From Tame to Wicked Problems: Rethinking Learning and Development in a VUCA World | Ellen Bensky

We're going to be talking about tame and wicked problems and rethinking, as Chris said, learning and development in a VUCA world. So, Turner Fleisher, we're 52 years old. We've got about 240 talented professionals that work with us. And we have our main office in Toronto, Canada. Yay, Canada, for the few of us that are here. And we have a little office out in Halifax. So, we practice architecture and interior design and experiential graphic design. And we work across multiple sectors within those 3 areas. I always like to show a few slides about our culture because it's something that I'm really, really proud of. We do a lot of things together. We like to do things together outside of just working together. And we also do a lot of giving back to our community together. So I'd say those are the 2 things I'm most proud of in our studio, other than building a learning organization. So I like quotes, and I thought this quote was really interesting from Peter Senge, who wrote this in 1990. The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization. And that kind of also speaks back to what Chris was talking about. And I really believe that this is true. But he also said something else that I thought was really cool. And if you haven't read The Fifth Discipline, it's a really incredible book. But the rate at which organizations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. And again, he wrote this in 1990, and we're here today in 2026. So a bit about our organizational structure, which is a little bit different than a lot of studios. Our operational departments, which include finance, digital practice, marketing communications, people and culture, yay, knowledge management, and learning and development, actually form the foundation of our studio. And those are the people that support our practice professionals to do the amazing creative work that they do. And so today we're gonna dive into my learning and development team. And if any of you have heard me talk before, I start small and I might get a little big, but you don't have to feel like, oh my God, if I don't have all these people Ellen has, I can't do this. All you have to do is start with one. So Nihar joined me as our manager. I knew that I needed to bring in somebody that had a Master of Adult Education. I was trying to wing it for a lot of years, and while I think I know what maybe people would like to learn, It's not my area of expertise. Nikki joined us recently as a learning and development specialist. Olivia joined us as a learning and development coordinator, and Sherry is also a learning and development coordinator. So we've got a really deep team of people who have education in learning and development to help us do everything that we do in our studio. So one of the things that I wanted to share is the reason why I I really felt strongly that we needed to become a learning organization. So, one of them was growth. And so, this is just sort of— I say 2014 because that was sort of when we're 60 people and we were bigger than like, hey, answer this question kind of thing. That was really the moment. And so, as you can see, as the years have passed, and not that many had passed, we went from 60 people all the way up to 256 people in 2013, which is crazy growth to manage without really thinking about learning and development. Another thing is our demographics. So, those of you who've heard me speak, I like to talk about greens and the grays. And the greens are, you know, the younger people that are going to teach us grays all the cool things they know. And the grays are the ones that are going to give all that tacit knowledge to the greens. And you can see our proportion. We're a lot more green than we are gray. And so, we really knew that we needed to— become a learning organization to get those 2 together. This is another thing I'm really, really proud of. We feel that if you have education anywhere in the world as an architect or an interior designer, you should be given an opportunity in Canada, even if you don't have experience in Canada. So, as a result of that, we have people that have been educated in a lot of different places in the world, but when they come to Canada, they might not know what are our building codes, how do we construct with different materials. And so that became also an impetus to really dive into learning. And then industry disruptions. So Turner Falescia was founded in 1974, and for 28 years we were doing okay. There was really not a lot of technological disruptions. I mean, my digital team likes to say, you know, CAD really wasn't a disruption. It was just a different way of doing 2D work. But in 2012, Autodesk acquired Revit, and 4 years later, we were considered an early adopter, if you can think about that. And I thought I was so proud. We're, we're gonna dive into this 4 years after. In 2010, Revit API became a stable platform. In 2012, we got photorealistic rendering, which kind of blew our minds. And then we have visual programming and scripting in 2014. And then it's got— I can't even describe. You all know what's happening and how quickly. So again, another real impetus for becoming a learning organization. So what we did was we created all of these learning and development pathways. So we had learning programs, we had learning events, we had self-directed learning, we had onboarding, as people have talked about, we had peer-to-peer learning, and we had intern accreditation. So, we were hitting all of these pathways and creating really great content. But then the world changed. And how did the world change? Another quote, and I really like this quote from Jason Huang, who's the president and CEO of NVIDIA. So, if you know anything about technology, he's pretty well-spoken on it. The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow Again. And that just is the concept that blew my mind and our minds around. It's the time to rethink how are we looking at ourselves in learning and development when this pace is so fast. And everybody talks about pace of change and change management. This isn't like— this is the way life is going to be. It's never going to go back. So, what is VUCA? I asked this to my studio at a town hall, like, how many people know what VUCA is? And there wasn't that many people in the room. And so VUCA, we're in a world that's extremely volatile right now on, in so many levels. VUCA is uncertainty, right? But it's also complexity and it's ambiguity. And so how do we lead? How do we work? How do we— but how do we learn in a VUCA world? And what do we need to learn to be successful in a VUCA world? So in a VUCA world, the problems change. So we used to have tame