Running a Regenerative Business Practice

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, startup advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community.

A Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we're digging into a powerful question that challenges how most design firms operate. What does it mean to run a regenerative business? Not just designing regenerative buildings, but building a practice that itself is alive, evolving, and contributing to a greater good. To help us explore this idea, I'm joined by three incredible guests. Matthew Broderick is president and CEO of Ashley McGraw Architects. Over three decades, he's helped grow the firm from 10 to 85 people with offices in Syracuse, Boston, and DC. While he's designed many higher ed and sustainable projects, he'll tell you his greatest design project is the firm itself.

A Susan Angarano is a principal at Ashley McGraw and founder of Vason Studio. She brings a wealth of experience in educational planning, interior design, and stakeholder engagement. And she's passionate about creating spaces rooted in culture, context, and sustainability. And finally, Josie Plaut, associate director of the Institute for the Built Environment at Colorado State University, joins us as a guide through the theory and practice of regenerative business. Her work supports organizations in aligning strategy with social and ecological well-being. Together, we'll unpack what it means to lead a firm where people are developed as intentionally as projects and where design excellence is a byproduct of organizational vitality. Let's get into it. Hi, everyone.

A Welcome to the show. I am super excited to have the three of you on board to discuss the regenerative business practice. So just a way to kick things off. Is there anything that you all are looking forward to in the upcoming year? Josie, do you wanna kick us off?

C Sure. Happy to. Hi, everybody. I'm Josie, and I am couple big things in 2025. First of all, I'll be turning 50. So that feels like a big milestone and, have a host of celebratory activities kind of planned out a couple bucket list items, fixing the Northern lights, up near the Arctic Circle. And I'm also actually really looking forward to a publication that we're doing with Ashley McGraw. Suzanne's been really involved in that as well as one of Ashley McGraw's founders, Ed McGraw.

C We're going to be publishing an article in the Journal of Interior Design focused on a shift in design education and practice around regenerative thinking. So I'm really looking forward to that coming forward in 2025.

B Great. Matt, do you wanna take it next?

D Sure. So in 2025, on a personal note, I will have a our older daughter graduating from college and our younger daughter coming home from her first year of college. So lots of, fun. So we'll be settling our older daughter into New York City and welcoming our younger one back home for the summer, and that'll be awesome.

B Great. Susan, how about you? In addition to the book or the publication with the article with Josie.

E Yeah. Definitely looking forward to seeing how that comes together and seeing that published. I think for me, 2025, I'm looking forward to an uneventful year. Just kind of regrouping and seeing what unfolds. We've had a lot of busy things going on work wise, you know, and then just kind of some various challenges that I'm looking forward to seeing what 2025 holds for me.

B A lot of my listeners are are architects or students coming out of school or new firm. Actually, we get a lot of potentially new firm leaders or individuals that are starting are looking to start their business. And I think when we think about regenerative design and architecture, you know, it's it's actually creating buildings that give back to the environment. So how do you guys define a regenerative business, and and what does it mean to be a regenerative business?

C Yeah. So this is Josie. I'll take that one to start with and then maybe kick it over to my colleagues here today. But I think that since you mentioned, given that your audience is mostly design professionals, it's important to distinguish between regenerative design and regenerative business because they aren't one and the same. Regenerative business practices can be used across the entire industry of any kind of business or organization, nonprofits, even government organizations could adopt what we're calling a regenerative business practice. And so depending on who you work with, they do share some of the same same source materials. Right? So there are some commonalities in terms of sourcing wisdom and understanding from the living world. Beyond that, it takes on a different flavor when we're talking about organizational design and development and leadership.

C It's also worth mentioning that regenerative business has a pretty long track record. So the idea of regeneration has really become popular in the last five or ten years. But I've worked with Carol Sanford, who has been working and calling her work regenerative business design for over fifty years, which is surprising sometimes to me given sort of the emergence of this word in our industry. And I've been helping companies like Ashley McGraw for about ten years help to transform their business strategy as well as their organizational culture towards using regenerative thinking as as the basis for that. So fundamentally, regenerative business differs from conventional or progressive business practices in a couple of really fundamental ways. And as I already sort of mentioned, it's based on the science and working of living systems. And that's sort of how the world actually works rather than these human impositions that we place on it. So unconsciously, we bring a lot of mechanistic and authoritarian or even humanistic views of how the world works, and we kind of impose that on everything.

