How Knowledge Management Drives Firm Excellence

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Li, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Corey Squire, AIA, an associate principal and sustainability director at Bora Architecture and Interiors in Portland, Oregon. Corey is a member of AIA's strategic council. He also lectures nationally on a range of sustainability related topics and led the creation of the AIA Framework for Design Excellence and associated toolkit, resources that are actively redefining excellence in the built environment.

A In today's episode, Corey will share insights from his new book, People, Planet, Design, a practical guide to realizing architecture's potential. We'll explore the power of knowledge management, how the strategic organization of information can elevate a firm's performance, making it easier for employees to access the right knowledge at the right time. Corey believes that by sharing sustainability expertise across teams, firms like Bora can deliver projects that truly embody the principles of sustainable design. Stay tuned as we dive into how Corey is using knowledge management to drive sustainability and overall firm excellence. Let's get started. So welcome to the show, Corey. So glad to have you here.

B Thanks, Evelyn. Really glad to be here.

A So we've been opening all of our episodes with a little bit of an icebreaker. Is there anything in your formal bio that you'd like to share with us or anything that you're looking forward to either personally or professionally in the coming weeks?

B The coming weeks, I'm gonna be talking about knowledge management and sustainability at kConnect next week. Knowledge management is one of my favorite topics, and I very rarely get to talk to people about it because it's not most people's favorite topic. So it's gonna be like a very self selected crew that is interested in in engaging on it.

A And we'll put down the link to K Connect. I am jealous. I am a fan of Christopher Parsons and what he's doing with K Connect. So I'm jealous that you're gonna be there and that K Connect is not in San Francisco this year. But anyways, thanks for that.

B Oh, mountain retreat.

A Yes. So you did, in that intro, kinda tease this whole conversation about knowledge management. But I think it's gonna actually be a pretty exciting conversation, even though you're saying that a lot of people are somewhat bored with knowledge management. But, you know, before we dive in, can we maybe take us through your own career path and why this has become increasingly more important to you as your own career has progressed?

B Yeah. Alright. I can yeah. Let me let me give a little bit of background on myself, what I'm working on, and kind of the relationship between my focus in sustainability and knowledge management. So I have been in the architecture profession for 10 years or so, but I've only worked in sustainability. So I've been sustainability director, sustainability manager. Any other title associated with sustainability, I've been a sustainability consultant, and it's a relatively new field within architecture. A lot of firms have sustainability directors now, but it's that wasn't the case, let's say, 10, 15 years ago.

B So it's almost like we're kind of inventing the role ourselves as we go along, this, like, group of people who are in this in this cohort. So the way that I kind of got into knowledge management as a key piece of sustainability was that I found that I was answering the same question over and over again. So as a sustainability leader within a firm, I'm really there to support project teams. I'm I'm encouraging them to do better work, but a big piece of the job is because I'm kind of a technical expert. So people would come to me with questions. Like, a classic question is, how much insulation do I need in my walls? And I would get this question over and over and over again. And if you do similar project types in similar climates, the answer doesn't change. Right? There's there's the right amount of insulation.

B And so much of my time was answering similar questions for different people in different settings. So I was at, Lake Flato Architects in San Antonio, and we we purchased the synthesis platform. We built an Internet for the first time, and I built out a section of the Internet called the design and sustainability page. And I used this as an opportunity to basically download everything I knew about sustainability and organize it in a way that was accessible to project teams. And the question stopped because I had was able to document the right installation and the right context in a way that was useful and accessible so I didn't have to spend my time answering that same question again. And I got to redirect my efforts towards firm leadership, firm culture, all the really important things that are required to get these strategies, high performance, sustainable strategies into projects that go beyond just knowing kind of what are valued to use.

A And I think that I mean, that was just kind of one instance. But I I mean, you actually ran your own consulting practice department of sustainability. And I think this is something that you saw recurring in many firms as you worked with many different size firms, different types of firms too.