problems. Now we also have to be thinking about wicked problems. Tame problems are clear, defined challenges with known solutions. in stable conditions. So, examples of tame problems that impacted our studio, and maybe you'll resonate with some of these: applying evolving building code requirements, right? That was a tame problem. There's a new building code out, we have to get people to know what that is. Developing master details and Revit templates, leveraging BIM for coordination and model management, building proficiency in project delivery standards, Creating consistent onboarding processes, and defining clear project roles and responsibilities. So when we were in it, those kind of seemed pretty big to us in the moments that they hit us. But let's talk about wicked problems. So wicked problems are complex challenges with no single right answer that are shaped by changing conditions, interdependencies, and uncertainty. So let's talk about a couple of wicked problems that our studio is experiencing and has been experiencing in the last 1 to 2 years. Balancing client vision, budget, and constructability in unstable market conditions. Aligning clients, consultants, and municipalities and project teams around competing priorities at the same time. Making critical decisions with incomplete, information and compressed timelines, right? I need this now. It's like, well, but what about this? Well, there isn't any time. We have to make a decision and get it done. Navigating the accelerating impact of AI and technological change, delivering greater project complexity with tighter fees and shortened schedules, and supporting our studio members through this uncertainty, change, and rising expectations. So those are tame and wicked problems as we see them through our lens at Turner Fleisher. When you have a problem, you always have to navigate a solution. So let's talk about some solutions that you would navigate with tame problems. You're gonna try and build capacity if you wanna solve tame problems. So that could look like developing technical skills and applied knowledge. It could look like building proficiency through practice and repetition. It could be about executing work consistently using established methods and standards, right? So you're building capacity to help solve those tame problems. But when you have wicked problems, you actually have to strengthen judgment. How are people thinking in order to solve a problem that actually has no answer? So we need to help them connect decisions to real-world outcomes. We need to navigate competing perspectives and priorities, and we need to help them adapt their thinking through experience, discussion, and reflection. So that's going to be a different kind of learning experience than it might have been if we were just trying to build capacity. And so our philosophy is that learning and development moving forward has to be a combination of building capacity and strengthening judgment. So there's no going back. This isn't like a moment in time that we have to just like help everybody be able to, you know, think more critically. This is going to be the forever moving forward. So once we sort of digested all of that, we thought, okay, well, let's look at some of the programs that we have that are existing programs. And how can we readjust them through this new VUCA lens? So, TF Academy, and some of you heard me talk about TF Academy, it started in 2015, and I'm super proud. We just finished our 30th term. We're just about to get ready to prepare for our 31st term. One of the things we did when we were looking at TF Academy was we knew that we were going to need to be developing some new learning programs, and TF Academy was pretty intensive. So one thing we did was we changed it from 3 semesters to 2 semesters. We used to have a winter, a spring, and a fall term, which was kind of crazy. So we changed it to 2 terms. So we have term 1, we have a break, which we never had before, term 2, and then we have another break after it. Seems kind of simple, but you know, you have to live and learn, right? So here's an example. In 2024, we actually had 122 learning opportunities during the year, and I'll get into what a course and a workshop and elective is, but those numbers are pretty big. So in 2026, we've brought that down to 81 learning opportunities. We dropped from 26 courses down to 15, from 16 workshops to 12, and so on. So less intensive focus on TF Academy, allowing for more focus on other programming. So let's talk about TF Academy a little bit and the changes that we made to some of those courses and workshops through our new lens. So this is just an overview. Anybody in the studio can be an instructor in the academy. You just have to have passion, will, desire to share your expertise with others. In term 1, these are all of our external instructors that come in and teach in the academy. And this is something that we have really leaned into. So if you think about solving wicked problems with complexities of others in the AEC industry that our studio members are interacting with, we're really leaning into bringing those experts into the Academy so that our studio members can understand and learn what those perspectives are. And so we've really added a lot of external instructors to the Academy, and anybody in the studio can be a student. Courses are 12 to 16 students. There are 4 to 6 sessions. They're in person and Zoom. So I want to give an example of what we've done to change one of our longstanding courses, which is Understanding Risk Management. So one thing you'll see is we've got, you know, an associate and 3 principals and a senior project coordinator who are all participating and being instructors in this course. So again, broadening the perspective that the students are getting from more people within the studio. Session 1 and session 2. We go through sort of, we call them the 5 fundamentals of risk. We go through professional liability insurance, governance, our risk process, and then what happens if you end up in a claim. Then, we added something new, which is called a fishbowl exercise. And this was to get them again, that experiential, in the moment, I'm going to think, I'm going to be in something that I just kind of learned about and talked about. So it's a facilitated discussion exercise where a small group works through a real-world scenario while others observe, listen, and reflect. Members of the larger group can jump into the discussion as the scenario evolves, moving between observation and participation. And this helps support critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving through a collaborative discussion and diverse perspectives. So right in the moment, they get to jump in and be part of Solving a risk