Designing Modern Learning Organizations: Rethinking AEC Learning Development in the Age of AI

The presentation is Designing Modern Learning Organizations: Rethinking AEC Learning and Development in the Age of AI. I've been thinking a lot about modern learning organizations over the last year, and this is the way that I kind of break down what that means. So I think modern learning organizations in AEC primarily accelerate learning and scale expertise. That's really what firms are trying to do. And they do that by aligning people, process, culture, and technology. So technology has been the catalyst kind of stirring the drink over the last few years. But as we all know now, having worked with AI and working in learning development, technology is like 5, 10, 15% of it. Like really, it's around the people, process, culture, strategy. Like how do we do this work? And the reason why this is so important now is I think we can all agree we're in a really rapidly changing environment. Technology codes Regulation, whatever it is, like there's just so much that's changing. And so modern learning organizations are realizing that the approach they took to learning and development in the past isn't gonna get them where they want to go. So this became really apparent to me after doing a listening tour in 2023. We had just finished the transition to Synthesis 6. There are people in the room that don't know what that was. In short, we rebuilt our platform from the ground up over a number of about 4 years. And when we came out of that project, I did a listening tour with 80 of our clients over 2 months saying like, look, we've done this big project. Now what should we be working on in terms of technology? What are your hopes and concerns and what are you excited about? What do you think how we can partner together? Like just wide-ranging conversations about what is the kind of relationship of us and our clients and the community? Like what's, what's the next big thing? And I heard 2 main themes come out of that. listening tour. One was AI, right? So this is the spring of 2023. In the fall/winter of 2022, the first ChatGPT had just dropped. And so by the spring of 2023, people were like, yeah, AI is gonna be a big thing. We don't know exactly how, we don't know if we should be excited, we don't know if we should be nervous, but it seems like it's gonna be a thing. It seems like that's something that will fit into synthesis somehow, and KA can help us with, but we don't know what. And then the second bucket was learning and development. And what we heard was, you know, yes, the technology we have isn't getting us where we want to go, but we're also feeling like our programs aren't as effective as they could be. And we think there's a way that we should be doing learning and development better. If there's a way you can help, that would be great. And so what we did is we took that back and said, you know, look, we've been a social intranet platform since the beginning. We need to expand our scope, right? We need to take a wider lens and have more surface area. We want to integrate knowledge, learning, and AI into one integrated approach. Because we think it's a little bit weird that learning and development has been siloed from knowledge management and software and teams and kind of processes. Like, why is that? Why shouldn't this all be integrated? So that's what we started doing. And as we built Synthesis LMS and we went into our first beta in the summer of last year, right away we started realizing, and our clients and the early people building started realizing, like, look, this isn't a technology project, right? The way that we're thinking about organizing our learning, how we prioritize what we're teaching, who's teaching, how they're teaching, like all of that needs to be rethought. And to me, I kept hearing some version of we need to level up, we need to go to the next level. And what I kind of took away was we need to modernize our approach to learning and development and recognize that things have changed. And that's where this whole kind of idea came from. And so it led me to this conviction, and some of you have heard me say this over the last year, that I think AEC learning and development will change more in the next 5 years than it has over the previous 25. How many of your firms refer to yourselves as learning organizations? Like, use that term? So maybe like half. I think you all are, whether you call yourself that or not. It's just a degree of kind of intentionality, right? So for a firm to go from a single founder or a group of partners that founded the firm, you start adding employees, you take on multiple projects, new market sectors, new technologies, you open locations. Like, there's learning that's happened every step along the way. So your organization has had to learn in order to adapt to change or it would have died, right? So you're still here, so ergo you're all learning organizations. The question is like, has it been kind of ad hoc and reactive, or is this something that's intentional and aligned with strategy and really good? So this is kind of what I mean when I say modern learning organizations. Okay, the way that I want to walk you through the way I think about learning— modern learning organizations is through a maturity model. It's got 7 levels in it. We're going to go through all 7 of these levels. And what I hope you take away at the end is it's all 7. You want to do this as an integrated stack. This is kind of, I think, the— now somebody can probably find a way to improve this, but I think in general, like, this is covering what I think the firms that are pushing the edge in terms of being modern learning organizations are doing. So what it's going to do is take you through what I think is a traditional learning organization to kind of where we are today. I'm going to then talk about the change to what's getting added onto that model to make it a modern learning organization. We're going to talk about how to apply the maturity model, and then we'll talk about what's next in the future. So I start at level 1, which is learning by doing. This is also the apprenticeship mentorship model. This is the foundation of how we've learned in the AEC industry for the last 20 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, like really as long as we've been building, a lot of times it's been somebody with more experience takes somebody who hasn't done things before, kind of stewards them, guides them, mentors them, gives them challenges that they cannot totally destroy a project on, and is there to catch them when they fall, right? This learning by doing and getting reps and slowly building out your knowledge base of what it means to be an architect, what it means to be an engineer, this is how we've done it for a long time. And so this is a photo that Lianakis shared with us. And this is from, I don't know, let's call it 1953, close, right? So this is mentorship model then. It's still the same, right? We're still kind of teaching people and guiding people and introducing them to the way that we do the work. We may have some new technology, we might have iPads, but we still have Trace, right? And we're still kind of sitting side by side with someone and giving them instruction and giving them guidance and giving them confidence. So If you imagine that you want to learn how to become a baker, you might read a book. So this is one of my personal favorites, Beard on Bread. We have an old copy of this. You might take an in-person course on learning how to bake. You might watch YouTube videos. You might watch The British Baking Show and try and get Paul Hollywood's approval with your baking techniques. You might turn to AI and ask for tips on baking. But the truth of it is you won't become a baker until you actually start trying to make things, right? The French have a saying, You have to put your hands in the dough. You have to experience what it's like to have a dough that's too wet and you need to add flour or too dry and you need to add water. You need to burn some loaves, right? You need to underbake some loaves. You just have to go through that process in order to become a baker, right? You can't get it just from watching YouTube videos and, and using AI and going to classes. And in the same way, if you want to become a great project manager, right? You can read stuff on your intranet and the project management guide. You can take a learning path on your intranet about, you know, becoming a project manager and project management fundamentals. You can go to community of practice meetings, or you can attend workshops, right? You can ask AI questions about being a project manager and get answers. You can even use knowledge agents, right? But the truth is you have to apply what you know on real projects with real clients that have real consequences, and then have that mentorship to help you learn.

Right?

