Katie [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the AEC Marketing for Principles podcast. This show is designed as a conversation between sales and marketing principals to address trends, challenges and best practices that are driving growth for professional service firms. Through our collection of discussions with subject matter experts, industry legends and leaders, we aim to share thoughts and practical tips with our listeners and that you can use for growing your AEC brands. Hosted by me, Katie Cash, Senior Vice President at smartigies, the AEC growth consulting firm that’s been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 2008. Hey folks, let’s be honest with each other for a minute. The way we are managing knowledge in the AEC industry is a little bit of a mess. For honest, we’re probably not really managing at all. And what I’m talking about is we have proposals living in silos, we have project information that never gets shared beyond the project team that actually worked on the job and it lives in their mind.
Katie [00:01:05]:
And then we’ve all watched that great insight walk out the door when someone retires or leaves the firm. So what if managing all of that knowledge wasn’t just an internal problem, but what if we really think about it as a competitive advantage, especially when we talk about winning work? We are in the middle of the thick of pursuit season here in AEC and everybody’s trying to find that competitive edge. And I think today’s guest is going to help us connect a lot of those dots, help us really think about knowledge. And the way we structure our knowledge architecture within our firms is really going to help us. So today I’m talking with Chris Parsons. He’s the founder and he’s the CEO of Knowledge Architecture and he has spent the better part of the last 15 years really helping AEC firms across the industry. Big, small, multidiscipline, nichely specialized in helping them organize and share and really think about how they can activate their expertise that already exists within their walls or within the talent within their walls. So whether you’re a marketer or you’re a principal listening today, I really want you to start thinking about the long term value of the information that lives within the walls and within the team that you employ at your organization.
Katie [00:02:21]:
And today’s episode is really about making an impact through smarter collaboration, creating better content and using systems that are going to support both. So I’m really excited to have Chris with us. Chris, thanks for taking time out to talk with me.
Chris Parsons [00:02:33]:
My pleasure. It’s fun to see you. Katie Cash.
Katie [00:02:36]:
Yeah, it’s fun to see you and I know you’ve had A a busy summer yourself with all the different events that you’ve been speaking at and you’re gearing up for the fall roadshow. I think we’ll both be at PSMJ coming up, so it’ll be fun. But let’s really talk about this topic. You know, let’s talk a little bit about why having a knowledge strategy today is really becoming more and more of a C suite issue. And I have had two conversations already this morning specifically on this topic with two different clients. So, you know, maybe we talk a little bit about you. You’ve been doing this for a while, you’ve worked with lots of firms. Why do you think now is kind of becoming this moment where creating a knowledge strategy is.
Katie [00:03:17]:
Is really being mission critical?
Chris Parsons [00:03:20]:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I just want to go back just a couple clicks. So before starting Knowledge architecture In 2009, I ran technology into architecture firms here in San Francisco for about eight years. So, and I spent my time in those two practices. That’s where I discovered that knowledge management was a thing and what should be a thing. It should be a thing. And I learned about it from outside of aec because people at that time weren’t talking about knowledge management in our industry, at least not using that term. And so, you know, but the army was doing it and NASA was doing it, and big law firms were doing it.
Chris Parsons [00:03:53]:
And so I tried to figure out kind of how to bring some of those knowledge management and practices into our firms to make them more successful. And then ultimately I figured out that’s what I want to do with my career, is help architecture and engineering firms with knowledge management. And so that’s why I started the company. Some of the reasons why it’s important today are evergreen. They were important back 20 years ago when I was in it. Some of them are really new. But like, just starting with today, I think there’s a few things. I think there is a pace of change that is just accelerating the pace of business and change are accelerating, whether it’s the way that business development is expected to happen, you know, the kind of client expectations, new materials, new building technologies, new regulations.
Chris Parsons [00:04:35]:
Like there’s that there is a generational transition with baby boomers, like really accelerating their retirements. And demographically there aren’t enough Gen Xers to replace them. You start seeing is now millennials and even Gen Zs getting in positions of management, design leadership sooner in their careers than ever before. So we’re wanting to accelerate those people’s like, knowledge and learning journeys. And then there’s AI, which is super disruptive in both ways. Like it’s a huge opportunity, but then it’s also kind of terrifying or spooking some firms too. And the thing that firms that are getting into AI, certainly in our community and clients we work with, they understand that good knowledge is the foundation to good outcomes with AI.
Katie [00:05:17]:
Right.
Chris Parsons [00:05:18]:
Without solid firm wide information, project information, whatever it is, AI can’t really help you. And so there’s this kind of renaissance happening within knowledge management. We call it the KM 3.0 era. So knowledge management 3.0, which is the AI powered revolution and it is really helping firms sometimes for the first time understand like it’s not just a nice to have to have good project information or good organization. Like it’s essential if we’re going to take advantage of these new AI capabilities and stay competitive.
Katie [00:05:47]:
Yeah. And you know, and it’s, it’s not a new problem. It’s kind of a tale as old as time. When I first got in the industry 20 years ago, it was a friction point then. Right. You know, I’m, I’m a marketer. I’m working on a proposal. I’m asking my internal clients for information and they’re like, I’ve given this to you three times.
Katie [00:06:04]:
Why can’t you remember this? I’m like, oh, well, I don’t have anywhere to put it. It’s a proposal that I forgot about or my coworker did and I didn’t know what she knows. So yeah, I see that all the time. And you’re right, there are people being promoted in positions or new positions being created that might not have been there before that are being filled by younger individuals where the years of experience aren’t on their shoulders. Right. And so being able to have information that they can learn from, glean from so that they can be more successful isn’t helpful in both firms.
Chris Parsons [00:06:35]:
I sat between the principles and marketing.
Katie [00:06:37]:
Yeah.
