Modernizing Learning to Scale Quality at Lionakis | Laura Knauss and Kristina Williams

Hello and welcome to the Smarter by Design podcast. I'm Christopher Parsons, founder and CEO at Knowledge Architecture. And in today's episode, we're talking with Laura Noss, president and chief practice officer at Lionakis, and Christina Williams, director of design technology at Lionakis. And we're talking about modernizing learning to scale quality across the firm. I am very excited about this topic. I really enjoyed talking with Laura and Christina. We've been working with Lionakis since 2012, and we've always been impressed by their approach to knowledge management and learning and development, but that over the last 12 to 18 months or so, they've really just jumped up to a whole nother level. And in this episode, I really wanted to talk about two main things that I've been watching happen at Lionakis. Number one, the way that Christina and her design technology team have completely revamped their approach to teaching design technology through their design technology bootcamp and other stuff that they're working on. And she's going to talk all about that in this episode. And then also bringing Lauren to the conversation, who's taking some of those same methods for rethinking the way that they do learning and development, but applying those to practice topics across the firm. And this is all coming from a deep realization that for generations we've relied on an apprenticeship model to help educate architects and engineers. I can't tell you how many times I hear from clients, you know, apprenticeship models just not quite working, especially after hybrid. We came back to the office and it's just not working, it's not the same. And when you really kind of like stop there for— and sure, the pandemic had something to do with it. But I think what I've been hearing more and more is it's just not fast enough. It's just not consistent enough. It's just not reliable enough for how fast things are changing and how people want to learn today and not have to completely rely on the way that one person teaches them. They want access to a broader set of knowledge, kind of on demand. That's the way that people are learning and want to learn. And so what we talked a lot about in this episode was kind of repositioning apprenticeship, right? Letting learning and development, kind of firm-wide knowledge management, provide a solid foundation, a consistent foundation across the practice, and then having, you know, senior architects or project managers or engineers mentor staff to solve specific project problems. And so that kind of repositioning of apprenticeship and the ability to use knowledge and learning management to help the firm scale quality and consistency, that was right at the heart of what we talked about. But we all got into all kinds of nerdy learning and development topics too. And the, the balance of kind of short videos versus live instruction, how you actually create those videos, how firms can structure learning to be retrieved after the event happens, right? Whether that's through AI search or someone discovering it down the road. And so we really went from kind of big picture goals and strategy and through redesigning learning experiences all the way into the nitty gritty details of learning experience design. So if you're really thinking about how your firm can modernize its approach to learning and development, if you're thinking the apprenticeship model isn't quite enough alone anymore, we need some reinforcements, maybe we need a bigger boat, this is an episode that you're really gonna enjoy. Okay, so modernizing learning to scale quality at Lionakis with Christina Williams and Laura Noss. Here we go. Okay, Laura and Christina, welcome to the Smarter By Design podcast.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks, Chris.

Christina, you are giving a talk at AEC Talent Max in May titled Learning at the Speed of Change: Adapting L&D to Your New AEC Workforce. And Laura, you recently shared at our executive workshop a couple of weeks ago how Lionakis is rethinking learning at a firm-wide level. So let's just start. Can you both describe that shift from your perspectives?

I think through my role in design technology, I've delivered a lot of internal training, and I'm on a constant mission to design and teach programs in a way that truly sticks with the learners. And though we're always continuously improving with that, there's sometimes things that happen in the world and in our industry that really make you kind of think outside the box even more and require you to get a little bit more creative with how you deliver training. So I feel like there's been enough of that that has shaken up things a bit and it's making us reexamine how we learn.

What are some of those things in the world that are shaking up?

I would say, so like in the world, AI, of course, it's like a kind of a given at this point, which is cool. And social media, the way people get information and seek information. And all the noise, I guess, good and bad, that's coming at all of us. I think in the industry there's doing more with less. There's, if you go way back to compare it to today, more documentation, more codes, more litigation, less time, shorter schedules, client expectations. It's just kind of forcing us all into this. You know, you hear the word busy a lot. And I think there's clearly something to that. As much as we hate hearing the word busy, it's true. And it feels like we're just doing more and there's more noise and we have to find a clearer path to what we need to get to.

