Future of Knowledge Management in AEC Firms

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

B an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture.

A 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 back to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we're excited to sit down with Christopher Parsons, the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture. Christopher has been at the forefront of technology in the architecture, engineering and construction industry for over 2 decades, driving innovation in knowledge management. His career spans pivotal roles as a chief informational officer for Steinberg Architects and the information technology director for SMWM, now a part of Perkins and Will. Christopher's background in history and his extensive experience in leadership have given him a unique lens through which he approaches the intersection of technology and organizational health. His work focuses on developing better ways to manage and share knowledge across AEC firms, ensuring firms have the tools they need to stay competitive and collaborative in an evolving industry.

A In today's conversation, we'll explore how knowledge management has evolved in the AEC industry, the key drivers of change, and what the future holds. We'll also dive into Christopher's thoughts on how collaboration, cultural shifts, and how AI are shaping the next era of knowledge management. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you here.

C Hey, it's good to be back.

A So we usually open with a little bit of an icebreaker, you know, asking if there's anything that you're excited about coming up. But I also feel that you might have something to share with us about the weekend that you just had as well or the week you just had.

C Yeah. We were in, Sundance, Utah, Sundance of the Sundance Film Festival for kConnect 2024, which is our annual knowledge management conference, which we haven't had for 5 years. Because at first, COVID. And then we got deep into finishing off the new version of our intranet platform synthesis. And so it was our first time back in 5 years, it was our first time in Sundance. We completely changed the format of the conference, and we had a blast. So I am all full of good knowledge management vibes and community vibes coming into this call. So, it was an amazing week.

A And I think that's kind of a great transition to the conversation that we're going to be talking about. Right? Knowledge management and, actually, how it helps, build community and culture within firms. I think, you know, a lot of people think about knowledge management in firms and they think about the dreaded folder structures, the project folder structures that we all deal with. So as somebody who is building tools in this space, how would you more thoroughly describe knowledge management?

C Yeah. I've always kind of described knowledge management is, you know, using people process and technology to help your firm make the best use of its knowledge. So AEC firms are knowledge based firms. Like, that's it. That's the co currency. There's no widgets, there's no inventory. It's knowledge, right? And so, historically, firms have had things like marketing, or finance or HR, to help manage, you know, kind of the marketing engine, the money, the clients, the people. But knowledge, which is really the currency of AEC firms, has usually not been that formally managed.

C Certainly not really talked about in that way, as an asset that can be leveraged and grown and you go acquire new knowledge. Like, of course, you do it. Like, if you want to enter a new market sector, you're like, we need some people, and then we'll have to learn how to do these projects. But it's usually pretty unformalized and unstructured. And it's kind of we do it 1 project at a time. And what I think knowledge management offers is a way to take a more systemic, intentional, formal approach to making the use of the firm's knowledge. And so if you've got one expert who knows how to do this specific building type or this project type, how do you then grow that knowledge to more people? Right? And how do you help the firm or one office can do something? How do you make it to another office can do something? And it's this really intentional practice that is really exciting. It's really fun to work in, I think.

A I think people might hear that definition of knowledge management and the sole practitioners or the individual. The small firms kind of might tune it out a little bit. Right? You're talking about big things, people that they don't have the operational overhead for, or, you know, consultants that they're working on a part time basis with to manage those functions. So how would you say that knowledge management could show up better for for the smaller firms, and can it play as critical as a role for their size firms as well?

C Yeah. No. Great question. Thank you. I mean, starting with a sole practitioner. I mean, I think at some point, everybody works by themselves, even if you work in a company. And so in the field of knowledge management, there's this concept of personal knowledge management. And this might be as simple as, I don't know, let's take this podcast.

C Like, you probably, at this point, have a checklist of the things that you do before you do the podcast, things you want to do during the podcast, and then, like, kind of like closing out the podcast and, you know, publishing it and all the things. And so that is knowledge management, just for 1, is I'm going to build a checklist. That's kind of like one of the most simple tools of a knowledge manager is a checklist, so that I don't forget to do things. And so sole practitioners can have checklists. They're really helpful once you add a second person or a third person or a fourth person. It's, you know, when we finish a project, here's how we close it out. Right? When we kick off a project, here's how we do it. When we review a set, you know, here are the things that we look for every time, you know, regardless of what the who the client is, like, these are the the ways that we do QAQC.