Chris Parsons [00:06:37]:
And I watched go on all day long over email. And then is like, how many projects have we done that are health care projects in California? Last five. And like, like the crazy part is the answers were always different. Even though there is one right answer. You know what I mean? It was all recall out of people’s heads. And like I’m as a technologist and as a knowledge person. There’s gotta be a better way. That really was like that kind of thing was like what propelled me into doing this.
Katie [00:07:00]:
Yeah. And I’ve had a few clients who are very, I’ll call them entrepreneurial and they they don’t see things in black and white. So, you know, when you get faced with those questions in an RFP of we want your list of healthcare projects, you know, in the last five years, I’ll pull a list and they’ll say, oh no, what about this one and this one? I’m like, well, that’s outside the timeline. They’re like, well, but we did do that warranty thing that was actually this time. So that breaks it. I’m like, oh, okay, that’s a gray area. But you know, the data wasn’t set up that way to acknowledge that the timeline had stretched. Right.
Katie [00:07:37]:
So.
Chris Parsons [00:07:37]:
Right.
Katie [00:07:37]:
But let’s talk a little bit more about this. So some people sometimes kind of categorize all of this data repository as someone else’s problem. But what I want to talk about is how you can use this information to connect the business development functions to really know how to grow the firm. Right. Because we’re all about helping firms do things smarter, more efficiently. But it’s all in the spirit of chasing projects, chasing clients and winning work. And that all comes down to having good information to help with business development. So maybe talk a little bit about that.
Chris Parsons [00:08:12]:
I’m glad you framed it that way because it can let me make a bigger point about knowledge management to start, which is information management is a piece of it. In fact, you know, I put a periodic table together of knowledge management elements that I shared in 2016. I recently updated and shared at our conference this year. One of the families of elements is around information management. So it’s CRM and digital asset management and intranets and all those kind of things. But there are way more things that go into it than that. So, you know, there’s thought leadership, right? There’s what we call communities of practice inside an organization to share knowledge. There’s research and development, there’s learning and development and mentorship.
Chris Parsons [00:08:46]:
Like there’s a bunch of other things that happen inside a firm that are that we consider knowledge management. And so if I kind of start with marketing and business development at the most high level version of it, meaning how do we position our company to win work? How do we differentiate our firm? And let’s say that we have a subject matter expert that can deliver this really hot in demand, I’m just going to make something up. Ambulatory care, right? Let’s just pretend like that is the hottest thing. It’s impossible to find people who can do ambulatory care. And there’s a line out the door waiting to hire your firm because of this expert. From a marketing perspective, if you don’t do knowledge management and you don’t help that expert transfer what they know to other emerging professionals or what we call nexperts within the organization, you’re just limiting your capacity to grow as an organization. You’re always going to be bottlenecked by that person and God forbid they leave the company and go to your competitor. Right? So from like a, from a strategic positioning of your business, you need to be investing in knowledge and learning and development to help grow your capacity, especially in those kind of high demand, what we call critical knowledge areas of your company.
Katie [00:09:54]:
Let’s keep going with that because I think I recently read one of your articles kind of forecasting 12 trends and one of those was really about the evolution of teams. Maybe talk a little bit about that and maybe some of the trends you’re seeing. And the idea of knowledge management creating all of your periodic tables, getting all of those to stack up together, is working and helping teams evolve a little bit more.
Chris Parsons [00:10:20]:
So I think that there’s this perception that knowledge management is, it has gotten associated with whatever SharePoint, intranets, maybe database, maybe put stuff in Deltec, whatever it is. And like that’s true, that’s important. It unlocks a whole bunch of capabilities for your firm. But the broader scope of, when you connect it to learning and talent development and strategy is where it really gets firm principals excited on a sustainable basis. And so what we see around teams is like for, here’s just like an example. Knowledge management and learning development in many firms have been siloed. For example, let’s say that your firm has grown. Let’s say they acquired a small firm or they hired a bunch of new people and you’ve realized that project management is all over the place.
Chris Parsons [00:11:03]:
So you want to kind of establish. The fictitious firm I always use is CJP design. So you want to figure out the CJP way, you know, to doing project management. A lot of times that gets captured in a knowledge base like synthesis, like the platform we build. But then you’ve got some other learning and development team that’s creating a course and like teaching people project management. It’s done by different people in different systems. And there’s this very kind of like siloed, disconnected way of thinking about knowledge. And that happens, you know, in marketing too.
Chris Parsons [00:11:31]:
You end up with six different marketing databases and then there’s a server and then there’s stuff that’s in people’s heads. And so, so much of knowledge management is about either Consolidating information in one place or integrating systems so that you can get to one single source of truth. But it’s also around teams connecting their knowledge work together. As an example, another example that’s maybe more marketing related. Communities of practice are a fancy knowledge management term to describe healthcare architects that get together and talk about what they’re seeing across their projects and best practices trends. Or you might see it in sustainability or might see it. You’ve got these different communities within the firm. Those folks like if marketing isn’t involved or connected to what they’re doing, they’re missing a huge opportunity to be able to talk about the firm’s expertise, to do storytelling, to help drive thought leadership, content marketing, blog, social media, whatever it is.
Chris Parsons [00:12:20]:
So like the knowledge creation engine disconnected from the knowledge, you know, the sharing engine or the communications engine, like there’s just so many opportunities to work as a more connected practice. Whether that’s people, whether that’s technologies, whether that’s process. And I think that’s something that we, when we look at firms that we think that are doing this well, they work together as like a connected practice, as kind of like an integrated system.