B Yeah. So knowledge management became this recurring theme in thinking about sustainability. So, yeah, I I was in practice for a while at different firms. I then kind of left architecture practice and started this consulting firm, Department of Sustainability. And I was working with firms around the country who would bring me in to kind of improve their performance. They set these ambitious goals. We want all of our buildings to be net 0. We wanna accomplish the 2030 challenge.

B Like, whatever it is, we wanna eliminate toxins from our materials, but sustainability is just really, really complex and super broad. So you really need to be an expert in so many different fields to kinda get all these all these questions right. Right? You need to understand heat flow through an enclosure. You need to understand the chemical makeup of of building materials. You need to understand hydrology for stormwater man management. It all comes down to, like, the content. The information is a little overwhelming. And knowledge management as kind of a foundation for sustainability makes it all accessible.

B Right? You can learn something once. You can document it. You can return to it. And if you question it, if it changes, you can update it. And that was what I found was really this missing link. So when I consulted with firms, I talked about sustainability, but I talked about knowledge management. And then when I wrote a book about sustainability and practice transformation, knowledge management is fundamental to that process as well.

A But I think and here's what makes you a little bit different because you're thinking of it from a through a knowledge management lens. Like there was a point in my career where I build myself as like a sustainable guru, but what ultimately I realized is that it was becoming a lot more technical and it was clear that there was others in the industry that were a lot more passionate about these type of technicalities than I ever was. But I think it also comes down to how, like, knowledge management is not just having a platform, right, that people can go to. But, like, really even breaking down these more complex topics and buckets into into a way that they know how to to search it and find that knowledge at the time that they need it too. So how did you begin to look at how you broke down everything that is sustainability into categories and begin to to make it more accessible to people?

B Yeah. The the buckets is a really good way of thinking about it because you lay out kind of what you want to achieve, and you can decide what knowledge is necessary for getting that. And you can do that whether you have knowledge in a in a specific area or not. You can also use that to identify kind of gaps in knowledge. But I think that the the fundamental way of organizing a knowledge management platform is around goals and values. So you initially, as a firm, decide what you want to achieve. And from a sustainable I mean, the firms that hired me wanted to achieve something in sustainability, though you this could be broader. I want my billings to be, I don't know, carbon neutral.

B Whatever. So what does it mean? What does a billing need to do to be carbon neutral? And you talk about the building materials, talk about the the energy use, you talk about your grids, you talk about refrigerants, and then you can draw a connection between the goals of a firm and the necessary information to achieve those goals. So that's a little bit how I like to think about the structure of this, and it would be different on on different firms based on what what it is you want to achieve.

A And then you and I were talking about how when you started at Bora, you're kinda like, but okay, you guys need a knowledge platform if I'm going to do this. So what was that conversation like with with them? I mean, you know, I'm all I'm all for, like, negotiating your terms of, employment, but I feel like that's a that's a a negotiation that they didn't see coming at the time.

B Yeah. My my terms of my terms of employment included knowledge management platform. And and part of it is, like, it it seems essential to do my job. Right? I if I'm good if I learn something and I want people to know it and I don't wanna physically have to tell that person, where do I put it? And that question really leads to a broader conversation about knowledge transfer and information transfer within a firm. There's a lot of firms that store information in files on servers where it gets lost forever, and that could lead to just repeating information. Like, I learned something, I share it, and then everyone forgets, and then somebody else learns the same thing and shares everyone forgets. So I think if we wanna make progress, we really need that foundation. Where do we put things that we learn is is just so fundamental to advancing from, like, point a to point b.

A So I would say that a lot of people that haven't thought about knowledge management and maybe we actually need to get a little bit into, like what it is. So, so obviously Christopher Parsons has a very specific knowledge management system, but I feel like a lot of firms' knowledge management sources what you just described. For me, it was a certain folder tree structure, right, where everything was stored on a project. And if I wanted to look up something, somebody knew something about where something lived in a certain project, and I would have to go then find that project with the right folder in that project to make sure that I'm looking at the right thing. So what we're talking about is not your folder tree, essentially.

