A conversational podcast between Evan Troxel and Christopher Parsons about how knowledge management in AEC firms has historically struggled to operationalize lessons learned and tacit expert knowledge. The speakers argue that keyword-based retrieval and static lessons-learned databases create friction, and that AI-enabled search that surfaces answers across videos, docs, and intranet content (integrated into the flow of work) can reduce that friction.
Chapters
I mean, what do you think just generally about like, the way things have evolved and how we store information, but also how we can access that information to make it less friction to find the things that people need when they need it.
I mean, there's so many things that we've been doing in knowledge management. I don't just mean at KA and even within aec. I just mean knowledge management in general. There's this notion of critical knowledge transfer which you were hinting at, or expert interviews that were really, really good ideas. They recognized, let's take lessons learned. They recognized that it'd be good if our firm didn't have to keep learning the same lesson over and over again. And the next time we encounter this condition or this challenge on a project, we can learn from our past projects that we don't have to just learn the same thing over and over again. The problem was operationalizing those insights. So somebody writes it down and what puts it in a lessons learned database. And now what's the next person supposed to do? Think of all the potential things that could go wrong. Search this lessons learned database on, you know, like, it's just, it's just kind of wild that what you had to do back then is like the only way to get lessons learned useful is to operationalize them and change policies, change standards, change training, whatever it is, you had to really put them. And that's still a good idea. Don't get me wrong. Even the lessons learned database now has gotten some new life breathed into it because now somebody doesn't have to think like the way that we're approaching it at Knowledge Architecture is. I don't have to think whether it's in a lessons learned database or if it was in a video or maybe it's in the standard section of our intranet. I just ask my question and AI will be smart enough to retrieve the right answer whether it comes from lessons learned or not. And to your point, like, it's removed a lot of friction from the content creation process. Same thing with interviewing folks to transfer knowledge. Like, it's really hard for experts to write down what they know for two reasons. One, they're super busy and they're expensive and billable and finding time is hard. Writing is hard for them. But also, most experts don't know what they know anyway. They don't know what it is that makes them special. Like, it's what we call tacit knowledge in knowledge management. It's silent knowledge. Right? So the two types of knowledge are explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Generally it's how people talk about it. Explicit is stuff that you can write down. It's standards, procedures. This is. These are our rules. This is how we do things. But tacit knowledge is like, you imagine if you ever worked with a CFO that can look at a gnarly spreadsheet and point to the one cell, they're like, it's because that's off, you know? Or you imagine a pilot who can fly a 747. And if you've ever seen the cockpit of one of those things, there's thousands of switches, and they know exactly what to do. It's all like compressed intuition. They don't think, oh, I should go find this button and do the thing. They just get a feeling that something's off, or like, this is what needs to happen. So it's hard if you ask an expert to write down what they know, it's very hard for them. So interviewing them is a really good technique. But then the problem was always on retrieval. How do you then take those insights? So you imagine somebody searching those past videos using keyword searches or lessons learned using keyword searches. And they get seven videos, 10 videos that are an hour long each. What are they supposed to do? Watch all seven or 10 of them? It's stuck. It's not realistic. We kind of have stacks that capture the sharing. And now we're getting this, like, flow of work thing. That's the big breakthrough of the unlock. That's pretty exciting.