situation that is presented to them. And then in session 4, they go through 4 different case studies, and these case studies all had different paths to solution. Something is pending trial, some were settlements. And so they, they get to hear from all of the, you know, sort of Grays. They wouldn't want me to say that, but their experiences actually living through a claim or a potential claim. So learning outcomes: to understand the studio's approach to risk management, governance, insurance, and claims; recognize how communication, documentation, and decision-making influence project risk; explore risk management principles through real-world scenarios; and apply critical thinking and problem-solving through real-world case studies and discussion. So another one that I'll talk about is our WELL certification course, so Designing That Enhances Human Health and Well-Being. So in session 1, we go through WELL principles, In session 2, we go through a few global case studies. In session 3, we talk about how does your project potentially become a WELL-certified project. But then we added session 4, which is a walking tour where they go to an actual WELL-certified building. So again, we're trying to make those connections between what we're teaching and then getting out there and seeing it actually applied in the real world to make those connections. So explain the core principles and objectives of the WELL Building Standard, describe how wellness strategy influenced design and the experience of buildings, and connecting the WELL principles to built solutions through an experiential walkthrough of a WELL-certified building. So, in our workshop, one of our workshops is practice advisor drawings and details. So, Kojo, our practice advisor director, and Jeremy, one of my partners, and Taya, who's a practice advisor. So, these are the people that check all the drawings. So, before a drawing goes out, practice advisors have to look at it and give their feedback. So, in session 1, they're having, you know, That workshops are smaller number of people, so you get real hands-on learning. So, you can see they're watching Jeremy draw detail. Everybody gets a chance to get up there and draw detail. They talk about construction sequencing and constructability, coordinating with structure, and building control layers. So, learning outcomes: they recognize the role of detailing in design quality and project delivery. They explore how detailing influences constructability. Coordination and building performance. And they apply lessons learned through real-world examples, discussion, and collaborative review. Again, getting people together, getting them talking while they're learning. Pencil and Pixel. This is a new one. It's a really amazing course. So McKelly, who's our design director, and Calvin, who's a design lead, run this workshop. And so session 1, 2, and 3 are all about the pencil. And all about, you know, before you get AI into your design, you really have to design it yourself. We're not looking to AI to come up with our first draft designs. We're looking to AI to be able to provide those iterative enhancements to the design that we already create. So in session 4 and session 5, then they get into the pixel. So what can you do with AI? So to illustrate design ideas through hand-drawn sketches, Break down and draw complex forms using simple geometric shapes, using shading techniques to transform sketches into rendered 3D forms. And then we're going to explore AI-generated variations that build upon and enhance these original design concepts. So practice electives happen once, maybe twice during a semester. They're unlimited. People can attend. They're in person. They're on Zoom. So, this is where we really are drawing in those external people to come and talk. So, this is one that's coming up in this term, Navigating Complexity Together. It's a panel discussion. So, getting back to those wicked problems, right? So, a developer, a builder, a builder, another construction company, like all of these people coming together with my partner Steve on a panel, and they're going to be identifying how developers, owners, and builders are responding to changing market conditions. describing key trends shaping the industry, including shifts in development priorities, pricing, trade availability, and emerging asset classes, and identifying strategies that organizations are using to navigate uncertainty across procurement, staffing, financing, and project delivery. So really helping our studio members understand, because sometimes they think, you know, we're not doing a good enough job to manage these on their behalf. So we should be pushing back on these timelines. We shouldn't be agreeing to do this new thing. And so if they can hear from these people directly about what's impacting them, and they have the opportunity to ask a question, we're hoping that they'll build some of that knowledge, which is going to help them when they get in front of a wicked problem. To compare industry leaders' perspectives on current challenges, opportunities, and future areas of growth. So here's another practice elective. This is Daniel, our lead software developer, and we really believe at Turner Fleisher that AI, for sure, it's not going anywhere. It's absolutely going to be a part of our practice. But if we want our studio members to use AI, we really felt like they needed a foundational knowledge of what is AI, right? Like, we all are like, how does that actually work? What is deep learning? What is machine learning? And so Daniel, in this elective, differentiates between artificial intelligence and machine learning. He explains the foundational functionality of platforms such as ChatGPT, and Copilot, like, how do they know all that stuff? Like, literally, how can you ask it anything and they can just, like, produce that? Where do they get that information from? Use effective prompting techniques to engage with AI tools more efficiently. I know I sometimes get in fights with ChatGPT. I'm like, what do you mean you don't get it? Like, so, like, what— how can I prompt it better so it'll give me what I'm looking for faster? And to describe RStudio's expectations for safe, secure, and ethical AI use. in accordance with our AI policy. So right from our digital teams', you know, mouths, it's like, how do we approach this and how do we want all of our studio members to approach AI? So then our wellness electives, and this is one of the areas of our academy that I'm really proud of, because if we were thinking about learning and development, we have to think of the whole human. And so if we're feeling better about ourselves, we could probably think better. And that's sort of what started the wellness electives. And these are just a