C And so that can be from 1 to 5 to 10 to a 100 to 500. Like, that kind of basic ethos of, how do I not make the same mistakes over and over again? How do I make the best use of my knowledge on this given project or opportunity? That goes to all scales.

A I just wanted to give insight into how everyone can begin to use a knowledge management tool. I actually use Notion, which is a free platform to just manage all of the checklists that you were talking about and even automate some of the things that I do for my own business in there as a sole practitioner.

C That's right. Yep. There's tools at the free end or the very inexpensive end. And then that are very kind of generic in nature and not industry specific. And that gets all the way into what we do, which is generally more for firms that are somewhere between 35 100 people. And they get very AEC specific, and they've got more functionality. But there are plenty of Google Docs, Notion. Like, there's a bunch of stuff, Basecamp, that you can use that's at the entry level.

A Right. So Notion obviously is a new tool, but knowledge management is something that you've been very passionate about for as long as I've known you. So can you talk about how knowledge management has evolved over time, especially as these tools and technology have changed?

C Yeah. I have been passionate about it for a long time. I think it's it's I was a history major too, which is probably part of it. So knowledge management as a field really goes back to like 1995 ish. That's when you start seeing the first books and papers published on knowledge management and people talking about doing it formally inside businesses because of the explosion of information inside companies because of technology. As a species, we have been managing knowledge a lot longer than 1995, And figuring out how to learn from our mistakes and share knowledge and teach people. I mean, it's, it's a very old thing to be part of being human. But I think if we go to the kind of the the 1995 forward, you know, perspective, I think there are kind of 3, like main eras that we've seen.

C The kind of first era of Kilometers or Kilometers 1.0, if you want to call it that, was a lot about trying to get what we call tacit knowledge, so kind of silent knowledge, out of people's heads, and write it down and make it explicit. So we call that explicit knowledge. So in the field of Kilometers, tacit and explicit knowledge are the kind of 2 of the big things. In the beginning, that was binders and you know, things that were printed out. And then they go on went on to file servers and became, you know, network shares. And it was a lot of very static information that was usually blessed by somebody pretty high up in the organization who decided what our standards are, what our processes are. And everyone was expected to kind of read them and follow them. I'm overly simplifying.

C But like, that was a lot of kind of, from at least from a technology perspective, what knowledge management was. There were trainings and stuff, but you didn't see the kind of corporate universities and learning and development programmes that we have seen, you know, really explode over the last 30 years. From a technology perspective, the second big wave was social media, in my, in my perspective, and you saw, you know, I was in I worked in 2 different architecture practices running IT. But part of the the part of my job I love the most was the Kilometers part of my job. And I started saying, like, you know, this stuff that we're seeing outside with Facebook, and eventually Twitter, LinkedIn, like that should be used inside the company to help share knowledge where anybody can post something. They can have conversations, you can ask a question, get answers, like, that just seems so obvious in 2009. And so that's when we started knowledge architecture was really riding the social wave internally, and figuring out how to use that to share knowledge. That was a technological change.

C But it was, I think, even bigger, a cultural change inside firms. And having lived through that, and probably many of the people listening to this have lived through that, There were a lot of fear around, wait a minute, you're gonna let anybody in the company share something without it going through the, you know, kind of the blessing committee? What happens if they say something wrong? What happens if they say something inappropriate? Like, oh, my gosh, that seems really kind of quaint now in 2024. Like, these technologies have made their way through almost every single AEC firm. I don't think those fears are there anymore. Most, much of the stuff that people feared would happen didn't happen. And so that kind of gets us to today. So I feel like from a technology perspective, we've really moved from this digitization of paper, to now the kind of social community collaboration piece. And now we're heading into what I think is the 3rd era of knowledge management AEC, which is gonna be AI and plus knowledge management.

C I think that's gonna be a super interesting thing. So a

A lot of these, when you talk about 123 and the evolution of that, it all seems to be driven by by technology. And then it's also seems to me that the the biggest challenge of implementing it, at least within our industry, happens to be our own internal culture and what we think about how we communicate and transparently share information even internally with within a firm. What do you see as this next hurdle as people are looking towards towards AI? And what I and I'm gonna jump in here and say what I love about this conversation is so much of the AI topic within the AEC industry right now is focused on its limitations for designing buildings. Right? But I think there's so much opportunity that we could be applying AI to on the business operations side, which is kind of where Kilometers falls. But what do you see as kind of the biggest hurdles?

