A recorded conversation (Christopher Parsons, Jess, Jim) about making knowledge assets in AEC firms more sustainable by using short, modular video-first documentation. They argue video-first reduces authoring lift (from ~120 hours for long text to 1–5 hours for subject experts), makes updates easier via modular clips, and lowers change-resistance because replacing or updating content becomes less costly. Trade-offs noted: video is easier to create but harder to edit than text, so management strategies are required.
Chapters
I think you said something really interesting there, Jim, that I may want to ask both you and Jess about. So the rate of change does seem to be continuing to increase. And so, and I think you're right, you're not going to stop learning, but you could stop documenting and you could stop sharing. And so it feels like, Jess, the strategy you described about being video first and having your geeks, you know, your DT team helps support subject matter experts in reducing the lift on their end feels like it makes those knowledge assets more sustainable and durable. Because it's not a 200 hour effort to replace this long written documentation, it's maybe for the subject matter. You said one to five hours. If ACC totally changes or your approach to site observation reports totally changes, is that part of like your conversation with them?
Yeah, I think an important part of context. It's not like we are building a massive repository of information so we don't build content that exists in the world. I'm not going to build a series of how to use Bluebeam or an intro to revit. What we tend to build content around is when we're rolling out processes or we identify places that people need help. And so like we did a series on field reports, but it's really around how to use like our iPads, our templates. This is how we do field reports. It's not necessarily like an intro to Bluebeam on the iPad or how to do a field report in general. Same thing with acc. That series is being built because we are rolling out a new folder template. So it's really around. This is how you set up your project to be successful within Shapley. This is our folder structure. This is how you apply permissions, that kind of thing.
To your point, there is, there is part of people's reluctance to deal with change is the amount of aggravation that they know they're going to have to go through in order to get through the cycle of change. And making it easier to create documentation for a process means that people will have less perceived opportunity loss or sunk cost in, in the recreating of that content if the process needs to change in some meaningful way. So the more we can reduce the friction about creating like the, well, this is the communication plan for how this change needs to take place in the business, the easier it's going to be for us to convince people, okay, well a new thing came out that is going to have substantial amount of value for us and we need to change that thing that we just put into place last year. If it took them 120 hours to write the documentation for it. The people that did that are going to be real sad and they're going.
To be a lot of sunk cost, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They will be slightly less sad if it only took them two hours I think.
Also building out that content into bite sized portions so if something changes you don't necessarily have to throw out the whole series. You maybe just like remove a video, add a new one or if there's like a new feature you can just like slip that one in in the midd and so it makes it easier to update content rather than rebuild content.
To make it because it's more modular.
Yeah but that said, video is harder to edit than text is so you'd create strategies around managing video which will help it get closer to managing the effort to manage text and 3 caps.
It's easier to create video but it's harder to edit whereas the text it's harder to create but it's easier to edit.
