Podcast Live: AIA|LA People, Processes, and Practice: Technology + The Business of Design

A I'm Evelyn Lee. And I'm Janine Chastain. We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

B Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. Welcome to Practice Disrupted. Hello, Janine.

C Hi, Evelyn. Hi, disruptors.

B Today's episode is a podcast live, or I should actually say on demand, in partnership with AIA Los Angeles. Janine and I were invited to deliver the opening keynote at this year's AIA LA Technology Conference that happened in late February. Now the program was titled people process and practice technology and the business of design. Unlike most technology programs I've been to this one was special because it was focused on technology applied to business operations and practice management, which is the area that as you all know, Janine and I get really excited about. So historically, technology conference tend to be about project technologies, so AI, VR, Revit, BIM, all of the above. So I'm grateful to see the business aspect of practice shining a little brighter.

C We'll be playing audio from the keynote recorded at the actual venue. But before we do, we wanted to give a shout out to the conference committee members who invited us to this event. Thank you to Carlo who is the executive director of AIA LA Will Wright who is also on staff with AIA LA Brian, Nicole, and Lauren, who are all part of the volunteer leadership bringing this conference together. We so appreciate your invitation to this event. Now Lauren, who is on the planning committee and a senior associate and project manager at Co Architects said there were a 117 registrants. And Nicole, who is also on the committee and an associate in practice technology leader at HED, said that the audience included engineers, architects, operations leaders, tech founders, and CEOs. And I wanted

B to give a special shout out since you mentioned HED, which is actually where this all took place. So thank you for having also the right tech set up to help us with this recording. Nicole also mentioned to us that she received an overwhelming positive feedback on the overall program and that firms were inspired by the possibilities set forth by the speakers. So I think it was a really successful event. She also further commented that it was the first that she has witnessed such enthusiasm, particularly in her firm leaders replaying ideas and adding new ones to explore in their next works and that our talk energized an ops leaders who typically isn't sparked by this topic. So so go us. I feel that's a little pat on our own, like a pat on the back for ourselves, and that we were speaking their language. So witnessing these moments of inspiration Yeah.

B What was

C Yeah. What was interesting about this recording is that Evelyn actually traveled down from San Francisco to LA and was at the venue, and so you're gonna hear her audio with audience participation in the background, and she's at the podium speaking. Now I'm on Zoom and I'm recording at my desk, so I'm in North Carolina and so basically this was definitely a feat in technology of bringing this keynote together and our amazing sound team has edited it all together to make it available for you so you can participate in this presentation that was recorded in late February. So let's jump into that audio now.

B So my name is Evelyn Lee. I'm the head of workplace strategy and innovation for Slack Technologies. Janine, my counterpart, is in North Carolina right now, and she is the founder of Apostrophe Consulting.

C So I'm a small business owner and founder of Apostrophe Consulting, and I partner with architects across the country who are thinking about how to elevate their business strategy behind their design firms. And a lot of clients are navigating conversations on change right now, and I essentially help them find solutions by leveraging my training in architecture and my MBA. And I've teamed up with Evelyn, and we are the co creators of the podcast, Practice Disrupted.

B Janine also wanted me to add, like, this is just the tip of my week. So Salesforce told the Slack team that I had 2 weeks to clear 250,000 square feet of office and move into their tower. So I'm glad to be out of that fray and over here, but it's been a very hectic week. So I feel like this is just an extension of that. But thank you for having me here. Sorry. Go ahead and go into the practice disrupted.

C So what you're seeing on the screen right now are the faces of a 125 past guests who've been on over a 100 of our episodes. In every episode, we're exploring a theme on change and how it relates to how the practice of architecture is evolving. And today, in the spirit of technology, you guys are all part of a live recording for the show, so this will be in an upcoming episode this season. I just wanted to take a minute to acknowledge that, you know, when we started in 2020, you know, we knew that the industry industry was going through transformation, we could feel it, we had both experienced it in our careers. And we were determined to bring those conversations to the forefront of how practitioners were thinking about managing their firms. And so we watched as during the pandemic, change was accelerated. It pushed practitioners to break past their norms. And basically, Evelyn and I had this great opportunity to leverage that moment and to talk about all the different things that we're shifting in practice.

C And we want architects to meet the moment, as I'm sure you do too if you're in a technology position in your firm. So this podcast really is a body of work that's designed to bring more visibility to all those facets of change. And, Evelyn, do you wanna talk about some of the themes that we talk about on the show?