This is a craft. It takes a long time to learn in this industry, and you just have to get reps. That this kind of idea of learning by doing, it's, it's not going anywhere. It's the foundation of how people learn today. And I, and I believe that will continue to be true into the future. This is the process through which knowledge becomes capability, capability becomes confidence, and over time that develops judgment, right? This is just, there's a certain amount of time that has to happen. But I think what a lot of people are feeling like, and Dan Hottinger's here from BWBR, who said on stage, 8 years ago, and I think is more true than ever, we don't have 20 years to build the 20-year architect anymore. So this process of learning by doing, like, isn't fast enough. This one project at a time way of learning leads to what I've always thought of as kind of a Swiss cheese knowledge of how the craft works. You've got a bunch of holes in the beginning, and over time through working on projects, you slowly start filling in, you know, some of those holes. But one of the challenges with this, right, is this depends a lot on What projects do you get assigned? You know, are, are you getting the same type of project over and over and over again? So maybe you're not getting enough variance. It depends who's your project manager, who your project leader is. Are they a good mentor or not? Do they take time to nurture you or not? Do they give you things that push you or not? And so this one project at a time is highly reliant on serendipity that you happen to get the right projects with the right people. And so people's development is super jagged and uneven. So strengths and weaknesses for each of these levels, their strengths and weaknesses. So what a lot of firms have done traditionally is they layer on level 2, which I call vicarious learning, right? Learning through others. So yes, we'll still learn one project at a time, but this lets us learn across the different projects that are happening in the office. So many of your firms, in fact, I would probably suggest that all of your firms do some of these things, right? Project spotlights. Lessons learned, site tours, guest speakers, all those kind of things that are available to the whole firm. You'll also generally do them targeted, right? Communities of practice, or you've got discipline groups, you do kind of Q&A sessions with experts, they share tips and tricks. And then maybe, you know, kind of in the more modern era or getting toward the modern era, those things get recorded, right? They, they're available through Teams and people can ask questions on Teams or Slack or Synthesis. So, We found ways to learn vicariously, asynchronously as well as synchronously. How many of your firms are doing some of these activities? Okay, right. So you're all doing level 2. So what's good about level 2? People get exposed to things more quickly than they would if they were just working on one project at a time, right? They go to a crit and they're learning about a challenge that happened on a project and how a team solved it that they can kind of file that away in the back of their mind and they've seen it, right? And they run into a problem that another project manager had on their project and how they dealt with it. An upset client, right? That's something that they can get some kind of reps on learning vicariously through others' experiences. It builds culture, right? To hear what other people are working on. It encourages curiosity and asking questions. This is a way that people connect to people, and this is why these are such beloved programs in most of your firms, I would say, is like there's something about the vibes, right? That's good about having people share what they're working on with projects. Importantly, they're also pretty easy to program. It's like, hey, we have something, we have a slot next month. Is anyone working on anything? Okay, great. Brent, you can do it. You present. And then Jennifer, you've got the next month because you're already working on something and you can share it. So super good. So the downside is it's kind of ad hoc. So when I ask Brent and Jennifer to share next month and the month after, it's whatever they happen to be working on, right? And so does this— is this the thing that people in the firm need to learn most right now? Maybe, maybe not, but it totally depends on what they're per— what they're available to, to share. You get kind of variable quality when you have these. And again, it's overly reliant on that serendipity. It's just reliant on chance. And some of our clients have called that random acts of learning, right? Which is good. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's a little bit kind of like, again, hope isn't a strategy to some degree if this is all that the firm was doing. Okay, so from level 2, as firms evolve, so, right, there's learning by doing. You want to learn across projects, so you do vicarious learning. Then next you get to codified knowledge and processes the firm way. So we've done enough projects that we start figuring out, look, we have a point of view of what good looks like when it comes to the way that we set up this type of project. So the benefit of doing codification, and this feels like maybe the last room in the country that I need to tell people why it's good to codify their knowledge and best practices, but really what it's all about in some ways is we can scale our company as it grows with better consistency, better efficiency, better quality.

Right?

We're actually learning as an organization when we make mistakes on projects or when we have breakthroughs on projects, not just learning at the project level. So a big step for firms to take. How many of your firms have some kind of, this is the CJP design way that we're doing things?

Right.

Just like the Mandalorians, right? And so this is really, really powerful. And what we talk about in knowledge management is taking tacit knowledge, which is that knowledge that's kind of silent inside all of us. It comes from the same Latin word for taciturn. So it's silent knowledge in all of us. And we try and codify that to make it explicit. So we take it above the waterline and we make it visible to everybody. Now you can't do that with all knowledge. Some of that is just deeply compressed intuition and experience that happens through reps. But what you can do is a lot, right? Your firms can agree on how you start up projects. Your firms can agree on kind of standard levels of details for projects, or what standard calculations are, or how you approach quality assurance or worksite safety, or you can build standards libraries, right? That is possible to do. And that's what many firms here do. And the thing that has become very, very clear to me is like, this is the crux of the whole problem of becoming a modern learning organization. In order to take advantage of higher levels, getting into higher levels of learning and development, but then also to take advantage of AI, you can only advance as far as your codified knowledge and processes allow. You have to define what good looks like in order to scale it. Otherwise, you're just scaling what Brent and Jennifer think, you know, and maybe that's fine, but like really to get where you wanna go, I don't think that's gonna be what you wanna do. So the good news about this is as we've gotten into some of these new technologies and into this modern era, those higher levels act like a magnet, right? And they're pulling knowledge out of people. They're realizing that if I contribute my knowledge, it helps make me more effective. It helps make my team more effective. And they're seeing that in a way that they've always understood intellectually, but now that the technology is at a place that it can really deliver and unlock a lot of new opportunities for experts. And I want to kind of give you more concrete examples as we go along. But before we get there, I want to talk about level 4, which is structured live learning. This is synchronous learning. This is where serendipity that we talked about in levels 1 and 2 starts becoming intentional. Because you've codified what good looks like, because you've codified the firm way, We can now build instructional materials, right, that help scale that across our organizations. And those could be, again, at the firm-wide level, onboarding, vision, mission, values, technology training, how we approach safety. Those could be more role-based. So for first-time project managers, here's how we do project management at CJP Design. Or for first-time people managers, this is what good looks like in terms of leading people in our organization, or new leaders in general. It could be situational learning. So it could be project typology training. This is our approach to healthcare, Healthcare 101. It could be market sector training. It could be project phase training. Like, I've never done construction administration before. I've never done a site tour. Here's the way that we go do those things. So if it's their first time doing X, the firm has a way to teach them how to do it. So what's good about structured live learning? It can be very high fidelity. You've got an instructor. They're sharing their thoughts with you. You've got real-time interaction. It builds connection and trust within the company. Sometimes it can lead, if there's time left for it, to some really deep discussions about the practice. Sometimes they can involve exercises so people can apply what they're learning. It's a good way to reinforce the firm way, and it creates sometimes good cohort experience. Like people meet people through the structured live learning that they end up building a bond with and they build trust and they can work with in the future. On the other hand, Structured live learning can be really hard to schedule. You've got, you know, a bunch of busy people, including the person teaching and trying to get that in their calendar, especially if you're asking them to teach multiple times a year, 5 times a year, 10 times a year, it can get really tough. It makes it hard to scale. It becomes difficult sometimes to do across office. You are kind of stuck with a one-size-fits-all pacing. So we've got 60 minutes. It's going to be 60 minutes and we're just going to move through all the stuff. One thing I've heard a lot of people in our community sharing as we've been talking about this is, look, we get so excited when we get somebody's time, we just try and fire hose them with everything that we know because we don't know when we're gonna get a window of opportunity with this person again. So if they don't happen to apply that in the next 2 weeks or the next 6 weeks, right, it's probably gone forever. So you have this weak long-term recall. It's difficult to reuse structured live learning on demand. So if I only need the thing that was taught in minute 45, like, What's my ability to go back and get access to that? So those are all things. Does this resonate?