Katie [00:12:42]:
Yeah, I think all of that is true. And while you were talking, the one thing that sprung to my mind is, you know, we’re, when we talk about aac, it’s very much a professional services driven industry. We are all selling expertise, but ultimately we’re selling a promise to the customer that they’re going to have this type of customer experience. And you mentioned a few different scenarios. Hey, maybe CJP design, you know, just acquired a firm. Well, if you don’t take time to orient them to the way in which CJP does project management, does customer experience, does all of that, they’re just going to bring with them whatever they were doing before because it’s muscle memory, it’s comfortable to them, it’s what they’ve been doing. And I think that there’s some risk associated with that. You risk, you know, your CJP design, you risk your brand reputation if it’s not in line with what your customers were expecting.
Katie [00:13:35]:
Right. You know, and maybe they’re, they’re not delivering the same level of service because you kind of out service your competitors or maybe it’s over and beyond and then someone else is getting a little bit jealous that they’re not getting the same quote unquote a team because so doing it different. But then I also see it in other scenarios where you know, our industry has had more demand than They’ve had people recently, so they’ve just been getting people as fast as they can and I think in some cases not taking the time to properly on board and so bad habits kind of come over. But at the same time, when you’re hiring those individuals, you get to leverage the experience that they bring with them and you need a way to capture that, you know, their personal resume is still sellable underneath the new monocle, underneath the new name, whoever they’re employed by. And so finding a way to get them up to speed with how you do business, but also extract everything that they have done previously so that you can leverage it. I think that’s a really good point. And you mentioned kind of this trifecta of it’s process. Yes, we are a process driven industry.
Katie [00:14:45]:
Oh my gosh, if I see another TQM chart, you know, I’ve seen all of them. We are very process oriented but it’s a people driven one and everybody interprets processes differently. And so then you also need to have tools and technology to help connect the dots for everybody to allow me some automation, some continuation, some accountability there to make sure everybody’s going in the same direction.
Chris Parsons [00:15:09]:
Yeah, you said people, process and technology, which are three of my four and my fourth is culture. Yeah, you said two things I’d love to pick up on that are great illustrations of this. Let’s go back to mergers and acquisition. You kind of called out some of the downsides and the risks of not kind of doing good knowledge management around an M and A. Well, but there’s also all these missed opportunities too. So let’s say that you don’t do a good job of letting the kind of legacy folks know what the new people bring in terms of skills and expertise. Right. And so you’re working with a client, they need experiential graphic design and you go find a consulting firm to help with you instead of hiring using the folks that you already have in your company.
Chris Parsons [00:15:45]:
And so just even the basics of socializing, who knows what, what are we doing here, you know, integrating those kind of like capabilities honestly, like get down to it. Like if they have a separate project database from your project database and you kind of figure out what our past experience is and you can’t reference their projects quickly and easily, you’re just missing opportunity to kind of showcase. I talk about knowledge management being about helping AEC firms make the best use of your knowledge. You’re not making the best use of your knowledge if you don’t integrate the firms well from like a knowledge Perspective right on the M and A side. On the onboarding side. What’s interesting to me about onboarding is we’re building a learning management system into synthesis. It’s in private beta right now with 14 firms. And one of the things that’s come out so quickly in working with those companies in our new system that you create courses and learning paths and assign them and a lot of this is around onboarding.
Chris Parsons [00:16:35]:
But what’s become very, very clear is like a lot of the high opportunities aren’t necessarily just new hire onboarding. You are continuously onboarding people through their entire employee journey with you onboarding to being a project manager, you’re onboarding them to doing healthcare architecture because they don’t know all the and the jargons and the equipments. You’re onboarding them to doing CA for the first time or doing a site visit for the first time. So it’s this really intentional. We know you’re going to go do a new thing. We want to teach you the CJP way, right? We want to help you learn, we want to get you experience, pair you up. There’s this kind of very intentional knowledge and learning development plan for people that’s scalable, but it requires this goes back to the merger, merger thing. But then also it could be growth.
Chris Parsons [00:17:17]:
Like you went from being a 50 person firm to being 120 person firm. You went from being a single office firm to having four offices. And like the process and the CJP way scatters and it’s kind of whatever somebody did on the last project becomes the process. So in order to do that kind of continuous onboarding I’m talking about, there needs to be some, some time to work out like well, what is our way? Sometimes our way is we don’t have a way you can pick, but at least you’re being clear, you know. And so I think there’s so much of that deep thinking about how we do the work we do, why we do it the way we do, that just firms are doing now. And I think it’s really heartening to see.
Katie [00:17:51]:
Well, I know I have a client, they’re rather large multidisciplinary design firm, they have their processes mapped out, but they’re so diverse in their market mix and you know, with their services that sure you have a process from A to Z, but depending on what you’re doing, you just might do B, G and K, but at least it’s there. And then you kind of pick and choose and I think that’s that’s super duper helpful. And then we have other clients. Chris, to your point, where they had the CJP way mapped down for their legacy markets and their clients, and they had it optimized and it’s ready to go. But some of those markets are kind of fizzling out and they are looking at repositioning and breaking into some new markets. And now they’re having to determine how do we adapt that to a new clientele that we, we haven’t really served yet. We think some similar pieces. So here’s some, here’s some building blocks, but we’ve really got to build it together and find out how our, our process really works over here for this type of clientele, for example.
Katie [00:18:55]:
And I see more and more clients doing that because this market’s been a little bit wacky, where it’s been super hot in areas and then dries up and somebody takes a vacation or whatever. But we’ve seen a lot of clients over the last, say, 12 to 18 months breaking into new markets that they traditionally had said no to and trying to find a way to leverage what they had done in the past to make it relevant for that new world where the demand was.
Chris Parsons [00:19:19]:
Right. And they may not be calling that knowledge management work, but that’s absolutely knowledge management.
Katie [00:19:23]:
But it is. Yeah.
Chris Parsons [00:19:24]:
Right. And if so, if they were aware that it was. And the different tools that are available in knowledge management, not just technology, but like process tools, these things like communities of practice or like turning these into courses, like kind of having that lens to how are we going to operationalize? So let’s say that we’re successful breaking this new market now, how do we operationalize the lessons we had from the first couple projects that we did and not have a sustainable, like, wedge to get into that market?