B Yeah. So we have a number of different themes. So we have I think equity, diversity, and and inclusion is high on everyone's list. So we have a number of different topics where Janine and I just sit in the background and we let their voices be heard. We have a theme called Architecture and so it's other people like myself that have left traditional practice and found careers in other organizations and other industries. Actually, we kind of also continue to share our mutual love of architecture because that doesn't disappear when we leave traditional practice. And then we have we just did an outside looking in where we talked to the this week, released yesterday, Jason, who is the founder of Hyperwrite. And Hyperwrite, he doesn't utilize chat GPT, but it is an AI mechanism, kind of like Grammarly.

B It's like Grammarly boosted for AI, I would say, because Grammarly has a little bit of AI built into it. So we talked about how can we bring AI to the business operations side of practice, which is the side that Janine and I tend to geek out on. Like, we are really excited that this technology conference isn't just covering project focused technology, but how it is applied to business operations as well.

C Yeah. Exactly. So we're thinking about firm operations, and we've included at the end of the presentation our playlist on technology, so you can check that out if you wanna learn more. But we wanted to start so this presentation is really about the business case for why architects should be adopting technology to improve the business of design. And I wanted to start with identifying the problem that we're trying to solve. So at the core, we are an industry in transition, and we know that. We all are experiencing and feeling the pain points. While we adopted new ways of working, we adopted CAD, we adopted Revit, We were really slow to make the jump into organizational systems that would support that technology to succeed.

C And, of course, it was because some of it was being developed as it was being implemented. But I think we know inherently that we're behind as an industry in adopting that change. And so, ultimately, the problem that we're trying to solve is a broken business model. We feel that people are the most important part of practice, and unfortunately, we've left the people who are responsible for producing the work in this weird in between space, where we kinda have one foot in the past, and we're kinda one foot in the future. And we want to pull them out of this middle of change so that they can really transform how we think about the way architects practice. We believe that we have an opportunity to rethink how the industry operates, and ultimately that will add more value to society. So I wanted to talk about an article that our friend Shawn Joyner wrote. He is based in Los Angeles, and you may have seen his article on Archonnect.

C But he basically talks about debunking the mythological workplace culture. And he says, we all know the argument. This is how it is. This is how it's always been. You have to grind. You have to suffer. My mentors went through it, so did I, and so will you. It's when we believe something should be a certain way because it has traditionally been that way.

C This incoherent reasoning even has a name. We call it the appeal to tradition. And I really recommend this article. We interviewed him on on episode 101. So if you wanna hear more about what he has to say, you can read his article, or you can check out that episode. But, essentially, what we're talking about is a shift in the culture of our firms. So we know that architects in Los Angeles have made the headlines of the LA Times based on academic practice. And that media attention has also been echoed in London, after a legal consultancy, Howlett Brown, revealed the toxic learning and teaching culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

C And most recently, the UK's architects registration board has announced an overhaul to the country's education and training of future architects. So what are these behaviors? They're tied to a pedagogy that we've inherited. The belief that if you put in the time of long nights, overworking ourselves, undervaluing ourselves, not leading with trust, and inherently poor communication, we are essentially mirroring behaviors of the past that aren't serving our practices. I'm certain many of you have also heard about the Architectural Workers United, which gained visibility through the New York Times when Schaap proposed to unionize, or at least some of the staff did. And so while that bid ultimately was tabled, the event spurred international discussion at architecture firms and architecture studios around the globe. And we had the opportunity to interview the Architectural Workers United on episode 84 of the podcast. So if you're interested in learning more, you can go check that out, or you can visit their website. But, ultimately, even though the shop unionization didn't happen, the discussion did, and there are many other efforts underway to bring unionization to the field of architecture.

C So regardless if you believe unionization is the solution, the reality is we're facing a generational shift in how we measure ourselves as a profession. The metrics that we once used to measure our commitment to the profession are no longer relevant for modern day metrics of success. And that is a shift of moving towards values based, trust building, open and transparency, agility, empowering employees, and creating healthy boundaries in the way we practice. And I would say from a business standpoint, if you think about it, if everything's on fire, something's inherently wrong. Something's inherently broken. It that pattern should be a red flag to you that you need to stop, reassess, and rethink the way that you guys are practicing. Because it's ultimately perpetuating behaviors that are symptoms of the greater problem. The new metrics that you should be thinking about are really people centric because essentially, people are the most important part of any design studio.