B No. So, I mean, you know, it could be. Right? So, I mean, but you're right. It's it should be a little more involved than that. I I consulted with a firm in Colorado. Not a small firm, but a a medium sized firm, 30 people or so. And they had just had this phenomenal folder structure tree. And and the founders of this firm were like, the organization of the information on their server was, like, the number one thing to them.

B And because that was such a top down priority, it worked for them. Right? But other firms that I've worked with, you have a folder straight, and, like, half the projects are doing this. Half the projects are doing this. A lot of firms have a folder called library, which has 20 different every everything else

A in it. And and 20 different iterations of the same thing. Right?

B Right. Now we're gonna take everything, and we're gonna put it in this folder and label it old, and we're gonna start again. And then

A Or version 1.2, like, our final version 1 point, like yeah. You get I like the final version of the time. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it could

B work in a lot of different platforms. Right? The the one the one that I've had a lot of success with at both Lake Flayto and that I've consulted around and that we use at Bora is an intranet, specifically the from knowledge architecture, which you mentioned. And some benefits around kind of an intranet platform rather than a file structure platform is number 1 is searchability. Technically, you can search a file structure, but it doesn't it's not a very effective search. And then there's this idea, like, let's say you create a template. I think templates are really important because they help with a consistent approach across projects, 2 goals, 2 strategies, 2 vision. So, I guess, to back up, like, here at Bora, our vision is all around meaningfully advancing climate health and equity on our projects. And one way we demonstrate that, a lot of these features are invisible.

B Right? Like, indoor air quality is an invisible feature. We still have to communicate that graphically. So we have a consistent diagram template that allows projects to document the strategies that they're using to achieve those goals. And the template is on our Internet. And because it's on our intranet, you have to download it to use it. But if it's in a file server, then what you have is somebody just editing a template or moving a template, and then somebody uses the last thing that somebody edited, and then it kinda changes over time. So it's very hard to maintain consistency with that. I mean, again, with, like, the small firm with the, like, top down approach, it's possible, but it's it becomes challenging with the with the classic file structure.

A Are there any principles that you have around kind of knowledge management? I mean, especially through your lens regarding sustainability and how how are firm like Bora or or, you know, and and Bora is for all intents and purposes, on the medium to large side

B of things. We're about 75 people right now. So we're in that range.

A I feel like anything like the, you know, the AIA is, like, the jump from small to large happens between, like, 0 and, like, anything that's, like, 50, I think is, like, large. Right? But, like, have you developed your own principles around how you organize things when it comes to knowledge management?

B Yeah. So a little bit around, like, how do you specifically leverage these ideas for improving project performance or your sustainability outcomes? So a a few ways of thinking about that. One of them is this idea of highest common denominator. So the way I like to describe this is, let's say that you're working on 2 different projects, same program, same whatever, but they're in 2 different jurisdictions. And one of them has an energy code from 2,021, and one of them has an energy code from 2,012. Does it make sense for those 2 projects to have fundamentally different enclosure systems, mechanical systems, energy use performance just because that's the jurisdiction that they're in? Or does the firm decide how a project should perform and what an appropriate enclosure is and what an appropriate mechanical system is, and there should be consistency across that. So what you have the ability to do in an intranet is document your own internal best practices. So our projects at Bora, our installation values for the roof, given our climate zone, is is x.

B Right? And then our walls are are are whatever, and our windows are whatever. And I can actually give you these values in the show notes if you're all interested in them. But the the big thing is, like, we don't want to decrease the performance of a project just because the jurisdiction allows you to. We wanna take a stand as a firm. Like, these are our values. These are the strategies used to achieve these values. And we can have every project elevate to the highest common denominator, which is what's documented on our on our Internet. So one example there.

