Dan Hottinger & Stefnee Trzpuc | Teach Them How to Fish: Enhancing Technical Learning with KM

Can I just say thank you to all of you who hung around for the last session of the day on such a beautiful day. I mean, we appreciate you hanging out with us to listen to our story. So who is bwbr? We're a design firm in the upper Midwest with practices in interior design, architecture and master planning. Amongst our many project types, we tend to specialize in the highly technical medical, clean room environments, laboratory spaces, maintenance facilities, detention. Those are some of the examples. Over the years we've worked very hard to establish a reputation for quality construction documents and client service and mentorship and development is one of the cornerstones of our mission statement. And we lean on that so that we can develop our core of expertise from within. 2015 and 2016 were like the end of one era and the start of another era for us. Like many of you, we were preparing for the retirement of a lot of long term employees who are knowledge leaders and experts in their field. You know, how do you train the next level of leadership to backfill those positions as everybody steps up a chair? We had a longtime principal in charge of production who was retiring at the end of 2015. Bob had 35 plus years experience as an architect and 25 plus years experience at BWBR with a longtime role as as the head of our building technology and standards. At the end of 2015, I was asked to step into his role with oversight on technical learning and quality assurance and our building technology and standards. Also in those two years we experienced unprecedented growth. We hired 35 new production team members and that number doesn't include the accounting staff and the admin staff that we added to back them up. And fully 2/3 of that number were recent grads out of the university's architecture and interior design programs. There was also a perceived decline in quality. Our quality assurance reviewers and our construction administrators were reporting problems with the document sets. Of course, this in turn was being reported to the principals who signed the drawings. And naturally their reaction was fix this right? But when you took a look around, there were no metrics in place to really evaluate the problem or define even what it was. That perceived decline in quality was concerning to all of us because you know, we, you know, we made our bones on making really good, well thought out document sets. We kept hearing it's the same problem on every project. Our quality assurance reviewers were using up all of their time on ticky tack little things like issuance dates and you know, the index didn't match and it took them away from the bigger issues that they wanted to Review. Our construction administrators were dealing with the same problems across all of our project types. Chief amongst their concerns was stuff like coordination issues, really. Coordination with our door hardware, coordination with the consultants and the engineers. So, as you know, all of life's problems can be solved over lunch, right? Go to lunch with coworkers. It doesn't matter if it's your NFL team that's tanking. You know, how to fix could be a work item. You talk it over for an hour, everybody's got an answer for it. One day I was out to lunch with a co worker. His name is Todd. Now, Todd is also transitioning into a role as a quality assurance reviewer at the firm. And we were talking about, you know, those basic architectonic skills that were not coming in with the first year students out of the university. Todd's a very quiet and thoughtful type, you know, perfect for qa, right? And Todd puts down his sandwich, he leans back, he crosses his arms, he looks at me and he says, you know, Dan, we just need to teach him how to fish. He was right. I mean, right there that day, the seed was planted for what we wanted to do. So how do we teach people how to fish? Or in other words, how can this be fixed? We wanted to kind of put together a basic idea of what we were trying to do. So the first thing was we thought, okay, can younger staff be brought up to project speed faster? Can they be taught problem solving skills? Can they learn how to the ins and outs of the system that we have within the firm? And can they be taught to have the confidence to go up to people and actually ask questions when they don't know what they're talking about or what they're doing? You know, there's no dumb question, right, that has to be taught. Who would have thought? Smarter, better, faster. But not only faster in their problem solving skills, but faster in their own personal development? And then again, can we develop metrics to evaluate their actual problem? But there again, can we also make sure that these metrics are broad enough that we can evaluate whether or not what we're trying to do is actually having the desired effect on the problems at hand. So we figured we needed to understand the why. Why is this a problem? And why do we need to address it before it becomes endemic? We came up with four main reasons that we thought were kind of the underlying reasons behind the issues that we were facing. One was the role of the recession of 2008 and 2009. You know, that really cannot be understated in our area. The sheer Abundance of out of work architects made a lot of them look around and think, you know what, it's probably better off for my career to make a lateral move. I'm going to go into facilities management or I'm going to be a product rep or they would just leave the industry entirely. So