C And that's behind a lot of what we do, but it's often pretty unexamined. So what worldview we're using, we kind of inherit that culturally and just assume and move forward that that's the one right way or the only way to see how the world works. And so regenerative business goes back to using principles of living systems. For example, one principle is that an organism that survives in nature is one that becomes important to a larger system. From that premise, we can then start to explore how we as individuals and as a firm become increasingly important to the systems that we serve. So that is how an individual becomes important to the firm, how the firm becomes increasingly important to the clients that it serves, and to the communities that those clients exist within. So there is this notion of how are we generating benefit across multiple systems. And then maybe I will sort of say that, you know, then within that framing, we apply both developmental psychology.

C So that's the understanding of how the human mind and the human being develops in terms of their own thinking, ability to deal with complexity, navigating uncertainty, taking greater and greater systems into consideration. We blend developmental psychology and transformative education into business practice. So it requires a lot of development of the people who are in the business to kind of grow beyond those existing models and and paradigms in their own heads and to start to adopt a different way of working and being in the world.

B Thanks so much for that, Josie. I kinda wanna create an example, and tell me whether or not I'm on the right cue from an architect speak type of lens. And this is true with a lot of other organizations. Right? For a long time, I think when when we talk about hiring people, we talk about culture fit. But that is really kind of an older terminology. You want everyone the people you bring in to be aligned with your values, not necessarily a fit to your culture, or at least that's something that I say. Because essentially, any person that you bring into the firm is then evolving the culture of that firm. Is that more of a regenerative perspective on how an individual then affects the business and the business plays into to the community?

C Yeah. So you're keying into something that is important, and it's one of the tenants another one of the tenants or principles of regenerative anything, which is this idea of singularity. Right? Each one of us has singularity, and each firm and each client has singularity. Sometimes we call this essence. Right? Whatever it is, though, it's that it's that which is particular and unique within each of us. And so there's always this kind of essence to essence connection. And how can we, instead of kind of standardizing or expecting everyone to fit to our particular morals, beliefs, values, do more of a one to one recognition of each person's opportunity to contribute their uniqueness to the organization and the organization to the clients.

B Before we get too far in, can we get a little perspective on how this particular group came together? And I think Matthew, both Suzanne and Josie has helped and kind of inform your thinking around running your practice as a regenerative business. How did all of the three of you meet and come to work together?

D In some ways, I was kind of going through the chronology recently, and we've started digging into regenerative work probably about 02/2009. And that probably a little more on the regenerative design side, some of our sustainability practices. We were doing a really deep dive into sustainability, and we were starting to do some of the tools and frameworks that we use in regenerative business into the practice. But then I think 02/2017, Suzanne and Ed McGraw did some training with Josie, and maybe I should let Josie and Suzanne explain what that was. And that started a more formalized kickoff on this work.

E So I can chime in a little bit, Matt. I was invited by Ed McGraw to join him in a regenerative practitioner's group called Blenzys that Josie was running at the time. And it was my first introduction to any of this kind of thinking. So for me, it was more introductory thinking about systems thinking. And as I became more involved, I became aware that it's it's thinking or practices that I've been engaged in before without realizing it. And through my master's program and and other areas in the design world and just kind of my own personal beliefs, it seemed to really there were good synergies there. And so I just kind of took an interest and struggled through it. It's kind of a difficult concept to

D I don't

E think I think we're always working towards that. So, just kind of continued on with that in that interest, and it's it's grown from there for me.

D Yeah. And then I would say in 02/2019, Suzanne and myself, Ed McGraw, and another one of our partners, Andrew Shuster, started working a four year program with Carol Sanford and the Carol Sanford Institute, which was a deep dive into regenerative business and applying that to our individual business. And for three of those years, Josie was a resource to us in that work. So she would do some of the small group breakouts with us. She we would have meetings in between those to further develop that kind of work. And once we wrap that up in 2022, we just continued on working with Josie. So we still get together as a core team about once a month to work together on developing the organizational structures. Josie and a colleague, Beatrice Ungard, are working through are almost done working through an eight session workshops with our project managers, which is very different project management training than what we're all used to because it's not about here's the process to manage a project, here's the techniques to manage a project.