Okay.

Whew.

The thing that came out that to me that was super surprising, which wasn't on my radar at all, is the last piece, which is instructor burnout. That like people that have taught the same thing over and over again are just a little like tired of it. Like they don't, like, why do I have to keep teaching this 101 again and again? Like I have other things I wanna do with my life. So that's kind of, So traditional learning, to me, that's a traditional learning model. I think this has been true for 20 years, 50 years. Like, I think you could go back into an architectural practice and plus or minus with some different technology, like, this is roughly what firms were doing. And the thing that I, you know, I said back at the beginning, the feeling that I got from our community, I've heard people say over and over again, is like, this got us here, but it doesn't feel like this is sufficient to get us where we want to go to deal with what we're running into in practice on a daily basis. So we need to level up as organizations. So why it's time to level up. I touched on a few of these things. We all know them, right? Greater business complexity, the increased pace of change. We've got at one hand talent shortages, but we've also got retirements. And what that's leading to is bottlenecks in terms of technical abilities, which leads to some business continuity concerns. Like, are we really gonna be able to continue to carry on this work? How is it gonna happen? So we're trying to move people faster into roles than we've ever moved them before. Something that would have taken somebody 15 years in the past, we're trying to get them there at year 5 or year 7 or year 8. So these are all things that, that our community is experiencing. The other thing that's happening is people's technology outside the office has rapidly improved over the last 2 or 3 years, right? They've got on-demand access to knowledge through AI, through YouTube, through TikTok, and they want that same kind of access to knowledge and learning inside the company that they have outside the company. So the traditional model, right? I think this is fair to say that it's been, it's slow and it's inconsistent and it's resource intensive and it's too reliant on serendipity. It's served us to get us here, but we want to go to the next level. To borrow from Jaws, we're going to need a bigger boat. So what does that bigger boat look like? So I'm going to go into levels 5 through 7. So level 5 is on-demand native learning. And just to be clear, when I say on-demand native learning, I don't mean recorded live learning. I mean stuff that's built purposefully for people to consume kind of asynchronously. So what it's not is taking the hour-long intro to project management on Teams and just putting that on a network server or putting that on the internet, right? That can work. It's better than nothing, but it was built for a live audience. And if you guys tell me if I'm off base here, but they can have long intros and Q&A and digressions. It's 60 minutes. It's kind of hard to navigate for recall. They're hard to update if something changes. And if you're a person watching this on demand, it's really a second-class experience for you. It wasn't designed for you. It was designed for people in the room, and then you're just happening to catch it afterwards. So what firms are doing differently? I'm showing you examples from Synthesis. We are not the only company in the world doing on-demand native learning by any stretch. But here's the approach, right? Instead of one big mega thing, you break it down into modular lessons. You can add quizzes for knowledge recall, you can do role plays. And so in this example, it's an introduction to project communications, and we're, we're suggesting you schedule a role play with Jennifer to practice having a difficult conversation. You can link to resources out that people should also read as part of understanding your introduction to project communication. So it could be electronic communication policies and client communication guidelines, whatever those resources are. They mark off that they've read them. And so for a learner, this is a very different proposition. I can go at my own pace. So maybe I want to do 10 minutes and I get a cup of coffee. Maybe I need to pause and rewind and go back and watch that part again. I can really consume it at the way that I consume information. It's easy for me to go back in the flow of work. So if I just needed lesson 5, you know, on this difficult conversation piece, I can just go back to that one piece pretty easily. I can search to it. Or I can go back anytime I need it. And this is really, I think, a really powerful idea that I don't have to like, and maybe I don't even need to take a whole course. Maybe I just need to learn one small snippet of one small course and that's all I need to solve the problem that I'm working on currently. And then I can just move on with my project. From an instructor perspective, this is a really, and I'm gonna kind of each time I'm gonna show 2 sides of the coin, right? The kind of the learner benefit on the instructor side, on the instructor side, you can get that one kind of gold standard version recording of your intro, right? Of the kind of the lecture piece of it. And you can just nail it. You can give it, you can do multiple takes, right? You can edit your script down. You can be concise. You can really get it right because it's broken down and it's made modular. It's easier to maintain and update over time. And we think because these are higher quality, there's better long-term ROI for you as an instructor. You made this investment and then people can keep taking this thing over and over and over again and use it in all different ways. And it allows, you know, people, project managers, project leaders to then direct people just to what they need in that moment. So as the, To the degree to which the organization and the leaders understand the catalog and what's available in terms of learning, they can send people right to what they need. So we think this is a really good approach. So that's kind of on-demand native learning. That's level 5. Level 6 starts putting some of these things together. That's hybrid learning. So it's asynchronous and synchronous put together. So best of both worlds. On one hand, you've got on-demand native learning. This is where you teach the foundations, the concepts, the preparation. It can be the lecture part maybe of a course. And then you pair that with live, right? So you've got live discussion, application of concepts. You can reflect as a group. You can get connection with your peers. As a learner, this is really great. I can kind of go at my own pace mastering the material or getting to understand the material. And then I can get answers and practice, you know, in a group with other people. And so this allows self-paced learning, flexible access, strong recall, all the stuff we said. for on-demand learning. Plus it's like I can understand how that stuff applies to my project, right? I can get real-time clarification. If I didn't understand something or I want you to go deeper, I can ask the instructor what that was. I can hear, and back to vicarious learning, I can hear what problems my peers are running into and then I can learn from their challenges as well. So from an instructor perspective, I get those same benefits, right? I've got the gold standard delivery. I can, this has made me as a person more scalable. It reduces that burnout and that repetition, but then it lets me do this part, which in talking to instructors, this is the fun part. I think this is what I've heard over and over again is like, yeah, it's not the lecture part that I really enjoy. It's like the questions that I get. It's like turning the light bulbs on for people, exploring the edge cases. Like as an instructor, I get questions and I'm actually learning in the moment cuz I actually myself haven't seen quite that problem on the project before. And so it really leads to this like good engagement for them because they're fired up. So I think these hybrid learnings are gonna be, the hybrid learning model is gonna be really prevalent in our industry in years to come for exactly these reasons. I think it's more scalable, it's more fun, and if it's more fun, it's more scalable. It's kind of this great argument there. So the question is if kind of on-demand native learning has these benefits, if hybrid learning has these benefits, what happens to level 4? What happens to structured live learning? So I think what firms are going to do is rebalance their learning portfolios. So they're going to move some things to native on-demand, introductory concepts, technology basics, awareness courses, foundational workflows, how to do your timecard, all those kinds of things. There's no reason somebody is teaching that live, all the onboarding stuff. A lot of that can move. Some things will get upgraded to hybrid. So for example, project management bootcamps or learning, you know, Healthcare 101 or Libraries 101, there's probably a mix. of, you know, on-demand instruction plus live technical discipline upskilling, safety, construction administration. Like, those seem like pretty good candidates for hybrid. And then there's going to be a pocket of it that stays live, I believe. The canonical example of this would be a leadership development program, right? And