couple. Sound healing. So we, we bring in a sound healer, and this is during the studio day, and to understand how sound and vibration can support stress reduction and focus, experience sound as a tool for relaxation, clarity, and balance. And people will leave feeling more grounded, refreshed, and connected to a sense of calm. Again, we go back to the VUCA world. Yeah. I don't think the word calm is anything that you would get in your mind when you understand what those letters actually mean. Communication, because this whole thing is predicated on people's ability to communicate in more complex situations where we're really having to, you know, define things and have these difficult conversations. Communication is super important. So we lean on Jordan Scholl, who's a Toronto adult He works at the Toronto Adult Speech Clinic and is an expert in communication. So he does a lot of our electives. So this one is Communicate to Motivate. To recognize how communication influences motivation, engagement, and collaboration. Consider how curiosity, empathy, and listening support stronger conversations and shared understanding. And to identify communication strategies that build trust, openness, and positive impact in team interactions. So that's sort of TF Academy and what we're thinking about and how we've iterated on that. We have a program called Site Visits with Kojo that, I don't know, has been around forever. Kojo's been with us, I'm going to say 35 years. And so Kojo, back in the day, used to raise his hand and say, who wants to go to site with me? And people would just like jump in his car and they would go to site. And as we grew, you know, at 240 people, you can't just say, who wants to go to site with me? There's like got to be construct around that. So, my learning and development team turned that program into an actual program. And so, Site Visits with Kojo is a quarterly program. 4 students get to go. And what we added now is they need to have a defined learning goal, and they need to have gotten their manager's approval. So, it isn't just anybody, I want to spend the afternoon with Kojo, or I want to go look at that really cool building. It's, what are you trying to get out of this? Out of this experience. So, then Kojo can tailor these visits to each of the 4 people's learning goals. So, this goes over 3 months. They have a kickoff, they meet in person, they talk about everybody's goals. Another thing that we added, Kojo used to go back to the same site, and he thought that was really great to see the progression of construction. But what we really felt people needed was seeing different typologies in different stages of construction. So, they go to 4 different buildings, and they go for a 3-hour site visit. Each participant needs to do a presentation to their team about the experience, what they learned. They have to do a Newton post, which is our synthesis platform. So, they have to share it with the broader studio. What did they learn when they went on this site with pictures? And so, other people can potentially learn from it. And then, there's a debrief with them to understand how was the experience, what went well, what could be better. So, then we also created some new programs over the last 2 years, and one of them is Project Site Visits. So, you'll see a bit of a theme here. We really heard loud and clear from our Studio members that getting to site to see what they were drawing as it was being constructed was something that people really, really wanted. But sometimes it's not in your role. And so, if you're a designer on a project, it's not in your role to do a site But those are typically the people that will benefit most from going to see their own site so that they can make that immediate connection between their drawings and their details and how it's constructed. So, anybody from job captain all the way up to principals can be an instructor for this. You have to have experience on this project, so they can't ask an associate who hasn't worked on this project to take them on this site visit. So we really want to keep it with somebody that has the knowledge of the particular project. And the students are unlimited per semester, so anybody can sign up for this. They just need to have, again, a defined learning goal and their manager's approval that this is something that would benefit their learning and their development. And so again, it's a 3-month program. They have a kickoff where they meet to talk about the expectations. Then they go to site again. It's a 3-hour site visit. Again, they have to do a presentation to their team, and again, they have to do a Newton post. So one thing that we heard from our engagement surveys and just generally people speaking and thinking about, again, living in this VUCA world where communication is so important, is giving and receiving feedback. And so we got feedback that we weren't all so great at giving and receiving feedback. And so we created a new multi-phase learning experience designed for studio members across all roles to strengthen feedback conversations, communication, and interpersonal effectiveness through interactive workshops, coaching, and real-world learning experiences. So every single member of our studio went through this program. So session 1 was 3 hours. They talked about a comprehensive guide to asking for feedback. Session 2 was a guide to receiving feedback well. And then they had an optional opportunity to do a one-on-one session. And I'll go back. Emma Collier is an executive coach who we've created a really great relationship with, who delivers a lot of these programs for us. Again, leveraging our in-house capabilities to do some of this, but really getting out in the world and bringing in experts that really lean into this and do this as their profession has made a marked difference in the impact of the learning. So we did a whole program with our associates, and for us, associates are members of the leadership team. They sit right below partners, so they have a lot of responsibility in the studio. So this was a new leadership development experience designed to support individual and collective growth within this group through coaching, reflection, assessments, and facilitated discussion. We really wanted to make sure that this group, who's really responsible for making a lot of decisions in those complex situations were best supported to be able to get themselves and others through it. So Session 1, they talked about leadership foundations and emotional intelligence. Session 2, decision-making, leading through change. Session 3, communication, influence, and presence. And Session 4, resilience and sustained leadership impact. And again, throughout, they had an opportunity to have individual coaching.