Yeah, Christina talks about it specifically in the learning area. I have to look at it from firm growth, from the diversity of our firm, the regional diversity of our firm, and quite frankly, delivering a consistent expectation, a consistent model model into the marketplace. And so as we've grown, we've seen so many of our traditional models, that apprenticeship model, start to, if not devolve, have way too many different and disparate voices being those teachers or mentors. And so you start to see the consistency of the firm erode so that we're now doing it in camps. This is so-and-so's camp for how they teach in their team, or this is somebody else's camp or somebody else's region. And I think this emphasis we've been making as a firm is saying, no, we're one firm. We have a consistent approach, the Lionakis way, to how we deliver projects. And this is giving us that opportunity to give everyone the same message. Doesn't discount that apprenticeship model, which is essential in building good architects, I think. But it certainly gives them the toolkit to be good teachers as well.

Why is having people practice consistently beyond the same message— why is the Lionakis Way important?

That's a really good question. I think there's an efficiency piece of it, right? That we're not teaching everybody a different way, and then you work with a different project leader and why is that all different? But there's also a lot of the markets that we serve in the healthcare space, in the civic space, education. Those people move around, right? They may go from one school district to another, from one healthcare facility to another as leaders. And our reputation follows us, whether it's there in our San Diego office or our San Francisco office. They're assuming they're getting a level of quality, a level of project delivery from Lyonnakis regardless of where we are in the state. And so that messaging becomes really important. We love to hear we have the best drawings or the depth of staff or all of those positives, and we want it to apply to the whole firm.

Yeah, and we have a saying for our standards that we want any person in any place on any project to be able to fit right in. So it kind of goes back to that efficiency of from the team member standpoint, if you go and work on a different project for a different PM, that you're not having to relearn their way of doing things.

So that— I think what you said about the apprenticeship model— yeah, devolving, is that the right word? Maybe it's that it's becoming less central to the way that you're thinking about accelerating learning and developing people than it used to be. But I'm sure it still plays a role. But it sounds like from what I'm hearing, The role of it being the primary instruction model in the Lydonakis way isn't going to work. But once people understand the way to do things, people still need mentorship and support on their projects.

Absolutely. And I think it is giving the teachers the toolkit, right? Those people in that position, what method am I supposed to be teaching them? How are they supposed to be delivering things? And if they haven't been taught with consistency, or haven't developed over time, or they came from another firm that did it differently. How are we giving them the toolkit to make sure they're enforcing the way we want to deliver projects and the caliber and quality of project delivery that we expect?

Got it. So it's not so much you have rogue people wanting to teach people a way that they disagree with. It's just— No. They have to tell them something in, in the lieu of not having a resource, they just do their best. Right?

Yeah. And they've been delivering projects a very long time and they, they've done it successfully. And, you know, when we have disagreement, we have a way to bubble those things up and a committee, if you will, that will help us decide what is the way we're going to do this. And then let's all march together and agree on it.

So that's kind of like the why, like the deep why it sounds like of why you're thinking you need to modernize your approach to learning. What has kind of been your approach to learning? What do you think was broken? How are we— this is a big question, by the way, and we'll get to it like in multiple parts, but like, like, so like, where were you? What was broken? Where are you going? What's your approach going to look like? What's your dream, hopes and dreams for how learning could work at Lionakis?

I'm going to go way back since I've been here the longest, and Christina can do the modern history. Since I've been here 36 years, I'm not gonna complain how Lionakis taught architects, right? Because they taught me and I'm proud of, of what they've taught me. But it was one-on-one. It was one person sitting next to one person and following them around as a mentor and learning. And that is still very much what we do, whether it's taking people out on job sites, whether it's that incidental learning that happens by overhearing a conversation. That's really important. But I do think that we were a little ad hoc how we taught across the firm. So we might say, "Oh, I'm so frustrated. Everybody keeps doing this 'wrong.'" And we'd pull them in a room and someone would teach them how to do it right. Well, that worked really well for those 15 people who were in the room and got the new message. And theoretically, they went out and perpetuated that message. But now that we're 200 and 25 people, it's very hard to say, hey, tomorrow we should learn this thing, and gee, I hope you're here that day. And so I think for me, that's really been the impetus for all the things that Christina is putting in place for us so effectively. And she saw some of that in her early part of her career, but when you go way back, we never knew to teach people in a different way because it was So strictly apprenticeship.