C And I want you to think about why. Your team are the ones that are producing the work. And contrary to what some believe, you're not actually selling architecture. You're selling the services and the talents of the team that you've brought on to your staff to produce the work and to solve the problems. Architecture is the output of the people that you bring in and hire in your organization.

B Pre pandemic, I was opening up a lot of my talks saying architects are 3 recessions away from being extinct. So I feel like, you know, this is something that was and there's there's no scientific methodology behind it. It was really meant to spark conversation, but what I was seeing, even pre pandemic, was that the next generation was coming in and requesting more of their employees. They were wanting to be more engaged in social endeavours within their work, or they were already asking about better health and mental health and well-being. This is also pre pandemic with the time that I saw interest from VCs, putting a greater interest in the AEC space. And that has and and now they're to the point where some of these newly funded companies are draining our talent, right? They're taking our talent and they're going to the VCs. And it was just like, it was also at a time It was just to begin to have a conversation back then, pre pandemic. And I think the what the pandemic has done for us is it essentially accelerated everything that has happened.

B Health and, like, mental health and well-being is top of mind for everyone. Everyone wants greater flexibility, and the truth of it is that we're still in this great resignation period. Right? How many architecture firms right now that are struggling to have all of the staff they need? I know you guys can feel free to finish to get through the work on their pipeline. Right?

C So we wanted to frame a little bit more about the cost of failing to solve this greater industry wide problem and how we're operating from a process standpoint. Essentially, the number one thing that comes to mind is unsustainable burnout. So we know we've gone through the great recession, that took our talent. We've lived through the pandemic, that took some more people out. And essentially, we're all facing this shortage of staff and a massive amount of work, and it's burning people out. And so mental health has risen to the top of a lot of people's minds. And it's not just in architecture. I mean, it is across industries, but it seems to impact architects at a very high rate.

C And, essentially, I think there's some research that you can look to from Harvard Business Review about some of the factors that is pushing people towards burnout, which includes unsustainable workload, perceived lack of control in their work, insufficient rewards for effort, lack of supportive community, lack of fairness, and mismatched values in the work itself. We also wanted to talk about the loss of talent because obviously that's that's top of everyone's mind. And I I didn't get to see the room when you all raised your hands about who's struggling to hire people right now, but I'm assuming you're one step away from architecture firm that's looking to hire somebody. So basically, we're collectively we've collectively chased talent out of our industry, and they're not staying because they aren't finding the value that we used to take from the way that practice was organized. Those metrics, as I was saying, don't apply anymore to this next generation. There's a couple of metrics that we wanted to point to. Also, a Harvard Business Review article that you can look at around the employee value proposition, which includes material offerings, opportunities to develop and grow, connection and community, and meaning and purpose. So I think you guys have heard these things, but there's actually research that points towards these 4 components needing to holistically work together in order to win the war on talent.

C And the last piece of research that I wanna point you to really talks about the opportunity cost. When we're losing talent and we're not attracting new people into the industry, it's gonna cause long term consequences. Right now, we're dealing with the consequences from the great recession because people who are my age, including me, don't practice architecture. So that job captain, that person that's transitioning into the project architect role, they're not there because they didn't survive the recession. And the ones that did are being maxed out because they're very valuable. They're like unicorns. But a great place to work is a company that you can look to for additional research. And they say that great places to work have higher retention rates, lower levels of burnout, they innovate faster, and they rebound faster from a recession.

C So I'm gonna hand it over to Evelyn, and I'm gonna mute my mic while you talk, Evelyn.

B Okay. And I wanna keep us on time and allow for questions at the end, so I'm gonna go through these a little bit quicker. We actually do have stats that are gonna be coming at you. So what is the solution? Janine, next. So I turn my work is based on the work of the Future Forum. Has anyone heard of the Future Forum? So go ahead and go next. Okay. So the Future Forum is a leadership and consortium and research consortium pulled together by Slack, Miller Knoll's on there, BCG, and the last group is a leadership group.