B Right? The Internet is not the place where you store all the different iterations of the energy code so that you can choose which which energy code you want to apply for this project. It's where you document the right thing to do given your firm and given your values and goals. So one one example.

A But I think it's an important example because in your book, which we will drop in the show show notes and, you know, people, planet, and design, you do have a chapter on culture. And the interesting thing is, like, how you live into that culture and how that culture kind of and its values begins to show up in everything that you do in the firm. So I I think we can all agree that building codes for the most part is just like the the least harm you can do. Right?

B Right. The least harm you can do. It's not what you're supposed to do. It's just

A what it's all meant to do. Yeah. So it's interesting then how you can leverage something like the Internet or use templates, right, to kind of live into the values much like Bora does because they are looking to do much better than the least harm.

B And I like to also, like, connect well, I guess, 2 thoughts. We'll we'll jump back to the culture in a second. But I like to also connect so the goals the goals can link directly to the strategies. Right? And the strategies can link directly to the way these strategies are documented within a project. Like, if you care about health, that means you want high indoor air quality. And if you want high indoor air quality, you're gonna document your enclosure in a certain way. And we can jump straight to the sample drawing set that shows you how to do that. But we also can then link directly to the communication.

B How do you talk to clients or consultants or colleagues about any of these things? And if we do that consistently, it becomes more powerful. So super super brief story. We do affordable housing in my firm, and anyone who's worked on affordable housing knows that there there's a lot of vinyl flooring in these project types. And mostly because it's durable and inexpensive. But vinyl flooring is also really problematic from a health and an equity standpoint. Health because of the chemical composition, equity because of the supply chain, and a lot of kind of abuses that kind of result from either beginning of life or end of life. So we are in a a project meeting with the contractor and the client, the developer, and we're talking about the, like, the SD level price estimate and going line item by line item. And the contractor mentions that there's gonna be a $200,000 ad for non vinyl resilient flooring.

B And the client says, why are we paying $200,000 more for this other flooring? And in that moment, the design team from Borah, maybe, like, 4 people ranging from principal to, like, junior designer, everybody piped in and explained exactly why we're not gonna use vinyl flooring in this project. We had rehearsed this. Right? We not like we technically rehearsed it, but we have the language and the communication around these topics that are important to us on our intranet, and we review them. We know these topics are gonna come up. And then after everybody got a chance to explain why we're not gonna have vinyl flooring in this project because it doesn't align with the the stated goals of the develop of the affordable housing developer, we're also able to follow-up that evening with a detailed email that we've sent to other clients all of the reasons with all the links and all the research about why we do this. So just that ability to, like, connect the strategies with the communication all in one platform, speak consistently, design consistently. The like, having this information together and consistent and and and linked is just incredibly valuable.

A So that brings to to mind, like, another point. I think, you know, we started off this conversation with knowledge management, giving you the time to free up yourself from getting asked. No no question's a a bad question. They're being asked the same question over and over again when it's it's easy enough to give somebody a solution. But if, you know, as you build out a knowledge management system and it gets more complex. Right? And I think over time, you find better responses or additional research to add. So then but how do you make your job like, does your time then always become like, what is are you essentially just updating the knowledge management system, and how are you knowing what is the best thing in there? You know, it's like, yes, you gained back all this time, but also does your job description in a way kind of change because of it?

B Do I become the editor of the internet rather than the sustainability leader? Yeah. No. It's a good question. I and I do spend a good amount of my time updating the Internet as we learn new things, but I also make a big effort in inviting others into that process. So there are people in in my firm who are experts in nonviolent resilient flooring. So that person's responsibility is to maintain the content on the Internet related to nonviolent resilient flooring. My job as sustainability director is to set the overall agenda about not using vinyl and to ensure that the resources are available for people to choose better products, have effective communication. But my hope is that I'm not actually the one editing all the pages.

