How Community Accelerates Knowledge Sharing in AEC

Let me get back to intentionality. So even before starting Knowledge Architecture, when I was a cio, when there was some big new change, the way that I navigated that change was bringing people together. So we went through a massive change in workflow in our industry called Building Information modeling, which basically meant instead of drawing everything in 2D, we were going to model everything in three dimensions. A whole big change. And so in San Francisco, I got together the other CIOs and design technology managers and we had a digital design breakfast club and we got together once a month. And this community of practice type stuff, you know, what are you seeing, what are you trying, what's working, what's not working, what do we think is coming next? And that is an amazing way to learn when you're at the beginning of something new and nobody has all the answers, but people have pieces and parts of the answers. And so in community you start to see a much bigger picture of like what's happening much faster and you can all move faster. And so when I started Knowledge Architecture, there were two big things. One, I was trying to bring knowledge management to AEC because it hadn't really been done. And number two, we were in the middle of what I called the KM 2.0 wave, which was bringing the stuff that was happening on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook into the enterprise for knowledge sharing between offices and teams. So the way I knew how to do that was through community was to say, like, look, I know you're doing something with this, you're doing something with that. Let's get together and share what we know so that we all get smarter, faster. We're there again with AI and now AI is km 3.0 for us. And it's changing the way that you access knowledge and share knowledge again and again. Community is right at the heart of that. So I feel like it's a really killer app for navigating change as a community. It's also win, win, win, right? It's a benefit for the community members, it's a benefit for Knowledge Architecture. The product gets better. So it's a very, it's a very symbiotic way to do it. And it's also just super for me it's super fulfilling. Like I just really enjoy learning that way. And you know, you can start, you get a lot of good raw inputs and then as you start synthesizing and kind of crystallizing the ideas, you've got a built in community for vetting and testing those ideas. As an idea moves from holding it Seems like something's happening over here all the way through. A finished product like community is important every step along that whole, whether it's a product journey or a thought leadership idea journey, it's useful on that whole workflow.

So do you think you would have been less successful had you, when you started Knowledge Architecture, you did the traditional software industry thing of yeah, you have an annual user group meeting, but you're not, you don't really have a community. You know, you're giving presentations once a year and maybe some clients are giving presentations, but it's, it's, it's not an ongoing community that, that goes on even after the conferences, conference ends. Would you have guys have been so as successful had you not done, you know, your form of community from the start?

There's so many things in that I want to address. One, I think that whether you're talking about Gensler or whether you're talking about Knowledge Architecture, I think programs like this, whether it's thought leadership or community, are in the DNA of the founding team often. I wouldn't say always, but almost always when I see a unique program that some firm is doing, it's got roots go going all the way back to the beginning. So part of me your answer to your question is like, I can answer the counterfactual, but I also don't know if there's any other way that it would have happened. That just seems like it's so deep in the way that we relate to clients. But if I took imaginary company like ours, trying to solve our problems without our team in it, I think somebody could have been a successful business building AEC Internets without community. That said, we were trying to do really novel things. Our biggest competitor is SharePoint from Microsoft, which is essentially free. And so if you're going to take on a huge company that's basically distributing their product for free, I mean they sign enterprise agreements, but there's no additional cost, then you need to be really different. You need to make it very clear that not only is the product completely different, but the whole experience of interacting with your company is different. Whether that's our community, our client success team, the fact that we build AEC specific advice and best practices and that we can point that back to successful case studies from our community. So I can't imagine Knowledge Architecture, the community's at the heart of this whole thing. I could imagine that somebody else could build another company. But I would also say like our goal is not to build the biggest software company in the world, otherwise we'd be doing this very differently. You know we would have raised venture capital we would have a whole different go to market strategy we're trying to build a a an experience for clients who want to be I use this we use the term smarter by design right who want to make the best use of their knowledge to empower people to trust and share like there's an an ideal client profile there's some hallmarks to borrow a phrase from you there's some hallmarks of like those smarter design firms that we're looking for and community fits really well with that what's his name Michael something wrote a book from mit Michael Schrag I think called who do youo Want yout Customers to Become? And the whole idea is like having this vision for who you want your customers to be and who you want them to become through working with you and we have a really strong vision around that which it just feels like community is essential to executing.