as a result, the seven to eight year project architect that we were looking for didn't exist. They were hard to find and everybody wanted them. Number two was the accelerated development required by an accelerated industry. Everybody knows that we're seeing ever shorter project schedules, shorter phases, sometimes we're jumping phases entirely and on top of that we have ever smaller budgets to accompany that. This accelerated development was an issue that we were, that we were dealing with as well. Number three was critical thinking versus technical learning versus software knowledge. Now, 20 years ago, a first year architect coming out of the university started at an architectural firm. They would sit in their cube and they would do stair details all day long, right? And they would just work their way up from there. That was the expectation. First year architects coming into the firm right now have much higher expectations. Well, they have an affinity for the software and they're very well versed in 3D environment, right? But the software, but their technical skills are just not as strong as the other two areas. The non preferred activity problem, this is nothing new. This has been around forever. Again, the architect coming into the field 20 years ago who had to do the stair details and work his way up from there, the architect that's coming in today, they have much higher expectations and they do not include sitting in a cube and doing stair details. Right? So Pete Smith, our CEO made the statement while we were looking at the why. He said we don't have 20 years to develop the 20 year architect anymore. And he was right. We didn't, but we felt that we were experiencing a technical debt. Now technical debt is a software programming concept that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that's easy to implement in the short run is used instead of the best overall solution. Taking staff and accelerating them into roles and expecting them to grow into them is a very similar concept. The fundamentals are not there. They simply do not know what they don't know. So and again, this is a product of the accelerated development required by an accelerated industry. You know, to sum it up, we really needed to pay down some of our technical debt. So what could we do right now before we could propose it, we wanted to put together the basic tenets of well, what are we trying to do? We wanted an adaptable continuing education program. We wanted to be able to address the issues that we already knew were a problem, but we also wanted to be able to address the things that come up throughout the year. Things that, oh my gosh, this is on fire. And this is a problem. It's a big problem that we've had in multiple projects and we need to address it now. We also wanted to have focused learning with a targeted group. We knew that having the right group in the room during these learning sessions was crucial to the success of the program and then reinforcing the importance of the fundamentals. So when people came in and we were working with them, we wanted to give them that basic foundation of fundamentals that they could then grow their career off of. Now, when we proposed this program, I mean, it was the buy in was immediate to my shock. But our CEO said, okay, I want to get going, but I want to go now. I don't want to wait around. He gave us eight days to get started. We talked about it on a Monday, and he said, I want the first session the following Tuesday. And one of our other directors, Tim Sessions, looked at me and he said, eh, don't worry about it. Just ready, fire, aim this. Just get going and dial it in as you go. So we gotta get started. What are we gonna do? So, you know, we have to draw the line somewhere. Who's in the group? Who's that targeted group? So we figured, okay, we're gonna have people who've been in the profession for less than five years. We wanted to give them all the basic foundation that they could build their career off of. Also, we wanted to include anybody who had been at BWBR for less than five years. And really that was mostly because we were gonna go through process items. We're gonna talk about the code process, the code review process. We're going to talk about setting up a quality assurance review. We're going to talk about how to interact with your specification writers in these sessions. Again, it's intended to be a smaller, focused learning group. Now, we're actually fortunate in that we have a forum every month at the lunch hour. And in that the firm brings in pizza, they bring in sandwiches, and we have kind of a mixed bag of different things. You might go in there and there might be an IT update. They might have the construction administrators come in and do notes from the field. The performance design group might come in and talk about what we're doing for Earth Week. We also would sprinkle in technical learning topics. But really when I would stand up there and do technical learning topics. I could look out over the crowd and I could see principals, I could see project managers, I saw accountants and I saw admin staff. My targeted group was never in there. So what we did is we decided, okay, we're going to take it out of the lunch hour. We're going to do it twice a month in the morning. We're going to require people to be there and we're going to pay them to be there. But what are the issues that we can address immediately? You know, again, we had to get started right away. We already had our quality assurance reviewer input. We already had our construction administrators who gave us some