and reflection.

So then we decided to take it one step further, and we brought Jordan back. And so we have associates on the practice side, but on the operations side, we have directors who sit at the same level of influence in the studio. So we really wanted to bring the 2 sides of our studio together and give this group of people an opportunity to strengthen communication, collaboration, and shared learning between them. So associates as practice leaders and directors as operational leaders, while building confidence in communication-influenced decision-making and navigating complex interpersonal dynamics. You see a theme here. So session 1, they talked about communication styles and active listening. Session 2, adaptive communication across stakeholders and situations. And again, they had individual coaching and reflection throughout this program. We have people managers. Not all studios have people managers, but we believe that just like any other business, everybody has a manager, people should have a manager. But we wanted to give our managers an opportunity to work with Jordan. So again, some real-world scenarios, coaching, collaborative discussion, feedback, difficult conversations, you get the drill. Assertiveness framework, communication foundation, feedback conversations, motivational interviewing, difficult conversations and leadership communication, and balancing team needs, accountabilities, and studio priorities. Because to get back to those complex Wicked problems, balancing needs is super important in being able to try to navigate through that. And they also had individual coaching and reflection. So you might think, what could you possibly have left to do because you're doing all of these things? So I just wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into some of the things that we're working on next. So we have all of these pathways, as I shared with you, But we sort of realized, you know, we don't really have a learning framework. So these pathways were sort of like, we need this, we'll create this, we need this, we'll create this. But we didn't have a framework that kind of tied it all together. And so we thought, okay, we need to make a framework. But in order to make a framework, we really need to better understand what our current challenges are. So I don't want to guess. at what the focus of our framework should be. I really want to know. So we're in the middle of doing some assessing. How are we going to pull out what are the challenges that people are actually experiencing? And once we understand that, we can set some goals for the framework. And then once we're done with that, we can actually write the framework. So this is currently a 2026-2027 what's next project for my learning and development team. And they're actually doing a lot of this work. in combination with my people and culture team. Because that's, you know, a lot of times learning and development lives in HR. Sometimes it doesn't. We've moved learning and development around. We had it in people and culture. We had it in knowledge management for a while. And now it's a department on its own, but they all collaborate together across certain things. This is definitely one of them. So that's what we're doing there. But even before we get the learning framework, we know we still have to be iterating. We can't just stop and say we can't do anything until we have The framework. So one of the things that we're doing is we're creating our e-learning center. And so what is our e-learning center? Well, it's built on the Synthesis LMS, as you've heard about. Our e-learning center will give studio members control over when, where, and how they learn. It'll deliver just-in-time learning at the point of need. It'll capture and share expert knowledge across the studio. It'll reduce, as Christina talked about, repeated training. Through reusable content. And so, like we do at Turner Fleisher, we've created a team of people to work on this eLearning Center project. And so we've got Nihar, manager of L&D, Nikki, and Olivia working on it. We've got Marco, who's right there. We've got Kayla, who's a knowledge management specialist, who many of you in the room have met at summer camp before. And we have Joyce, who is responsible for creating all these beautiful visuals and bringing our brand alive in everything we do. So what they've been working on so far this year is really identifying the types of learning experiences best suited to the Learning Center. They've defined our course development process, and now they're in the process of developing some beta courses. So as Christina was talking about, we started with some onboarding because we do a lot of onboarding, and it's definitely burnout for the people who need to repeat those same things every time a new studio member. So we're starting with Payroll benefits and policies. And so we have Amruta, who is our payroll and benefits specialist, in the process now of creating this e-learning course. And one of the things, just like Christina was talking about, and who knows, we're going to try this instead of meeting before, which is interesting to sandwich that. We're going to meet after. And so we're going to let them take the course, kind of digest it. We don't yet know how much time, but maybe a week. And then they're going to meet with Amruta. And instead of meeting for an hour, they're going to meet for 30 minutes. And that's how we're going to try it out. So they can come prepared with their questions based on what they've learned about our payroll and our benefits and our policies. So it makes that time that they meet, which we agree meeting in person creates that connection, but maybe the conversation is going to be more meaningful if they're coming in with questions as opposed to just being told it in a moment. Digital practice. We have a lot of onboarding to digital practice. We definitely have a turn or flash your way. So we're starting with some of our digital practice onboarding. So Revit templates is one that we're working on right now. And again, they'll go through all of these lessons. There'll be some quizzes. They're figuring this all out at this moment. But then they'll meet with Rocky, who is our digital practice lead, when they're done. And we're going to try out the same kind of thing that they can, you know, watch it, take it in, and then meet with Rocky and ask any specific questions that they might have. So that's the learning center that we're working on. And now, you know, we have to talk about AI. We can't, you know, have any kind of presentation anywhere these days without talking about AI. AI is expanding learning beyond formal programs. It's turning studio knowledge and business data into guidance, insight, and better decisions in the flow of work. So I'm just gonna run you through quick 2 examples of some really cool AI stuff that we've been working on at the moment. Wyatt is a custom AI platform built on Uninet, which is our ERP system, and it gives us instant access to live business insights without exporting the data into complex Excel spreadsheets or building Power BI dashboards. And this has been— we've only had access to this for, I'm going to say, 6 or 7 weeks, and my finance team is doing crazy stuff with this. So I've got my whole finance team is in it, and then I've got some of my associates and partners in a beta group playing around with