So there's kind of a challenge of scaling your old traditional approach to learning development. And then there's also, is it fast enough to keep up with the speed of change that Christina alluded to earlier?

Yeah, I think so.

How about you, Christina? Like, what are you seeing?

Yeah, I think, um, well, my history goes back. I've been here about 14 years and I started as a Revit specialist. So I think back to when I started and the firm was pretty early on in its adoption of Revit, and we were just focused on getting Revit out there to people. And, and even when I think about how we did that, you know, full days of training or getting everybody from a particular market or studio into a room together and teaching them about a topic that they may or may not use— they need it for Revit, but they may not use it. Right away. So that's what training looked like a lot, just like getting a bunch of people together and picking a topic that seemed like people should know at some point.

Mm-hmm. And I mean, okay, obvious question, that didn't work.

It didn't work. No. So when I mentioned being in a role where I, I love documenting and sharing best practices, and over time you realize that you know, some things didn't work. You thought you delivered the message clearly. You thought you had the right people in the room. And then you get the same questions a couple months later from those people that you knew were in the room. And when that happens, there's moments of frustration. You kind of go through like, was it me? Did I not say it clearly? Did I go on too many tangents? Was it them? Were they not paying attention? They were there. I saw them there. This was like, not in a time where there was people joining virtually and they weren't multitasking on another project. And even people that were engaged during training, they were there, they were talking with me through it, they were asking questions. And that frustration of revisiting the topic that you thought just put in, you put that in their head, didn't happen. So that frustration leads to growth and changing how you do things and really examining What worked and what didn't, why didn't that work? And I feel like I'm thinking about that all the time, every year for 14 years, I've been wondering. It's like one of my life's missions to just figure out how to get information into those heads at the right time.

Okay. Well, what have you learned then?

So I've learned that A, learning about a topic that you're not gonna use right away, and I mean right away, like, in the next few hours or that week is not very helpful unless you engage with it a decent amount to get some of it in your head. And you're not going to learn it thoroughly. You need some iteration. You need to go back and forth. You need to learn it, do it, learn a little bit more, do it, revisit. That's one thing. Another is trying to cram too much into like a whole day. You know, we tried to take advantage of All right, somebody just started. Let's, you know, give it all to them right away before they get busy on projects. And we'll just tell them everything they need to know right now, and then they'll just know it and they'll be off to the races. Yeah.

My window is closing to get to this person. I'm going to get them as many things as I can before they disappear.

Not, not good. Doesn't work.

Yep.

Long, right at this point, like I talked about social media. And how people look for information, sending a message in a very long format. And I mean long, like even what we were used to, I, I was talking full days. So we shortened over time to hour-long sessions and that combined with the pandemic and being virtual and not wanting to do full days on Zoom or Teams or something, but, you know, we crammed into a 1-hour And now 1 hour feels too long.

1 hour of lecture feels too long.

Yes, 1 hour of lecture, 1 hour of talking at, talking heads, talking at people.

You know, I think for me, I've been a school architect my whole career, so I learn a lot from teachers about how students learn. And so it's really funny to me that these light bulbs didn't go off 20 years ago, maybe about how we should reach the architects and engineers in our firm because we know that some people learn by doing, hands-on learners. Most people, right, are hands-on learners. But we also have those people that absorb. They need to go back, they need to revisit, they need to ask questions and come back and revisit. We have graphic learners. Funny story in this firm, I've had us adopt a whole new platform for our project management that has a much more graphic interface on it because the architects weren't absorbing the spreadsheets. The engineers were, quite frankly, but the architects weren't. But suddenly we have a dashboard and Christina's been working towards a more dashboard-oriented thing for us. So I think it's the combination of all the things Christina talked about, but also the recognition that our people just learn differently and some will need to go back multiple times to that one piece of the video because it isn't sinking in or go back to the exercises and the answers in order to be able to remind themselves how they got there. And I think that's an important recognition.