B And we have a number of people from Stanford and Harvard helping us understand the data that we're they're collecting. But what is really interesting about the Future Forum's data is that they've been surveying, they've been doing these pulse surveys of over 10,000 knowledge or desk workers throughout the course of the pandemic to understand how people are feeling about their overall sense of belonging, about burnout, about their productivity, and they you can see the changes as time, over time, from when you were deep in the pandemic, when offices started to talk about their return to work initiatives, and how And then you actually see this growing disconnect between executives who want everybody to return to the office, and the the worker bees, the middle managers, and the individual contributors that are really struggling, and that actually want to have greater flexibility within their work. So the future forum polls is released every quarter. The last one was just released this month, last week. Form.com, you can go download it. You can go download all the poll surveys. But the biggest takeaway from this last one is burnout has is at an all time high since they started this the survey process, which is back in May in 2020. And the executive summary is that executives are struggling more than ever, and this is not just architecture.

B This is this is a more broad conversation too. Toys are are burned out and and the great resignation still isn't over. So the solution that we talk about is the digital HQ. And, you know, the digital HQ has become more important to us. I think everybody is returning to this hybrid way of work. But if you think of 3 different modes of work, either all remote, all in person, or this hybrid, hybrid is actually the hardest and toughest one to pull off. Right? Essentially, everyone has to always act as if they're remote, even if they're in the office together, so that the remote individuals still can go through the conversation. So we talk about the necessity for the digital HQ and how it can dramatically improve retention, provide flexibility that unlocks productivity or embraces greater product, helps employees gain greater productivity, and then even build connection for a distributed workforce.

B So how many people out there use Slack? I know architects tend to use Teams. That's okay. Teams is free on the back end of Microsoft 360. I get it. So I work at Slack, and what most people don't realize, like, about Slack is that pre pandemic, we were like any other company. 3% of our workforce was remote, I had an assigned desk, every single other employee had an assigned desk in an office, and everyone lived centrally around the 10 offices that we had globally. So while everybody else was going through this retrofit and redesign of what the future of work looks like and how we work going forward, Slack was right there with everyone else and we were getting all of this really interesting information from our knowledge leaders at futureform.com, but then it no one was implementing it in Slack, the company. How do we begin to change our own culture and our own workflows to reflect what we were finding within the futurefarm.com? And that's essentially, at its heart, is my job to take all of that research and implement it in the company, which is on the same journey that almost every other company is on.

B And it we're calling for a complete redesign. So here are some stats from the latest feature forum polls. So executives report record low experience scores, so work life balance is, I think, obviously. Stress and anxiety year over year is actually not down. It should be up. And then there's a 35% overall dissatisfaction with the work environment. Workers prefer to be hybrid, we're finding, but execs want to spend more time in the office. The interesting and the ongoing disconnect also between executives and workers workers is executives in their lives are at a place where they're generally more supported.

B Right? They can pay for childcare or they're at a place where the children are a little bit more grown up. They have a little bit more room and space. I think there's a few articles that, like, Mark Zuckerberg has been calling in from his compound in Hawaii, you know, versus and and asking people to come into Facebook at Meta. So there's this growing disconnect between executives and non executives. And what we believe at Slack inherently is that the returning is is the wrong direction, unless you are really, really intentional about how you set that up. We believe in greater flexibility. We believe in digital first, but we also quickly follow that by saying digital first doesn't mean never in person. You need to be very intentional about how you spend that time in person together.

B So individuals, contributors, so I would say most of your worker bees on CAD on projects have seen with greater flexibility, have seen a better increase in work life balance, lower stress and anxiety, overall satisfaction of their job, and they feel a lot more productive too. And the interesting thing is, and I hear a lot of executive leaders say this, They say, like, oh, our culture has suffered when we went remote. And I think when you think about culture, everyone thinks about the the social events that happen. But when we talk about culture at Slack, it's every single interact time we interact with an employee, every time I send a message, depending on what type of tone and voice I'm using to send a message, that's building the culture, right? So one of the things that we've done to support our move to digital is we we have this continue we had this learning program on what the Slack voice is, but now we onboard everyone onto, like, what is the Slack voice? How do we communicate with each other in a way that is courteous, humble, but, you know, also smart and hardworking. If you want an example of our voice at play, I would just follow us on social media. I think we're, like, the darlings of whatever have, like, everyone else when Google goes when Gmail goes down, when Teams go down, you know, there's, like, a lot of complaints. When Slack goes down, once we're backed up, everyone is on LinkedIn and it's actually truly amazing. Like, Slack handled that.