input. We went to our synthesis site and we looked for the underutilized tools and resources on there. And once we found them, we took a look at, tried to unpack the issue a little bit and say, well, are people not using them because they don't know how to use them or they simply don't even know they're there? So we had to take a look at that. We also wanted to identify our resources, our resource mentors within the office. Now this was a two fold item. We wanted to make sure that people understood who they could go and talk to if they ever had questions on particular projects. But we also wanted to identify people who might be willing to come in and teach some of these sessions as well. Right? So this is our introductory year topics. You know, we hit the basic stuff, right? We've got roof plans, 101. We've got dimensioning properly, writing a good note. Who knew you had to teach that? But it's amazing that you do. Now we also hit the process items, the QA process, the specification process, our code review process. But we also wanted to throw in some fun things, right? Sketching details. So I would argue that sketching details is kind of a lost art. But being able to stand up in front of a crowd, a group of users, and sketch out and convey your thought on a whiteboard is really important tool to have in your toolbox, right? So for the learning sessions we had three basic requirements. Number one was you had to have learning, we had to have learning goals. What are the basic takeaways from each one of the lessons? Tell them the how and the what and the why is this important? The second requirement was identifying resources within the office. This could be people, this could be good websites that have been vetted. This could be stuff on the synthesis site. And then we also wanted to use good project examples to illustrate best practice design. But you know, Using bad examples can be just as effective. And in the spirit of my favorite mistake, we actually encourage a lot of the presenters to talk about problems that they may have had related to the field and then talk about the solutions that they had and whether they were good or bad. Got a series of example slides here that we're going to run through just to kind of give you a flavor for what we talk about in the sessions. This is a learning goal sheet. We always try to have four or five different learning goals on each one of them. We also try to tailor it for continuing ed credits through the aia. If you're a registered architect and you're on the list, then you can take advantage of the CEUs that come along with it. Right now, you know, we've got a lot of process items in there, but right now we're at about a 50% acceptance rate by the AIA for these. The requirements of the code. Whenever possible, we try to tie the code to whatever they're doing, whatever the subject matter is. The interesting development off of this is actually the people who attend it go to the slide deck on the synthesis site and they print it and they take it back to their desk and they use them like cheat sheets. So there are people that have a pile of these at their desk, and whenever they work at a project, they leaf through them to make sure that they hit all of these items. Planning guidelines, okay? Search engines are both wonderful and horrible at the same time, right? You can find anything out there. You can find a planning guideline for anything. You can find revit families for anything. But the problem is, is that stuff good? Is it current? Does it meet code? So we try to remind them that you can find all of this stuff. But go and talk to the experts within the office to kind of vet it, make sure that it's actually. Make sure that it's actually good. And that's something that you want to use down the road. It's always a bummer when your project manager says, where the heck did we get this information? And somebody says, oh, well, I found this online. Writing a good note. Whenever possible, we try to tie the specifications to the drawings and we try to reinforce the notion that, hey, whatever it's called in the drawings is what it's supposed to be called. I'm sorry, whatever it's called in the specs is what it's supposed to be called in the drawings. And it's also a little reminder that there's another team that's going along with you on a parallel Track that you need to keep apprised of your progress as you go through your specification writing team. This is an example. Resources and material sheet. We have our list of internal experts on the particular session that we're doing here. We also have online resources that we have vetted that we feel are good resources for design guidelines and some detailing on there. This one was about precast wall panels. So we have the PCI and we have the NPCA in there. But if there are other resources outside of the office, you know, a really helpful product rep or somebody that we go to a lot with questions, we'll list them on there and we'll let them know that Bob Guile will come into the office and he will help you figure out your details and, you know, give you planning guidelines and work with you as you go along. And of course, at the bottom, we always try to reinforce the specs, make sure they understand that they have to coordinate with the specification writers. Tips and tricks. Now, the main subject is always pre produced. We always produce it ahead of time. But Tips and Tricks is a little five minute vignette that we put at the end of every one of these sessions. And it really allows us to zig and zag with the project issues that come up on a weekly