Yeah. So like when maybe we'll talk about DT Bootcamp as a, as a starting point and, and, and Christine, I'll let you introduce it more properly, but that's a kind of a flagship learning program at Lionakis. And at the beginning of bootcamp, this is what you're referring to, multiple days, all in person, live, right? And so where's the recall opportunity for somebody that doesn't remember what design options are 6 months down the road, you know, as an example. And so you've been progressively trying to adapt bootcamp over time, and I wonder if you can kind of just take us through that at a high level as a working example.

Sure. So our Design Technology Bootcamp, it's our annual training program, so we've been doing it 12, 13 years now, where we take a select group of individuals, usually representation from each market service office. We take them through this intermediate to advanced Revit training. And the goal is to have a network of people out in the studios that work on projects. In DT, we are, we're all overhead and we can talk about, we can get in that more if we need, but though it just creates that network for us. Eyes and ears out on the projects that help connect with us with DT. So when I was talking about the full days, that was actually in reference to like a new hire, average new hire for Revit for 3 full days. The beginning of boot camp was 3 full days for 10 weeks straight. And so 240 hours, we were basically trying to clone ourselves a little bit in DT because that early adoption of Revit and we just need more people to be able to work on these projects more efficiently and just know everything about Revit. And we even went through soft skills and we had a book club and everything. And it just, it was a lot. It was a lot to take people away from projects to begin with, let alone the effectiveness of the learning. And it was a lot for learning. So we crammed everything we could think of to teach someone how to know what we know in DT into those 10 weeks.

I mean, that's like 3 college courses.

It's a lot. It was a lot. I look back and I'm so surprised that we went out the gate that way. It was, it was definitely effective in so many ways, I'm sure. Right? We developed those individuals. They became a part of our team. I'm sure they learned a lot, but it was a lot even from, you know, taking away from projects, investing that much time in people. If we wanted to repeat this year over year, did we really want to invest that much time? And was it effective? So we just kept dialing it down, trimming the fat off of it. What do they really need to know? We don't need to clone ourselves. They just need to be effective in helping their projects. So we dialed down the curriculum and just became really focused and intentional about what we needed them to know and what outcome we were looking for. So over the years, it's been pretty consistent now at around 54 hours of training.

Mm-hmm.

Before the pandemic, we would still have everybody travel up to one office to be together. And because of the traveling, we would have to fit it into maybe a week at a time. And then the pandemic allowed us to be a little bit more flexible and rethink that we can do this virtually. Therefore, we can break it down further because I think we knew we should break it down, but some of the traveling and being together limited that. So since then it's been in 1 to 2 hour sessions spread across a few weeks and across the entire year for that bootcamp cohort. And even within those 1 to 2 hour sessions, they started out with a lot of talking at them and just showing them click by click by click what we're doing. And then maybe having them repeat it while we're doing it, which I, I recognized that at one point that they're following along with us during training, which means they're just repeating what they're seeing. Mm-hmm. And they're not really absorbing much of it at all. There needs to be a component of them working independently and not repeating and mimicking. And so that led us to more of a talk a little bit and then have them work on an exercise. And the more we found the, their light bulbs were turning on, gears were moving as soon as they started to do the exercise. And even when we shortened the amount in the beginning where we're talking at them, we found immediately as soon as they started their exercise, they were like, wait, what, what did you just say? So, so even 15 minutes of talking was too much to each. You almost just need them to dive in.

Mm-hmm.

And see what happens. But you need a little bit of, something to get them going, to just set the stage that we're talking about this topic, you know, access that part of your brain and here's a little bit. Now here's an exercise.

There's a term in learning development called desirable difficulty, which I think is what you're getting at, right?

Yes.

Where you need to put them in a position where they have to struggle. Mm-hmm. Because that's how they're gonna learn and remember.

Exactly.

Versus the thing you talked about, just clicking along and following Christina ain't gonna cut it for that.

No, no, no. So, so that started to really feel like something was working there with the exercises. And since then we've focused on exercises quite a bit. And, and now we're trying to deliver that message in the beginning as concisely as we can. We were part of the Synthesis LMS beta program, and, and we've started to develop online courses through our learning center. Which allow us to pre-record that message in the beginning. And when we think about pre-recording it, I, I listen back to, you know, we would always record those 1 to 2 hour sessions. I listen back and I think I really could have said that more clearly, more concisely. I went off on a tangent that they didn't need to know at that moment. Added a little bit more nuance that probably cluttered their brain. As they're listening and trying to learn. So I cut all of that out and being able to pre-record that message has forced me to be more concise with it. And I am finding that I am, I can become a better instructor by doing that and being conscious of how much time I'm spending delivering that initial message.