B You know, they did a master class in how we handled the software going down. And what's interesting about Slack is it shows up in our update notes. Like, some people will say, you know, we updated data stream 3xqr5 because of lag or something, or that they'll just say in their update notes, we updated data stream x y z. If you look at their product update notes, and this is our brand voice coming through and also our internal company culture coming through, Slack says, we heard you had a problem on Huddles where, like, if the music was coming on too soon, and while we love our music, we understand that not everyone does, So we're going to tone that back a little bit and give you a little bit more time. But like the update notes are even really personable, and this is how we communicate not only externally, but internally as well with the company. So correlations between lower productivity levels and remote work that are not supported. So workers with a full schedule flexibility, and we'll talk about the difference between full flexibility and fully remote workers with versus fully in person workers. Essentially, it's just saying that the greater flexibility that you can provide your team, which means not only for us, but for architecture firms, how do we build in more asynchronous workflows? Essentially, how do you get rid of the meetings together? Right? And how do you build in workflows where people can do the work that they need to do at their best time? I was sitting down to dinner last night, and I tell everyone I I work.

B I'm notorious for working. I know this is you're gonna say Evelyn, that's horrible life balance, work life balance, but I'm notorious for working from, like, 9 PM to sometimes 2 in the morning because the only time in my house that is completely quiet, all the kids are gone to sleep, like, I I don't need to cook anything for anyone else, like, nothing no emergencies are popping up, that is when I get my best work done. So how do you enable your employees to work when they get their best work done? And obviously, no one else in my team is up from 9 PM to 2 AM. And then the interesting thing is burnout is on the rise particularly for women, younger workers, and middle managers. Middle managers, we are finding, are struggling the most because they have these metrics that they keep me they need to keep continuing to perform against. They are aren't trained to manage distributed teams and they have to learn how to manage distributed teams, and nobody is providing them the professional development in order to help them do that. So we'll talk a little bit about a framework that can help support that. If we go next, here's overall kind of where people are feeling the stress.

B So middle managers, 43%, individual contributors, 40% executives, still feeling burnout, but the the lesser grew. And ultimately, what does that mean for the employer? Right? Burnout. Burnout means higher turnover. It means lack of productivity out of your staff. Janine covered this a little bit, so I'm gonna keep going. So employees want choice. So they want greater flexibility, and we'll talk a little bit about it. The the interesting thing is that they want 80% want flexibility in where they work, but 94% want flexibility in when they work.

B So if you think about all of these offices that are saying, we need you in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or we need you in the office Tuesday or Thursday, you're digging into that, like, coming into that office and being there from 8 to 5, which, or 9 to 5, you know, or 8 to 6, or, you know, you're architects, so you can expand how many hours you're spending in the office. I used to spend long hours in the office. But in placing that demand on them, you're actually taking away from this 94% metric because they want flexibility in when they work. And to enable that, you also kind of have to give them flexibility and and where they work. And people that are given more flexibility so that they have a heightened sense of productivity and are 53% more likely to focus. I'd like to say that companies that have leaned further into flexibility with greater intentionality too have not just the conversation didn't just stop at you're coming in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The conversation continues to say how do we remove meetings from our calendar? How do we have asynchronous meetings? And an example of an asynchronous meeting is, so at the beginning of every week, we have a Slack bot that drops into our what we call a stand up channel, and instead of having the weekly team meeting, the Slack bot reminds all of our team members to chime in on what they're working that week, what they accomplished last week, and what are potential roadblocks that they could be running into this week. So we've essentially eliminated the team meeting, and we've removed it to async.

B So everybody drops in their updates. I know where I know where everyone on my team as well as my boss knows what everybody on our team is working on. And if he is seeing any road blockers, he can reach out to those people directly, but it doesn't have to take away time from the whole team. So how do you begin to build in these asynchronous workflows even into your meeting schedule to begin to eliminate meetings? And then make it easier to connect collaborating, building camaraderie and facilitating in person meetings. So this is the primary method of what we believe at Slack and what the future forum should be the research is finding when people come together. So on days that I actually go into the office, I wipe out all meetings on my calendar and they're they're not gonna be working days. Right? I'm there to collaborate with my employees in person. So you just for me and for my boss, that's just the time that we're going in to have conversations, to do team building, to really collaborate and strengthen those bonds.