B There are a bunch of pages that I are editing, but that's like so the ultimate goal once we, like, fully realize the benefit of the system is that there's expertise coming from everywhere, and everybody learns something and feels empowered to now either edit or add to our intranet, which is our shared our our shared knowledge, our institutional knowledge. And there's this important piece of trust because I've made the case to my firm that everybody needs to trust that everything on our intranet is accurate and up to date. And because questioning it just takes too much time. Right? You don't wanna look on the intranet and then have to verify somewhere else. It does mean that every once in a while, something's not gonna be up to date, but, hopefully, they'll be good enough. But that's the norms that we wanna establish. If you learn something new, you update the area that's basically assigned under your expertise and that everybody in the firm knows that the best information is in this one platform.

A And then that kind of leads to my follow-up question or maybe it's a bit of a comment, but also a question. I mean, you came to this on from the sustainability side, but obviously there's like and you you even talked about how this falls under communications and a common language which could lead to business development, marketing and etcetera. So the applications of this is actually a lot more wide range than I think most people consider.

B Yeah. A 100%. And I think that a lot of it comes down to goals again. Right? A lot of firms have goals. And I always when I worked with firms, I always ask, what like, where are they? How are your firms doc or how are your goals documented? And sometimes it's an external website, which is fine. Sometimes it's on a document in a server somewhere. But a goal is only so great as you have the resources and support to allow any individual in that organization to be empowered to act towards that goal. And that's what the interlinking and updated information and kind of these flow paths that we're talking about within the Internet allow for.

B So if your goal is around business development I get every firm has goals around business development. Right? Those goals should be documented intranet as well. And then the resources that allow individuals to the firm to be like, oh, well, we're really interested in this specific market sector, and maybe that means that we should read these publications and maybe that means we should attend this conference and meet these individual people. You can see how you can draw a clear connection between our goal and our strategies and our desired outcomes and, again, the documentation communication. Even though the documentation might not be architectural like drawings, they might be an article that you write. Right? Or it might be something else. But it's all about setting goals and following through on those goals. And it's really hard to do that with a large group of people without a consistent process.

A So I'm assuming that since you required a knowledge management system be put into place, this was not necessarily you were enduring a kind of a firm that had maybe not haphazardly even managing their knowledge, but not in any structured way. So what were the challenges that kind of you faced in in implementing this when stepping into a larger organization?

B Yeah. So, yeah. So I've been a borrower for a little more than 2 years. We've had our Internet for about a year, so it took about a year to build it, which I think is fairly standard. Not to, like, kinda throw cold water at anyone any of my colleagues in the previous iteration. But when I showed up, like, all of the firm's knowledge was in a series of web based OneNote documents that were, like, distributed in different locations and the people who knew where their content was documented knew how to get it, but it wasn't clear how anybody else can get it. So, like, I don't know. If you're if you're using a software and you need a license key, you would still have to go to the person who manages the technology, OneNote, for that person to pull you the license key.

B It wasn't this opportunity where you can either find it yourself or if you, I don't know, brought new software to the office and had a new license key, you can add it in a place that anyone else can be able to find it. So yeah. So building a knowledge management, platform is totally challenging, and it takes a lot of time and real investment and effort and resources. And it was probably a 6 month effort of half of my time plus additional a lot of additional people's time, and it was a real investment of the firm. But I think that since then, so many processes have become streamlined where we are not spending nearly as much time searching for knowledge. Right? Search and retrieval of knowledge is is a is a is a time suck in a lot of organizations. So, yeah, so there's a time effort, and then there was the piece around trust, which I mentioned before. Like, we needed to everybody needed to get to a place, take a leap of faith where it's like, there's this new platform.

B I need to trust what's gonna be there. And I spoke very candidly to the firm about we need to trust each other as coworkers, and that's the only way this this platform is gonna work.