So Laura, I'm kind of curious as you've kind of, thank you for that, Kristina. As you've been kind of watching this happen with the DT Bootcamp over the years, what was going on in your mind as you were watching those experiments and kind of all of that change?

Well, I think for me, the most exciting part of it is, you know, one of the things in this profession is because of the apprenticeship, because of the time you have to put in to go from, say, school to licensure or to competence to deliver a project. This is an area where our newer graduates, our younger staff, can really excel as these technology specialists, as Revit specialists, as experts in this area that maybe our 25-year people don't. They're not learning new technology. They're maybe not even using Revit technology. And so it puts them in a place on the team as really valued, and it, it really empowers them to teach the person next to them and not think, oh, I don't really know anything. I don't have to look out for that person who's a year behind me or 2 years behind me. So, you know, when we put them in this position and they're so well taught through the boot camp, everybody's going to them. And when we get multiple people in a studio or in an office that have been through boot camp, it's kind of raising all boots. Everybody's going to them. They're getting that one-on-one with a peer. That they don't have to ask uncomfortable questions in front of, you know, the boss. And so I think that that's a really good way to teach the next generation to be good teachers. If you want to be a learning organization, right, everybody has to go in with the mindset that I'm teaching the people around me what I know best. And this is an area for those younger staff, especially especially to excel in.

I love that you said learning organization because I've been talking about modern learning organization, and like, that's where I think AEC firms need to go for about a year and a half now. And you guys are definitely on that journey of modernizing learning at Lionakis. And there's two specific things I want to talk about. I want to talk about modernizing the boot camp program we just talked about, and then Laura, some of the practice Lionakis Way stuff as well. So Christina, I know that you redesigned Bootcamp in 2026, and you just ran the first section of it a couple weeks ago.

Yes.

And so maybe can you take us through the redesign, what you did, and then how it went?

Yes. So it, it was being part of that group, the beta cohort for Synthesis LMS, that really, we had a lot of great conversations in there about how do we best deliver content to people. And it's, you know, those are my people where I've been thinking about these things for years. It was so nice to have others to talk to about it. And that's where some things really clicked for me in this short format and prerecording topics. And so we went for it. We said, you know what, we have access to this great tool and we can develop all of these for the bootcamp training that we'll deliver this year. So we went to town, we recorded our first module of content, and we figured, you know what, we don't really wanna just prerecord this and then give it to them and have 'em watch it on their own. Who knows if they'll watch it and what pace do we have them watch it at? So we really liked still having that in-person aspect, not in person, but together aspect of it. Because I think there's a lot to the boot camp in that you're together in a room, you're talking about it with each other, others are hearing questions and that they need to learn those topics together. We need to go at the same pace and not have people drop off cuz they didn't watch the videos or anything. So we decided that we take these recordings with that concise message and watch them together like a little live watch party. Party, and then we'd all be there where they could continue to work on the exercises that we'd give them for those topics. I wasn't sure how the live watch party would go. I knew it'd be a little bit awkward to hear yourself talking on a video where you would've been there teaching them, but I love it. It makes me, like I said, I can say my message more concisely and I'm already prepped. I don't have to worry about something going wrong with the dataset files. And I know that I can focus on the more important part, which is those exercises and engaging them throughout the session. So we went for it. We, we did these watch parties. They worked on their exercises and we found right away that they would access the videos while they're doing the exercises.

That thing you said before, right? It's like, I just told you this 10 minutes ago.

Just told you.

Yeah.

So they need to be able to pause. And take it step by step. And maybe there's a little bit of that mimicking going on, but that's okay because they know that this resource is bottled up and there for them anytime they need to do that task. So it kind of reinforces that habit of going to a resource and looking for it when you know that it's there and you know that it helps you along the way. 'Cause previously they couldn't access it again. Unless they ask me to repeat it again. And I can't repeat it for them every single time they're working on that task on every single project. So, so it feels really good to have this nice packaged, concise message for those topics that people are already using the recordings.