B So I try to stay away from my computer as much as possible when I'm in the office, and that's makes that time in the office more meaningful to me. If you find yourself going in the office and sitting on Zoom calls, especially if you're the only one sitting on a Zoom call, then you'll also probably find yourself thinking, I could have taken this at home and avoid the commute for coming in the office in the first place. The other thing that you should know if you're looking at EDI is that the percentages and the desired flexibility remains the strongest in your minority represented groups. And what we found is the reason for that is they don't experience as much as them of the microaggressions that tend to show up unintentionally in the office, but they also don't experience the need to code switch. Right? To kind of, like, put on a uniform and show up in the office and present a certain way in the office versus their ability to kind of be more themselves at home. So throughout the pandemic, these groups are actually said that their sense of belonging with the community, with our workplace actually rose because they felt like they were being listened to more, and they weren't getting any, of the negative feedback that sometimes people don't even realize are happening just because, I think, because we we can all learn so much more about how we're communicating about our peers. And then technology innovators are dramatically outpacing laggards on productivity. So people that have leaned in to to teams like Slack or tools like Slack and Teams and Miro and Mural and all of the other things that I think we all began trying, right, over the pandemic.

B People that have not only leaned into it, but adopted it and created operations process and policies around it are seeing greater, dramatic improvements on the access to resources, the ability to focus, and productivity. And what I mean by that is everybody is literally on it. So how many of you still get internal emails from your other team members even though you have Teams or Slack? Right? So until everyone is on board on the same digital HQ, then you're not going to see kind of all the rewards that you can have be seeing of actually having a digital HQ. And it also could create switching costs. I don't know how many project managers I talk to that are dealing with a multi generational leadership group, and they're like, well, this this this principal, they want me to he's really on top of things or she they're really on top of things. They want me to teams them. Right? To communicate in teams, I would say Slack them. They would want me to communicate in Slack.

B They would want me to send something in channel. This principal, they prefer text. Like, they'll get they'll respond to me really quickly in text. This principal, they only they're still stuck on email, and they haven't really transitioned over to the new ones. I need to email them. But there's a switching cost for those middle managers that have to think, what is the best way to communicate to this person, you know, in in the workflow? And not even and even those little things tend to eat into your productivity. So I was, like, thinking about, like, actual implementation. So how do I begin implementing the findings of future forum in my office? I would recommend checking out the book.

B This is the book by the future forum, and these are the 7 steps for redesigning work. So, really, we internally at Slack, we created new principles and guardrails about how we work as a digital first workplace, And I'll talk a little bit about that. And then we decided, you know, every team is going to operate a little bit differently. So we need to give them the flexibility and the ability to do that. So we helped set up a template for what we call team level agreements, and we normalize the culture of learning. I remember in our early communication that going out, we said everybody has to have beyond Zoom, everybody has to have their camera on. Right? And then Zoom fatigue became a thing. We're like, okay, we were wrong.

B It's okay if you have your camera off. But, like, normalizing that this is experimental, and it will continue to be experimental. And we're going to put ideas out there, but feel free to push back and tell us what is working and what isn't working. So Slack has a really great video and this is this is true of teams too that at least talks about the move from email to a platform like soccer teams. Right? If you think about email communication, it's very it's you and whoever you are communicating directly to or have cc'd into the email. Right? So you need to give people a reason to not to get off of their email. And we generally try to push everyone to channels because the idea is, like, you want to all the communications to go the entire team at once. And if if a principal or partner needs to be switched out on a a project, then they have the history of that there.

B Right? If you're communicating in texts about decisions being made, if you're communicating on email directly with the project manager and then somebody else steps in, they are now missing the conversations that happened in email and text. So thankfully, we had buy in and a lot of the companies in the book talked about the necessity to have leadership buy in the high level, but it's really about how much more the team gets out of it from a transparency and communication and understanding what's going on with the project if all the communications happen in a single source rather than a whole bunch of communications happening around the project. So we try to put a business case around it. I can talk a little bit about team agreements. So the guiding principles were out there. The guiding principles for us were really, really high level. So we want to provide maximum flexibility and freedom for people to do their best work. We want inclusivity, so ensure equitable access to opportunity and build inclusive teams.