maybe that's even not only live, but that's maybe in person, right? You get 10 to 12 people. We've heard a couple examples of this on our podcast over the last couple months where it's like, look, we're going to spend a day together or 2 days together. locked in a room. We're gonna tell all of our hopes and fears together. We're gonna get like deep and like share like what, what our insecurities are so that we can understand as a team, like how to grow and develop as leaders, how to lead other people. To me, that's probably never gonna be done on demand. And maybe there, there could be some on demand plus live, but I think a lot of these things are just gonna stay live forever, 'cause that's the best way that this learning happens. So I think it's a spectrum of approaches that you might take. So that's level 6. So I've made it 35 minutes without talking about AI. Thank you, Bill. So level 7 kind of ties all this together. It's AI-powered just-in-time learning, right? So it allows you to kind of personalize and synthesize the things you need in the moment. So what you've been doing, what I've been showing you all the way along, is that modern learning organizations are building strong digital knowledge foundations, right? So when we build a sustainability guide as part of codifying our knowledge and processes, right? And we write down what good looks like when it comes to indoor air quality or to embodied carbon or toxic chemical avoidance. When Jocelyn does a sustainability short on mass timber basics, right? Or Brianne shares the tips and tricks from this new sustainability plugin. Or when Brenda shares lessons learned from one of her projects using reclaimed steel, or as you're building a standards library, or as you're building a course catalog on sustainability courses, you know, on your intranet, or you're tracking sustainability data in your project directory. All of that is building a digital knowledge foundation that AI can take advantage of, and it can power just-in-time learning based on that. All of that work done in the right way really empowers AI. So you can start asking questions like, why use mass timber? And get an answer driven from the codified knowledge that you've created, from the videos that you've created in your courses and different lessons, right? All of that is put together in one place, but they don't just power search. They power intelligent agents. I mentioned earlier, you know, you'll be hearing more about knowledge agents at this event. So I want to just take you 5 minutes into agents. That's a very, very long conversation, But I'm gonna try and give you a small window into it. And I'm gonna, and I'm gonna reduce the world into 3 types of agents. These are not the only 3 types of agents, but I'm gonna just do 3 for this purpose. Informational lets you retrieve information from a subset of your firm's knowledge for targeted and curated use cases. Creation-based, so you use that firm's digital knowledge foundation to develop and write new things in the moment. And then process-based, which lets you execute structured, repeatable work by tapping into your firm's standard operating procedures and what good looks like. So in the first example, this might be a sustainability advisor, right? So we just looked at all of that digital knowledge foundation that your firm has built through your codifying your knowledge through learning and development, through sharing all of the things. This means a sustainability advisor agent can go tap into that knowledge and help people get access to 101 and 201 level questions, which is great for learners. They can get really quick access to information. It's also great for experts because it makes them more scalable. They're not answering the 101 and the 201 questions all the time. So in this example, it's a really long question that I wanted to ask. I've got a client who's pushing back on indoor air quality. So I want you to help me make an argument on why it's important, what the ROI is, and then tell me some of the strategies we're going to use on the project, right? And the agent is able to tap into all of that firm's knowledge and put it together and give me a personalized answer. And then I can go back and forth with questions and answers on it. So similar to some of the AI search technology this community's been using, it's just targeted. This agent is just grounded in the firm's sustainability knowledge, and it's kind of optimized for that use case. In a creation-based example, I put a healthcare proposal assistant together. So this is grounded in the firm's, you know, healthcare projects, descriptions, could be project sheets, boilerplate language, whatever it is that's relevant to how your firms describe healthcare work. And I can ask questions and I can help it, have it help me draft approach statements or cover letters or all the different pieces and parts that you need in terms of pursuing new work. What makes that work though, right? So if I'm writing an approach statement, you've heard me say what good looks like a lot. I think that may be the phrase you hear the most at the conference this week. The reason that we can have an agent that can write well is we've taken the time to define what good looks like in this example, in terms of writing approach narratives, like here's what a good approach narrative looks like at CJP Design. And we have then paired that with all of our past experience, and then we can have the agent do its work. So the last example is a process-based agent. This is from one of our clients in Australia, Matt Tence. He's the practice manager there. It's a fee proposal assistant. And what Matt was doing is he personally was reviewing all the fee proposals that went out the door. And he's like, I don't think I should be the only person that knows how to do this in the company. So built a fee proposal assistant, which allows his emerging project managers and project managers to upload a draft fee proposal. And then get feedback, right? It will go through it and say, here are the things that are missing. Here are the things you did that, that aren't quite up to our standard. And just do a quality assurance check before Matt does the final check before it goes out the door, right? And the reason that's able to happen is Matt took the time to write down a fee proposal checklist. He defined what good looks like for our fee proposals, which means he can give that to the agent. They can upload a draft fee proposal. It can compare the two and generate that output. So all this, remember when I said that you know, these tools in the higher level are kind of acting like a magnet to pull knowledge out of your experts. Matt wouldn't have written down this before, right? This, this down before, like this isn't something he would've thought to do, but now the agent opens up the opportunity for him to scale that knowledge throughout the company. What it's also done is maybe he had done it before, right? Maybe he had a fee proposal checklist, but it was only 7 items 'cause it was a tool for him and he filled in all the gaps. between those 7 items with tacit knowledge. It'll just have one step. It's like, make sure client scope is well-defined. It's like, great for Matt. An agent does not know what to do with make sure client scope is well-defined. So you have to get into more detail in defining what good looks like for the agent to do its work. But while you're in the process of defining what good looks like for the agent to do its work, you're also defining it for humans, right? And this is capturing that knowledge that was only in Matt's head. You're making it available to AI and you're making it available to humans. So as we develop as learning organizations, this is why I said this is the catalyst, right? This is stirring the mix up quite a bit, but there's still a lot of people process work to do. Okay, so that's what I wanted to touch on with agents. And this is what I meant before when I said that firms will only go as far, you know, as becoming modern learning organizations as their codified knowledge and processes allow. Because that is the— that's the thing that powers the whole thing is defining what good looks like at your firm. So we've seen levels 1 through 7, and now you might be wondering, well, how do I apply this model? And if you guys are anyone, anything like what I imagine, you're probably kind of sketching in your notebook or in your head, like, are we at level 4? No, we're at level 5. I think we've done some 5, but like, we're really not doing a 6. So like, You can apply it that way, right? You can do it at the firm-wide assessment level and kind of see where you are as an organization, which I think has its uses. I think a more even powerful way to do this is to do it by knowledge domain. So in sustainability, maybe we're a level 7, right? In healthcare, maybe we're a level 2. In project management, maybe we're a level 3, and in onboarding, maybe level 5. And this allows you to understand with more granularity kind of where the firm stands. It also allows you to then figure out what to do next. So it might be, I look at this and it's like healthcare's a 2, obviously that's where we should work, right? They're just doing learning by doing and vicarious. They haven't defined core processes. They don't have a way for teaching that, like all the things. Maybe we should dive in and fix healthcare, right?