So I want to help people get a visual of this. So you in your learning center, you have a learning path. Uh-huh. Which is a collection of courses called Bootcamp Full-Time.

Yeah.

And then you've got, in this path, you've got about a dozen courses that are somewhere between 16 and 35 minutes long, including the exercise and the video.

Yeah. Right? Yeah.

So for example, you have a course called Revit BIM Execution Plan and Kickoff Core, which has a 5 and a half or 6-minute video.

Uh-huh.

Followed by an exercise that people are gonna take, and then there's a quiz at the end. So kind of like, is that kind of generally your structure is a short, short video exercise in a kind of a course that makes it 15 to 35 minutes? Is that—

Yeah. And actually the exercise time we didn't factor in yet to the completion time of the course for some of those. And the learning paths we're still building. So we're, we're still creating content for the next module of bootcamp so that that learning path will have a lot more courses in it. But generally, yes, we, we watch a lesson, which is a short video, then we work on the exercise and that's where most of the time is spent on the exercises.

Got it.

Yeah.

So Laura, you are taking this approach to practice as well.

Mm-hmm.

So can you talk about, talk about why, like actually take a step back. How were you, we talked how you were doing kind of Revit education in the past with the history there, but what was the way of teaching people the Lionakis way or teaching them technical skills or? Project management skills, like what did that look like pre-2026 and what does that look like going into this year?

Yeah, it certainly was throw them into the deep end in the early part of the career, that one-on-one model. Over time, we've done a lot more training, the one-hour training, the pull all the project managers together, bring an outside trainer in to talk about project management. But again, if you were a project manager who started with us 3 days after, that outside trainer came to the firm, oops, right? You didn't get the training. And so when Christina was bringing back to us the LMS piece that she was doing on boot camp, we started talking about, okay, what are the practice things that we need to do every year? What are those things that we need to do on a regular basis? And what are those quick strike things we have to do? And how could we apply this same concept here? And, you know, there's a little bit of me, obviously, that wants to see how do we measure this? How do we measure our success? And right now we measure a lot on happy employees, happy clients, happy employees. And anecdotally, over the last couple of weeks, we've just been getting rave reviews from the folks on our DT bootcamp, our visualization bootcamp. But especially, I would say, because it's more new, the way we're delivering practice boot camp. And in fact, somebody even said yesterday, I learned more in that 1 hour about cartooning, which was our first one, than I've ever known in my career. And it was 1 hour, 4 videos. We had an outside person do videos for us, an outside consultant. And so we were able to draw on our best resources in short snippets. And I think for me, again, being a learn-by-doing advocate, the exercise piece that put us into breakout rooms that were mixed by, by position, by experience, by how vocal they are in, in a room was really enlightening for how engaged people were in the exercise. At all levels, how they let the younger staff kind of drive and ask questions and learn by inquiry. And in a much more comfortable setting than if we had brought the whole firm together for a training where if you wanted to ask a question, you had to speak up in the room, the big virtual room, or do something in the chat and hope you got recognized. So I think one down so far for 2026, but yeah, it's been so successful and I think having test drove it in DT where the people are selected, the group is much smaller. Christina's been able to really set us up on the practice side as well.

So to help me kind of follow along, so it sounds like you put people into a big Teams call of some sort. They're all in the like main room. That's where they do the listening party, watch the prerecorded videos that are 4 or 6 minutes long on a couple topics. Then you put them in breakout rooms.

Yeah.

To do the exercises, bring 'em back to the main room if there's more on-demand content, and then back out to breakout rooms again. Yeah. That's kind of the format of how to keep things moving.

That's what we did in the cartooning practice. And it was, again, really enlightening. We learned a lot, right? Like how much time do you have to put into the exercises? Do we need to be able to give the answers, right? So we're in the process of recording answer videos. So when people take it on demand, they can get those answers and see how well they did on their exercises. But I also think, and this is probably pretty typical of AAC firms, it's solidified for us on the practice side, what is our message we're teaching here? So we have the Lionakis way, but even in that, there's interpretation. There's a way, way I did is kind of like that, right? And this forced us, the practice side folks, to come together and say, we're teaching this course to everybody and it's going to be on demand. Do we all agree that this is the right person to teach it, the right messenger, if you will, but also the right approach to this because it's being codified, if you will, in how the firm delivers this practice-based training. So that part, I think, also cleared a lot of path because it empowers our younger staff to say, knock, knock, that's not how we're teaching that on the, you know, in the Lionakis way.

