How Lionakis Moved From Ad Hoc Training to a Strategic Learning Roadmap

I don't know if Lianakis will identify with this or not, but like one thing I've been hearing from clients is, you know, when we think about practice training, we kind of look at who's available and who's interested. And, you know, someone wants to talk about mass timber. Cool. You take May. Someone wants to talk about cartoony cartooning. Okay, you take June. And it's kind of this ad hoc, organic, well-meaning thing. And it sounds like there's a little bit more— like you're putting more rigor and structure into what, because you're investing more also in making the things, but.

Absolutely. I think we were that not too long ago. We're really busy in our day jobs and we can't keep losing focus, right? Pivoting and kind of, oh, you want to talk about that? Great. Let's spend an hour and get everybody in a room and talk about that. And so what we did is we prioritized, we brainstormed what were the most, you important practice issues of the time. We aligned it with this investment we've been making with some outside consulting on a refresh of some of our things. And then the team, right, our project delivery team had prioritized the top 4 areas that we needed to handle this year and that we thought could be a consistent message that would have a life, right? That would have a life beyond that initial training. And Why I think that's important is that we still have a business we're running, and part of what we're trying to do in this business is build the next generation of architects for this firm and for the world. Mm-hmm. We're trying to make sure we have that consistency. We're trying to get more efficient because there are less architects entering the industry than are leaving it. And so we need our architects to be able to do more being an architect and less kind of figuring out how to do a sheet layout, for example. Mm-hmm. And so we can make them more efficient and we didn't want to be as distracted by training, at least not in the model that takes the work that this one does, by things that weren't through that lens, right? So sure, if you want to have a group get together on our couch here and talk about somebody else's mass timber project, that's great. We encourage that. We have design couches sessions to do that. But the energy we were going to put in our sustainable practice training that was going up on the LMS and all of that is going to have to be focused And we got general agreement on what those 4 areas were for the first year.

So you've kind of, you've got a core curriculum for Lionakis, but then there's, if people want to create electives and share them, go for it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yep.