A But I think it's also, you know, a and having worked at Slack, there's also this, like, level of adoption. Right? So there's also the you're the sustainability guy, I'm gonna keep coming to you and you're, I imagine you're not answering the question, but you're like constantly referring them to the right page on the the knowledge net for a while too. So I guess, like what tips did you have around kind of adoption of these technologies to that that help? Because I don't think the interesting thing about knowledge management and actually putting everything into a knowledge management system is that it it requires 1, as you said, this level of trust, but it also kind of requires this level of transparency and accessibility to more firm knowledge than frankly I had access to, you know, as as, like, a younger person working into the firm too. So I think there there is really truly a bigger mindset that shift that has to happen for these things to take place.

B I think that's a good point. I think you do want as much transparency as possible, and it is something that that we discussed as well. It's like, is there a subtle reason that things are buried in the server because maybe we don't want everyone to see them even if they technically have access to them? And when you put everything on the Internet, it really daylights a lot of information. Right? It daylights strategic planning documents. It daylights all all sorts of thing. Like, we have we have wave wage ranges, and, technically, the wage ranges were always available somewhere on the server. You can ask for them, but now you can search for them and find them. Right? And job descriptions, all that all that good stuff.

B There is a necessity for a a degree of transparency and openness among the organization, which I think is a good thing. Right? And I think if the if the Internet pushes you in that direction, everybody benefits from that.

A But I guess why and what we are conversations in building that, and I I need I need to get better at not asking multi part questions too. Let's double back in the adoption side too. Bora is one of those firms where if people are like, what firms are looking to hire? And I know Bora has openings. They're definitely one of the firms I would refer people to. So- Doctor.

B Oh yeah. We, we'd love people to come join us. Doctor.

A Right. Right. But on that level. So I do think that you couldn't necessarily have done this obviously at any firm, but what was that decision making process? Was there some extra buy in that you had to create around what transparency could mean for the entire firm? And then secondly is how did you support the adoption of the tool throughout the firm?

B Yes. We definitely had discussions about transparency. And a lot of it was couched through equity. So there's equity is an important topic where a lot of firms are really focused on equity, possibly struggling with what that means. And an idea that I share a lot with my clients and and then with Bora is that a big piece of equity is access to information. Because when some people have access to information and others don't, there's a power imbalance. And it doesn't have to be intentional. It could be completely accidental.

B So an example is at Bora, everybody at the firm has a $500 personal education stipend. So you can use your $500 per year on on, I don't know, webinars. You can go to industry events. You could buy a book. You could do whatever you want. And that decision was made with the best of intention. But how do you communicate that in a consistent way? Like, maybe an announcement was made when that policy first went into effect and maybe people used it. But the person who joined the firm the next week as a junior designer maybe heard, like, some inklings of a $500 stipend, but didn't know who to ask about it, didn't feel empowered to really pursue it.

B So we've rolled out this great new benefit, but really only people who maybe have more seniority or feel more empowered were able to take advantage of it because it became buried. But once you place it on the Internet and it's searchable and it's discoverable and maybe you even, like, hint about it or, like, post about it, If people can access that information and explains the privileges that they have, that they can then reference and leverage, huge, huge benefit, huge leveling and evening of the playing field for the entire firm regardless of either seniority or level of confidence asking for things. So I think a lot of the discussion around transparency was couched through this idea of of equity. And then the other the other question is, like, how do you get people to buy on to a new technology? My big focus there was this concept of usefulness. It's like, the goal is to be is to build an augmented platform that is as useful as possible. And that means that we start with the questions that people are most likely to ask and kind of move outwards from that. And I think that if people feel like they're getting value, they're gonna come back. Right? And if they feel like they're not getting value, they're not gonna come back.

B So we built the Internet not in secret, but we built it behind closed doors for 6 months before anybody at the firm got to see it because there's a fear that if you haven't built a certain page for, I don't know, of of you haven't built the page that describes the rendering software and then somebody wants to know about the rendering software and they don't find it, they they might never go back. So our goal was to complete 75% of our information before anyone got in to check it out. And I forgot how we came up with that goal. Maybe that was from knowledge architecture. Maybe we just came up with it. But it was it was like, we need a good chunk of this information to be complete and useful so that when we let people in for the first time, they're pleasantly surprised. It beats their expectations. They can see the potential.