C Yeah. Yeah. If I could go back to the the the first point you made, though, I think you're right. I did frame it as a there's new technology driving change. But I do think it's kind of hard for me to unwrap those things, you know, underneath the social media movement, inside the company, even with knowledge, you know, management, there was this kind of demand, expectation, hope for more transparency. Right? And this was a technology that kind of helped that. But There was this recognition that, like, you know, let's tap into the collective knowledge of the firm to answer a question or to figure out how to go after a project. You know, let's treat all of our employees like adults and talk about the challenges and, like, trust that they can do these things.

C Let's spread the work. Let's realize that sometimes a job captain might know the most about a certain topic in the entire firm, you know, because of their experience, whether it be technology or otherwise. And so, you know, there was this big cultural change inside firms. I mean, when I started in practice, this idea that people would work from home, like, no way. Like, I remember bringing it up. It was just like, that's never gonna happen. And look where we are now. So I don't know which changes us first, if the technology changes us, or if we change and then the technology reflects or a little bit of both, it seems like it's, obviously, it's hard to separate them.

C So I think with AI, I think it's gonna be the same. I think there's this idea. I like what you said, there's this kind of, are you choosing a position of fear or position of hope or curiosity? And I kind of try and be pretty neutral on that, like, I see both I see the extremes reflected a lot where I'm obviously on the fear side, we see what the challenges are there, and then people won't make any progress at all. But on people can become overenthusiastic and think this is going to completely save them without understanding how the technology works. So I think

A Absolutely.

C Right. Okay. You've probably had some of those conversations. So I think there's this, like, middle ground, which is like, this stuff is promising, which is what I deeply believe, but we're gonna have to do the work to unlock it. And I think a lot of that work to unlock it is knowledge management. So to be more specific, you're right, we work more on the business operations side, like we don't make design software, we help firms share knowledge within the company. So inside synthesis, which is an intranet platform, we have, you know, pages and posts and videos and documents that range anywhere from here's our HR policy to our QAQC standards to how we design, you know, ICU, everything, like it's just there inside of our clients, they captured it all. So when you want to use AI to, like, ask a question of that data.

C Right? So, like, I'm working on a stair detail for this x project. You know, what's the best way when I run into this condition? For the firm that had managed knowledge effectively and had really captured a lot of how they approach and how they do things and why, the AI is going to have a lot better knowledge to draw off of. For a firm that wasn't practicing knowledge management, they might have no information or it might be outdated or conflicting. And so the separator for me between firms that are going to take advantage of the promise AI versus those that won't are gonna be the firms that are managing their knowledge effectively. I think that's really the key to unlocking this whole thing.

A I think that's a pretty big statement that you said relative to how firms are going to be embracing that technology and how fast firms move forward if, if they do. I see, and I, I joke about this a lot, but it's, I joke about it because it's true. You know, there are firms out there that are still using Revit like it's CAD. So, you know, where on the spectrum of knowledge management do you see firms adopting this more? Like, how has it been for you to sell the value proposition of what you're delivering to firms? And is there really a greater interest in in what proper knowledge management can do for firms going forward?

C I think there's this kind of grounded curiosity that like the firms that I admire that are really going after AI, like, in a way that I would do it if it were me, I think are on one hand, very open to change, like realizing that, you know, the cliche these days is AI isn't going to take your job. It's AI plus a person using AI. And so I think they realize that like, you really just need to adapt this new way of working, but also understand that it is far from perfect. It is like 1st or second inning. And that's okay. It doesn't mean that the technology is broken. It just means it's not, you know, it's we still have a long way to go. And sometimes, like, there's this question I like to ask.

C Epistemology is the field of knowledge. Right? Like, how do we know what we know? And I think there's a phrase called epistemic humility, which is like, how could I know what I know? That I like to ask of myself, or others, or our company. But it's like, if you're asking if you're asking an AI this question about stair details, right, and we've constrained it to the knowledge that's within your company, like, we don't want it just pulling information from the Internet. We want it to really use your data, be grounded in your data. And you get back an incorrect answer. There's this kind of curiosity. It's like, well, why is that answer incorrect? Was our is it the software? Was our knowledge incorrect? Should we should we go acquire more high quality knowledge to be able to feed the AI? And so it requires this kind of curiosity about understanding how the technology works and how it could know the answer. And then the humility to say, like, maybe this is on us.