Katie [00:19:50]:
They are, they’re getting their first two at bats of some new projects in that particular market. And they basically have like an auditing committee that’s just oversight that’s basically documenting the wins and the challenges and of coming out the other end with not just lessons learned. But hey, this is how we’re going to plan things forward, you know, and it’s looking at process, it’s looking at staffing, it’s looking at pricing, it’s looking at all kinds of different things because you’re right, you know, we are always onboarding. Something is always changing and is always moving.
Chris Parsons [00:20:24]:
Even expertise. Katie. Like, I think sometimes expertise gets talked about like it’s this noun that is like hard and fast and it’s like a, it’s like you have it or you don’t. It’s like kind of binary. And the truth is expertise is like super organic. Because one thing I talk about all the time is the half life of knowledge is shrinking. What it meant to be an architect 30 years ago and like how long something you learned would be true or the way or the process like that is just collapsing and collapsing and collapsing. So just because you have expertise today doesn’t mean that thing will be considered expertise three or four years down the road.
Chris Parsons [00:20:57]:
Just because things are changing so quickly and so this. And it’s true at the individual level, but then it’s true at the organizational level too. If you say we’re experts in whatever it is healthcare design and you don’t have this intentional learning organization that’s continuing to learn the new trends, the new techniques, the expectations, maybe this kind of specific part of. I said healthcare before, so I’ll stick with that. This part of healthcare is kind of going away. Like we’re not really doing it that way anymore. But there’s this new way part of knowledge management is not just making use of the knowledge you have today, but like creating the new knowledge you need to be competitive in the future. Like there’s a lot of that that’s like a creation and that could be creation organically by doing what you said, by kind of like doing these kind of like pilot projects and learning rapidly from them.
Chris Parsons [00:21:40]:
That could be an acquisition. It’s like, you know what, it’s going to take us a lot longer to build this capability than acquire it. But we’re still bringing the knowledge that we believe strategically we need into the company so that we can be competitive and we can thrive kind of going forward.
Katie [00:21:53]:
Absolutely. So with all this change, I think there were two other trends that I wanted to kind of pick your brain on today. One, on the idea of these new roles. I follow AIA on Instagram and a few others. And they’re projecting new roles for future architects that don’t exist today but will in the not too distant future. And I think you did a few of those as well. Like starting to see different roles crop up with the idea of someone kind of owning this idea of being the firm wide knowledge manager and maybe facilitator around all that. What are some of those roles that you are seeing now? Maybe even give some advice on types of firms or where they might fit into firms because we have a lot of listeners that are wanting to be really strategic in how they staff and think about things.
Katie [00:22:41]:
And this might Be a new position that would really make a difference for them, make a big impact. And then I also want you to talk a little bit about the tools. Right? I know you’re, you’re a tech guy, so talk a little bit about the tools. What really works when you have the billable team like strapped at both ends and they can’t do anything else and you’re going to onboard a new piece of tech? What, what really makes a difference?
Chris Parsons [00:23:01]:
You start with new roles, but in order to do new roles, I have to take a step back and talk about strategy a little bit. So when something hot and sexy like KM 3.0 and AI powered knowledge management comes around, it’s kind of like a lot of times the reaction is who do we hire and what do we buy from a technology perspective? And I think sometimes what gets shortcutted is what are we even doing? So like, how does this connect to the business strategy? First, for example, let’s say that you do have a business development problem or a marketing problem. Like you’re not winning, like at the rate that you think you should be, you just don’t feel competitive. That’s a thing. Let’s say that it’s not. That’s not the problem. You’re winning but the quality’s not great or the product management’s not great and people are unhappy. Let’s say all those things are working, but your employees are disengaged and burned out or don’t understand what’s going on and what’s expected of them.
Chris Parsons [00:23:49]:
So to me, like, and there’s only a handful of high level problems like that that AEC firms are facing. Those are the big ones, I think that the CEO worries about or the executive team worries about is winning work, doing the work, acquiring and retaining talent, staying competitive and innovative. Big picture. Like obviously we have to be making money running the business, right? Those are the big things. So when we’re thinking about knowledge management or intranet technology, like synthesis or whatever it is, or learning and development, it’s like which of those high order problems are we trying to actually make progress against? Like if the firm has a strategic plan, hopefully it’s laid out in there. Many AEC firms, as you know, don’t have strategic plans, but principals still kind of know this is more important than that thing. So sometimes you have to kind of extract it out of that. I say all that to preface roles, saying like, I don’t start there, I start kind of like with the strategy piece.
Chris Parsons [00:24:38]:
And then once we kind of understand what that Thing we want to make progress against and figure out what the knowledge angle to getting better at that is like let’s just say quality. How can we make progress against that goal with the team that we have today? First?
Katie [00:24:49]:
Yeah.
Chris Parsons [00:24:50]:
To prove that we can to establish value and build some momentum and what happens then. And this could bring it back to me to marketing. This is around marketing information. How do we move out of this reactive kind of like churn of like just running from fire to fire and like not building high quality, you know, information and knowledge bases. It could be that you hire a person and make them the marketing information manager. Like that’s a title that I see around. My favorite tool in business is the Eisenhower matrix, which is it combines on two axes. You go from urgent to non urgent and you go from not important to important.
Chris Parsons [00:25:25]:
And so most people work in the urgent and important. That makes sense. That’s logical. And then the next thing they do is they work on urgent but not important. Where they should be working is on important but non urgent.
Katie [00:25:37]:
Yeah.
