KM 3.0: Turning Knowledge Into Your Firm’s Growth Engine | Part 1 #kpunpacked #podcast

Hey, welcome to KP Unpacked. My name is Jeff Echols and I'm joined today by a friend and another, I'm going to say another big thinker in the world of architecture in AEC and innovation as it applies to the built environment. I'm joined by Chris Parsons, who is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture. He's also the executive producer of Kaconnect, which is the Knowledge Architecture's annual conference for the AEC industry. He's also the author of Smarter by Design, which is their newsletter. And he's been a technology leader, a Chief Information officer, and the Information Technology Director of firms all around architecture in aec. So, Chris, welcome. It's great to see you. I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad to be here. That's a great intro. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. I always enjoy. So, you know, another thing that we have in common is that we both missed AIA national this year. True, in Boston, that is usually a time that we can run into each other, we can meet up, but we both missed it this year, so I guess we missed an opportunity to meet elsewhere.

So we're catching up. This is our chance.

It is, it is. So I mentioned that you're the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, which there can be lots of plays on words and maybe you can explain some of them, but where did the idea of Knowledge Architecture come from? What's the kernel and what does it mean today?

It's a great question. So as you mentioned, I ran technology into architecture practices here in San Francisco. And in both firms, I set up technology with kind of three pillars. There's kind of like core it, like servers and networks and all that kind of stuff that you would take out of an architecture firm, put in a law firm, be the same thing, design technology, obviously. And then the bucket. I called Knowledge Management. So that could be intranets, that could be CRM, that could be digital asset management, that could be learning and development, mentorship. Like, how do we, you know, educate the workforce? How do we make the best use of our knowledge? Like, that was the part in both firms that, like, lit me up that I really like spending time doing. And so when I kind of finished the end of my run at the second firm, I kind of wanted to do Knowledge management full time. And I kind of had two choices. I thought it was kind of go to a mega, go to Gensler, HOK, SOM, etc. And be the Director of Knowledge Management or Chief Knowledge Officer. And I interviewed with many of those firms and others to do something like that or start a company and build tech and provide kind of knowledge management best practices to more small mid sized firms like the firms I grew up in. So the first firm I worked in was about 80 people. The second one was about 150 multiple locations. So like that's what I grew up knowing and chose the latter path. And Synthesis is our product. It started as an intranet platform. You can get into that as much as you want. We kind of, it was initially built on SharePoint and so we were kind of like we're wrapping SharePoint and making it more AEC specific through integrations with things like Deltec and Open Asset and unit and now 8C 360. We also just sharepoints, a very generic tool. It doesn't know about projects or employees. It doesn't know about a lot of the things that we care about in the ec. And at the time it also really needed a facelift. So we kind of like skinned it, made it nicer to look at. We improved search, analytics, all the things over time. We have moved off of SharePoint, we're now our own app from the ground up and we have moved into AI. So we've got an AI search component to the Internet which we can get into. And then we are now just into private beta for our learning management system. So the kind of the vision of what we tried to do over the last 15 years, it's all been in that same field of knowledge management. But now from a technology perspective, we're really trying to support folks from capturing knowledge to sharing knowledge, to distributing knowledge through, you know, learning and then kind of like using AI to kind of cut across all of it in the flow of work. So at a high level like that's what we're doing. And then you mentioned our conference, we do best practices. So so much of success in knowledge management is about people, process, technology and culture. So we try and hit the people, process culture stuff through events, through community to try and help people understand how to get really good, you know, at doing knowledge management. Kind of like being full stack know knowledge managers, if you will.

Yeah, yeah, you mentioned 15 years. So when you, when you think back to deciding to take the road less traveled, if we can call it that, what, what year are we talking about at this point?

2009. So right in the middle of the housing crisis.

What a great time. Let's you know, it actually is, I.