It depends.

It depends. Say it with me. So the thing is, is that like maybe you just started your healthcare practice and you've got 1 project in the office or 2 projects in the office, and maybe you're not at the point yet where it makes sense to evolve and kind of go deeper in terms of the learning organization there. It could be, on the other hand, that the healthcare practice is 20 years old and you're at a level 2. So obviously that's a big problem, right? It could be that we're getting out of the healthcare market and it doesn't really— we don't need to put effort here. So like scoring this allows you to then take it against your strategy and understand like, Where are the biggest gaps? Like we're trying to move into this new area of work. Do we have the knowledge and learning that we need in order to go into that new work? Or we have a bunch of project managers retiring. We really need to get serious about upping our project management game, or maybe project management's fine and it's not an issue. So this allows you to have a much more strategic, intentional discussion about where to make investments because something I've been saying for as long as we've had knowledge architectures, you can't manage all the knowledge in your firm. There's just too much of it. It's changing too fast. So you have to be intentional about where you put your bets. And I hope this model is helpful for you guys in terms of thinking that through as you adopt some of these new technologies and move into the modern learning organization era. To close, I want to go back to the very beginning of where we started with learning by doing, because I still believe, again, it's the foundation. Like this doesn't go away just because we've got fancy new technology. In fact, I think it's super important still. You still, in order to learn the craft of being an architect or an engineer, have to put your hands in the dough. There's been a lot of people saying that the apprenticeship model is dead and COVID killed it, which I think there's some truth to that. Like, it has certainly changed. Like, being on Teams or being on Slack or Zoom more often, like, being more digital and not having people be able to walk over people's shoulders. Like, there has been a movement towards the apprenticeship model changing. But I don't think we should give up on it. I still think it provide— uh, is really, really important to the health of our practices, but I think it has to evolve. And I will share a story. I was lucky enough when I was in college to spend a semester at Oxford University as part of the study abroad program. Um, it's a fantastic program that I was part of, and they have a really unique thing at Oxford called the tutorial program. Does anyone here familiar with that?

Great.

Uh, one, one hand in the back. What this means is the instruction is one-on-one or one-on-two. You get a dedicated tutor. So I was a history major, so I was learning kind of English-Irish history one-on-one with an expert in that field. And we'd meet every 2 weeks, you know, in a pub or in a classroom, right? We talked for an hour, hour and a half about the material, and then he would give me an assignment. And the assignment would be something like, look, in the next session we're going to talk about the Irish Rebellion. and Easter of 1917, you should come prepared. That was the assignment. There were no books, no syllabus, didn't tell me what to read. It's like, just come prepared to talk about this subject, which at first took a lot of getting used to, 'cause as Americans, we were used to getting pretty spoon-fed exactly what was gonna be on the test, and like, here's what you need to read, and these are blah, blah, blah. It's very open-ended. And so what I had to do is go to the library and start finding books on this topic. I had to, I actually got lucky enough, I got a cheap flight to Dublin, And I went and I walked the site where all of the conspirators gathered and they planned the insurrection. I saw how it all went down, had a good time in Dublin because it's a beautiful city, and went back. And so when I met with my tutor, I was able to draw on that personal experience, share him what I learned. I missed things, right? He would ask me questions and it was something I hadn't read about or I misunderstood, and that was fine. He was able to provide that real clarification for me. But I learned so much more because I had to figure out my own learning path and I had to apply it on my own, and I had those Experiences. And I think that's where this technology and that's where this modern learning organization approach is leading us. I do think that if, you know, Sarah has to learn to do a door schedule this week or do a site tour, I think somebody pointing her to a course that she can take and then exercises that she can work through and maybe go try and draft a version of the door schedule first. So when we meet, like you've struggled with it some, right? You've had to learn it, you've had to apply it, and now I can point out the areas that you missed.

Right?