C Or maybe it's not. Maybe it actually is a technology issue. But it's being open and invested enough in the conversation and learning how the technology works enough to be able to get the most out of it. And I feel like maybe in your Revit example, I think that happens sometimes is firms will run to, well, this solves the problem that's immediately in front of me right now. And that's good enough. And, you know, maybe it is good enough for I don't know what the circumstance of that company is. Maybe it is. But there's also perhaps opportunity that are living on the table.

A Yeah. And maybe then then Revit wasn't the best analogy. But it is this fact that we keep moving towards purchasing new technologies, but we don't necessarily leverage it to its fullest extent. And I think a little bit about that is kind of our lack of curiosity, right, and what the actual capabilities are, but also just sometimes just like a lack of overall understanding in terms of the change that needs to happen when you do move to a tool that you that there's additional processes that the firm has to take on, right, to make or not maybe not additional, but different processes that the firm has to adopt to really make it happen.

C Yeah. I love what you just said. So in the beginning, I said that I think of Kilometers as people, process, and technology to help your firm make the best use of technology. And I think what people want to do a lot is they want to write a check for some technology, and hope that that's going to make the change, when indeed, it actually requires an investment of people's time and probably adapting or changing or adding new processes in order to get the most out of that technology investment. So that is absolutely true. And it's going to be as true with AI, maybe as true more true with AI than anything, I think. Which I think for people that have been around technology long enough, I think they get that. I think it in some ways, this is a brand new technology.

C In some ways, it's just another transition to a new tool that's gonna give us superpowers, and we just need to find our way through it.

A Yeah. I think that the difference is we are aware of the change. So in a way that creates an additional barrier for us to take on the change because we know it's not going to be a light lift. Right? Isn't you can't simply write the check. And then I also think that there is a kind of done for you at a very basic level. This is done for you buy in system. When you buy in something new, like you expect to get something immediately for that check you've written. And I think the biggest difference between AI and how relatively new it is, and it's specific applications and what we're talking about, is that it's it's so new that you need to be willing to experiment a little bit more with the tool than we have in previous tools that we might have purchased.

C Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, I think with our clients, we've we've always obviously, we do betas. But I think with some of the newest AI stuff we're putting out at the end of the year, it's gonna be a much longer beta, like, probably a year plus for the AI search technology. And even within that beta, that's, like, at the customer level or the client level. Even within that, we're probably gonna have them have, you know, 25 people out of 200 using the technology to really make sure that we can nail the use case first, that they understand how to teach people how they would even internally do change management, because it is a pretty big change.

A I feel like architecture firms know they need to make a change right now, but the change is so great that they're scared to take the necessary time to make the change. And then because of that, they don't necessarily move forward in the with the speed that we need to move forward in order to move the profession forward or the firm forward.

C Yeah. That that that makes sense to me. I think it's a very rational it's a very rational position to not be making change on AI just because there's a new technology out. So if I'm the managing principal or CEO of an architecture firm, I'm thinking about how our firm is winning work, and how we can do better at winning work. I'm thinking about how our firm does work and how we can do better quality work or or profitable or whatever it is. I'm thinking about attracting and retaining talent. Like when I go to bed at night, when I wake up in the morning, these are the thoughts that I have. It's not necessarily AI or technology.

C But if it is AI or technology, it's usually how can I do one of those things better? How can I win more work? How can I do the work better? How can I get talent? And I think there are obviously some things in the world right now, which are driving me to want to think about AI if I'm this person, right? Let's call her Em. If I'm Em, she's our fictitious user in our in our demo platform. So if I'm Em, I'm thinking about demographics. And I'm thinking about the fact that there aren't as many Gen Xers as there are boomers and millennials, right? And so those kind of, you know, 40 to 50 year olds, or said another way, kind of 15, 20, 25 years of experience in architecture, there just aren't demographically as many of them. And some of them went into technology in other fields. So I'm thinking, how can I bring the millennials and Gen Z up faster than we brought the Gen Xers up in terms of being effective? And now I'm saying, Well, yeah, okay. Because that's a real business problem for me. How do I do that? That's knowledge management, perhaps.