Think, I actually think it is a good time to start a business because two reasons. One, Ben Horowitz Talks about this peacetime, wartime CEO kind of thing. And like when you kind of go in a hard time, you have to learn, like you have to have the value proposition really sharp. You kind of like build a culture of not spending a bunch of extra money just because money's around. So you have to be really disciplined in finding a value proposition. Right. And that forced us to do that.

Yeah. And you know, thinking back to that time too, there were also lots of people talking about, well, you know, this, this tool, that tool, the other, this app, etc, you know, we're all born out of times like this.

Right.

The. So, so yeah, I think it is, it is a good time. It was a good time for a lot obviously for, for knowledge architecture, you know, and you, you Skip back ahead 15 years and the things that you're talking about now, the knowledge management, et cetera, as you were, as you were describing the timeline and the trajectory of knowledge architecture, talking about SharePoint, it really struck me that this week as we're recording this, this is a big Mastermind week for me. So I facilitate all of our Mastermind meetings. And this week was construction tech leaders and two innovation leaders, mastermind groups. SharePoint is discussed and one of the big topics always is knowledge management. Whether it's transfer, whether it's platforms or building it in house, etc. It's definitely a reality. As we look out across the landscape, not just of AEC certainly, but definitely in our architecture firms or engineering firms or construction firms, how are we going to transfer this knowledge, this wisdom to the next generation or this generation that's coming into leadership? So it, I, I Wonder, you know, 15 years ago, were you a little bit ahead of the game or no?

Well, I mean, that's an interesting way to put it. Let me, let me try and answer it in this way. Knowledge management as a field, I mean, we've been managing knowledge as a species.

Sure.

Starting with cave paintings and, you know, out on job sites, you know, people. It took us a while to get to drawings even. Right. Like, like drawing on. Yeah, yeah. So, like, but, but I think like knowledge management as a field really took off in the mid-90s.

Okay.

I think it coincided with the Internet exploding and kind of people wanting to digitize a lot of technology. There are a couple big conferences and thought leaders that got started in the mid-90s. And so that was kind of km 1.0, which was taking things that were in binders, standards, policies, all that static content and just digitizing it and making it easier to distribute, easier to Search. When I started the business, we were in kind of that, what I call Km 2.0 wave. So that was kind of Km 1.0 was the digitization. Cam 2.0 was when in the world, like Twitter was starting, Facebook was starting, like all these social apps were starting. And the idea was, can we bring that social technology inside the business for knowledge sharing instead of just it being top down? Can we make it more democratic, more point to point? Can I have more of a community approach? Can I ask questions and get answers, share lessons learned? We were early, I think on that. We were right there. As soon as those apps started launching, we were kind of hacking SharePoint to layer in some social. This is when I was still in house, kind of like, yeah, oh, cool. Like I can post something and someone in LA can comment back. Like, it was like a. It felt really like new. And so that's right when we started the company. And the culture took a minute to catch up because there was a lot of like, what do you mean? Anybody in the firm can share or answer questions like, what if they say the wrong thing? What if they, you know, get in trouble? Like, I don't. I want to be able to control what people are sharing. So there was a lot of like, questions like that to get through and we got through them. That sounds kind of quaint in 2025, but it was like a big, it was a big thing in 2009, 2010, 2011.

Yeah. Well, I wonder, you know, as you say that, right, the, the culture hadn't caught up to that. Was, was that specifically an AE or an AEC problem, so to speak, or was it broader than that? Because we know, I mean, many of the things that we talk about, or, you know, we talk about AEC being a laggard. Laggard industry, was that the case or was. Was it broader? Was it all industries that. That weren't quite there yet?