D It's shifting the focus on looking at the role of the project manager in developing their team, in developing the people on their team and creating that developmental culture. We also just finished a strategic planning process this fall or are finishing a strategic planning process this fall that Josie helped to, facilitate with the full firm and the leadership team. So we've been kind of evolving our work together over the past, you know, six to ten years as we kinda shape the whole organization, and it's still very much a work in progress in that regard.

B Suzanne, it it sounds like you might have kind of inherited being a part of a firm that was beginning to look at regenerative design. Matthew, you started in regenerative design in practice, and you're looking at how to move that towards business. When you were discovering what it means to have a regenerative business, what attributes of having a regenerative business were so appealing to you that you wanted to make that transition and explore this way of working?

D Well, first, running a mid sized architectural firm always feels like a very precarious sort of place. It's a tough industry, you know, and being a mid sized firm kind of in that industry, you're very aware of the competition and the evolving landscape and the resources you have to develop and evolve, within that. And, you know, I've grown to believe very strongly that as a midsize firm in our industry that the the only way to to thrive in that industry. And I I was thinking the other day that not to survive because I I don't think there's an actual thing as surviving as a architectural firm. I think if you're surviving, you're on this slow degrade, down downgrade to extinction sort of thing. But if you if we really wanna thrive, we need to be able to harness the creativity and the initiative of every single person in the organization because it can't just be the leadership, you know, coming up with the ideas and figuring out how to implement and figuring out how to expand our product offerings and that sort of thing. We need to be able to allow everybody to do that. And that kinda requires two things that are inherent in the regenerative business work.

D One is that developmental culture where you're trying to do that blend of, you know, regenerative work and developmental psychology where you're you're trying to develop each individual according to their own essence and give them the agency to say, I see I see a problem that I think I have a solution for. I feel like I have agency to pursue that and to apply that. But then on the other end, this is ultimately about the client and our ability to provide value to them. And one of the ways we say that too is not just providing value to the clients, it's about contributing to the value adding processes that they are bringing to their endeavors. So contributing to their visions and their own value adding processes. And so if you take those two together, if you if as an organization, and this is what one of the things, for example, we're working on very strongly in our recent strategic planning efforts over the last two or three months, if you can define really clearly what your strategic directions are is as a firm and what your strategic pursuits are and communicate that clearly to the entire firm, and then build the agency and the capacity and everybody in the firm to say, okay. I understand that. I see that, and I see a place where I'd like to contribute to that.

D Then you're able to harness the, you know, then you may be we may be a mid sized firm, but we have 85 people who are actively exploring ways to evolve our offerings and better serve our clients, and and and that's a way that we can propel our way forward that I think under that kind of traditional model that I start off my career in is much more limited.

B You're all related to the built environment. Even Josie, you're working with regenerative business practices. You have ties back to the built environment. You all play very active roles within the AEC industry. The way you guys talk about regenerative businesses, one, you obviously need leadership buy in. The whole firm has to be approaching this and to to be brought in on this. There are a lot of things that we struggle with from a practice standpoint in the AEC industry. What are some of, I would say, the harder mindsets shifts that you have to make considering what happens within like how we usually do things in the AEC industry, throwing one out there, maybe like gatekeeping, right? Like earning your way to client meetings, earning your way to doing more on the project beyond details.

B What are some of the biggest hurdles that you see that we need to overcome from a mindset perspective to think about running a more regenerative business.

C Suzanne, I know she's got some good things to add on this in that personal journey and kind of reorienting the relationship with both client and with staff. So I'd love it if you would talk a little bit more about that.

E So I'm actually trained as an interior designer, not as an architect. So I think my perspective has been a little bit different. I've always felt a little bit like needing to find my place on the project team or to find my place within a client meeting. So I think this this was a little bit more natural for me in in in integrating into a business a regenerative business practice because I've sort of been in that position needing to find different ways to approach engaging with the firm and with clients. I think some of the mindset shifts are in which that's in my mind, it's exactly it's exactly that. It's around, like, giving people the opportunity to see things through and to contribute and giving them that that they all have the potential for something like that. I think a traditional or stereotypical architectural environment, there are egos involved in terms of, you know, design language or design abilities. And I think there's some natural qualifications there, but there's also the creativity is very subjective and something that can be done in a vacuum or be done in a very cocreative environment.

E So I think, again, kind of going back to my interior design approach, it's working with clients in a way that's digging for deep understanding and looking for the users and the client to contribute to the design vision. And it's similar. I kind of bring that lens to working with colleagues and, teams as well that looking at what what insight can each person on the team bring to the project and develop that capacity.