what can we do. So I've got 3 examples of dashboards. So revenue efforts, so shows in real time how the work we're doing compares to the revenue that we're earning, with the ability to explore the results by month, department, manager, pretty much anything you want to know. And I know these aren't pretty diagrams, but these are hot off the press. So you'll literally be able to— you can create any dashboard. It can look like anything you want. You can just verbally prompt it. We're going to create some that we're going to share with people so that they don't have to try and fight those prompts. And if you want to use this dashboard, just here, here it is. Another one is our financial KPIs. So we analyze our KPIs on a monthly basis. So my finance team is pretty amazing. And so we get a fully vetted financial statement. internally every single month, which helps us make better informed decisions as we're moving forward. So this dashboard brings our 10 key financial measures into one live view, making it easy to track monthly performance, compare results year over year, and understand long-term trends. So Julia had a ridiculous Excel spreadsheet that had like— and I don't know anything about Excel, but I do know that it had complex pivot tables in there. And that every month she had to take the information out of Uninet and into Excel. and figure out how to share it with myself and then the partners. So now it's like literally a dashboard and it's every day. So as soon as the month ends and everything gets posted, boom, we have access to this. And this is just the monthly view so we can see how we're doing on a monthly basis. But like I said, we can do year over year. And I think Julia was crazy at the beginning and went like 10 years back. And I'm not going to talk about how many tokens she used when she did that. This is a really cool one that one of my members of my finance team created. It's a payment behavior dashboard. So it analyzes current receivables against historical payment patterns to identify which clients are paying as expected, which are slowing, and where we need to focus our collection efforts. So he like took this to the next level and created this incredible payment behavior dashboard. dashboard that, like, it's mind-blowing because now it's opened up the possibilities of what else can we look at behavior of, like bill review, timesheets. I don't know, there's all kinds of things that have behavior attached. So this has been a really cool dashboard, especially again, if I go back into the VUCA world, when you live in a VUCA world, everybody kind of wants to keep their money in their own pockets a little bit longer. So I don't know if any of your companies have experienced, you know, cash flow and receivables. It's a little bit different now. So something like this is essential to have at this moment in time. So let's get into Synthesis and Synthesis AI. So AI search revealed opportunities for us to strengthen our knowledge foundation. So we thought we had really good knowledge, but guess what? You know, AI is showing us that we need to build a shared taxonomy beginning with a studio glossary, because when you ask AI to search and you're calling something a guideline or a workflow or a standard in different places, but you actually mean one thing, AI is not going to consolidate all of that knowledge correctly. So this is something that Marco and his team are working on, and then aligning that terminology across all of our knowledge pages. We got to go in and fix it. Right? Once we identify it, we can't just leave it there. And we're updating our pages and guides to close content gaps and inconsistencies. And actually, this, this is where I got the idea for the roundtable that I'm doing this afternoon, because this— we didn't— we weren't expecting that we were gonna need to have people allocate time to doing this. But what AI shows you is you have to take the time to really ensure that your data is good, or you can't do anything really with AI. And AI agents, Chris talked about them. You're gonna hear a lot about them. So one of the things, of the many things that we love working with knowledge architecture is the ability to get into beta testing for anything that they're thinking about and just like, you know, dive in and, and test it out. So we're beginning to develop knowledge agents that will make our studio knowledge easier to access and use in the flow of work. So the first agents that we're looking at They'll answer questions. And Chris, you talked about information agents, I think you called it. So these are, you know, answer agents. They'll answer questions. We're going to look at drafting agents and agents that analyze and create new knowledge. So examples, Studio Handbook Helper, that's going to be pointed at our studio handbook and people can get answers to questions about policies, benefits, procedures, all of that good stuff. And that maybe Marilyn, who's also here, Maybe Marilyn's team can spend their time actually on those more complex people issues that come up in a VUCA world than answering questions that are basic knowledge that our Studio Handbook helper could do. Expense expert. We get a lot of questions by finance team. Can I charge this expense? And what is this receipt? And is it good? And how do I do this? And so they're exploring an expense expert to get answers about all of our policies and how to submit expenses. Expenses, because everybody just wants to get paid quicker for their expenses. Of course, there's going to be a Revit assistant in getting answers to our Revit standards from modeling to project setup and improved contents and workflows. Newton content creator. So this is one of those drafting agents that Marco's playing around with to draft Newton posts and pages from ideas and source material aligned with TF writing and brand standards. So how can we help facilitate speeding up that process of getting new pages and new content and new posts out to our studio. And this is a really cool one. It's now called the Knowledge Analyst, Chris. We've gotten rid of the Knowledge Keeper because it's not really just keeping the knowledge. It's actually analyzing and creating structured lessons, tacit insights, risks, and recommendations from knowledge capture sessions to inform future work. So if you have these knowledge capture sessions and you have all these notes, you can ask the knowledge analyst, what we should be doing with that. So if you have questions about that or any of these other agents, Marco's right here, and I think you're doing a roundtable on this guy. So you can go meet Marco and hear more about this at that point. So that's what we're doing. And I'm gonna end with a quote, 'cause you know now I like quotes. So this is Peter Drucker in 1980, Managing in Turbulent Times. The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, but it's to act with yesterday's logic. And so again, 1980, that was pretty cool because I think it is super relevant to what we're all experiencing now. And I really do believe that that is the greatest danger, is to worry about change as a change management problem, as I said, and not just understand that change is just how we are going to be living. And adjusting to the pace of change isn't an initiative or a program. It's literally how we work together and how we learn and develop our people together. Thank you. 58 seconds.