You know, it's funny, I heard this laggard thing for forever and when I spend time with people in other industries, they all say that their industry is a laggard. So somebody somewhere thinks, I guess maybe Silicon Valley never says that they're laggard. So I guess there's like, you know, Silicon Valley and like everybody else. Yeah, no, I mean, sure. I think that like that kind of idea of like management structures being a certain way and moving towards like a more community or democratic or collaborative way of leadership and communication, I think every industry, I mean, to be honest, there are still pockets of our industry and others that I'M that are still going through that transformation, you know, and no, I think that that's, I think it was a sea change. Usually when there's a technology change, there's like a deeper cultural change that's coming along with it. It's the same thing. Km 3.0 is what I call the AI transition. Right. AI powered km. There's all kinds of culture stuff that's going to have to get weeded out and figured out. Like as this technology, the technology is disruptive and it's a catalyst for those broader cultural like even business model conversations that are being sparked now, right?

Yeah, yeah, 100% now. When I took over our startup incubator, took over running, facilitating our Startup Incubator 2, almost two years ago now. I guess one of the things that surprised me, and I don't know why it surprised me necessarily, but it, but it did. About 90, 95% of the founders that were running their startups through our incubator were from industry and so they were a civil engineer and they had identified some problem, some frustration, maybe some problem or they worked for a real estate developer and so on and so for forth. When you were in the role of CIO or information Technology director, what were the problems that you had identified at that point? Or were they any.

No, no, no. It was exactly that. Born of my own kind of like mixture of frustration and opportunity, you know, that I saw. Sure. Like I'll give you, I could go on but like maybe I'll name a couple. I sat between in both firms, I sat between marketing and the principals and I watch, I like watched the conversations and then saw the emails back and forth around like how many higher ed projects have we built in California in the last five years that are over a square foot? And then you get back six answers and they're all different. Like when there's actually one right answer to that question and then the same question the next week and the same question. So it was a lot of, it was like in people's heads. There was a lot of us not writing down how we did. So onboarding was tough. We didn't have like a way that we did X, Y and Z thing and it wasn't shared, it was all learned on the job, which I'm not going to take away from experiential learning. Like it's a really important way that we learn. But like just writing down how this firm operates, what our, like what our processes are, if, if we bring a new person in who has healthcare experience but has never Worked on a retail project and we want to onboard them and ramp them up into retail. Like, what do they need to know about retail to be effective in their first week? You know, there's just like so much of that. That's just what in knowledge management we call tacit knowledge, meaning it's in people's heads versus explicit knowledge, which can be written down. You can't write it all down, but man, you can write down a lot and you can build frameworks to help people just learn stuff. And if somebody's away on a job site, that means that nobody can make decisions because all the information's in that person's head or God forbid they leave the firm or whatever it is. So yes, it was that frustration that like, we are a knowledge based business and we are not, we're not stewarding it. It's like if you had money and didn't have it in the bank and you just had it like laying all around the office and in people's jacket pockets and in their backpacks. That's the same way that I looked at the way our knowledge was being stewarded. It's just like it's everywhere and there's no kind of centralized strategy. So, yeah, knowledge is money in many ways and it's our currency. And that's what drove me nuts. But it also got me excited because I thought there was so much opportunity to do better.

That's a really interesting image. And right now there's somebody in the audience that's listening and they're using their favorite AI tool to create that image. We're going to see it in the comments somewhere. Hey, here's the AI generated image based on that illustration that Chris just provided of knowledge being money. I love that. So as. As we think about. So that that was the seed.

Yeah, it was then I was reading what's Changed? And so I went to. I should say one more thing. Yeah, two more things. I went to an event back when it was called Zweig White. They had an event, I think they only ever ran it once, called Firm of the Future in 2005. And they had like Ed Friedrich's former CEO of Gensler. They had people from the MIT Media Lab. They had the Kieran Timberlake, I can't remember which Kieran or Timberlake. One of them was there. And I just watched these presentations and I was like, spellbound. I'm like, these firms, design firms generally are designing their businesses like they would design buildings or infrastructure.

Yeah.