C So one of the things that Suzanne is speaking toward is there's a couple important shifts in relationship. So one is as a leader or a manager, we often come in with unconscious ideas about people being fixed. You have a fixed level of talent. You're you have certain capability, and and then we kind of, like, manage to people's strengths and weaknesses as leaders within the organization. And within regenerative business, there is sort of a tenant of growing people to grow the business. And to do that, you actually have to let go of the idea of, a, your superior intelligence, and that's hard to let go of because you've risen in the firm because you're good at what you do. Right? You are smart and you are capable, and so that's why you rise through the ranks. Right? And so part of that shift is in setting some of that ego aside and really focusing on the development of each person on your team and believing that they have unlimited potential for growth and that your job is to help them develop themselves and help them develop their ability to contribute and to see and understand rather than kind of dictating and regulating and being that hub at the center of everything, right, which a lot of people are really attached to.

C We don't talk about that much, but it's like protecting power to be at the center and to be sort of in that command and control position. And so instead, it's about distributing capability and growing capability across the entire team so that everyone is ongoingly increasingly able to deliver. It also requires the same kind of reorienting your relationship with the client. So instead of being the sort of designer with the understanding that you're going to impart your wisdom on them, you put yourself into a partnering relationship where there's a lot more humility involved in how you show up to understand your client, to understand their needs, to really unearth who they are and what their real life struggles and challenges are, and then to meet them there as a partner. And to think of them as like being an underwriter for their hopes and dreams and aspirations. So there are some positional shifts that need to happen, and they require letting go of a lot of kind of ego is a big piece of it that can show up in destructive ways. Now final sort of thought on this, ego is not a bad thing. I'm actually not anti ego.

C It's important to see your importance and relevance in the world, but how that plays out as either being overemphasized or underemphasized is when it's problematic. So the ego just needs to be in right relationship with everything else.

B Speaking of perspective and going Josie back to these prescriptive, more mechanic models that we've developed in our business practices, I can anticipate that somebody is gonna be like, well, we already do that with our clients. We are already partners with our client. Like, maybe, Suzanne or Matt, you can help me too. Can you give kind of a more specific example of how your average architecture for my approach something with a client and how a regenerative approach may differ? Because I feel like all architects believe that they're really emotionally driven to deliver upon what the client's values are?

C Before they answer, I just wanna say what you're hitting on is really important, which is there's this tendency when we hear something that sounds good, there's a tendency, a natural tendency to be like, yeah, we already do that. And so a challenge to your listeners is to actually pause and say, but do we? When when are we really doing that? And in what ways are we really kind of trying to focus on serving our own needs and interests in terms of focusing just on managing the complexity of navigating our day? When is that energy really directed inwards toward yourself, and how often is that energy really being sourced from the value that's being added to the client? And to just notice because we all, we all navigate and shift and flex between those spaces. And we all have a tendency to revert back to the effects and impacts on me and my life and my world. And how do I just get through my day? And we forget to connect, how is this thing that I'm doing right today in this moment actually truly connecting to and adding value to my client? So I think it's more of a dynamic process than like we do that or we don't do that. It's more like when are we doing that and when are we not doing that? And how can we grow our capacity to increasingly source? When we sit down with a junior coworker and look at a drawing, are we connecting that back to the value that's being created and developing their understanding? Are we just saying, here's how this needs to be, go do it, without really growing their capacity to see why it matters, how it impacts the project, how it impacts the clients and the end users. When are we connected to that? When are we not? So I don't know if either of you wanna jump in with a specific example there, but I wanted to kind of illustrate that it's, a, it's not that firms aren't doing it. It's more like how much are you doing it, and how conscious are you of how often you're there versus when you're more internally focused.

E I'm not sure if I have an example, but what Josie was talking about in terms of asking yourself, that for me is where it starts. It's any engagement, whether it's with a team internally, one on one with a colleague, working with clients. It's asking those questions to bring more consciousness to those conversations and to those efforts. And it's so easy to go into a meeting with this is how I've done it every other time, so I'm just gonna show up with that pre existing agenda. And a lot of my work is looking at how it can be tailored to that situation, to that client, to the community, whatever it might be, and it starts with asking those questions. So and that's sometimes hard because you're disrupting your daily workflow in order to ask those questions.