C Right? That's a learning and development program. Or that's AI, perhaps. You know, that's being able to put, at the fingertips of these Gen Z millennial employees, the collective knowledge of our company over the last 20 years so that they can get help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round, at the moment of need. So I think I'm excited as that principle when I see it move the needle on something I care about. And I think there's a lot of ways that AI and knowledge management can do that.

A Katie I want to go to this notion of generations that you mentioned, as well as call back the move from tasset knowledge to explicit knowledge. Because I think as we look at the older generation and the retirement cliff that we have coming up, there's still a lot to be gained from that generation prior to retirement. So, you know, as somebody who is an expert in Kilometers or knowledge management, you know, what what are some of the ways that you look to capture capture those individuals who inherently love building the right relationships, love to be out there doing all the things, and and don't wanna be entering things into the computer about what they remember of, you know, their expertise?

C That's a fantastic question. In 2017, we engaged with a woman named Dorothy Leonard. She was a former professor at the Harvard Business School. And also then before that, she was at MIT's Business School. And she got to be known as an expert in the field of what's called critical knowledge transfer. And this is exactly what you're talking about. This is that deep, deep expertise gained by decades of practice, just the thing that separates the best of the best. And that's what she spent her the back half of her career really figuring out how to get good at.

C She wrote a book that's there's she wrote her first book called Deep Smarts, which is a little bit more academic. And then she wrote a book called Critical Knowledge Transfer. We brought her in for K Connect 2017 to do 4 projects with you know, 4 projects with our clients, to kind of help them teach them the methods of doing critical knowledge transfer. And, you know, those are up on our website and the K Connect site. But at a high level, what I learned out of that project was number 1, it's very rarely technical stuff. Like, it's not code, you know, it's not dimensions, you know, it's more about communication. It's more about values, that you really kind of find, you know, out of these experts. And so it's about judgment, you know, and pattern recognition.

C And so the core method that Dorothy used to kind of locate that, to even understand most of these experts don't even know what that critical knowledge is. They're just good at their work because they've been doing it for a long time. And so they're not it's tacit to them, right, as well as to others. And so what she did is engage them in telling project stories was the best way to pull it out of them. It's like, okay. Tell me about a time when a challenging thing happened to a project. Great. They start telling the story about this hospital project, and then something went wrong.

C And then she just, like, dug in. It's like, okay. And then what did you do? And then what did you do? And then what did you do? And just, like, kept unfolding it. And what came out of that is, like, these internal systems of thought. Sometimes they were like little tools. Like, there was this guy from this company, Dewberry, who had this little, like, card kind of, like, rank 1 through 8. Like, when it comes to designing a mechanical system, these are the 8 things you need to consider, they're always going to be the 8, you know, whatever it is safety, cost, efficacy, etc. And these are the order in which I rank those decisions.

C Because that's how you get to the best outcome like and so that he doesn't even use that thing on a day to day basis. It's just deep in his brain. He's like, well, obviously, we're prioritizing whatever it is safety now. But like, it's so invisible. And so through those interview processes, like just all of these insights of how these experts played at such a high level, you know, we were able to pull out. And then those videos were captured, and that they were shared within the organization. But really, it's that process of understanding that experts usually don't know what they know. And then finding ways through actual project stories to pull it out of them.

C And so a lot of our clients have continued using that methodology, you know, and doing these expert interviews and trying to get really at how they made decisions at critical junctures. That's a great method for doing it.

A Thank you for sharing that. I think I feel like listeners are gonna be like, we don't have time to sit down with these individuals. I think I think the thing is we need to sit down with these these individuals as things evolve sooner rather than later.

C One of my favorite tools, I'm a nerd that loves 2 by 2 charts. So the Eisenhower matrix, which many people may be familiar with, if they're not, you've got 2 axes. On one axis, you've got urgent and non urgent. And then in the other, you've got not important and important. And what people tend to focus on is urgent stuff, period, whether it's urgent and important or urgent and not important. But the quadrant that gets missed is the is the important but not urgent. This is critical knowledge transfer. This is where a lot of knowledge management lives.