basis. This is actually one where a construction administrator was out in the break room and when I sat down next to him, he started talking about, oh my gosh, the wood grain is always showing in the wrong direction. On the drawings. It's shown going horizontal. And then when the shop drawings show up for review, they turn them vertical and that turns into a cost issue. And now I gotta deal with it out in the field. I don't want to deal with this anymore. Well, we were able to go, okay, this is a problem. We need to take a look at this, put together the slide, put it into the very next session and remind everybody that this is a bigger deal than you think it is. And you know, it's something that needs to be addressed. Questions. We always have questions at the end, but we allow people to ask questions all the way through. We actually do it in a conference room. We feel that the smaller environment that we do it in makes it feel more like a group and less like a classroom. And it kind of engenders that communication back and forth. There's a lot more discussion as we go through the learning topics. You know, one time we actually got booted out of our regular conference room. So we went to the conference center that we have in our floor and people started Filing in and they're like, ugh. It's like a classroom, which, you know, that's immediate, qualitative feedback. Oop. Nobody likes doing it in a big classroom. So, you know, we try to make sure that we have it in the smaller environment to make everybody feel comfortable asking questions and make it feel more like a hey, we're all in this together type of thing. So I've got like four or five of these under my belt. I've got. I think I got things going. I think that I'm starting to figure out what I'm doing. I'm starting to dial this in. I'm starting to get out ahead and I'm planning for the future. And then Steph found out what I was doing.

Well, when I first learned of the landmark learning sessions, I thought they sounded just fantastic, like something that we could really benefit from. So, of course, I was eager to run out to Dan and ask how I might support his effort. And I've known Dan for a lot of years at this point, and I can honestly say he had never been so hesitant to accept a meeting with me. But we did. We grabbed a cup of coffee and we chatted about this educational program. And I just described what a great opportunity it might be for knowledge management to really get involved. Well, he very reluctantly agreed, but with a very strong warning. He did not want any complications. And I remember he explicitly told me he wanted this to be an independent family film, not a Pixar production. Okay, well, Dan was doing a really good job at kind of keeping me at arm's length, but I couldn't help but be concerned that maybe Dan didn't have a great understanding of what knowledge management's role was in supporting our organizational learning. And of course, he later admitted that that was very much the case back then. And I figured that the best and maybe the only thing I could do was really to start to win him over with a couple of quick wins. So the first thing I wanted to do was actually get a common language with Dan. It was early 2016, so I invited him to come out to Ka Connect last year. And I can. When we had our first coffee meeting, Dan actually told me that he was on this year of saying yes to everything. So thanks for that opportunity, Dan. I got you out here. And I could tell that even at the airport date, Dan was just racking his brain trying to figure out why the heck did I say yes to going out to a knowledge management conference. But the plan actually worked better and faster than I could have imagined. When we were out here the first afternoon, we were sitting out in the audience, I got a text message from Dan and all it said was, all right, I get it, this stuff is pretty cool. I'm drinking the Kool Aid. He did say that. So I had some fun with Dan when we got back. But what it did is it really created the tone for the year that we were about to have. And we later looked back and we called it our year of discovery. Dan and I found ourselves in these frequent and deep conversations just around all the different activities that were really kind of surrounding landmark learning. And it was a great year of working together. Dan shared with you the story of how these came to be and what they are. But we also wanted to share with you some of the CAM strategies that we've put into place and some of the measurements because we think it's helped us to craft a program that really connects learning with KM strategies to our business strategies. And that's specific around how we manage the talent and manage the quality of the work that we do. And we worked on a lot of different angles of this program over this last year. And so we just pulled out some of the highlights and then we'll share with you some of our lessons learned. So the very first thing that I threw at Dan was just simply about capturing these sessions. You know, Dan was so focused on just solving the immediate problems of our current staff. What I was really hoping to help him see was just the general reusability of this content. His first sessions, and actually most of the sessions since are just fantastic pieces of information that would be helpful to onboarding staff. I mean, what happens if we continue to grow at a fast pace? What's going to happen to all the new staff? Are we going to see these problems, Problems repeat themselves? Well, Dan got on board, I think almost immediately when we started working