D You know, I'm thinking about what Josie and Suzanne said in relation to helping staff grow and develop and and thinking about, say, the kind of and Suzanne touched on this, but the old kind of apprenticeship model of you sit down and you just say, you know, you sit down with a less experienced staff member and you say, this is how you do it. This is how I've done it. This is how I learned to do it. This is how you shall do it. Mark it up. So, you know, the draw do it like this sort of thing. And then on that note, I hear a lot over the years that they're not getting it. They don't, you know, they're, you know, they're not listening.

D They're not getting it. And I I think when you take that extra step of saying and it's a big step of saying, okay. Let's look what you're doing. And it could be, you know, drawing a detail doing a wall section or drawing a toilet detail or whatever. It could you know, that nuance of and granular, but saying, okay. Can we draw that line, that connection to how this serves the client and serves the client needs? Because it's also much more motivating than you should do it that you do it because you you've we've always done it this way. And it also requires of that person, who's growing and learning to search a little bit for the answer themselves and not be yeah. Does and we'll probably touch on this more in the conversation.

D But, yeah, I think there's in traditional business, there's a certain expectation that grows, you know, when you when you get into, you know, business environment of I'm expected to be given the answer, and I'm expected to be told, you know, if I'm doing it right, and if not, how I should be doing it. And it's this externally driven, externally sourced environment that stifles that innovation and that creativity that everybody can be bringing to it because it's, you know, it's those handful of people who are who are charged with telling everybody else how it's supposed to work that all of that initiative, all of that, all of those ideas have to be generated from that. And that's a that's a very limiting funnel to push everything through.

B Enjoying the show? Join a community of fellow disruptors at practiceofarchitecture.com/community. Your membership helps support the production of this podcast, Practice Disrupted, and funds the creation of more resources for all of you. Looking forward to growing together. Join us today at practiceofarchitecture.com/community. I have to admit, I've definitely been in a leadership position where I'm I'm running up against a deadline. Right? And we were trying to onboard a new individual and he was asking all these questions and I was getting a little I was just like, we just need to hit this deadline. So right now I need you to do it this this way, in this instance. Thankfully, I feel like I was self aware enough to say, like, okay.

B I'm sorry we had to hit that deadline and just get it done. But, like, let's let's go, like, go back and answer your questions that you were asking originally. But how do you balance and I feel like that's so much of the struggle of the grind and the hustle culture of working in architecture firms with these managing the client deadline, with the expectations, with also trying to ensure that everyone is being seen as a single entity and knows how they're contributing to a broader good. I I can see some of our listeners just being like, but sometimes we just have deadlines that we need to meet, and we just need to hunker down and get it done. So what does that mean to all of this mindset shift?

D It comes up all the time, and it's something that it's come up very recently, honestly, and something that that you kinda have to wrestle with on a day to day basis. And one of the things that we talk about is you're constantly working you're you're working simultaneously at a at a bunch of different levels. And there are levels of just operating and maintaining the business. Like, okay. We gotta hit this deadline. We gotta get this out. You're not you can't innovate on everything all the time because that's exhausting, and you you're not gonna get stuff done. So it becomes a question of, yeah, there there are certain systems in place.

D There are certain ways of doing things that at times you're just trying to perfect and do those really well. But are you are we able to also spend enough time pulling ourselves out of that and trying to look at it differently and think about it differently so that gradually we're elevating some of those things? So something that you're just trying to perfect and maintain in the office, you know, your drawing standards or your design process. And can you, on a regular basis, look at that system and look at that so that you're innovating and improving upon that process, elevating it up. And then you're gonna be operating you're gonna be maintaining it back for a while longer, but it's a it's different and it's evolved. And so just I think the word Josie touched on was really important earlier was being conscious of which of those levels you're working on, that are are we just trying to perfect this thing that we're doing. You know, we're trying to just perfect our drawing standards right now. But over here, we're thinking a little bit more broadly about something else, and you're you're kinda doing all of that work, if that makes sense. Because I think it's we I think one of the things we've experienced I've experienced is that if you do this work in a way or you talk about this work in a way where it sounds like, no, you can't do anything that's rote or that anything that's consistent, you always have to be, you know, innovating and thinking differently.

