RaeVyn Consulting | The Operating Gap — Free tier | Oct 2026
In this issue:
The night before
Every seat sees AI differently
Where your credit leaks
You can’t conquer what you’re not willing to confront
3:25, Room 3: After a Breath
Last call
Catch up on Part 1: Fifteen Minutes, Fresh Batteries, and One Deep Breath
The night before
My conference started Friday night at the speaker meet-and-greet. I met plenty of speakers that night, but Tanya Boyd is the one who stuck. I was holding a bad Old Fashioned, I rescued her from making the same mistake, and we ended up deep in a conversation about what makes a good one. I didn’t know yet that she’d bookend my whole Saturday.
Every seat sees AI differently
I picked the sessions I was interested in, totally unaware that most of them landed in Room 3. Staying in one room all day was never the point, so I changed tables every session and sat with a new group of people each time. Same room, different view.
Tanya Boyd, Director of Creative Collaboration at Project Success Academy, ran The Creative Navigator: Unifying Teams, Driving Innovation, Shaping Influence.
Tanya calls herself an accidental PM, and her résumé backs it up: disaster recovery, healthcare, IT, marketing, and government. Nobody handed her a project plan for any of it. She took ownership, and one unusual job after another pulled her into project management.
Then she put the room to work. Plan a company-wide AI rollout from the point of view of the departments that would have to live with it.
Watch what came up. Which skills do we hire for now? How do we protect personally identifiable information (PII)? What do we tell people who are afraid of layoffs? How do we train the team we already have? What does the transition timeline look like? And for every group: what’s in it for them, said in their language?
Almost none of it was about the AI.
Every hard question was about the people impact of an AI rollout.
Where your credit leaks
At 12:35, I sat in on Tamika Brunetti, Managing Director at Ascent Social Capital, with Credit Leakage in Projects: The Presence to Pipeline™ Method.
credit leakage /ˈkred-ət ˈlē-kij/ noun
What happens when strong delivery never registers as value.
Tamika broke it down into three parts: explain why the work matters to the people reading about it, keep evidence of the outcomes (including the risks you helped avoid), and share that story on a regular schedule.
Then the exercise. Write a status update the way you’d normally report it, then rewrite it as the business benefit. I wrote a line about finishing a documentation framework and rewrote it as what the framework saved: less dependence on other teams and fewer future development hours. Same work, very different read for a leader skimming it.
If your work isn’t getting recognized right now, build the portfolio anyway. Benefits, business outcomes, risks you helped the team avoid. The problem that never happened is the hardest win to see and the easiest to forget, so write it down before anyone asks for it.
Ask: Will this help leadership understand the value being created?
You can’t conquer what you’re not willing to confront
At 1:30, Michael Laidler, a leadership speaker, author, and resilience strategist, opened Fueling PMP Resilience with his background: more than twenty years leading under pressure in law enforcement and federal work. Then he mentioned where he’d been a police officer.
Laredo, Texas.
My mom was sitting next to me, and we both whooped from our seats. Laredo is a long way from Frisco.
“Small world,” Mom said.
Michael walked the room through his Failure F.U.E.L.S. Growth framework for turning setbacks into growth. It starts where most of us stall: facing the hard moment instead of working around it. In my notes, I wrote down what usually stops us: the fear of seeming weak or lost.
He taught “Name It to Tame It” through his own story. For a long time he kept quiet about the things that scared him, because saying them out loud felt like failing. Once he started talking about them, he could start to heal, and the fears lost their grip.
Then he turned it on us with three prompts: a thought to replace, a battle to stop ignoring, and a belief to lead with.
What’s one internal battle you’ve been avoiding?
3:25, Room 3: After a Breath
Room 3 sat 80 people: desks that each sat eight, with a TV at the end of every desk so everyone had a close-up view of the slides. That was good news, because I’d added details to my illustrations that I was afraid would get lost.
My talk, Stop Patching Symptoms: A Diagnostic Framework for Project Delivery Failure, put ten dysfunction symptoms on the wall and asked the room to rate each one from 1 to 3 against their own teams. As I talked through each dysfunction, I couldn’t tell who was writing scores down and who was doing the mental math.
Then we got to the severity scores. Hands went up. People felt seen, and it was good to know they weren’t alone.
I’ve been working through this framework for a few years. Spend that long with anything, and it starts to feel like common knowledge. The doubt seeps in: everyone knows this already.
But then, after the talk, a woman stopped me to say thank you for one tip in particular, the one for the Decision Dodger: shrink the decision until it’s too small to dodge. She was going to use it on Monday. Sharing that with me meant the world.
Last call
The day ended where it started, with Tanya. We grabbed those Old Fashioneds, met more great people, and made new friends.
Every session I sat in that Saturday circled the same thing: what goes unsaid. Tanya’s rollout planners found that the hard questions were the human ones nobody had asked yet. Tamika’s talk reminded me that the impact and the risks avoided are the plot. Michael’s talk taught me to replace one negative thought with a truth, and to stop ignoring the hard things. And the woman who stopped me with a thank-you also gave me the best feedback of the day. THANK YOU!
Next issue, the Decision Dodger gets the full story: what it looks like, where it comes from, and how to shrink decisions until there’s nothing left to dodge. It’s the first of 24.
Thank you to my support system. Think about who’s in your corner when you walk into the room. My mom flew in from Laredo. My partner recorded my talk. And the crowd was full of friendly faces: the people I’d invited and the people I’d met that weekend and moved through the sessions with.