Chris Parsons [00:25:37]:
That is where knowledge management lives. That is where you sharpen the saw. That is where you build the database, you know, so that the next time that you do a proposal, the next time you do whatever it is, you have really good information so you can move faster and with more joy for the team. And project managers aren’t annoyed because they don’t know why you can’t remember the thing they told you six months ago or they told someone else on your team six months ago. So I feel like there’s this kind of cultural shift, strategic alignment that happens first you start getting momentum and then you start putting roles in there to help accelerate and make those gains sustainable. So you want someone that’s going to come to work thinking top of mind for your organization around knowledge and learning. It’s like thinking about these challenges that can come to work with a non urgent but important mindset, not just a team. You have to be responsive in marketing and business development.
Chris Parsons [00:26:26]:
It’s, it’s the job.
Katie [00:26:27]:
Yeah.
Chris Parsons [00:26:28]:
For a team to have someone who maybe isn’t on that same metabolism and on that same responsive thing that can be proactive even if it’s a percentage of a person. Although that has all these risks that I’m sure you know and they get overloaded and then can’t catch up. I hope I haven’t gone too far astray, but I’m trying to kind of like lay out a context before you start putting a knowledge manager, a marketing information manager, an AI data strategist, Or a learning and development manager or whatever it is. I think establishing the strategy and the culture and the habits first and showing some progress. Then we start talking about people.
Katie [00:26:57]:
Yeah, yeah. Work with what you have. Plug the boat first, I guess, and then start getting folks to it. So what advice do you have for our listeners? They might sit on the marketing side, they might be on the principal side where the culture just is not there. Just in terms of like they’ve got good people, people do great work. But in terms of prioritizing the knowledge transfer, the documentation, you know, really helping with that is just clearly not a priority for that team. How do you help turn that around? This is a big friction point where.
Chris Parsons [00:27:33]:
Right.
Katie [00:27:34]:
People want similar things but they’re at different ends of the spectrum. But trying to get them to get closer and closer together and it’s all centered around, well, if we could just have good data, then I wouldn’t ask you for the same thing 300 times and you wouldn’t have to mark up wrong information 300 times. And I would know that we could chase a new emergency department because we’ve done 300 of them in the last five years. But right now I think we’ve only done two and they’re outside of the window. How do you help people prioritize it?
Chris Parsons [00:28:04]:
Sometimes people go ask whatever it is for resources, for attention, for focus, for time from leaders and they only present it in how it would make life easier for marketing or IT or hr, whoever, whoever you are. So you, you kind of frame it from like this is so hard for marketing without kind of framing the what’s in it for them kind of piece. And so you said a piece of it. It’s like you wouldn’t have to keep marking this up. I wouldn’t come to you at the last minute asking for this information under duress. We’d already have the information. We could just smooth out that process. Wouldn’t that be better? So I think kind of trying to find out those win win scenarios helps.
Chris Parsons [00:28:41]:
If that doesn’t do it. Like, so you need to connect to something that somebody that you’re trying to influence cares about. And so you need to hook your thing to something that they care about. But there are certain times where like culture is tough. Like there are firms that run a little bit. Like we’re going to run their engine really hot. We’re going to burn people out, People are going to churn every two or three years. That’s just the way that we operate.
Chris Parsons [00:29:03]:
It’s efficient, it’s profitable, doesn’t seem to be a problem for us. If that’s kind of the mindset that like, that’s what a good business looks like, like you might be in the wrong spot in terms of the wrong company. I don’t mean to get too negative about it, but like, you have to understand ultimately like their vision and culture for the company. I’ve gone through this personally. Like, you can’t change that if you’re not on the leadership team. It’s even hard to change it if you’re on the leadership team because culture goes really deep. So part of it is just being really honest and aware of what the kind of priorities, how this company makes decisions, what they value and does it align with your value system? If it does, that’s kind of like where you have to start. You have to kind of like, could this actually work? Like, honestly, like, could we change this? I have seen companies go through a culture change with leadership transition though.
Chris Parsons [00:29:45]:
Like I, I can think of one. I’m not going to name them because it’s like very specific, but they had a very churn and burn, command and control, like a very old school mentality. And they brought in this new CEO and she’s like, if we’re going to be around in 15 years, like, we can’t keep operating like this. We’re not going to get the best people, you know, we’re not going to retain the people we’re going to be. So she like really just like dug in and changed their trajectory. That company, like it’s unrecognizable now. That can happen, but like that doesn’t happen from within the IT team or the marketing team. That really happens.
Chris Parsons [00:30:17]:
Like if there’s a leader that comes in that can really, but the board has to let that leader, you know, like, still, that’s not one person that’s a hero. There’s a governance thing that makes that happen. So I started from the simplest, like win, win thing. But there’s also this realism. Can this change happen?
Katie [00:30:31]:
Yeah. The best advice there is whoever you’re working with, trying to find their currency, what’s going to make it a win win for both parties and just starting small in celebrating the wins and making sure you shed light on now that we have this, this is what we can do here. And then just trying to get more and more folks right involved in that process.
Chris Parsons [00:30:50]:
I think from the leadership perspective, though, the other side of that coin, I think it would be really helpful for a lot of leaders to go spend two or three hours watching A marketing person put together a proposal and sitting over their shoulder and like seeing what the. Like to build empathy for what the process really looks like. And I think to the extent that you could even invite someone to like, well, come, come watch us work for a little while in our existing system and see does it look fun? Does this look sustainable? Does this look like a smart use of our resources? Maybe you have an idea on how we can improve it. So I feel like getting leaders more connected. This goes into technology too, like for, you know, BIM teams and digital design teams. It’s like the more that leaders kind of understand how the work gets done, I think can really help build empathy and then that can help maybe bridge some of those gaps of like people just don’t. They haven’t felt it viscerally like what it means to be working it really inefficiently.