D It's exhausting for people. They're like, but I can't do that all the time, and I just have to get my stuff done. And we have to remind ourselves and and reinforce everybody else that, yeah, there's an element of just getting our stuff done. But if all we're doing is just getting our stuff done, then we're not evolving and we're on that kind of slow downward track to end of extinction. So hitting that right balance is a daily struggle.

B I'm beginning to wrap my head around it a little bit more. And I think, you know, a lot of what we have too is new leaders or relatively small firm leaders. It sounds to me, and Josie might be able to help me explore this, it really is a mindset approach that you can take to businesses of all size. So you don't have to be a medium size firm, like even small firm and even sole practitioners can adopt some of these practices relative to how they deal with their clients. Would you say that's correct?

C Yeah. Absolutely. This work is relevant because it's how you think about the work you're doing. Right? So it's not just and then that informs your strategy, that informs what you think about, and that informs where you direct your attention. And that's really what this comes down to is where what is the source of thinking that's directing the action that you do every day? And that is relevant no matter the size of the organization. So if we are focused on developing our value that we're creating for clients or that's not a good example because to your point, you know, everybody thinks they're doing that. Right? Like, everybody thinks that what they're doing is is adding the most possible value to their clients. But it is it is easier to think in the example that we were just talking about about sort of the the work of getting work done.

C My observation is that a lot of architecture firms are working in a perpetual state of kind of urgency, in a perpetual and perennial state of kind of reactivity, vitality. It's very high stress. And that that overcomes it overcomes a lot of opportunities and it creates a lot of waste actually in the system. So you end up with a lot of redesign, you end up with turnover among staff because they get burnt out and they leave, you end up with having to continue telling people what to do because their capacity to grow is really kind of based on themselves rather than intentionally growing it. And so it's almost like what is lost when we aren't bringing people up as often as possible. And then we're just we're, like, locking ourselves in the same level of frenetic working because we aren't actually growing capacity to contribute while we're working. So so we have to be engaged while we're working. That philosophy and the philosophy or using living systems frameworks can work no matter the size.

C So we've been focusing a lot on more organizational culture and how we create a deliberately developmental culture within the organization, but that's only part of a regenerative business practice. It's a big part of it. Right? People are the most valuable asset within the organization and igniting and inviting their will to show up, their creativity to show up, their innovation, that's all really valuable, but that's only part of what a regenerative business is about. It's also in terms of how you see yourself in the world. What is it that you as a single practitioner, whether that's you and your own design firm, what is it that you offer that nobody else does? What's particular about working with you that people don't get when they work somewhere else? So knowing yourself and knowing that value really well. How well are you really able to image your clients' world and what they're trying to manifest? How well do you really understand their challenges, struggles, realities? You're stepping into their world and you're stepping into what's going on for them. How well do you know them? Do you know them well enough to really be a strategic partner in advancing their big picture goals and aspirations, not just delivering a building, but in actually making the process be value adding to them. So that's part of the philosophical approach that is the business strategy, not just the kind of organizational culture and developmental strategy.

C So all of that is is sourced from how you're thinking about your business strategy as well as your organizational culture and human human development.

B I'd love to explore maybe with Matt and Suzanne a little bit further around what this means for the expectations placed on employers and employees to actively participate in a regenerative business practice. And I know just looking at our notes here, Matthew, you talked about how you replaced performance evaluations and how that looks different too. So maybe that's a good place to start.

D One of the first ways that we rolled this way of thinking out to the full firm and to the staff is with the performance evaluation process. So we, like, probably most firms, most businesses had your typical performance evaluation process for years where you asked a bunch of people to rate you on a scale of, like, one to five, you know, needs improvement to performing exceptionally or whatever language you used. And and one of the things that we talked about with Josie and in our work with Carol Sanford was that, you know, that one of the things that that process does is it sources will outside the person. So it causes people to source their will from how happy they're making other people. So it they're not necessarily generating that will themselves or generating that kind of satisfaction themselves. So they're constantly looking out and saying, you know, am I doing a good job? Should I is this what I should be doing? Should I be doing something else? And that can be very stifling for the kind of level of innovation that we're looking for and the ability to apply each person's essence or uniqueness to the challenges that the company is facing. So we made a shift to what Josie called our reflection and direction process, and this is was based on something that she's used herself in her own organization, but we get together as a firm all firm gathering every April, you know, and we have people in 11 different states. So we're pulling everybody in.