B This also includes our hybrid setup in the office. So we're adding additional screens to our conference rooms. We found, for instance, on Zoom, right, a lot of chat was happening in the background during those meetings. But then that chat goes away in the Zoom rooms, because the people in the Zoom rooms can't necessarily see the chat. So we've added a secondary screen, and we actually spin up a channel or a thread for each meeting, and we allow that chat to happen in thread while the meeting takes place, coincides, and actually gives a greater opportunity for introverts, I'm technically an introvert, for me to participate and continue to participate in the meeting like than I than I otherwise would have. Speaking of introverts, how many architects like brainstorming and doing things on the whiteboard in person, because it's a great way to collaborate. Yeah? Lots of stickies. So what we also found with brainstorming, and this is this is true of our our Stanford and Harvard research academics that we have brought on, is that brainstorming in that capacity usually leads to group think, led by the person holding the pen.

B And there's also a lot of, I think my idea is gonna go up there, so I'm not gonna say anything about it. But then you actually don't know how many people in the room are actually thinking about the idea versus is it just the guy with the pen that's bleeding it. That style of brainstorming also tends to leave out the introverts, because they don't want to speak up in the room. And as you can imagine, it's usually the 3 or 4 loudest people in the room that's getting their ideas across. So one of the things that we've implemented with Teams is what we call brain writing. So you have the problem statement in advance, so you create a Miro or Mural board. You encourage everyone to throw all of their ideas up at once, and then you come back after all the ideas are on the board, and then you have a discussion. So it's just little switches that you can make to make for a more inclusive workplace using more of the tools that are out there.

B This also allows for greater asynchronous workflows and it means the time that you would have otherwise spent populating the whiteboard happens already, and you can shrink that meeting time to just the pure discussion of what needs to happen in person. So right at the end of the presentation, we lost the connection So I didn't get to hear much of that. I just wanted to

C So I didn't get to hear much of that. I just wanted to kind of revisit it and see was there anything either that you didn't get to cover at the end of the presentation that you wanted to mention in your presentation or anything interesting that came out of the Q and A?

B Yeah. I mean so much. Right? I think in leading up to the presentation, I don't know how many times we had to edit back slides. Right? It was a very quick kind of 45 minute keynote that we could easily turn into multiple different webinars or multiple different episodes on practice disrupted. But, you know, one of the biggest takeaways is that there there are clearly a lot of firms that are still very much working through this, like, even if they've decided we're going to come back to the office X number of days, there's still a lot of work being done. And in terms of how are they making that work. And I think that is really at the crux of our presentation. Like, this is truly a redesign of work from the bottom up.

B Like, the conversation can't just stop with how many days in the office, how many days out of the office, and I think that message rang true for everyone.

C Yeah. And it was really cool that you had just gotten the new Pulse update, and so you were able to talk about really fresh data from the future forum that was relevant. And I'm sure our listeners are gonna want to hear more about that PULSE data, so we will link it in the show notes so that you can go revisit some of the data that Evelyn's talking about in the keynote. Now I never saw a picture of the audience. I was just seeing your face. I couldn't tell what was really going on. So I was wondering if you could paint a picture for me of what I missed and perhaps our listeners on the podcast, like, what did the room look like? Who was sitting in the room? Did people come up to you after the event?

B Yeah. And to your credit, Janine, I think you did I know what it's like to run a webinar and not see the audience, and it's really daunting. So however and maybe it's because we've been doing this for so long. I think it actually worked out conversationally and and the audience didn't realize that you couldn't see them.

C Oh, that's funny.

B But that was it. But that's that was, like, a bit of a technology hurdle that we just didn't get worked out even with the tech check the day before. All best intentions. What I will say is we did have some tech hiccups throughout this, you know, and several people noted it. Like, this was probably the most forgiving crowd for that to happen to because these are the individuals that when there's a tech crisis, people are usually coming to them and yelling at them and asking them how to fix it. So so we had a very forgiving audience in that way, and that was a lot of who was in the audience. Right? So the people that support tech or even consultants and sponsors that help support firms from a technology perspective. Those were the people that were in the room, and then, you know, it was great to hear Nicole's feedback on the operations side.

B There's definitely some principals from HDR that that happened to be around that dropped in and listened in our conversation. I think that was really good too. And then there were some really enthusiastic students that good for them, literally a handful of them from UCLA that were definitely there just to get summer internships. So good for them for undertaking that, but they were a little shy, but and it took a little coercing, but they had no problems jumping into conversations after that.

