership dynamics she writes about in her upcoming book, How Dare She?

Rhonda speaks and trains on systems, leadership, communication, and AI adoption. She draws from what she has built and fixed, not from theory.