C Is that stuff that, like, the building's not on fire, so we can always put it off to the next week or the next month or the next year. But the firms that prioritize the important but not urgent, eventually, they start making separation, right? Because you start being able to transfer that critical knowledge from one expert, to now 5 people that understand how to do this thing, or 10 people that understand how to do this thing. And those gains start compounding. Right? So you can take on whatever it is more projects, so you can do more mentorship. And so that knowledge management is a long game. But you start compounding your wins pretty quickly, in my experience. And it's there's really like something kind of like something not anything really more important than beginning if you take the long view to be able to make that investment versus trying to get by week to week. If so it's a mindset shift.

C Right?

A No. Yeah. Absolutely. I think I think it's a mindset shift. I wanted to dive a little bit deeper on this idea. Well, you mentioned it just not too long ago that a lot of this deep critical knowledge is not necessarily technical, that it is, that it actually focuses, but you gave the example of the HVAC list, but I think a lot of it is just in how you communicate, you know, and finds itself in the soft skills that in the business world, in the management and leadership world are the skills that we need more our, our managers and leaders to have more of right now. So can you talk a little bit about how knowledge management supports maybe soft skill development or the nontechnical pieces of of the firm as well?

C Yeah. I've got an example that's very fresh in my mind because we just came off K Connect. And one of our speakers at K Connect this year was John Robison, who is the COO of KTGY based in Irvine. And John told the story of Elevate, which is KTGY's learning and development program leadership development program. And this is a soft skill as you get. You know? It's how to have difficult conversations. You know, it's how to set goals. It's how to bring your full self to work.

C It's about empathy. It's about vulnerability. It's about all these things that we all know make great leaders. But usually, I don't know, we kind of expect it to kind of you just magically happen when you grow up, which we all know doesn't happen. And so When you

A get dubbed the title of manager, right?

C Right. And you get the title, and all of a sudden, you know how to have difficult conversations, you understand how to be empathetic and how to be vulnerable just because you got a 20% salary bump and a new title. Right? That's not how it works. And so I think KGGY's program is fantastic. Like, it's led by John, the COO, and it's led by Tricia, the CEO. And they conceived of it, and they lead it, and they execute it themselves. And the phrase that they use was, what could be more important than this? Right? To figure out you know, our companies are only as good as our leadership in in many ways, and to figure out how to invest in those soft skills. And they didn't just buy a book and tell everyone to read it or send someone to a LinkedIn course.

C The 2 of them put this program together. They run the cohorts. They sit in there. They have the conversations. And they try and they bring in other kind of leaders from within the company. And they just really invest in that knowledge transfer and growth and development of their people. And that is critical knowledge transfer. It's just amazing.

C And so I've seen other clients do that, too, where they're like, it's so important to teach people whatever it is, the KTGY way or the Shepley Bulfinch way or the Turner Fleischer way. And we are gonna make the time to teach people all that soft skills, the why we do things the way we are, that why we care the way not just the technical details, but that deep stuff, like how to communicate with inside the company, but then also, obviously, with clients and consultants and other partners. And that's all knowledge management to me, you know, mentorship, learning, all of it.

A I completely agree with you. But I also kind of wanna get back to this notion of how does that show up in an actual interface and how can AI support that? So one of the things that I found, for instance, incredibly helpful when I was going to business school is that they encourage every student after an interview for an intern, a summer internship after an interview for a job to go into this database and say, you know, what questions were asked? How did you answer? How, like, did you feel that that was like, how was that response received by the other person on the other side? And I think there's so much information there that we can capture that, you know, I, as a, as a project leader at a firm, had to intuitively say, you know, at least after every interview, let's have like a a debrief of, you know, from everyone in that interview of how it went. But taking that to the next level of knowledge management so that you can share that out and share out the historical knowledge. I think a lot of us find ourselves back in front of the same clients or trying to, you know, expand into a field and you wanna know like what, what questions and responses work well and also how to tell it in the firm's voice. So can you speak to a little bit more about about that?

C Sure. I feel like there's 2 parts to my answer. So the first part is capturing, and then the second part is making it available to people at the point of need. So on the capture side, I think we've known how to do this in knowledge management for a long time, whether it's lessons learned or best practices or these critical knowledge transfer interviews or putting together learning and development courses. I think for many firms that have been doing knowledge management for a long time, that can be settled science. I'd be happy to talk to talk to, you know, more about, like, kinda what that looks like. But it's you know, you've created the culture of doing the important but not urgent. And you figured out like, I have one client that comes to mind, Bergmeier in Boston, who, for people that have never done retail or hospitality or whatever the project sector is, or even this specific client, they have created pages on their intranet, which have, like, here are the key things you need to know about this market sector or this specific client.