C Yeah. It was I will say to anyone who I'm assuming maybe during the pandemic, everybody's had a little bit of experience with this, but when you're recording and you can't see your audience, it's really hard because you don't know like how the information is landing so you're just kind of like plowing through it and you know as a speaker I do think I try to leverage that audience participation to, you know, enhance how I'm speaking. But anyway, it was like it's so weird. I've done so many virtual events and, like, when you are done, you sign off and you walk away and, like, you have no measurement of, like, how it went. But I heard Brian reached out later over the weekend and Nicole and Lauren the next week, it sounded like it went really well and I'm so happy that it did And to your point, the technology leaders are always willing to test technology and I think we're continuing to try and figure out how to do these podcasts lives and make them better each time. And so we are so appreciative to the audience for working with us through this.

B Yeah, absolutely. And I just wanna say, to whatever degree Janine and I are scheduling speaking arrangements, especially myself leading up to June. So if you are interested in bringing us on together or individually, our calendars are open for the time being, but they tend to fill up quickly.

C So Mhmm.

B So feel free to reach out.

C So tell us more about how the rest of the conference went. What were some of the other key things that you took away and remembered?

B Well, I think there was definitely, you know, we talked about this at the top of the podcast that these technology conferences, you know, tend to focus around AI, VR, etcetera. One of the topics that I actually didn't think about, because I have been less on the project side is kind of the fact. And I work at a tech company is the fact that these architecture firms still need to get on the cloud. And are still very much figuring out how do we give people access to everything they need that they used to have in the office now that they're working in a variety of different places. So like I said, it it was good to hear that people are still trying to figure out and they're open to hearing new ways of of figuring it out. I was somewhat of the assumption that architects kind of have stopped trying to figure out what's next once they figure out how many days you're gonna be in the office. But even some of the firms that were there are thinking, you know, they admitted some of the firm leaders were, like, you know, we are we have one day in the office, and we're looking at going to 2, but we're hearing from our staff that they just wanna keep it at 1. So it was also very encouraging to hear that firm leaders are listening to their staff too about these new policies they're making.

B Mhmm.

C And it sounded like you guys talked about AI, VR modeling, and I think you guys have, like, a breakout group at one point. Is that true?

B We did a breakout group and of course I went to the breakout group that was talking about building a more, a better hybrid practice, which was kind of a great conversation. So I don't know what happened necessarily in the other 2 breakout groups. It was also a freak weather storm happening at that time, so there was a lot of conversation about weather. There was that snow snow was falling in Pasadena, and I actually didn't get home until after dinner on on Saturday because it was too windy for my plane to take off. But that was also top of mind, turning out the 20, like, the 26th floor into kind of the grayness of LA. But yeah.

C Which is highly unusual. I mean, my goodness, you had such a tremendous week between Slack, your work that you're doing on the front end of the week, getting to this keynote the keynote itself and then the weather getting home.

B Such is the life. My husband did, though, he was like, At least he gets to sleep in on Saturday. So I did for the first time in I don't know how long, I don't know when the last time I did this was, but I did stay in bed until 11, which was a true gift of being able to sleep in on a Saturday.

C You know, I think I just wanna come back and say how much we appreciate AIA LA, the committees that came together to bring this program to life recognizing the importance of talking about technology but also practice management issues, and I think it was a great model for a conversation that anybody across the country should be having around how to elevate practice. And, you know, one thing we didn't get to finish at the end of the keynote was just talking about we have this entire playlist on the podcast of episodes that relate to technology and practice management, and so we're gonna link that in the show notes. So if you're interested, if you haven't listened to too many episodes of Practice Disrupted, you can go check that out and flip through and look for episodes that relate to topics you're interested in. But we are trying to curate these lists so that people who have particular interests are able to tap into the show and kind of sort through the things that they're most passionate about learning about. But we, you know, are so thankful for this opportunity. Thank you again to AIA Los Angeles and to the volunteer leaders who invited us.

B Yeah. No. Big thanks to everyone. For us, it is rewarding because it means that the work that we are doing on practice disrupted is resonating and that people are listening on the other side. So thank you so much for the invite. Thank you for the listeners who tuned into this episode today and tune in next Thursday for a new episode of Practice Disrupted.

C Hi, disruptors. If you like the content from today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of practiceofarchitecture.com/community.

B Our social media practiceofarchitecture.com/community.

C Our social media handle is practice of arc. That's practice of a r c h. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello.

B Thank you for joining us on Practice Disrupted, a podcast by the practice of architecture. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.