To Serve, and to Be of Service
“Projects do not change the world on their own; people do when they feel seen, supported, and united by a shared purpose.”
Paul Awkar, VP of Professional Development
To serve, and to be of service…
I wanted to feed this prompt to an LLM, asking it to help me with my foreword. Here is the prompt: I need your support to write a foreword for our quarterly newsletter with the following context. I have been a member of the PMI Lebanon Chapter for the past 5 years or so. We have just closed the highlight event of our PMI Lebanon Chapter, the National Lebanese Project Management Conference.
This event is very special since it marks the 20th anniversary of the chapter. It’s the culmination of all the efforts spent by previous boards and members (both of whom are volunteers, btw). This event took months in planning, we were on a very limited budget, we faced the usual event hurdles and constraints, we navigated through all of that, and we made it to and throughout the day.
This foreword must express my gratitude, my appreciation towards all members who attended, volunteers who supported and the restless board who planned, debated, resolved conflicts, solved challenges and collaborated on execution.
I want this text to look back at the last three to four years of our existence in the Middle East with a call for reflection on the dramatic events that stormed the region and Lebanon in particular. Looking at all our downs but also our ups. The year 2025 was by far the bumpiest of all rides. It was our PMI Lebanon Chapter year of the brave, the relentless, the volunteer, the student, the leader, the team and the human. Ending the text with an emphasis on the human traits in the project management profession and how they will undoubtedly shape the future of the profession alongside the AI and whatnot tools of the mega-trends. End of Prompt.
This is how my prompt became my foreword, wondering if I will ever write any foreword in the future without relying on an AI assistant for support…
As I reflected on these past years, on our work as volunteers, on the resilience that carried us through crisis after crisis, and on the collective strength that defined our Chapter’s 20-year milestone, I found myself returning to a simple idea: that at the heart of every meaningful endeavor lies service. Service to a community, to a purpose, to one another.
This realization brought unexpected resonance with the title of this article, “to serve and to be of service”, which is a punch line used by Keanu Reeves in the movie John Wick. I always wondered why such a violent movie, in appearance, pinned me down to my chair, no matter how many times I watched it. This short phrase alone, I believe, is the reason. The amount of implicitly and explicitly stated messages is substantial; could it be, maybe, also subliminal?!
The meaning of being part of something purposeful, powerful, impactful, driven by the sense of belonging, commitment, duty, and grace.
Come to think of it, I realized how much relevance it had to my day-to-day life, and, perhaps, furthermore, with the events and global-scale incidents evolving in the world today. Life always happens, and as life will continue happening, it strikes me how resilience, perseverance, community, my passion for my fellow human being, and sheer power of faith always get me through the challenges.
If 2025 was the year of the brave and the relentless, then let 2026 be the year of connection, minus, of course, the wars and human-inflicted cataclysmic events. May we continue to lead with competence, but also with compassion. Because in the end, projects do not change the world on their own; people do when they feel seen, supported, and united by a shared purpose.
Regards,
Paul Awkar, PMP®, PMI-ACP®, PMO-CP
VP of Professional Development, PMI Lebanon Chapter