C Here are the templates. Here's, you know, what to expect out of your first project. Here are some reference sets. You know, like, making all that stuff available has been good. I think about clients like BWBR of ours who have an extensive library of recorded trainings, you know, from all levels within the company. So there's a lot of knowledge out there. I think what's exciting to us about AI, especially because, you know, now we can caption all the videos and get the transcript searchable, is the ability to ask a very pointed question and cut through all of that content to create it. What we're doing is building AI generated search summaries, which will answer the question and then link back with citations to the result where it pulled it.

C And that link might go into minute 47 of a training course from 3 years ago. Whereas in the past, if I'm the person who's got the problem, I'm like, which of these videos do I go watch? The whole thing? Like, I have to do all this work in just to get a simple question answered to make progress. And so you know, we do a lot of what's in knowledge management called just in case learning versus just in time learning. You know? And I have to watch or read or learn all this stuff just in case this just in case this problem comes up one day versus what I think is now going to be possible with AI is, like, get right to that insight. And then maybe, in minute 47, I realize this is actually a pretty compelling, you know, presentation by this person about whatever the x topic is. So I can maybe back out. Maybe I start all the way at the beginning. Or maybe I realize, hey, there's this person in our company that knows this thing, and I didn't even know that they were an expert in this thing.

C So this ability to, like, get right to your point, but then see the context, and then maybe even connect to another person, I think that's what's gonna be quite different. And this is why I think we're entering a golden era of knowledge management. That one thing that the AI unlocks is kind of like they basically it's basically read everything and watched everything on your intranet. And then you can just ask questions and get answers like another person would with with links back to where it comes from. So, yeah, I can keep going about that. But it's in a very exciting because we've been doing all this building for all these years to get to this place. And what I think this technology does is unlocks all of that value that we've been storing up.

A Yes. This I think, you know, the other thing for me and frankly, the heart the most difficult thing for me when I started working at Slack was I always told people, if you are one of those individuals that, like me, came through an architecture firm and is used to organizing everything in folders, and that's how you search and find things on your computer. Using the search function in Slack to get into all of that knowledge is very, is very hard. It's, it's much easier if you tend to have everything on your desktop. Right? And you're using the computer search function because you've developed your own language of keywords and kind of how to, how to find those entities. For me, the one great thing about AI is I don't necessarily need to learn a new language system in order to be able to search for what I want. And it is searching the whole computer. Like, the natural language models are getting so much greater that I can literally begin to talking to my computer like I would any other person and and seek that advice out.

C Yeah. I think you're on point. You know, like, a simple example is I came from my old firm used to call these things standards. And now the new firm calls them guidelines. And in the old model of search, I search for standards, I don't find the guidelines. I think we don't have any standards, you know, whatever it is. And so natural language understands it. Guidelines and standards are pretty synonymous, and it can help you find the thing anyway.

C One of the things we've invested a lot in the last year is building AEC specific AI models. So we built a video transcription model, which allows us to transcribe technical terms, acronyms, all the different pieces of software materials, like we can be very accurate at transcribing them from videos. But we also can search on that knowledge as well. So we can understand, for example, take something like programming. You know, There's a sense of the word programming that's code. Right? There's another sense that's like space planning. And so we understand in the AEC firm, if you're searching for programming examples, you may be looking for space planning examples, maybe not just code examples. And so there's this extra lens because we're so AEC focused, we can apply on it to help you find that stuff even faster.

C And that's another thing that we're excited. Again, that this kind of, like, Kilometers piece, that's actually a sense of our community. So the way we built that model is our community contributed their content to it to help us train those models, knowing they would get to use that AEC model in return. And so that is kind of like KA plus our community doing knowledge management. Right? We're making the best use of our collective knowledge in order to be able to find things more effectively, which has been a really fun project to work on.

A So now if I if I'm a if I'm a young firm leader sitting here and saying like, okay, I need to make the mindset change from critical but not urgent to see the rewards in the end. You know, there's, there's tools out there to begin to organize my knowledge. There's, you know, critical thinking, you know, deep critical thinking knowledge that I might not need to get out of, from leaders that are rolling off. Where do you advise people to start when it comes to knowledge management?