together. He had some staff reach out to him who had missed the first few sessions, but heard from their friends at the office that it was really great. And they asked for one on one sessions with Dan. There's really good things that come from this. Right. So we have some staff who are seeking learning and from a great resource in our office. The other is that Dan is a wonderful instructor and we love that he spends time with our staff, especially, especially in that face to face environment that is so phenomenal to how we learn as individuals, but also to our culture. The downside to this though is Dan's busy. He's a project manager. He's responsible for our quality assurance reviews and for helping to develop our technical quality and standards. So we needed to make sure that we were optimizing Dan's time through the capturing of that initial content. But of course, thinking back to Dan's original comment that he didn't want this to become a Pixar production, which meant I had to be very careful on which technology I was going to suggest for these. We started very low tech. I think we just popped up an iPhone one time just to see what kind of a video quality would we get from it. And of course we had to move on and dial in our technology and software from there. And I'm sure many of you have struggled trying to get all your technology and software to do everything you want it to do and keep it very simple. But we eventually got to the point where we could very easily record the video and the audio of the presenter that was already layered on top of the slide transitions. We had a live feed going to our other office so that they could participate real time. And then we also reduced that post production time to just a few minutes. Of course, sharing goes hand in hand with capturing because the videos really don't have a value unless they have an audience. To do this, we set up a dedicated page on our synthesis site. The first thing that you're greeted with is really a calendar of topics. And Dan updates this fairly regularly. And this became a really important tool for our staff who were attending as they were wondering what was coming down the line in terms of topics for them and as they were starting to get more project assignments, could they see that maybe there was some help on the way in terms of educational content? We also have link libraries to the slide decks and all the videos for the past presentations. This page actually did more and it created a visibility around landmark learning. When we first launched, Dan mentioned it was a very targeted group. And to be honest, I don't even remember that there was an announcement saying that, hey, we're going to do some landmark learning sessions. And so it was if you were on invite list, you knew what was going on. But if you were on the outside, you just saw staff gathering in a conference room and you kind of wondered what was going on. But as we did make more kind of awareness around the efforts and, and people started hearing about it, they were either asking to get on the invite list or they were asking for the content. And this allowed us to get that information out to a wider audience, but still keeping it to that narrow, targeted group that we really wanted from the beginning. And so that capture and share was really the low hanging fruit. And we really wanted to move on to some more challenging strategies. And it was becoming clear that this program was really building momentum as as far, Dan was doing a great job with it and it had a potential to really change the way that we would approach technical learning. And as we found ourselves in a lot of those deeper conversations, one of the realizations we had is that it couldn't be just Dan or Dan and Todd and a couple of other people is that it had to become more integrated into some of our other groups and initiatives that were already involved in developing our technical standards and learning initiatives. And, and to get involved with these groups. It was actually kind of easy to get involved in a few of them because between Dan and myself, we were actually active in several of them. But there were a few that we weren't active in. And for those, we just simply invited ourselves into their next meeting and we had a conversation around short and long term goals. What was really weighing heavy on their fix it list. And for us it was trying to discover what was the overlap of all the different technical areas of our organization and hopefully can we get them moving in a similar direction. Dan and I found ourselves really serving as the connectors between these groups, encouraging cross technical, cross departmental collaboration and hopefully getting them to talk to each other more than they were. The integration strategy is also really important in helping us achieve our mission statement. Our business goals are really served by our four part mission statement. And we saw the largest potential area of impact was under the development of our staff. This has always been a part of our mission statement, but we were seeing that talent development was really now more intentional part of our business strategy and our culture. We also see a lot of parallels with this program. To help us achieve all points of the mission statement, we want to achieve that distinguished design and architecture. And to do that we need our projects to be minimally impacted by all the mistakes on the small stuff that Dan was describing. And that will in turn help us to have more satisfied clients and hopefully earn a more reasonable profit through