And this is like they design the business and they're using knowledge as a like, competitive advantage, whether it's research, whether it's the thing as I was talking about, about using lessons learned and best practices or creating good learning and development, like there is a better way. And that kind of tapped me into knowledge management. And then I started reading about the literature in the field and realizing, oh no, no, the army is actually quite good at this. NASA is quite good at this. Like, this is something that exists in large organizations outside of apc. And so then that became my mission. It's like, okay, I want to learn how to do this. But then when we started ka, it's like we need to kind of start educating the industry, which is why we did a conference, it's why we do all these things is because we, we are a knowledge based industry, but we just don't do it as intentionally or explicitly as we could. And that's, that's been powering my energy, my jets, you know, for, for a while now. And it's still, it's still exciting.

Well, you know, it's interesting to say that because that's, that's been, that's, that's been one of the things I've dwelt on for, for years, you know, even since before I started teaching pro practice in architecture schools is this idea that, similar to what you were just saying, that they design their businesses like they design a building. And so I went to Ball State, I also have taught at Ball State. And one of the things about campus is the architecture building sits here. And then if you go to this one particular door, you walk out that door and it's less than 100 yards away is the closest door into the business building. Right. And so you've got architecture, you're not going to learn anything about business. But the business building is just right over there, right. And you know, one of the things I tell students sometimes is like, listen, if, when we're talking about the business of architecture, if you need to understand how, how to, how to do invoicing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, something like that, don't even think about it, right? Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Walk over into that building over there, go into one of the student lounges and say, who has a system for invoicing? Six people are going to raise their hand, pick the one you like the most and use their system. Right. Why recreate it?

But you're kind of making a build versus buy argument, but not about technology, but about process in some ways. Sure, right, sure. Yeah, yeah, that's Interesting.

Yeah. I mean, and you know, we, we do the thing, we learn in architecture school, we learn design thinking, you learn critical thinking, things like that. And that's what we know how to apply. And we start applying it in areas that we don't necessarily need to apply it. Right. And I think that's one of the realities in the business of architecture that you're, you know, you just described it and you're working, you're working to change that, I guess, in a way. Right?

Yeah.

At least with the knowledge management piece of it.

Absolutely. I mean, I think one of my favorite kind of like tools in the world is that Eisenhower matrix. Right. Where you've got things that are non urgent and urgent on one axis and things that are not important and important on another axis. And what do we do as humans? We do the urgent and important first and then we do the urgent and not important second. Right. And the whole like the secret to knowledge management is that stuff is all in the important but not urgent quadrant.

Yeah.

It's the stuff that like, if we do this, this will show up and make us a better company three months from now or four months from now. And it's that investment with a kind of a long view, sometimes not that long, you know, like it could be a little bit out, but it's like being able to slow down and work on the business versus work in the business, like all those kind of things. And so, but you find firms, I mean, there are. One of the really like gratifying slash pleasurable parts of the journey I've had running the company is how many smart firms there are in our industry that do exactly what we're talking about. And what was really fun about K Connect in the early, I mean, it's still true, but like in the early days it was like I was on a treasure hunt trying to find these smart firms who were doing a piece or a part of knowledge management really well. They weren't even necessarily calling it knowledge management. They were just trying to make their business better. And by connecting people together, they got to say like, oh, I can take something from this firm over here and that firm over there. Like we were able to start to picture together as a community what this could look like. I released a periodic table of knowledge management elements in 2016, which I've updated. But like, that came from like spending time in the field with AEC firms who were just smart, who cared, who stewarded their business, who could work on the non urgent and important stuff. Like that's the ethos of the firms that do well with knowledge management.

Now you mentioned KM 1.0 and 2.0 and you mentioned that 3.0 is AI. So of course AI is the hot topic almost all the time these days. How is KM 3.0 changing what you're doing and what you're seeing in the firms?

