How Bora Scales Expert Knowledge

Bora is a 70 person architecture firm. They do interior design and planning. They're based in Portland, Oregon. Their Internet is named Choco, and their focus has been on using knowledge management strategies to help scale expert knowledge. So this is Corey Squire. He's Bora's Director of Sustainability. He is a nationally recognized expert on sustainable design. Before Bora, he was the Sustainability Director at Lake Flato and, and in between those two things, he was a sustainability consultant. So he knows a lot about the subject. He was actually the lead author of AIA's Framework for Design Excellence. And in 2023 he published a book called People Planet Design. So if you're looking for a great book on sustainability, I highly recommend it. There's a bonus in here that there's a whole chapter on knowledge management. And the reason why there's a chapter on knowledge management in Corey's sustainability book is his view is that knowledge management is the key to unlocking sustainability. He would say that it's not about shaming people into doing the right thing. It's not about who cares more about the environment or the penguins or the polar bears. It's about sharing practical knowledge that helps people make better design choices to make buildings perform better. And like many experts, Corey doesn't want to answer the same basic questions over and over again. And that's honestly part of why you write a book, right? To get the 101 and the 201 level questions out of your head so that you can move on to the harder challenges and deeper work. On their intranet, Bora is using that same principle. So we're looking at the best practices community. On their intranet, we're looking at a project outcomes page. And it includes contributions from Corey and other sustainability and design experts within Bora on things like materials or toxic chemical avoidance or indoor air quality, embodied carbon, environmental justice, other goals that Bora has and shares with her clients for their projects. So these aren't just technical checklists. They are the project outcomes that Bora wants to achieve through smarter, more responsible design. And so this is a good example of taking knowledge management as a way to operationalize values, not just say, we want to have higher indoor air quality or we want to create more environmental justice with our buildings. No, literally, here's how you do it. And so an example would be the indoor Air quality page. Each of these pages follows a pretty consistent format. It starts with why the topic matters, period. And that outlines Bora's approach. So how the firm actually handles it in practice. And then it breaks down the key decisions and design strategies you would use to create better indoor air quality in your projects. So this is critically. It's like how Bora does it. And you'll see of course, that Corey's linked in the upper right and he's the go to person if you have more questions. Corey is prolific on his Internet when it comes to sharing. He's regularly writing about new and emerging technologies. We research and development experiments, useful trends, what other firms are doing. Kind of like what's happening in sustainability. So this is a good example of KM 2.0, right? That social collaborative layer. This is actually Corey's book. He uploaded it to the Internet, he broke it down into individual chapters and posted the whole thing to a document library. So Corey and I had been talking about AI search in KM 3.0 for a long time. When I told him we were going to start building this technology, we started asking the question, what would happen if we could build a digital twin not of a building, but of Corey, Right. And we nicknamed it Robocory. And his son made this illustration. This is his dad, right? As a robot who can answer questions on the Internet. And the goal is not that Corey doesn't want to talk to people like that's not what he's trying to achieve with RoboCory. It's just that there are tons of, like I said before, 101 and 201 level questions that RoboQuery can answer really well. Which frees up carbon based Corey or real Corey to focus on the more strategic, complex and high value work the client, specific questions or challenges that are facing the firm and their clients. So it's not just about making Corey more efficient, it's about unlocking capability for the staff. So if Corey's traveling or he's at a client site or on a project or out on pto, the firm can keep moving. People can get their answers in real time. It's expertise on demand. So let's take a look at Roboquari in practice. I might ask what's our firm standard for indoor air quality? And here's the answer. And you can see that the performance requirements page from their process community is cited. So if I want to, I can go deeper and explore the source material or I'm looking at what are strategies for minimizing CO2 levels within the building. And here are six of them and they're all cited and they're referenced back to underlying content, including in this example, Corey's book, which is pretty awesome at the bottom of the page. Again, as we saw an example before, you can see that you could reach out to Corey. So maybe you've digested this information and you haven't found what you need. Or it doesn't go deep enough in a certain area. Connect with Corey and he can take you further. Who should I talk to about Embodied Carbon? These are folks that you can reach out to. And maybe Corey's out of the office, as I said before. So we're also suggesting you connect to either Debbie or. Or Jeffrey.