Practice Rebuilt: the AEC firms winning right now aren't the quietest ones

Hello,

Every AEC firm right now says it wants to be seen as different. Almost none of them can say what makes them different in a sentence a client would actually repeat back.

That's what stood out to me from this week's episode with Nikita and Aya, co-founders of Archicon, a conference built specifically because the standard AEC event format had stopped working. Fifteen-minute talks. Extended Q&A. No black clothing. The format is a symptom of a larger argument they make: firms treat brand voice and business systems as the boring parts of practice, the parts you get to once the design work is done. Nikita mentioned that you can be professional and have personality, and that you can learn and have fun too; it doesn't have to be so serious.

This comes up continuously in conversations I have with the firms I advise. A firm's differentiation usually lives in three or four partners' heads, expressed through how they talk about a project in a room, and it evaporates the moment that partner leaves the meeting or the firm. It never gets written down as a system anyone else can run. Meanwhile, the operational side- the Notion boards, the CRM, and the way a proposal actually gets built- gets treated as infrastructure instead of as a second place where the firm's distinctiveness has to show up.

One thing AI does when it isn't helping is exposing our shortcomings. A recent AEC-wide survey found that only 27 percent of firms currently use AI in their operations, but 94 percent of that group plans to expand its use this year. The barrier isn't belief. It's that most firms' data still lives on paper or in someone's head, so there's nothing structured for a tool to read. Whatever a firm never wrote down about its own judgment is exactly what breaks first the moment someone tries to automate it. The firms treating their judgment and their voice as something worth systematizing are the same firms who'll have something coherent to feed an AI tool when they're ready. The rest will be improvising twice.

Where in your firm does your actual point of view live only in the room, and nowhere else?

Keep learning and growing,

Evelyn Lee, FAIA | NOMA Founder, Practice of Architecture Host, Practice Disrupted & Fractional COO

P.S. If early collaboration is where this shows up structurally for you, not just in voice, AISC is hosting a live conversation on architects, engineers, and fabricators working together before the drawings are final. Tuesday, August 18, noon Pacific. Register here.

Also open from AISC: the 2027 IDEAS² Awards; entries close August 31.
​see the categories and enter​

/// practice disrupted ///

Unboring Architecture Business, Live Events, and AI-Driven Operations, with Nikita Morrell and Aya Garcia Schlachter

Archicon's co-founders on why brand voice and operational systems are the same fight, and what changes when firms stop treating personality as unprofessional. listen now

/// the signal ///

Three things that crossed my desk this week, none of them about design, and none of them in my LinkedIn Sunday roundup.

The thread: the parts of practice architects treat as intuition are exactly what's getting systematized out from under them.

A Bluebeam survey of 1,000 AEC professionals found only 27 percent currently use AI, but 94 percent of that group plans to expand it this year. What's actually holding the rest back: 52 percent still run design phases on paper, and 69 percent say regulatory uncertainty has slowed their plans. The gap isn't willingness, it's that most firms have nothing structured for a tool to read. read here​

AEC Magazine's July/August issue argues the AI story in this industry won't be written by the software vendors, it'll be written by the firms with the deepest institutional knowledge, if they bother to structure it. Worth a read if you've been assuming the tools will do the differentiating for you. read here​

Cascade closed a $3.5M seed round for a pursuit platform that scores public project data against a firm's own win history, another sign that the informal judgment senior partners use to pick which pursuits are worth chasing is becoming something a tool can systematize. If pursuit strategy still lives entirely in one partner's gut, this is the kind of tool coming for that gap next. read here​

/// up steel, together, better /// presented by AISC

Early collaboration for project success, with Georgi Petrov (SOM) and Wade Lewis (Puma Steel). A live Zoom panel on what changes when architects, engineers, and fabricators collaborate before the drawings are final, hosted by Evelyn. - Tuesday, August 18, noon to 1pm Pacific. 1 AIA LU pending.

/// the handoff /// - something you can do on Monday

This week, start a shared log of how your firm actually interviews, so what works (and what falls flat) stops living only in whoever happened to be in the room. About sixty minutes to set up, then two minutes per interview after that:

1. Open a shared doc or simple database: one row per candidate interview, with columns for who interviewed, which questions got asked, whether a case or work sample was walked through, and a plain-language note on how it landed.
2. Right after your next interview, before you forget it, log the actual questions you asked, not the ones you meant to ask, and note which ones actually told you something real about the person.
3. Flag the interviews that fell flat: the ones that ran long on rapport and short on signal, or where two interviewers walked away with opposite reads. Write down why, in one sentence.
4. After a few weeks, pull the log and look for the pattern: the two or three questions that consistently produce real signal across different interviewers, and the ones that consistently produce nothing.
5. Turn the good questions into your firm's actual interview guide, so the next person who interviews a candidate isn't improvising from scratch; they're running what already works.

Why it matters: good firms already track win rates and pursuit history. Almost none of them track their own interviews the same way, even though hiring well is one of the highest-leverage decisions a firm makes, and right now most of that judgment still lives only in whoever happened to be in the room that day.

/// up and coming ///

Practice Disrupted is back this Thursday, July 30. Season 13 kicks off after the summer pause. listen here​
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AIA Oklahoma Conference, keynote, Enid, September 23
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NOMA Annual Conference, moderating the AIA/NOMA Leadership Panel, Miami, October 16
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Your Firm Is the Project, workshop at the Trimble Dimensions User Conference, Las Vegas, November 9
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