fewer mistakes. While it was also becoming clear to us that we were building a long list of problems that needed solving. And it's one thing to identify problems and another to start solving them. If you've ever had the privilege of hearing Carla o' Dell from APQC speak about knowledge management, she will tell you that one of the first things you should do is to find a problem and solve it and use that to leverage knowledge management into other areas of your organization. And we really Took this to heart as we were evolving this program. And by this point, whether Dan realized it or not, he was a knowledge manager and a pretty good one, too. Good job, Dan. And that's because he was using this opportunity to bring together diverse groups and individuals and having conversations around solving problems, not just identifying them. And then he was actually doing something to make. Make sure that we didn't have that problem in the future. And not many learning programs, at least not the learning programs that we had, were structured in this way. And of course, when we looked at solve the problems, that looked really easy on the surface, they weren't quite as easy as it sounded at first. The example that Dan gave earlier about the wood grain direction sounded like a simple problem to solve. We're having an issue. Let's just remind staff that they need to check the. The wood grain direction on every single document. Well, we just took a little time to unpack it. And we discovered through that process that there was a default setting in our base revit model that if we just manipulated it a little bit, we could actually prevent some of this from happening. And so multiple groups shared in that responsibility to help come up with the right solution. And then it was immediately presented at the landmark session, kind of an inward way of looking at what were the real problems, how can we work together and make the correct solution? And, of course, there's measurement. Right? We could look at measurement in a variety of ways, and they're each going to tell us something a little bit different. We have activity metrics, performance metrics, qualitative feedback. Right. The activity metrics are really the simple stuff that we can collect. It was how many sessions we were having per year, how many staff were attending each session. Were they doing the bare minimum, or were they actually regular attendees? The harder but yet more valuable measurement for us was really found in the performance metrics.

So when we were collecting these metrics, we wanted to make sure that we were hitting the most important things first. Those that had a direct business outcome, we measured in a couple of different ways. You know, from chasing the money through tracking our change orders to something as simple as just doing a report card. So you remember we talked about the fact that it's the same problem on every project. The fun thing is, depending on who you talk to, those same problems are different. So we asked our quality assurance staff and we asked our construction administrators to put together their list of their top 10 items. When you overlaid them, even though they were different, they. They were really the same. There was a lot of Layering there. Most of the time it was just the same problem that was just worded differently. So out of those lists, we were able to boil it down to 15 top items. We then gave that to our construction administrators and we said, give us a hard letter grade on these, tell us what it is, and be entirely honest on them. I mean, every firm has this list, right? We just wanted to know what ours was. The lowest grades were given the highest priority for next year's learning sessions. Now, while we were doing that, we also wanted to get some. Quantitative feedback is great, but qualitative feedback is also good as well. So we put together a survey and we sent it out to all the attendees and we asked them stuff like, what are your takeaways from this? What do you feel that you are learning from these sessions? What do you want to learn about in the future? And the feedback that we got from the attendees and we continue to get really helped us dial in focus on the sessions a lot better as well. So now we've got a list of topics and we have the. We're looking at 2017. Three of us got together in a conference room and we decided to do a poll planning session. We set it up where we had all of the months arrayed. We decided what, what those dates were that we were going to do them on. And then we just started filling in with the topics. Now we were also trying to make sure that the topics had a semblance of order so that they didn't just seem like a jumbled mess of topics. As we went along. We tried to do a couple of series so that you could have a three part series about building envelopes. We also left openings in there for groups like the performance design group to create, come in and talk about the energy code, and the code group to come in and talk about the changes in the updated codes. We also left six sessions open for our interiors design group so that they could have dedicated sessions for themselves as well. 2017 filled up immediately and right now we're scheduled out to about halfway through 2018 with these. Really what we wanted to do, of course, right, was we wanted to reduce the number of mistakes that were being seen by the quality assurance reviewers so that they could get to the important stuff on their reviews. We wanted to make sure that our construction administrators were not dealing with the same problems on