Good timing. And also, Ellen, thanks for our first token joke of the, of the week. Can we start right where you left off? I'm curious how you're communicating Jensen's idea that it's never going to be this slow again to your staff, and how that— if you're communicating it, how you're communicating how that message is going over.

Yeah, yeah, we are. We have town halls, and typically it wasn't actually really a town hall, it was more like a presentation, and we would have people presenting in like 15-minute chunks what they were working on, but it wasn't actually Like a Q&A session. And so the last town hall, I tried having people submit questions beforehand and answering the questions in the town hall format. And it was fascinating because so many of the questions were about pace of change and how much more change are we going to go through and when are you going to stop changing. And in 2027, how many changes are we going to have? So we actually just added the last 2 town halls. We added another session, which is an hour and a half session. We're calling it a fireside chat. where we're just going to continue to dive in in an open and honest way. You can again talk to Marilyn or Marco. I just came right out and said it. I just feel like navigating through all of this is really— I was telling somebody this last night— it's making me lean more into radical candor. Mm-hmm. And we just have to talk about it. We just have to be open to say this isn't like— and I put that quote, In the opening to the book.

Like, I'm not making this up.

Oh yeah, that's why I like quotes, right? I didn't make this shit up. Like, it's actually a thing.

What bringing Nihar in, who's your learning and development manager, what was like the biggest impact you think? Because you guys were winging it before, I think that was your term. Like pre-Nihar, post-Nihar, having somebody with that expertise, like what has she changed?

Everything. You know, I didn't know who Peter Senge was. Sorry, I wasn't responsible for that. So like reading, and knowing who to read and understanding learning. It's not my area, right? So just listening to her, I spent— she's been with me almost 4 years. I spent, you know, I did my own listening tour, like, what are we talking about and how are we doing this and how should we be helping people learn to teach and how should we be helping people be ready to be students? And one thing that she struggles with, and it's very interesting, and the question before was like, So, Christina, how do you measure this, right? We're not actually doing training yet. So you didn't hear the word training here because training in Nihar's world of adult education requires a lot of validation of what was learned.

Right.

And so that's been, you know, her learning since she came in was that we're not ready for that yet. And so what we're doing, we're educating, we're teaching, But we're not measuring learning effectiveness.

Why aren't you ready for it yet? Like, what's the— what's holding you back?

Part, you know, time. There's so many things that we need to get out to people to navigate the world that we're in. And I think we're holding ourselves back, really. And that's where the framework comes in place. And then after that, we'll get into some measured learning.

What do you think is different? So you said framework was kind of 2026, 2027 project. What, what, how is it different, your approach after with a framework? Do you imagine like what's going to be—

We're going to be able to do more targeted, uh, programming because we actually understand what are our goals and how does everything we do, it will have to fit into that framework. And so if somebody has an idea that's completely out of like the lines, it's like, you know what, that might be a good idea, but that's not actually part of where we need to go and what our goals are at this moment. So we're actually not gonna Do that. So, and that's the other message to the studio is it's not that we're accepting everything. And so everything becomes a change because, as I said, it's not change management. We're still being really particular about what we do, right? And so the framework is going to help us and everybody else understand how the things we're doing all fit together to help the studio.

Kind of a go/no-go alignment tool to some degree.

Yeah, that's great.

Um, one last thing and then I want to open it up. Like, when you cut the TF Academy, like, by a third roughly, yeah, how was that received?

Um, it was received really well, and I think, um, well, I know we're continuing to cut it down because there is, uh, you know, fatigue and so much going on. So we've got all of these programs now, and even though you might think, well, hey, you're paying for it, why wouldn't they all just do it? But then people have— and we don't pay for the academy attendance. I haven't changed that. It's voluntary. I pay the instructors to develop their curriculum, but it's voluntary for our staff to attend. But Site Visits with Kojo, Project Site Visits, those programs, I'm paying their time to go to the sites. It's still a schedule thing. You still only have so many hours in the day.

Mm-hmm.

And so, I think we have to keep shrinking the academy in order to expand expand other L&D programming so that we kind of have something for everybody.

Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do we have questions from the audience? Got one up here and over there, so it's going to be a race. Okay, Tim. All right. I'm thinking a little bit about the maturity model framework, in particular that level 3, the codified knowledge. Hearing your story about how you sort of crowdsource content from so many different experts around your organization, how did you tackle that challenge of we want to reinforce a way of doing things versus whatever best practices we get from our experts who raise their hand to facilitate these programs, we're just going to roll with that?