B They can come back, and then they can start contributing because we want everyone to have a hand in contributing knowledge as well. I mean, it's a real challenge. Right? Uptake of a new system is challenging. Transparency is very challenging for a lot of organizations, but those were the those were the approaches that we took in those in those two areas.

A What are key attributes that you would look for for, like, a small or medium sized firm that's looking to spin up in in intranet? Like, what what does it need to be able to do for them? Because and Christopher will tell you like, Chris Parsons will tell you, you know, k a is, like, at a price point where and and and it goes into the overhead cost, right, of running a firm that not everyone can, afford? So if I'm a if I'm a, like, a smaller practitioner or if I'm running a team of 10, are there certain attributes short of having a really amazing filing tree? Like, what's what's the next step beyond that that I might be able to consider when looking for knowledge management?

B It's a it's a huge point, and there's I I don't think I think the knowledge management is, like, platform independent. I think you could do it in a lot of different ways, and there really is a different scale that'll work for different firms. I think that the the file structure could work, but you need a lot of top down control to to make that work. And there's also some, like there might be some tricks around how to get that to work a little bit better. Like, let's say that you build a PDF table of contents with a series of links that takes you to files or locations on the server. So it's like a directory. So rather than know that rather than kind of manually clicking through files you have on this single document, it's like, these are our goals and this is these are the strategies you need to get there, and each one is a link to a location. So you can start to build some of this yourself.

B I've seen people build intranets with kind of all sorts of different, like, simple software for web design. So you can build, like, a Squarespace intran intranet. Right? You there's, like, a a Google web page that you can you can build as well. I think the links are the really key thing. So linking like ideas to like ideas, creating that flow from goals to outcomes to strategies, I think is I think is really essential.

A So at Slack, we use a platform called Guru, at least for the knowledge ment management of all of our people things.

B Like all your employees, all of your

A Yes. But one of the interesting things about Guru is that it tells you when is the last time or and I'm thinking about, like, general things. Like, it tells you, like, when you when you link to other things. Like, when is the last time who somebody updated this? So you know how old the knowledge is that you're looking at, and then you could even essentially sort by, like, what needs to be. Is any is there anything over, like, a year old that I should be revisiting? And then 2, to your point earlier, like, who owns who is the owner of that that document? So if that hasn't been updated in a while, is there somebody, a resource with the in the firm that I can ask to see if there's, like, anything new that should be considered?

B Right. Yeah. But but, yeah, there are there are different platforms, and it can definitely work. It has to be thought out. Right? And we we spoke earlier about the buckets. You need to identify what are the buckets you need. You have to fill them. You can keep the empty buckets where you know you need to fill.

B We don't have the information yet. And then this piece of maintenance that you bring up. Who owns the information? How often are they checking in on it? Everything's gonna change at some point. How do we make sure that you don't put in 6 months worth of effort and then 6 months later, it's all out of date? Right? It's like, it's never gonna be a completed process. Updating and maintaining a knowledge management platform needs to just be part of the workflow. So you use it, you maintain it. And it's kinda like it's like anything else. Like your house.

B Right? You know that you know you're gonna live in a house and you know you're gonna replace things over time.

A A lot of deferred maintenance on your knowledge management system.

B You don't want you don't want deferred maintenance because it gets expensive.

A Knowledge management is like a it's a duality. Right? It it frees you up for your time, but it takes a lot of time to build and manage. But then you create this, constant way of speaking, not only to one another, but to your clients.

B To external audience.

A To external, yes, audience. Provides a level of equity. And, you know, me being more of an introvert too, especially in my earlier years when I was just like, I couldn't imagine, you know, just going up to a partner and tapping them on the shoulder and asking them any random question, I think would have found great relief in a knowledge net. So there's like this interesting duality between a level of transparency, but to ensure that everything is maintained and constantly updated and as a part of a process, it's almost like it's a very top down thing, right? Everybody at the top needs to be saying, this is something that we need to use. So it's just interesting to me, like the dualities of what makes for a successful non knowledge management system.

