How AEC Firms Can Turn Knowledge Debt Into a Virtuous Cycle

The best tool I can think of in business that comes from like business consulting is the Eisenhower Matrix, right? Where on one axis you have urgent or sorry, non-urgent and urgent. And on the other axes you have not important and important. And in business, especially at EC, we work on the urgent and important first. And that makes sense. Generally firms work on urgent and not important second, because it's loud. Somebody's making noise. It seems like it really needs to do it. But honestly, if you kind of like can step away, step away a little bit and be like, this thing doesn't actually matter. What we should be working on is that non-urgent and important stuff. That's where knowledge management lives. That's Dan from BW/BR going to QA/QC and being like, what are all the things you see all the time? So you're making that investment that will compound over time as that kind of flywheel, you know, gets going. It's making those slightly longer view investments in knowledge and infrastructure and process that just pay off more and more year after year. That's, that's to me, I think what makes the firms that are really great at knowledge management really great is they understand that non-urgent but important thing really, really well.

Completely agreed, Chris. And there's a, there's a lot to talk about there, but that, let's call it, uh, important but not urgent quadrant. I mean, that's like where the golden firms is, but it doesn't get worked on, right? Because there's usually somebody, you yelling about something else that's not quite as important. And unfortunately, the squeaky wheel gets the oil, so to speak.

Right. But the secret to getting out of that vicious cycle is counterintuitively to slow down and do the important but not urgent work, cuz that's how you start creating. So your subject matter expert is running at 110%, right? You get that subject matter expert down to 100% or 95% or 80%. Now they've got more time to invest in creating knowledge and you get the vicious cycle flipped over and it's a virtuous cycle. So you keep, it's almost like, it's like if you have a massive amount of credit card debt across 7 different credit cards, once you start paying down the one with the highest interest first, you still have that same amount of cash to get paying down the other ones. And it's like starts spinning you in the right direction and you're kind of like, there's like a knowledge debt that we're talking about here when firms are running at at 110% and there's no time to invest in creating knowledge and capturing knowledge and working on this system, not just solving an individual client problem. Like if you can make that flip, man, you can start going in the right direction. Like it's just, it's hard, but it's hard to, it's hard to do it sometimes. I'm not saying it's easy, but I've also seen enough firms do it that I know that it can be done.