C Yeah. I would start as high up in the organization and as business kind of strategy challenge specific as I can. So it's finding the biggest challenge in that organization. So back to our our friend, Em, our fictitious CEO. You know? Maybe the firm has a strategic plan. Oftentimes, in an AEC firm, it doesn't. But still, go to a Monday morning meeting with principals. And we're like, you have a sense of what the challenges are and the opportunities are.

C You know what the most important one through five things this year to get done are. Is it a quality issue? You know, is it a change order issue? Is it a, you know, developing and mentoring that next generation of talent issue? And then I'd ask the question, where's knowledge fit into this? Like, are we as a company making the best use of our knowledge? If we keep running into here's a great segue. There's a company BWBR. I mentioned them before. They run a a program, a Kilometers program called Landmark Learning. And where that came from was the director of quality, a guy named Dan Hottinger, said, you know, it's the same 10 things that keep showing up on the drawings. Like, in QAQC, we keep finding the same 10 issues over and over again. So at some point, it's like, let's go upstream, and let's teach those issues instead.

C Like, let's not just keep catching them in QAQC when they're the most expensive. Like, let's go upstream. And so that started a learning and development program. So for BWBR, in that moment, it's like, let's just get higher quality drawings, and then let's figure out what knowledge has to do with that. And then it doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be synthesis. This could be very simple. It's like someone makes an outline, does a PowerPoint, teaches a course.

C Like, just how can knowledge help make our company stronger intentionally?

A As a sole practitioner, I often think, like, what if I had a template for this? Or I literally just caught like, wrote that for another document. Where can I make it more accessible so I can just copy and paste it again? And that's like that's even to as a 10.99 contractor, you know, like, what is a what is the backslash command that I can have on my computer that attaches that w two to the email?

C And again, it's gonna take whatever. It's gonna take another 5 minutes, 20 minutes, hour and a half to do that once. Right? But then you just leverage it over and over again. There's a book I always recommend from Atul Gawande called The Checklist Manifesto, which really it's kind of start it starts from medical examples, but then it kind of spirals out into all different kinds of examples. But but that mentality of like, I'm gonna take a few minutes and build a tool, so that I streamline both my work and then maybe future people's work, you know, over time. That's what it is.

A We've already talked about what, like, I would see as the future trend of knowledge management with relative to AI. Are you seeing anything new on the horizon? What should we be keeping our eye out for?

C Yeah. I mean, I think if you back to the very beginning, we had this conversation of, like, is it AI driving change, or is it change you know, is, like, culture or something else happening, and then AI is gonna be a part of that? I think the pace of change just keeps escalating every year, whether that be new building materials, new software, legislation, climate, society expectations and culture. Just things keep moving faster and faster. And I think firms, there's an old quote from a guy named Ari de Geis, who wrote a book called The Living Company. And what he did is he studied companies that got to be like, really old, like 400 years old, or 300 years old. And his kind of famous line from the book was, you know, the company, the only true competitive sustainable advantage over time is to be able to learn faster than your competitors. And so I think there's this, this idea that like, our industry right now is in a permanent state of change that's only picking up speed. And being willing to learn fast, to let go of some things that aren't true anymore, or be willing to at least explore whether or not you know, part of knowledge management is learning what to unlearn.

C And sometimes that's really hard if you've gotten to a certain part of your career, and you've been very successful. And it's like, it got me here. But like, it turns out the world has changed. And now I And it's like, it got me here. But like, it turns out the world has changed. And now I need to, like, learn a new way. And the firm needs to learn a new way. And all these best practices we've set up, it turns out like some of them need to change.

C And so being not too attached to the way we've done things or the knowledge that we've acquired and being willing to continue to upgrade yourself and your company in terms of what you know and how you work, knowing that the half life of knowledge is shrinking every year, more and more. It sounds kind of, like, daunting. Like, I could I also feel kind of exhausted saying that out loud. But it's also kind of exciting. And you just kinda are riding an edge that's it's like surfing a wave that's just continually breaking, You know? And, like, trying to stay with that edge and stay up on your board. Like, that's, I think, what it is in AEC right now, and I think knowledge management's a big part of that.

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