Katie [00:31:38]:
Yeah, yeah. Maybe our leadership listeners maybe do a little bit of an undercover boss one day and just undercover boss just go check in. Because I know a lot of AAC marketers and I really do commend them. They make a lot out of nothing, you know, on a moment. And they get told at the kickoff meeting, we have no chance at winning this, but we need to get our name out there. And that’s the most deflating thing, you know, marketer. I’m like, please don’t say that. Help me understand the big reason why, why we want to get our name in front of them and let me spin the story that way.
Katie [00:32:07]:
Like let’s, let’s make it feel a little bit more positive so we continue talking. Chris, maybe let’s focus specifically to the marketers. So I’m a big believer that you got garbage in your system, you’re gonna get garbage out, right? And so how can marketers make a better use of firm wide knowledge so that they are telling better stories that convert to better proposals that convert to higher hit rates. Like what’s the best thing for marketers to do there?
Chris Parsons [00:32:34]:
So we run an annual knowledge management conference for AEC called K Connect. It was the second week of August, so I’m still pretty fresh from that. Katie Robinson is the chief marketing officer at LS3P. She told a story about an expert hours program that their marketing team put together. It’s really simple. It’s like a teams call where they find one of their experts. So they’re in 12 offices, bunch of different market sectors. They find one expert marketing asks them some questions out loud.
Chris Parsons [00:32:59]:
Anyone in the firm can join. But then it’s Kind of like a firm wide Q and A. It’s like an hour, hour long thing. Sometimes they have other experts interview other experts. And this was originally done to be really a mentorship kind of knowledge sharing, you know, connect the practice kind of thing. But like multiple things have shaken out from it. First of all, they record all those and they put them into our platform synthesis. So we transcribe all the videos and those are all highly searchable within our AI search.
Chris Parsons [00:33:24]:
So like now they’ve made that knowledge that comes out in expert hours searchable. The marketing team then takes that transcript and they run it kind of through two workflows. One of them is, you know, what blog posts could be maybe right out of this, what conferences we could we submit to. Could we either develop a podcast or go on a podcast? Like, how can we go tell Denise’s story? You know, more broadly, the nuggets that get surfaced through this, again, learning and development, mentorship activity. How can we turn those around and use those for marketing storytelling? Outside the firm at LS3P, marketing and knowledge management are kind of connected. Like, they both report up under Katie. From a knowledge management perspective, it’s like, what best practices just came out of this that we can update? What knowledge can we then create? Should we create a course out of some of the things that we got from learning from Denise’s story out of this one hour of the expert’s time in this recording, they’ve educated a bunch of people. They’ve created marketing outcomes, they’ve created knowledge management outcomes.
Chris Parsons [00:34:18]:
So that’s the kind of thinking, you know, that I think marketers are so good. I think that marketers have so many positive qualities that help them be at the center of knowledge management. Their firm, they have relationships with pretty much everybody in the company. They understand what the company does and how it makes money. They’re generally good writers or interviewers. To apply that to like internal knowledge sharing and management is great. Okay, That’s a whole thing that’s all valuable in and of itself. Let me flash forward a little bit.
Chris Parsons [00:34:48]:
So a lot of clients are using our technology because it searches not just like things like those videos and the best practices, but we integrate with like Deltec and Uninet and Open Assets. We pull that structured data in. We have a client, she told this story a couple months ago. They were going after a proposal. It was a housing project, multifamily housing project, next to a freeway. In the proposal, the client was really concerned about the noise. And like, how are you going to do noise abatement for this thing next to the freeway. And like there was nothing in their kind of proposal history, there was nothing in their boilerplate, there was nothing in their Deltec database.
Chris Parsons [00:35:25]:
They did a search like, you know, have we ever done blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on our platform? And out of a knowledge sharing session from two years ago where someone did a project review, they told the story of doing this, this project before. This was a detail in this project and it was in the transcript. So all that became searchable in the moment to that marketer. And so what I think that what happens is, is when you connect all these systems together and you do knowledge management kind of in one unified place, you can make this unstructured storytelling in the same search space as your structured data and your proposal history. And you can just again, make the best use of your knowledge and find your answer to the right thing. And so like, when you, when marketing is involved in helping drive some of these knowledge sharing events too, they’re actually potentially helping themselves down the road in ways they don’t even know today.
Katie [00:36:07]:
Yeah, I love that. I know a handful of other clients, Chris, that they’re marketers. I think they, the culture of their marketing team is just, they always have this curious mindset of how can I make something else out of this, how can I make leftovers out of this? And it’s kind of this, okay, know your byproducts. Yeah, this is, this is gonna make all this other things. So I have a client that their growth strategy is through acquisition. And so every year, you know, they’re acquiring a handful of firms. And part of that process, their onboarding process, is they do those internal knowledge share sessions where it’s basically Q and A. Let me get to know a little bit more about what you’ve done.
Katie [00:36:43]:
Like what kind of projects you done, you know, what’s your expertise? Do you do environmental graphics? Are you FIA certified, whatever all that is. And then they kind of do it back and forth. And that has really, really helped them build relationships. So it’s like helped to strengthen the culture, it’s helped to strengthen them feeling fully part of the team and kind of bringing them on board. But the knowledge transfer has been superb. Like, it’s just been so great. And from like day two, post deal, they’re selling what the firm that they acquired was as part of their own. And that marketing team is messaging about it.
Katie [00:37:16]:
It’s in all of their, you know, thought leadership pieces, their joint submitting, and it does feed and fuel and snowball, all kinds of other content.
Chris Parsons [00:37:24]:
And so what’s so great about that is like, that would have been a great strategy pre AI. We’re lucky to work with a lot of firms that are smart like that and they do that kind of stuff. So when AI came along, that just accelerates their journey because like all of those interviews, I’m assuming they were recorded, they can be made available so that.
Katie [00:37:41]:
They’Re searchable by your own internal podcast, I think.