Yeah, I will. One of the things that has been true is that firms so, so from a, from a product perspective, the way we've, the first way we've manifested this is through AI search in our platform. So we aggregate all the data from the other platforms. Then there's also stuff that's natively added to synthesis search through videos like natural language search. You can kind of picture if you're listening along what this, what this probably looks like. However, like AI search is only as good as the underlying knowledge data that it has access to. So a lot of firms that have been very diligent about stewarding whatever it is, policies, procedures, best practices, learning content, project data points, employee skills and licenses, like all that kind of information. That's the questions people want to ask. Like if you've been doing knowledge management all along, you've been in a, you started off in a pretty good position with AI, but it's also exposing a lot of holes right in people's data. And so it's providing really actionable and I would say probably the most amount of motivation towards like subject matter experts or like senior people understanding it's like, oh, I get it. If we capture our knowledge and we steward our firm wide data better, this unlocks these outcomes where I can just come in and ask these questions or my emerging professionals can ask these questions. And so it's really reduced that gap between I put something in here and I can get it back out. Whereas in earlier iterations of knowledge management it was, it was a little, you know, you remember keyword search from seven months ago? You know what that was like maybe six, I don't know at the old days that, the old days of keyword search. So I think it has kind of like lit a fire and like had people understand on a deep level why managing your knowledge is so important in the outcomes that it can generate. I think that's one big thing.

Yeah, and you mentioned earlier and I may have cut you off at that point or near that point, but you mentioned business model and that's one of the things that we focus on a lot at KP. ReadyCo is okay. Innovation for the sake of efficiency is great. You know, different emerging technologies et CETERA but, but what about business model innovation? So when you think about knowledge management and the way you just described it I thought was also, was also really beautiful, right? It's, you've got the subject matter experts put in it, you can get out of it. And, and this, this can change the way that we do things. What are, what are you seeing? Maybe it's your customers, maybe it's not, maybe it's just somewhere in the industry. But what are you seeing in terms of business model innovation where knowledge management is driving some sort of change?

Yeah, I think there's, you know, there's the classic stuff that I'm actually like, interestingly enough, like pretty familiar with but unable to say anything interesting on around you know, fixed fee versus you know, like time and materials and getting paid for value versus value based pricing and all that kind of stuff. I don't have anything new to say there that people haven't already said. What I think is interesting about km, like if I'm a CEO and I'm kind of like, well why would I care about knowledge management? And one would be like from an innovation perspective, like having the capacity to deliver on innovative new services. It could be a market sector, a building type, a new technology. We figured out a new way of building buildings, whatever it is. Like usually those things are started by like a person who's like the tip of the spear. Like it's, they go do these first five projects in this new market sector of this new type or it's a new net zero project or a mass timber, whatever it is. And then how do you make it so that you don't have to have that one person on every one of those projects you want to do in the future? You know that you're, you're, it's, it's a, it's a bottleneck, right? You're limited. Your growth, your ability to accelerate is limited by how well you transfer knowledge and can scale out that expertise across your company. So I think that's a huge lever in terms of like capacity and at the same time you're also managing risk. So if you are doing this innovative new thing, you usually doing that in a public area, like somebody recruits that person away, you know, like, so you're trying to manage risk also with that, you know, the kind of innovation. So it's kind of like how do you, there's so many. I spent a lot of time like five or six years ago with, with some in the thought leadership community outside of aec, like people that like professional thought leadership Writers and marketers. And what was always not talked about is the back end of like the delivery and the execution. So we've got this great new concept, whatever. I'm Accenture, and we've come up with something that we're trying to do. Great. Your first two or three people know how to do it. Like, how do you make it so that all of Accenture can deliver that across all of your offices and those kind of things. And I think it's the same thing for aec. It's like, how do we scale innovation?

Right.

And knowledge is right at the heart of it. You know, whether that's learning and development, whether that's like formalized training, whether that's whatever it is, AI access to support people in the flow of work to get answers. That is so much of what, what it is. So it's not all tacit knowledge. We're able to like, translate.

Yeah. So you've worked with at this point, you know, I would think 150 or more firms over 15 years. Yeah, I may be way off on that number, but.

No, we've worked with more than that. But you're in the barre ballpark. Yeah, sure.

