You Don't Change Culture, You Practice It.

Ricardo Triana’s story of entring into Project Management mirrors many accidental project managers. However, the unusual part is the many twists and turns to its plotline.

He trained to be a teacher of English and French literature. He became a father at sixteen, needed to earn a living, and drifted into IT because teaching in Colombia didn’t pay the bills. From there it was consulting he didn’t ask for, then project management he didn’t know had a name, then a slow climb through Latin America, Mexico, and eventually the US. That accidental start eventually led to the Chair of the PMI Board in 2014, then six years running PMI’s Latin America region and, later, its global culture and change management work, before he left PMI a month before we recorded this conversation.

That path is why the conversation with him on Project Management Matters didn’t stay on the surface for long.

The Technical Problem That Wasn’t Technical

Ricardo pointed to two moments that reshaped how he thinks about delivery. In the first, he was leading a software development group, despite having zero technical background, and the team kept clashing with him. The clash was not about the work but the interpersonal exchanges.

The second was an SAP implementation in Paraguay: thirty client employees, forty-five consultants, daily meetings that dissolved into blame. The technical side, he said, was never the hard part. If you have the budget and the capability, you can solve technical. What broke projects was people who couldn’t agree on how to disagree.

That’s not a new insight in project management circles. What made it land was the specificity of a company of thirty people needing forty-five consultants to fight through implementation, and the moment he realized the fight wasn’t about SAP at all.

“Traditional Is You”

Ricardo told a story about being cornered at a conference by someone dismissing PMI as “traditional” with too many processes, forty-seven of them, no project actually uses all of them.

His response: nobody told you to use all forty-seven. The standard isn’t the recipe, it’s the pantry. You’re supposed to apply judgment to figure out what the dish actually needs.

If you follow everything by the book and the result still isn’t valuable, isn’t on time, doesn’t satisfy the people it was meant for, the traditionalism isn’t PMI’s, it’s yours. You outsourced your judgment to a document.

You Don’t Change Culture, You Practice It.

Culture, Ricardo argued, isn’t the values statement on the wall. It’s what you actually spend your time and energy doing. He’s watched plenty of organizations declare they believe in transparency and teamwork without ever showing up for either.

His method for making a value real, developed over years scaling culture and it comes down to four things:

• Rituals. Small, repeatable moments (how you open a meeting, how you onboard someone) that people can set their watch to.

• Heroes. Recognition, not necessarily formal, of people who visibly live the value.

• Stories. The narratives that carry a value forward even when nobody in the room was there for the founding moment.

• Systems. Processes that either reinforce a value or quietly undercut it. A process too complicated to follow teaches people the value was never really the priority.

He was direct about the limits of scale, too: not every team norm should become an organizational mandate. Before you build a ritual, you have to get explicit agreement on what the team actually values.

Speak Up, or Stay Quiet Together

One story I shared was about the executive who championed “we’re going to experiment and learn from mistakes,” until the first real mistake got someone fired. Experimentation died instantly, not because the value was wrong, but because nobody said anything when the gap between word and action opened up.

Ricardo’s fix isn’t complicated, but it’s uncomfortable: if you see something, say something. The first person to name the gap gives everyone else permission to do the same. Silence doesn’t protect the team, it just makes the silence contagious.

Complement, Don’t Compete

On generational friction, Ricardo pushed back on the idea that Gen Z is fundamentally different in kind. What’s changed is exposure and access to information, speed of decision-making, the sheer amount of uncertainty a generation grew up absorbing. The mistake, he said, is treating a generation as a monolith instead of working with the individual in front of you.

His line on this was simple: when the ego of the team is bigger than the ego of the individual, you have a team.

Nuggets of Wisdom

• The technical problem is rarely the real problem.

• A standard is a toolkit, not a script, the judgment is yours to apply.

• Culture is built through rituals, recognition, stories, and systems, not stated values.

• Silence around a broken agreement is what actually breaks the agreement.

• Generational difference is exposure, not identity. Lead the individual, not the label.

Ricardo closed with advice for anyone considering this profession: get the language, find the community, be patient with the learning curve.

The question worth sitting with: where in your own team is the stated value and the practiced behavior quietly pulling apart and who’s going to be the first to say something?