Chris Parsons [00:37:43]:
Yeah, internal podcast. So all that becomes searchable and now you can move a lot faster. And it’s like, now I need this person that has this expertise and it’s like, boom, like we’re able to access that. So it’s not just the knowledge sharing in the moment, it becomes a durable kind of asset going forward. And so for firms that haven’t been doing this and they see AI and they’re like, cool, AI is just going to figure this all out for us. It’s definitely not. You need to have that solid, firm wide knowledge underneath it and so. But you can back back into these processes.
Chris Parsons [00:38:13]:
You know, like that example of expert hours, the example you just gave from your client. It’s a pretty simple low tech solution that can have a bunch of different ramifications. It does require you to do the kind of important but not urgent thing like you get a little bit of the expert’s time, you know, you do the Q and A, you write it up. There is a little bit of work that happens there, but it starts this flywheel and this virtuous cycle of like knowledge sharing and people getting to know things better. And then that’s how you’re going to actually take advantage of AI. On that front. It could be on the capturing good project data front. There’s a bunch of different vectors that you can go down.
Chris Parsons [00:38:45]:
You’re going to need to do the knowledge management. If you want to take advantage of what AI has to offer for your company, you have to do knowledge management. Like, I don’t think there’s another way up the mountain.
Katie [00:38:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. Chris, this has been great. As we kind of move towards the tail end of our conversation, I want to ask you what I call like some, some fast five questions. So these are just really quick think on your toes pieces, but you are the expert here, so give our listeners some advice. If you could eliminate one bad habit in how firms are currently managing or sharing their information, what would you have them stop doing?
Chris Parsons [00:39:19]:
Random acts of knowledge management. Meaning it could get tempting because there’s a cool technology or a cool idea to just do it because it’s fun and cool. And I know because I’ve done some of these projects in my lifetime aren’t connected back to a firm wide strategy or something that matters. So we’re going to get this new piece of software. It does all this really cool stuff. But like, so what? Like it doesn’t move the needle in something our firm cares about. So I think just connecting every new, whether it’s a knowledge management program or whether it’s software back to something the firm cares about. So no more random acts of knowledge management.
Katie [00:39:48]:
I love that. Okay, what do you think is a major blind spot that AEC firms have today when it comes to leveraging their.
Chris Parsons [00:39:56]:
Knowledge, overestimating that AI is just going to do it for them. Too optimistic about what AI is going to be able to do and too optimistic about the time horizon at which it’s going to improve without you doing. Its reasoning capabilities are increasing really, really fast. It’s able to handle images and multimodal. It’s like there’s all kinds of awesome stuff happening with AI. It doesn’t know your context, it doesn’t know your values, it doesn’t know your project history. It doesn’t, you know. So like I’m going to call out two ends of a spectrum around a way to approach knowledge in AI that I’ve seen.
Chris Parsons [00:40:30]:
I have strong, strong takes. One of them is we’re going to take 800 of our proposals, we’re going to throw them into some kind of folder, point AI at it, and we’re going to ask IT questions and that’s how we’re going to answer marketing questions. The other one is we take a little bit more time. We’re going to build boilerplate libraries. So this is how we describe our approach to mass timber or sustainability or equity or whatever the thing is, or our firm history. And we’re going to get solid project descriptions and they’re going to go into a database like an open asset or a Deltec or Uninet or something like that. So structured information versus completely unstructured. Now of course I’m calling out two ends of the spectrum, like there will always be something in the middle, but like the point of view there.
Chris Parsons [00:41:09]:
I believe that the structured database is going to kick the unstructured database’s ass every single time. So when you ask a question like what’s our approach to match timber? You might have written that approach in four different, 10 different, 30 different ways across those 800 proposals. And you don’t know you’re pulling A slot machine on which one you’re going to get, right? Or let’s say that you kind of cited one of a project that’s still in construction and you cited its final construction cost and square footage or whatever. And then you cite it again in another proposal six months later and those numbers have changed. And when you then go ask what was the square footage of this project like? Again, it’s a slot machine. Which one are you going to get? So I think this hoping that AI will figure it out. With unstructured data, it can do something. It’s better than nothing, I will give it that.
Chris Parsons [00:41:53]:
But I think if you really want to have great outcomes with AI over the long term, you’re going to want structured data as well as unstructured data. Like the example I gave before the housing project with the freeway. Like that is captured through unstructured data. But like your core data points and descriptions and point of views and boilerplate stuff like please write it down in one place and make it a source of truth. Like that’s my point of view.
Katie [00:42:12]:
Well, yeah. And I mean, just thinking of the project example, as marketers, we start including project sheets for jobs as soon as we get them awarded, right? And so the narrative for those is, you know, we’re actively working it, it will be completed in, and then the project progresses and that narrative shifts to reflect the current timeline of it and then finally it’s done. But then if you just have your AI pointing to your repository of proposals, it’s not smart enough to know the current sense of the, of the job. And if you’ve got a new person there, how are they going to know?
Chris Parsons [00:42:49]:
Correct? Exactly. You just hit on one of the key trends and I can’t believe you’ve gotten this far without saying it. When you optimize content for AI, you’re auto optimizing for humans, and vice versa. AI thrives on high quality, accurate, well explained data with context. We share the why, you know, whatever it is, that’s what humans want too. And so you said it really well. How is a new marketing coordinator going to know of this wall of 800 proposals and the AI? If I ask it today, it gives me this answer. If I ask it 10 minutes later, it gives me that answer like, how do they know which answer’s right? Like that just seems AI or a human.
Chris Parsons [00:43:22]:
You’re not setting them up for success.
Katie [00:43:24]:
I even did like early, early AI training with a client of mine and I think they had like 25 marketing coordinators and we’re all on the call, they’re all actively in their tool and it’s privatized. Like it’s behind their wall. Right. And everybody asked the same question of it and we got 25 different answers.
Chris Parsons [00:43:40]:
Right.