Okay. So, I mean, that's a lot, right? It's a lot of firms. That's a lot of. When I run our incubator, we're evolving it now, but in the past, we've always focused it on pre revenue and very heavily on customer discovery. And we would say, you know, hey, you need to, you need to have 150 customer discovery calls. So, you know, you're there. Right. You're doing all of that customer discovery for different reasons. Maybe, but, but what are, what are the big lessons learned? I mean, you've got quite a perspective. And that's the point, of course, of customer discovery is to get that perspective. But with that perspective of all the firms that you've worked with that have attended, feedback you've gotten from your newsletters and your articles and your customers that are using your products day in and day out, what are the big lessons learned from, you know, these years and all those firms and how do you apply that moving forward? Or maybe what are you here to teach others? I guess could be another angle.

So is your question, what are my lessons learned as a founder? Are you asking what are lessons learned for AEC firms? Getting better at knowledge management?

Yes.

Okay, cool.

I like both versions.

All right, why don't I start with the AEC lessons learned and then maybe we can talk about some founder stuff.

Perfect, perfect.

I Think the smartest firms. I know this sounds so trite, but it's so true. Connect knowledge management strategy to business strategy.

Meaning, sure, yeah, it makes sense.

You can't manage all of your firm's knowledge. There's too much of it. It's like, it changes too fast, especially these days. So the best firms are like, they just go right back up to business strategy. And they're like, we're trying to improve quality.

Cool.

We'll do these things. We're trying to become in design excellence. We'll do those things. We're trying to move into new markets. All of those are different knowledge management strategies, depending on what matters to the company. And like the, the best businesses do that and don't chase random acts of knowledge management or random acts of AI. Like, there's like a deep connection. And that's why the best knowledge management programs have executive sponsors for them who sit on the board or the management team or the leadership team, so they know what matters and what doesn't. And they can just like cut off, going in the wrong direction, off in the past. Like, that is. That is lesson number one and two and three almost in terms of when you see firms starting to get lost, it's always like, and what problem are we solving again? And if, even if we solve it, like, would it matter? Right. I think that's huge. And then it leads to prioritization and then it leads to like, more wood behind fewer arrows. You know, it's really. A lot of that is. And it's hard. It's hard if, like, imagine you're a company that works in 10 markets and you can't like, spread all of your investments equally across those 10. I mean, you could, but like, you're probably, there's probably some that make more sense to push your chips into versus others. And a lot of that resource allocation stuff can get political and it's tricky. So I think the smartest businesses can cut through that. That's what I've seen.

Yeah.

Very little to do with technology, honestly. Like, a lot of these are like, yeah. Cultural.

Well, yeah, I mean, and, and two of the things that you touched on there, I mean, again, I, you know, you're talking about this. I'm thinking about conversations that we have in our mastermind groups all the time. Because it's. Again, this is a topic with the innovation leaders groups especially, you know, there's, there's one particular example. I can't share who or what the firm is, but, but their director of innovation is tasked with building a knowledge management or they've been working on building a knowledge management system in house. And at our last in person meeting, which was in Atlanta in May of this year, they, they talked about that and the fact that, that their board of directors, on their board of directors is, I think it's more than one, but at least one champion of exactly what you just said, one champion of this knowledge management platform system, whatever they call it. And they're focused on knowledge transfer, focused on innovation, et cetera. And then there's another, there's another mastermind member who's, who has a whole innovation. They've actually spun out their own innovation team. So they have their parent company and they have the child company, so to speak, which is the innovation group. And they have built out a robust system because again, it's exactly as you described. They're in multiple, multiple markets, so offices all over the place. And you know, one of the things they've said is, hey, you know, our group over here in, in, in Phoenix is doing this thing and they think it's innovative and they're, they think they're, they're breaking new ground and only to find out that the group in, in Nashville or wherever has been doing that for nine months. Right? And you know, the one hand didn't know what the other was doing. And so they're, you know, they're working on, you know, that, that seems like it's such a basic example of knowledge management, but you get to like orchestration.

So like, knowledge management doesn't work when it's like a siloed department that's.