In this interview, Christopher Parsons talks with Lionakis staff about the firm’s recent decision to add a Learning and Development Coordinator. The discussion explains why the role was created—to capture and synthesize the knowledge of busy practitioners, edit recordings, write lesson descriptions, and use AI to generate content. The speakers describe how delegating specialized tasks (such as high‑level visualization) to dedicated experts frees architects to focus on core design work, improving efficiency and reducing bottlenecks. They draw parallels to other support functions (accounting, marketing, HR) that have already been built to offload non‑core work. The conversation frames knowledge investment as a strategic flywheel: by spending on learning infrastructure, Lionakis can accelerate growth, increase technical staff productivity, and ultimately boost revenue, while avoiding the risk of a talent shortage.
Chapters
And so you added a learning coordinator to the mix recently. Can you talk about why you added that and what the hope is for how that, how that helps accelerate this, this journey for you?
You can talk about it, Christina.
It's more of a— I do want to hear your take on it, but I, I, yeah, well, I can start. Part of it is, you know, if you think about how are we going to get all of these very busy people to document their knowledge. We need somebody to help do that. And my role, I need to stay up here too, in diff— like in the middle, kind of trying to synthesize all this stuff and execute the big picture plan. If I'm there helping editing someone's recordings, and then it's going to slow our progress quite a bit. So we need somebody that can come and help do a lot of the coordination of our learning and development plan. So being able to help with recordings, help create lesson descriptions, and this individual uses AI really well and engages with the language model to try to, you know, she may not be familiar with the topics or a little bit familiar that she can create content by leveraging AI too.
Well, Christina said that's good. I am very focused on raising the efficiency of our technical staff because I'm scared to death of the future where I don't have enough of them. So I've been very focused on looking for ways to have expertise outside of assuming practitioners have to do everything. And so our visualization—
Oh man, that's good. That alone is—
thank you for saying that out loud.
Well, I think architects are problem solvers, right? Mm-hmm. And so they think every problem is theirs to solve. Mm-hmm. And the reality is there are people more talented than us in solving those problems. Mm-hmm. Or more capable of doing it and not also trying to do our day jobs. So for example, right, Christina coming into this role, I quickly have known what Christina's skills and talents are, and they're immense.. And then I realized, why am I having everyone try and learn how to do visualization at the highest level? Mm-hmm. They need to do it as a design tool. They need to do it to competently communicate, right? But they don't need to put every button into the rendering. So we hired someone to do that who's better at it than the architects. Don't tell them, but, and faster. Takes that off their plate. Well, the person we have in the learning and development coordinator worked with me for almost 20 years as a right-hand administrative person and was looking for more. Right. And I said, Christina, I think that Regina would be great for you. Right. And, and she's like, if I could get Regina, I could do this and this and this and this. And suddenly her long list just got a little shorter. And I think that all of those things start the engine going, you know, and suddenly people see results much more quickly and didn't take all these practitioners in a room trying to solve a problem that somebody else could solve. And so we're, we're doing more. And that's what we had done really well on the business side of our house. Is building an accounting team and a marketing team and an HR team so the practitioners weren't doing that and taking some of those tasks off their plate. I don't think we had looked at our practice through that lens and how much better practitioners could be if they had the support of these experts in other areas. And that's was the birth, I think. And then Christina started to imagine how this learning and development knowledge management group could, expand design technology and that sort of area for us as a firm.
That's great. I mean, you're in the position now, it sounds like you have a clear vision of where you want Lionakis to be. You understand how knowledge and learning are support your ability to get there. And now you can see like, well, if I invest a dollar here, maybe I get 2 back over there. And so now it's a— it sounds like that's what I'm hearing from you. You see, you see the positive flywheel spinning.
Yeah. And, you know, we have this limited resource and we know that our ability to grow from a revenue standpoint is in many ways tied to how many technical staff we have doing that work.
That's the bottleneck on growth.
It's absolutely the bottleneck. And if we don't support them in the things that they— I don't want to say shouldn't be doing, but don't have to be doing, right? We'll never get over that hump. Right. And so that's, that's been a focus. And I think it's, I think it's working. I feel, I feel progress in that area.