You've gone through what learning and development scientists call desirable difficulty, right? That struggle of trying to learn something encodes it more deeply in your brain. And so I think that this idea that mentorship won't work because our subject matter experts are just too busy to teach people anymore, I think there's some validity in that. They are stretched really thin, and I've heard them say over and over and over again, I would like to put more time into mentorship. I would like to teach Sarah how to do our door schedule from the ground up, but I just can't because I've got client demands and I've got business development demands and I've got all these things. So if we can find a way to help the experts out, right? If we can help, you know, Sarah kind of learn more on her own first and then let me as an expert come in in high leverage moments as more of a reviewer, right? Sarah can interact with the AI or the knowledge agents and I can kind of chime in on that. That feels like something more modern. That feels like something that's more meeting the moment of where we live now. So that's what I've been thinking about lately. If you're not following the Smarter by Design podcast or newsletter, I encourage you to subscribe. This is, kind of the ideas I've been trying to work out loud on my own and then with various members of our community over the last year. So I appreciate that. And with that, we've got time for questions.

Thanks. Thank you for that, Chris. That was amazing. One of my questions would be, when you started thinking about the LMS versus where you are with the LMS today, what would you say your biggest pivot was from what you thought you were going to be building to this whole maturity model and what you're currently building?

That's a great question. Nobody's asked me that before. Oh, I didn't mean to do that. Oh, sorry. Okay. When we did the research— yeah, so Paul, I was trying to go here.

There.

When we did research, this was kind of like 2024. There was a lot of questions about, are we gonna support, kind of build an LMS that helps you track this live learning stuff that's happening or more focused on the on-demand people? And when we asked folks, it was very clear we should focus on on-demand. Like they had a way of tracking live learning. It was okay. Maybe it wasn't amazing, but it was like, it was working, but they had no really good way of doing on-demand. So we focused there, kind of assuming that we'd come back to the live learning thing. Pretty quickly after we finished. And so far that has not been true at all. Like, people are not banging down our door for us to optimize the, the kind of in-person learning and the tracking and that kind of thing. There's other things that they want us to work on. Um, one of the things that I think is, um, on the horizon— we haven't, we haven't prioritized it yet, like put it on the roadmap, but like I think it's inevitable— is bringing AI more into those learning experiences. So it could be something as simple as an AI quiz. So a quiz today, right, is like multiple choice or true/false. It could be, nope, it's like my— back to the tutor example that I shared, like, have a conversation with me. I am the agent grounded in the knowledge of this course. Like, let's practice. Carrie from BWBR has built one of these. Like, let's practice having a difficult conversation with the agent, right? That's part of the learning experience is applying what you're learning. And so I think that is, that is clearly something that wasn't on our horizon when when we got started, but like seeing people just start— starting reaching for that and making the tools do that kind of thing has been really interesting to watch emerge. Michael's got one in the front. No coffee this time. We're going to be talking a bit about this tomorrow, but how are you finding your community's ability to really focus on that the native content, the specially produced content to be able to make level 6 and 7 really work? Like, how are they finding the time to do it? Is that the question or? How are you seeing success? Am I seeing success?

Sure.

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a few things. One is, so yeah, I'm trying to decide. I can— this could be half an hour. On one level, there's kind of like deciding what quality it needs to be. So like some people, like when I see people moving slower rather than not, it's kind of like, does this need to be production quality? Like pro video level editing, lighting, sound. Does it need to be super entertaining? Like there's that, that can kind of slow things down. Or, and maybe in some cases, if this is like evergreen content for your company, talking about your mission and values and what you believe, maybe it's worth that investment. It doesn't probably need that production value if it's how you do your time card or something especially that's rapidly changing. So if it's a feature of a software that's quickly moving, if you spend a bunch of time documenting, you've missed the window of opportunity to teach somebody something. And so I think figuring out what your level of quality is, and Todd's gonna talk about this in his talk a little bit, is really important. And it doesn't always need to be the same, I, I think. Some of it is how, and I wrote about this in issue 20 of the newsletter, around that I think it's gotten a lot easier to capture knowledge now than it's ever been, right? Through recording software and transcription and being able to analyze those things very quickly. I think being able to surround a subject matter expert with people that can interview them, right? And tease out what they know, they can produce the videos for them. Like these are, we have more and more people with those skills inside our organization. And I think so partnering with experts and not asking them to do this all on their own, like we kind of used to, that has helped people move a lot faster. So I think those 2 things around like having a good eye on a good balance of kind of quality, but then also partnering with experts, that's helped people move pretty quickly. Yeah, you go in here too. I think that's Todd. Maybe it's a bridge from that last question a little bit. Are you starting to see patterns of where firms are getting in their own way beyond sort of levels of quality? But like, is there a certain level in the maturity model that just feels like it's a, it's a hang-up or an obstacle? Are there other patterns of difficulty that you're noticing?

Yeah.

Say more.

Next. Yeah. No, I— okay. So in that same, in that same Issue 20, I wrote about the passion budget. And so for as long as we've been having this conversation in this community, my point of view has generally been you don't need a dedicated knowledge manager or learning and development person or knowledge management team in order to do this work. And I still kind of think that's true, but I mean, I used to really think that was true, but over the last few years my point of view shifted a little bit. And I'm starting to believe that if you want to go to be able to execute at this level, like, you can't do it if it's somebody's 9th item on their to-do list. Like, somebody has to come to work every day thinking about how do we move the knowledge and the learning program of our company forward. Like, that has to be the thing for you to really be on the frontier of this and to really become a modern learning organization. I just don't think you can do it on the cheap. Now I think rushing out and hiring a team is not the right answer either. And so I think the passion budget thing is useful because you run experiments and you find out what experiments create value. And once you create value, you have an argument to pour more resources in the value. Like most executives and leaders I know, if you show them that I can spend a dollar and get 3 back, they want to give you more dollars. Right? They want to invest in something that creates value. So spending time creating value using the passion budget is a good way to get going, but that passion budget will hit a limit. Like it can only take you so far. And at some point then you're gonna need to invest. And the good news is like, that's a trend that I have seen going the right direction in this community. I think firms are realizing that too. I think it started maybe with AI search as one of the catalysts. It's like, oh cool, this can find all of our knowledge. Oh, oh no, this can find all of our knowledge, right? And so realizing that like in order to define what good looks like, that's how we're gonna get— we're gonna get knowledge agents and the LMS and like all this technology is just only amplifying that, that we have to get serious, as serious as we are about managing our money, right? We have finance and accounting teams. We manage the client and business development with marketing and business development. We have people stuff with HR. Man, we are a knowledge-based business. And like to say that we don't have someone that wakes up every day thinking about knowledge and learning management, like, That's the part of me that doesn't make sense to me anymore. So I think that's it. Is that too strong? Am I okay with that? Should I preach? Okay, good.