Oh no, we definitely have a Turner Flesher way. And so everybody is working, and sometimes people can think it's a little too much, uh, of our way. Um, so the people that are raising their hands are working within our infrastructure. They're not creating new ways of working. It was more gathering all of that tacit knowledge that everybody had. Um, before we had Synthesis, we had no written knowledge at all. So Marco and his team have done an excellent job at codifying the knowledge that people had in their heads and creating the depth and breadth of the knowledge that we have.

Yeah. Regarding the Wyatt Earp platform, I was curious why that was made as a custom platform and not as an agent, for example, with NKA, or, you know, something that connects to an existing platform.

Great question. We didn't create Wyatt. So Uninet created Wyatt.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, so we do have software developers that are developing custom software for us, but that could be a whole different session. In fact, my developers are doing the tour talking about it. So we do do a build or buy for software in our studio, but Wyatt was Uninet. Yeah, but it does have agentic capabilities. So my finance team has like, nobody is balancing a bank statement on their own anymore or with Excel. You just upload the statement to Wyatt and they balance it in a nanosecond for you. So there, there, there is workflows and agents built in with it.

I would also just say to build on that, you know, I think one of the things we're gonna be figuring out as a community is when do I use an agent built into a platform versus when do I use an enterprise agent that cuts across platforms? And in the case of Wyatt and Uninet, Like that is deeply into financial data that it has the best possible chance of understanding how to work well with. Whereas, you know, like a knowledge agent from Sake doesn't have, we don't go into like general ledger and those kinds of things. So that wouldn't be the right thing.

I also think it's really interesting that, you know, our financial data is our best data. And so what they've been able to do in a very short time with AI is exponential because the data's excellent. So that, that's off the table. So now they can just play and figure out how to leverage it. Whereas, as I said, with Synthesis, it's making us go back and make our data excellent so that we can do amazing things with it. Cool.

Yeah, I see a box.

Hey, Ellen. Thanks, Katie. Okay, I have to ask the question that the majority of the room is probably going to be asked when they try to pitch something like this. And you hinted at it a second ago by saying that you pay for people to go to the onsite visits with Kojo and everything. So, With a billable industry, how are you able to accomplish all of this and still have the billable folks meet their utilization targets?

Can I add one thing to that? You guys were in the Circle of Excellence last year, which is like top X percentage of profit margin. So it's not just the billability thing, it's also, and be profitable at the same time. So.

Yeah, we don't have utilization targets. My studio members don't know what the word utilization is. So, that's one thing. And I will say, like, it's just, I am so blessed. You know, I've been with Turner Fleischer for almost 38 years, so a long time. And I'm the CEO and CFO, so I get to have an idea and ask myself for the money. And that's not lost on me. That it's an easier sell, but it's also a harder, you know, I have to be successful, right? I have to be able to prove it. And it's just, it's built into our culture, but we still have work. You know, we still have project managers that are like, you know, it's not billed to their project. So, the time for these visits goes to learning and development. So, nobody's project budget is getting messed up by this. And people are seeing with the project site visits, the difference in the understanding of the designers of their project is instantaneous, right? If you never get to go and see how something you're creating gets built, how do you ever understand how to do it better or even do it at all? I don't know. So, that answers that. Yeah.

I see one of the— Brian, I see one behind you, and then— I'm wondering if you can speak a little more to the strength and judgment half of the equation with learning and development, because obviously with building capacity and proficiencies, you know, that's very objective, but then when you get into critical thinking and You know, how are you developing? How are you knowing whether that's successful with the, like, fishbowl and other exercises? Like, can you talk a little about that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the addition of the fishbowl in the risk course was incredible. The people that were in it, it only has happened once so far, were so— there was— everybody was jumping in, jumping out. It was really successful in terms of that. That's why we're bringing in outside experts along with Marilyn's incredible team to really help people set goals around these things and help the managers work with people to see betterment. Marilyn's team does a lot of work with individuals on goal setting, and her team and Learning and Development now are really working together to try and come up with different ways that we can understand, because it is really hard, right? Is somebody getting better at critical thinking? Are they getting better at using their judgment? And so it's really, where do we see them in practice, in meetings, in conversations with their team members? Are we seeing that getting better? And part of it is just by putting it out there that it's a thing and normalizing what a lot of your studio members are thinking is like, I don't know how to deal with this. Like, I don't know how to deal with this crappy situation that's happening on site. Because everybody's upset and they're all angry at each other and they're all turning to me because for some reason the architect should know everything. And then when the, you know, potential lawsuit gets slapped, everybody gets slapped. And we have a lot of insurance, so we get slapped harder. And it's like, now what do I do? And so we're, we're just trying to even just normalize the whole complexity and, and really hope we can make an impact.

I think we're ready for lunch. Ellen, that was awesome. Thank you so much.

Oh, you're welcome.