B Yeah. And it's a little bit of a leap. I mean, we spoke about a leap of faith in terms of, like, you gotta trust the stuff that's there for the whole thing to work, but it's also a leap of faith that you're gonna invest upfront hours for saving time later on. And, right, we talk about that concept a lot. Sometimes it it, like, comes to fruition. Sometimes it doesn't. It's always it's always a scary thing. Right? We're gonna how many billable hours are we putting towards this thing before we get any benefit out of it? But, but, like, part of like, we're mentioning before the culture piece, and it's like, as a as a sustainability director in a firm, I could be x effective as a technical expert where people come to me and ask about insulation or what flooring material issues or whatever else.

B But the fact that I don't need to spend my time doing that means I can focus on culture. And I think that's where that's, like, the big important piece in sustainability is is how are we designing, how are we communicating, how are we thinking about these issues. Right? When we're designing classrooms, what is most important? Right? Is it the orientation? Is it the glazing? Is it the daylight? Is it the materials? We need to think through each of these. We need to think about how they go together. We need to have a very thoroughly considered approach that gets us to the point that we want to get to, and we need to be able to convincingly describe that. And then show that it works. Show the outcomes that we're achieving. We need to create incentives.

B Right? We need to make sure that people are supported. We need to make sure that the principles are speaking consistently about our goals. We need to make sure that our compensation strategy is aligning with our goals. So all of these cultural pieces take work and effort. And, like, the the phrase I use in the book is, like, force of personality. Like, someone who's really gotta champion a lot of these things for them to happen. And that's a whole different job as being a sustainability technical expert. I mean, it's a different skill set as well.

B So it's like me plus knowledge management platform gets to do both of these things. But me me minus knowledge management platform get to do, like, not that much of either.

A And I think the other thing that we haven't really touched on, you you kinda touched on buckets, but at least from a sustainability standpoint, there are frameworks, right, that you can when you think about how you organize buckets, that doesn't mean you need to start from scratch every single time. And I feel like architects' intuition is to build everything from scratch too.

B Oh, yes. Oh my god. Every Yeah. Every firm that that hired me was like, we need to come up with our own lead checklist. I'm like, you don't need to come up with your own lead checklist.

A There is a lead checklist. Yes.

B There's all, yeah, there's all the stuff out there. And actually that gets to another point, which is the framework for design excellence. Right? One of the goals of the AI framework for design excellence was a consistent framework for architects. When I worked on the framework, I was I was in a sustainability leadership role in a firm with the understanding that most firms are not gonna have this this role. A firm less than 50 people is very unlikely to have a dedicated sustainability expert just because it might be too much overhead. So the framework for design excellence at the AAA, the goal was to create a knowledge management platform for the entire profession. And, actually, it was modeled off of the design and sustainability pages that I built in the Internet at Lake Flato. And the feedback that I've heard, especially some small firms is like, this is actually exactly what we needed.

B This is how this is a approach to think about sustainability consistently. The way that the way that we wrote the framework was as a series of best practices, getting to this point of usefulness. Right? How can somebody go to the measure design for water, go to the subcategory, the bucket, stormwater management, and then see 4 things or 5 things, best practices that they can easily apply to their project. And we also created a section on the framework called if I can only do one thing. It's the high impact strategy. So we have even added a little bit of this prioritization, which is, I think, also really important to a knowledge management system is, here's everything. But if you're constrained, this is what to focus on. That's, like, the work that I've done as a architect and as a kind of sustainability expert in the field was trying to organize and categorize sustainability knowledge both at the level of of a firm and at the level of of of the institute to provide knowledge, tools, make it accessible, empower practitioners to make the right decisions without feeling that they needed to spend all this time and effort on research or hire an expert.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture.com/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. 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. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.