All right.

Okay, I am that person.

Which person?

The person who wakes up every day thinking about learning and development.

God bless you.

Where I am. And you and I, I think we've interacted a little bit digitally about this, but what suggestions do you have I understand, like, okay, go through and, and look at the areas of your business and get an idea kind of where you are.

Yep.

Change.

Right.

Change management is rough. And I, I'm curious what suggestions you have about how— I don't think I need to convince the, the people who have the dollars in their pockets because I, I think I have their buy-in, otherwise they wouldn't have hired me.

Yeah.

The flip side to that is though, it's the boots on the ground people who are working their tails off. how do I get the buy-in there to make a change where it's okay to spend that time learning something new?

Yeah, that's a great question. I wish Corey Squire were here from BORA. He's got this great— he's got a pretty good 5 minutes on this, so I'll try and do my best to steal Corey's thing. He has this great stock photo of an apple, and there's 2 bites out of it, so you can imagine. So he's like, that's what change management has looked like at his company. The top is bought in, and the emerging professionals are bought in, but the people in between are the tricky piece, right? The people leading the projects, like in his example, he was talking about high-performance design, right? So the leadership's bought in, all the emerging professionals are great, but it's like, how do we actually apply this on all of our projects? That runs through project leaders and project managers and they're super busy and they're swamped. And it's like, I'd love to change, but like, look what I'm doing. So what he's realized is he has to go back and do a second wave of change to reach them. And he hadn't done a good enough job of figuring out what's in it for me and what good, like how this makes my life and my work every day better at that level of the organization. And that's the most important level of the organization in many ways to flip. That's the hardest level to flip. And so making that argument at that level of how does that make that project manager's life better, like I think that's where the energy— does that make, does this make sense to people? Like that's where that energy needs to go. So he's working on that right now and I'm hoping that we can kind of share what he's learned from it. I don't know, has anyone else had that experience too where, and from a change management perspective, they've realized that they missed that segment of their firm? Seeing some nodding. Yeah, Michael. Yeah, you have too. I think the other thing I guess I would say around change, I mean, again, this is a topic that can go on for a long time. We had a— we were just talking about this at dinner last night. We had somebody named Rose Hollister speak at one of our events in like 2019. And she talked about, she had this great phrase, it's like, people like change done with them, not to them. And so figuring out a way, you have to maybe go a little bit slower, but like the more you can get their buy-in, especially at that level, the people that are gonna, because if they make the flip, then their teams are gonna follow, right? So those are high leverage people to change, but bringing them in to be part of that change early, I think is my other. This is generic change management stuff. I'm apologetic if you guys, this is old hat to you, but I mean. It's old hat for a reason. Like, it's really the stuff that really matters.

Okay.

Good?

Yeah. Testing. I have kind of a philosophical question about, you know, the role that this kind of work plays in the larger role of, you know, work in Creating meaning in one's life and like, how does that intersect with versus, you know, there's a lot of apathy as well around corporate work, for example. So I guess what I'm asking is, is there like a fundamental conceit that you're going to be really interested in doing this kind of thing and that other people are going to be on board with you?

Who's the you in this situation?

You being the person who does care.

Right, but are you saying you as the kind of the knowledge learning management person, you as the subject matter expert, you as the learner, like which kind of persona are we talking about?

I think you as the learner. It's like, what does it mean to you as the learner if the resources given to you are not good enough, for example, versus if they are good enough? Like, you know, what does that mean for you as a person and your relationship to work?

I'll take a swing at it and tell me if I'm not answering the question that you're getting at. So Gallup, the Gallup organization has an employee engagement tool they use called the Q12. And one of the questions in the Q12 is, I have the tools I need to do my job. So that could be technologies I need to do, information I need to do my job, the learning I need to do my job. And that's a great foundational predictor of whether people are engaged in their work. Because if they're asked to do something and they don't know how or they don't have the tools to do it, that's kind of demoralizing right away. So I think given the opposite perspective, it's like you're asked to do something and surrounded by resources. AI resources, human resources, materials, tools, like that gives you kind of like an Iron Man suit, you know, and you can go do more things and you can move faster in your career and be more capable. So I think being resourced is a really, really great feeling to do the work. I mean, I'm presuming that you actually want to be an architect or an engineer and you think those problems matter. Like, given that assumption, I think this is a great way to engage people and feel like they're supported. in their development and not that they have to go to YouTube on their own and figure it out. You know, because you can do that for a little while. And if your coworkers are good to work with and the project's meaningful, like you can fight through that for a while. But I think eventually that can burn people out. And so I don't know, does that— am I getting near where you were going with your question?

Okay.

All right.

Very good.

All right.

A question that has been circulated within our organization, as we consider a more structured learning environment that allows for some continuity across the organization, how have you seen other organizations that may be ahead of us also open, open the possibilities for innovation.

Hmm.

When you build an overly structured platform, how are, how are these organizations accepting innovative ideas and then responding to them so that what was created 10 years ago, put on a platform and You know, it's kind of the idea of if everyone goes to the same university and they get taught HVAC design by the same faculty member, that the whole group only knows one way.

Right.

So, how do you allow for that innovative and kind of entrepreneurial spirit to still be embedded in your organization while investing in some—

That's a great question. I think, and this is not This is a question I've seen firms wrestle with, and the kind of most common way I've seen that addressed is this idea of non-negotiables. So I'll just take— I don't know. I guess some things, like maybe you don't innovate as much as like contract negotiation and project management as you might in some other areas. So there's kind of like, what are we talking about? But like in areas that are more like ripe for innovation, it's like, these are non-negotiables. Like, we do this on the project. Like, these are foundational things to the way that we do. We have a certain level of quality, we have a certain level of responsiveness, we have a certain level of whatever the things are. Beyond those things, you're free to innovate on top of that kind of thing that we've agreed on without making— I think I get where you're going. You don't want to either make it so the work product is all the same or make it such a straitjacket that people can't— like, the opposite of the, uh, of the Iron Man suit is the straitjacket, right? And so you don't want to make it so that they can't even think. They just like follow like check the box that we have a certain process and we only ever do it this way. And so I think some processes that are riskier, maybe that's okay. But like, as you get to things that are more creative, there is some semblance of like how we work together as a company that makes it our way of approach— approaching the work. Is that making sense? Looks like Christina has something to add on to that one. Oh, and over there too. I didn't know which one happened first.

Thank you.