every project. If they came to me next year and they had an entirely new list of things for me to address, that's a huge victory. Right? So far, based on our metrics, you Know that we're trying to develop and put together. We seem to be having a positive effect. But, you know, the qualitative effect is one of the bigger things that we're having right now. And that is project managers come up to me and they say, yeah, you know, I was telling somebody how to do something and they said, no, no, no, that's not the standard. I learned this in the landmark session. And they go, oh, so that's pretty cool to get that instant feedback, right? So what are our lessons learned from our first year that we could convey to you? We have six of them. Number one, you cannot do it all in a vacuum. I couldn't hold Steph at arm's length forever. I wanted it to be simple. I wanted to get going. I didn't want anybody bothering me. But when Steph came in, the process, improvements that she had and the ideas that she suggested not only made the sessions better, but they made my life easier. Right? It was easier to produce these and record them. And I didn't have people constantly coming to my desk anymore asking me for a one on one. Start small and build, but just start. I cannot tell you how terrifying an eight day deadline was to get started. I'm a fixer, but I'm also a planner and a thinker. If they'd have let me, I'd have spent three months trying to figure out the best session that I could possibly put together and it still wouldn't be perfect. Right. This just got us going and we're allowed to. And we could just zig and zag and dial it in and figure it out as we went along. And you know, that just built momentum and it's still gaining speed, which is great. Understand the real problems and work together to solve them. Take the time to unpack the problems that you think are happening. Take a look, ask different groups, try to get to the bottom of the, you know, don't take every problem at face value. Try to get to the bottom of why is this happening? And then when you get to that bottom, make sure that you're involving all of the different groups so that you have the full perspective and experience to be able to come up with an effective solution. Number four is the role of a coach, which cannot be underestimated, not only when it comes to planning and production of these sessions, but to really make it easier for the people who, your experts who come in and do a session for you. You want to lower the stress level as much as possible. I think, you know, some of these other sessions had Mentioned that, you know, sometimes your experts are not the best people when it comes to teaching. A lot of times that's simply because they're so stressed out to stand up in front of a group of people that it's almost paralyzing to them. So if you help them along and you help them with their production and even literally stand in the room and coach them along while they're doing it, you know, it makes it less stressful for them. Them. Now the effect is twofold. One, they're willing to do it again and two, they go, they tell the other experts, eh, it's a piece of cake. You can do it. It's easy. So now you have more people who are willing to spread their knowledge base. Right. Number five is stay true to the vision. If you guys remember, before, we had talked about the fact that we were trying to build on the fundamentals. We wanted to give everybody a fundamental base that they could build their career off of. During 2016, we were pulled 100 different directions. You should do this, you should add this, you should go there. Hey, we should have another group come in. Hey, have you ever thought about expanding this into five different series? We resisted all of that and we said, no, we're going to stick to the original road, we're going to work on the fundamentals and we're going to build from there. And then lastly, align with your business strategy or mission statement. For us, we were able to demonstrate that we were hitting two points on our mission statement. And with that, it gave us the buy in from firm leadership. But in addition to that, we also have the continued support of our firm leadership, which is fantastic. It's been one of the biggest things for us as we went through our year. So what was our end game, you know, throughout the year? Steph likes to send me articles all the time about learning stuff and knowledge management articles. Really. I think she's just trying to get me to be more of a knowledge manager. One of them that she sent me was from the Harvard Business Review and it was about the WD40 company and there was a new incoming CEO. And that incoming CEO wanted to change the culture of the entire company. And his thing was he wanted to have a learning obsessed culture. And I thought, perfect. And this one quote really struck a chord with me. I'm going to read it because I couldn't memorize it. I am responsible for taking action, asking questions, getting answers and making decisions. I won't wait for someone to tell me if I need to know. I am responsible for asking I have no right to be offended that I didn't get this sooner. And if I'm doing something others should know about, I'm responsible for telling them. Perfect. Right? That's exactly what we were trying to do with the landmark learning sessions. Now, since we end every single session with this slide, we're going to end this one here today with it as well. So thank you all for coming. We really appreciate it, and we hope that something we said said today struck a chord with you as well.