Katie [00:43:41]:
And it’s like, well, they’re all right, but which one is the most? Right, Right.
Chris Parsons [00:43:45]:
So, yeah, and there’s always, with AI, there’s always going to be variants. Just like if I asked 25 different marketers that question, I would get 25 different answers back. Yeah. So the art with AI, because it’s probabilistic, not deterministic, is you want to reduce the amount of randomness to the extent that you can. And so this is a great variable. Like instead of giving it 800 documents to choose from, give it one answer. Like it might summarize it or word it slightly different, but the facts shouldn’t change. You know, like if you’re just giving it 800 proposals, like the facts are going to move all around and that’s not good.
Katie [00:44:16]:
Okay, back to some quick questions. What do you think is one of the most underused resources within most AEC firms today?
Chris Parsons [00:44:25]:
Good, high quality project descriptions are so powerful when it comes to AI and getting good project data and knowledge management. You can only capture so many structured data points. How many hospital beds this had, how many housing units it had, whatever it is, you will go insane trying to capture that for every single project descriptions. So you kind of are taking unstructured data that’s a high quality description, putting it into a structured database that’s actually really powerful for helping you answer like long tail questions. So we just had one. How many projects of ours have had courtyard atriums? You could put a field in your database that every time a project has a courtyard atrium and you check it, the project description is a great way to narrow that gap between unstructured and structured information because it gets you so much more coverage.
Katie [00:45:10]:
In reality though, it’s not realistic to expect that every potential way in which a client might request your experience for an RFP or something, that you’re going to be able to capture that in your database. And even if you did, it would take you too much time and nobody would ever fill it out.
Chris Parsons [00:45:28]:
You would have a negative ROI on that. Even if, even if they did fill it out like it probably worth the effort. So it’s really that you can’t manage. All of your knowledge is something we say all the time. So it’s being really clear about the stuff you need to manage and the others that you kind of like. Well, I can maybe hopefully rely on a structure. God forbid I go have to ask somebody like, sure, you can still talk to people, but like maybe not talk to them about like basic stuff they’ve.
Katie [00:45:50]:
Already, things that they should already know. What is the first step that our listeners should take if they are just now starting out on a knowledge management journey? It’s the best first step.
Chris Parsons [00:46:00]:
Well, the first one’s quick strategy stuff like understand what’s really important to your company over the next three years and where you can move the needle and how you can align knowledge management to that. The second one is our conference that we run. We’ve run it since 2010 for 15 years of K Connect, where it’s literally looking at how the leading firms manage knowledge in the industry. We have a talk archive on our website of all of the talks for the last 15 years. It’s free. I encourage you to go look at what other firms are doing. I have a newsletter called Smarter by Design where I’m profiling firms that are doing this really well, doing podcasts, whatever. It is unlike when I was in IT, trying to figure out knowledge management, there is now community best practice technology.
Chris Parsons [00:46:36]:
Like you’re actually coming into knowledge management at a great time, especially with all the AI powered stuff like you are. First of all, I guess number three, be grateful that like you’re coming into it right now because it was a lot harder for a lot of people.
Katie [00:46:47]:
There’s a good roadmap for you to follow.
Chris Parsons [00:46:49]:
There is a great, great roadmap in terms of resources and technology. You’re coming in at an exciting time, so be happy about it, connect to strategy and then go see what other firms are doing because this industry is very generous with sharing knowledge about what they’re doing. It’s something I love about AEC and there’s a lot of great stories out there now.
Katie [00:47:05]:
Okay, so last one, this one’s fun. What was your favorite highlight of K Connect this year in your 15th year?
Chris Parsons [00:47:12]:
My favorite highlight this year is the same as it always is. It’s two things. One is working with speakers to help their talk. So we have a very collaborative development process. So, like just identifying speakers, figuring out the angle, developing their talks together. Like we work very closely, hand in hand and then just seeing them execute. Like I get to know them really well. I learn a ton from them.
Chris Parsons [00:47:35]:
Working with speakers is awesome. It’s always highlight and then seeing people who have never been to our conference before who are new to knowledge management, just watching the aperture open up for them in terms of like, oh my God, there’s this whole other world out here. The art of the possible that people are really doing this amazing stuff. They in our community that people talk about drinking the Kool Aid. So they come to K Connect and they drink the Kool Aid. Right. They’re now in the knowledge management cult. Like watching those new people just get so excited and connecting all the dots and them.
Chris Parsons [00:48:02]:
Yeah, like that never gets old.
Katie [00:48:04]:
That’s great. Well, Chris, this has been great. You already plugged a number of resources for our listeners, but I do want to remind them. Check you out on LinkedIn. You know, find Knowledge Architecture online. Ton of resources on that website. Subscribe to your newsletter. You’ve got great podcasts.
Katie [00:48:19]:
You mentioned Katie from LS3P. I listened to that one that you did with her online as well. That was a great listen. So all of those are really good. Anything else you want to share with our listeners before we sign off?
Chris Parsons [00:48:30]:
Just on our website. The kind of key to get started there is the Inspiration tab. There’s just like a ton of stuff there that can help you get started on your knowledge management journey.
Katie [00:48:37]:
All right, well, thanks everyone for listening and stay until the end. And I hope you garnered some great ideas from today’s conversation to allow you to approach marketing a little bit smarter as you move into the final phase of 2025. Thanks everyone. AEC Marketing for Principles is presented by Smartigies, the AEC growth consulting firm that has been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 2008. The show is hosted by me, Katie Cash, Senior VP at Smartigies. I would love to hear from you. If you have a question, a guest request, or a topic request for a future episode, send an email or a voice memo to podcastmartigies.com and if you’re looking for past episodes, be sure to visit our podcast [email protected] podcast. We hope you’ll tell your friends and colleagues about our show and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future episodes.
Katie [00:49:36]:
Thanks for listening.