Hi, Juliana with Ratio. This is very exciting. The thing that I'm thinking about in terms of our firm and how we can, you know, get the most adoption out of it possible is we're either going to have to focus on first doing these like trainings for either the admin tasks or giving the opportunity to more of like our designer side. So is it going to be sustainability? Is it going to be project management? From the organizations that already have this in beta, and this might be a question to the audiences, Do you get better success from either or, or does it really matter?

It depends. No, so, okay, like squinting out at like the 80+ firms that have got— that are in the LMS beta, I think by and large it's been onboarding, right? And design technology stuff have been really like 1 and 2. And some— for a couple reasons. One is there's usually already something there.

Right?

And now they're taking something there and they're making it more efficient and making it more scalable. Those are usually owned by people that aren't billable on projects. And so they can kind of get those first prototypes and they can experiment with like, here's exactly our mix of on-demand and native learning. Here's how we tie AI in. Like they can usually go build some like examples. And then when other folks see that and they're like, oh, I see if we did that with project management or we did that with our K-12 stuff, like we could have those results too. do, that makes it easier to show them something of like how it's gonna work. So I think that's been like the overly simplified way. But on the other hand, like we've had clients that are like, look, we've got, I don't know, we've got some big initiative that's going through the company. Like let's take AI, right? If you want access to our AI tools, you have to go through the courses and our AI, you know, our AI courses on the LMS, right? Mark them as complete and then we'll give you access to the tools. Or we're going through a rebrand. Or we're going through a merger and there's just something that's like, it's an interesting thing. It's like it's become a companion to internal communications, right? A part of the communications of this change has been we're gonna pull the course around it. So it's somewhat reactive and responsive to a challenge like that, but then also building on the things that are already solid and going from there.

Cool.

I think Christina had a question.

Oh, this is back to the other question, just to add on to the, Sure.

And, um, right, you have the Lionachus way.

So like, yeah, well, like, how do we leave the door open for innovation?

I think it's just acknowledging and being open that this one way can evolve as long as we're all evolving together in the same direction. We agree on that this is how we're going to change. So we want to hear the creativity and the changes and all the, you know, suggestions, but let's go with the same direction.

Right. So, like, not start building like a shadow way that we're— A separate initiative.

Oh, you know, this was our way and now we've learned more together since then.

Right.

Now this is our new way. So let's keep learning more together.

Right. So there's a creative tension between, on one hand, there are multiple ways to solve a problem and maybe this way is better than the existing way, balanced with, but we want to share work across offices and we've got We don't want employees working for different project managers doing things different ways because that drives them crazy and it's bad for the efficiency. So like there's some middle ground where it's like we want to do continuous improvement, but we also have to work kind of consistently so that we can have an approach to quality. It's a tricky puzzle. But yeah, I agree. I think maybe what you're saying also is having a good feedback loop.

Yeah, like this is the best way that we all know as of right now. And then we know that'll change as we learn more as time goes by. So, let's keep the door open and our minds open to not, like, tunnel vision to that one way.

Yeah, there are some knowledge management people that call it best-known practices instead of best practices.

Oh, best practices.

Yes, I like that.

Right? Yeah.

That's a pretty nice thing.

Yeah. Cool.

I think, Graham, and that'll be the last one.

Hi, Chris. If you'll suffer me for a minute, I think I have a long preamble and a short question.

Graham's the last question.

Um, I've been rolling this around in my head for a few minutes here. I love this visual, and I think if I put this in front of my organization in particular and ask the question like, where are we right now as a firm at a firm-wide level, I think most people would say, oh, we're at least level 3, level 4. We, you know, include elements of all of these things in day-to-day practices. And then I also love the idea of Breaking this apart by domain and putting that same question in front of everybody. I think if we broke our particular firm into every possible different knowledge domain that I can imagine and ask that same question, I think we'd be pretty hard-pressed to quantify any single domain as higher than level 2, which begs the question, how can we be 3 or 4 at a firm-wide level? And I think the obvious—

Look, I'm a history major, man.

That's been—

that's math is—

We're not, right? So that's that's a gap. We think something or we overstate our maturity at a firm-wide level, and as soon as we look at the details, we acknowledge that that's not true. And for me, I'm looking at the firm-wide level 3 as being maybe like the first big hump to get over.

Mm-hmm.

Something that I've experienced personally in our organization is asking, do we have a process for this? What is the process for this? In 1,000 different ways. I've been rolling this around a lot. lately, as a matter of fact, trying to figure out, like, the difference between need and capacity. I have this thing where, like, in the moments when we need a process that's well documented, it tends to be when something's on fire and we're trying to put it out. And at that moment, nobody has the capacity to produce that documentation, to, to create that process.

Right.

And then in, in the reverse, when we have the capacity to do that, There's no driving need. In the moments when people are free, they don't need to do something. And so there's always an excuse to put it off. An answer to the question, do we have a process for this, that I receive from many people across all levels of our firm is, do we need a process for that?

Yeah.

So my question is, because I think the answer is yes, in all cases, 100%, how do I overcome that objection when somebody says, do we need a process for that? What do I say?

Well, I mean, I think just to be clear, like in the way that I said you can't manage all the knowledge in your firm, I don't think you can manage all the processes either. And I don't think the answer is always yes, do we need a process for this? So I think it's getting back to like real business challenges, whether it's, you know, we've got a bottleneck in capacity, so if we streamlined our process, we could do more work with the resources that we have. It could be, you know, our quality is slipping, and so obviously maybe a process— and process isn't always the answer to every problem, but it can be answered a lot. Maybe there's a quality issue, or maybe there's a— we're losing money on our projects, and if we got more intentional about the way that we manage projects, we could not lose so much money on projects. So I think starting with a real business problem and then validating that the process is the way to solve it— like, I still think, like, an objection is a gift, right? Because then it forces you to make sure that we actually need to do the thing that we want to. So all that being said, I think there were 2 parts. That was one part to your question. The other part about the things are on fire versus not on fire, right? The tool I talk about all the time, some of you've heard me say it a billion times, is the Eisenhower Matrix, which is kind of like non-urgent and urgent, and then not important and important. And so what we work on first are the urgent important things, as it should be. But what we tend to work on second are the urgent not important things, because they're on fire, somebody's upset, it seems like a catastrophe. But the real magic in knowledge and learning management is in important but not urgent, right? That is doing the thing before the thing is on fire, you know, and that's like moving out of firefighting mode and moving into building capacity. So yes, still validate the thing is important to do, but then the smartest firms figure out a way to work on those important things even if they're not urgent so that they're set up and they're prepared. So I think it's those 2 things together.