D We pull everybody in four times a year. But in April, it's we spend a full day working on this where we start off we by asking everybody to reflect on the past year and what they observed, what they accomplished, how they grew, and there's with very specific questions. And then and then we ask people to think about the next twelve months and and where they see opportunities to grow. And in the context of we set the stage for that by reiterating the corporate strategy and the strategic vision of the firm and where we're trying to go so that when people are because what we used to get in the performance evaluation process from people, there's a goal section as there frequently is. And it's, I wanna get my license. I wanna do this, and I wanna but it's always very, like, internally focused as do.

B Me me driven. Right? Kind of how Josie alluded to that earlier.

D Exactly. Exactly. So we try to flip that on ahead to say, you know, it is sourced from yourself and your own development and your own essence, but it's holding that vision of where the firm is trying to head, how we're trying to serve the clients, and encouraging the staff to explore how they can connect to their own development to in a way that contributes to that strategic vision of the firm. And that's working in small groups and resourcing each other on that. So it's a it's a very careful process to help people through that because it's not a natural thing that, you know, you're used to. So that really kind of flips that on its head to try to encourage people and put some framework in place for people to think in that way. There is still you know, we're a profession, and there's that profession that requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of learning. You know, how do you put buildings together? How do you engage in programming? And so there's still that piece that needs to go on as far as, you know, providing people the experience and the wisdom and the education and how you develop as a technical professional.

D So that goes on in parallel, but really shifting the kind of viewpoint of from an externally driven, you know, what do you want me to do to an internally driven, how can I contribute to the development of the organization? And I think it makes for, you know, just a fundamentally better place to work if you're if you're doing that.

B One of the things that came to mind, Matthew, when you are kind of discussing that process is there's so many conversations right now around generation z and even millennials wanting to understand what their career ladder is or the progression is. What do I have to do next to get to the next level within a firm? So how is that balanced with this approach to individual and interpersonal development and them kind of also creating their own path based on their own unique skill set?

D Yeah, that's an interesting thing because we've wrestled with that notion inside and outside of this regenerative work for years. And we've tried to we've tried to really counter this notion that there is a a ordained path that you go through because, you know, traditionally and certainly when I started in the profession, you know, it was you're a junior architect, you get license, you're a project architect, you're project manager. Yeah. Eventually, you move up into a higher leadership position that hopefully includes ownership, and there's this kind of, you know, narrowing pyramid that you march up through. And in most organizations, there's only so many spaces at the next level of the pyramid. So what happens to everybody else who isn't able to find a space or fit into that? And trying to shift that mindset understanding to the idea that every role in the firm is of equal value, and every developmental path is of equal value. Because the reality is also that a lot of people don't really want that traditional path, but that is the path. That's what you have to do, and and you have to kinda go through those.

D And through this work, if we're able to provide almost an infinite array of paths that are all equal in the level of contribution that you're able to make to the firm is hopefully very empowering for people. And, I mean, we've been very fortunate to have very low turnover as an organization, which is is really important, you know, for the strength and the longevity of an organization. If you're not constantly churning over, I think the current statistics are like industry statistics are like 10 or 11% a year turnover, which is that's a lot of people do onboard. And, you know, and and we along with that, we do take the philosophy of if people do leave, we're very supportive of it because we see it as something that it's usually something that they're doing to as as part of their developmental path. They're seeing something that they want to explore, that they wanna do, and that's that's awesome. That's what we're trying to do. You know? And if they wanna go off and explore some other path, so for a moment of the times, they come back too. So it's a different sort of viewpoint and perspective, I think, that we try to take around that.

E Related to that, I think something I've observed when there's a sense that there's opportunities to contribute in a way that's not just climbing that hierarchy, there it's good for the individual, but it's also good for the business. And there's more growth in our business that takes on or ekes out kind of the different ways in which we can serve our clients that aren't necessarily exactly what the traditional architectural services are. So for instance, I started Basen Studio in 02/2019 as a a business that works alongside Ashenberg often, but also works in other avenues and with other firms, specifically around educational environments and working with communities and educators. So that's very similar to, you know, Ashlagra focuses on primary work is in educational design, but this is kind of going beyond some of that. And it was just an avenue where I could grow some of my own interests that were in parallel with the work that Asher McGraw was doing or is doing. So then there's a lot of other examples where kind of that ability to see how your own personal interests can contribute to the firm allows the firm to grow in these unique ways. So it's it's good for the business too, and I've I've seen that in a lot of different places. And I think that's where some of our biggest successes have been that then come back to kind of reinforcing or enhancing the work that we do that's more core to our original practice of architecture.

B A lot of my questions have been internally focused around the practice. So I would love to hear, alternatively, because it does extend to the client side, how clients have responded on their side to the way you guys work.

E So some of this, how we were talking about that, it's it's not about how within an organization, you know, kind of resisting the urge to tell somebody exactly how to do something and allowing the individual to or giving them the resources so that they can explore it themselves. I think the same is true in working with your clients. And I think that more of the typical approach is either we're, you know, as a design professional, we've done this before. We'll we're we can give you a solution, or the client is I need x, y, and z. Now provide that for me. And I think there's more of within this way of thinking. It's digging deeper into understanding how each stakeholder can contribute their own thinking to then produce kind of the the vision or the direction for the project. So with that way of thinking, it's how we engage in conversation, engage in activities with the client.

E And I think originally when we brought this way of thinking to clients, we were trying to describe to them what we would be doing and why it would be beneficial to them. And it's hard to articulate or articulate in a way that shows it's beneficial. It it comes across as sounding like, well, that's a lot more than I was expecting, or I don't have time for that or something. So I think what we've evolved to do is engaging in this way of thinking and and engaging with our clients in that way as an experience. So it's something that they that's the experience they're they're going to get by working with us, and the feeling of that and kind of reflecting back on that as you move through the process of design or for that project is something that you feel and is kind of lingers throughout the entire process that, again, maybe you can't pinpoint exactly what it was, but that experience is much, is powerful and makes that experience something that results in greater outcomes of the project. I think that we've kind of figured that out, that doing it by experience has really worked well in, working with our clients, and we get now a lot of just that referral business or kind of those the feedback of how how transformative the process was in addition to the end product of the building or the project or whatever it might be.

D And just to build off, Suzanne and others, but particularly Suzanne, have put a lot of effort into over the years. It is a very, you know, specific approach of how, you know, they interact with the clients. Some tools and they bring to the table to dig deeper into how the clients are what's really going on that might be be beyond the brief that you're given. You know, that the program, this number of spaces, but what is that they're really trying to get at from this project. And and sometimes that's that's things that they didn't know going into it, you know, that, you know, that the project could do for them or bring to them. So looking at the work, Suzanne and our other educational planners and stake people who do stakeholder engagement in the firm and have done, it's this kind of interplay of doing a lot of internal and upfront work to kind of build tools and techniques to bring that out with the clients, but constantly ensuring that it's not a rote toolkit that we go to client. This is what we do every time and but to be able to constantly shape that to the individual client and to keep that fresh because you're constantly pushing up against okay. Now this is a a rote system that we do now, and and, you know, it's very quickly devalued.

D So, I think our folks have done a very good job in trying to strike that balance, and the clients do recognize that as, you know, I think they feel more understood and then maybe they used to in our former processes.

B What advice would you offer to others that are interested in exploring and learning more, and how do they learn more about what they may think they're already doing but could be doing so much more in terms of being a regenerative business?

C Yeah. So in terms of learning more, Carol Sanford has written seven books. Most of them are award winning in terms of organizational business development. They're not all an easy read. If nothing else, maybe just start with, like, the first two or three chapters of each book. It really helps to have some deeper understanding and some experience of what she's talking about. There's, maybe a little bit of a a a shameless plug. I'll be, also leading a new offering through the Institute for the Built Environment next year called Beyond Studio, and Beyond Studio will be a place for practitioners.

C There'll be a whole suite of educational offerings over time that are offered through Beyond Studio, but it'll be a place for practitioners to kind of dive in and get some hands on or at least mind on thinking and experience with regenerative both design and organizational development. But I would say that, you know, first, it has to kind of start with this interest in going beyond the status quo. This is something that's good for people that feel a little restless with the current ways of doing business and really want to push and grow themselves and believe that, you know, the flavor of the month in terms of leadership and, you know, whatever they're getting out of HBR, which is always some tidy little package of like, here's five things you can do to improve x, y, and z, that those are usually kind of incomplete and inadequate for really transforming an organization. So this is good work for people who want to engage in, like, literally, like, kind of climbing up a rope and really doing some deep work to explore their own ways of thinking and being, but it can also be super rewarding.

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 practiceofarchitecture.com/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practiceofarchitecture.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.