Yeah, that's not how you cartoon a site plan.

Right, right. Exactly. I learned this and in the Lionakis way. And so, you know, it's been, like I said, one down. But we've got 3 other big ones planned for this year, and we're gonna keep learning with each one.

I'm curious about the experience kind of from the, both the learner perspective, but then also the people that were instructing and, you know, previously they would've taught it very differently. And was it hard to get them to do prerecorded videos? Like what's that been like?

I think so. Laura mentioned an outside consultant that recorded some videos. That was just because of that topic, because we were already working with them on that topic. We also had one of our architects record videos for the cartooning course. And I think there's always that new factor. It's like, what do you want? What? Okay, I'll go in a room and talk to myself on this video and I need to keep it to how long? And so that, you know, the new factor, it's a little bit different, but once they dove in, they, they were a natural at it. So we were lucky there. We have a really good first example for those that create content after this. But he recorded a couple videos and we had somebody help edit them. So we took away some of that burden of having to do the post-production and show them how to do it and everything, which they appreciated a lot. We even had some— that same person helped them put together their slides from a few bullet points that they— he joked how he was cartooning his cartoony presentation for them. Once they got to the— once he got to actually recording, I think that was a little uncomfortable, I would say. But once it was done and they saw that the outcome was really great, now when he talks about it and we're in studio meetings and people are giving feedback, he said many times that he loved doing a few short videos over preparing a 45-minute presentation.

So, and this person is not a natural public speaker.

Mm-hmm.

He's a natural leader in what he's teaching. And I think getting it right on a video ultimately felt more comfortable to him than being, facing the faces, right? In a room. And so this is back to those different ways people learn. I think there's different ways people teach too. Yeah. And this fit really well. For him. And we do, you know, we've often brought outside consultants, our mechanical engineers, our electrical engineers in to talk about a new code cycle or sustainability. I see this as another great opportunity to memorialize some of that material so that everybody's getting that and doing it in a way that they can stay in their office, right? Record a couple minutes for us and then join the live discussion.

So you kind of push an outsider even to try and Do this short videos plus exercises because this is what we did in the cartooning training.

Yeah.

Yeah, they were amazing. And they were like, okay, I'll try it.

They said, this sounds like a great idea. I get why you're doing this because this person has done training in other firms too. And yeah, they really— they got it right away why we were doing something like this.

So, so your architect's name, you've got the outside consultant, Christina, you and I guess probably Sophie recorded some of the DT Bootcamp. What is it like for them and for you to watch yourself in a watch party teaching a topic? How does that feel?

It, it was weird at first, but I think because I've recorded in the past for training, I'm kind of used to it. So I can't really, I don't know if Laura, if you've talked to Brian about it yet and what, what he thought. I know Sean was like, oh, I don't ever wanna talk again. Well, but people get used to it.

I thought the funny part was what the first thing Brian said to me is, I thought I already talked fast and they, they played me at 1.25. And I said, you know what, Brian, it didn't sound too fast at all. And I think once he saw it in person, he realized, oh, it did come off okay. People could absorb it at 1.25. And he thought he was already too fast a talker to be on, on video. So I think ultimately he was proud. Of, of what we accomplished on that one. Because he's been trying to get this message out one-on-one for a really long time.

I think what you said is really interesting there. It's like if somebody has a message they're trying to get out and it hasn't been effective, they're open to trying new things and see if that works better.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

I think it's really, really important because the frustration Christina talked about at the beginning, right? Where I thought I just told them this. That's tenfold when you, you know, look at how many are architects are trying to teach other future architects. How many times do I have to say this? And so I do think they're being pretty open-minded about this.

Yeah, there are, there are others lined up for this format. One of them, our IT director, and he's, you know, been in the same position as me where we have to, you know, teach people about software all the time. And he was just like, oh, thank goodness, like this. Finally, this feels like my message will be heard and retained, we hope. We're hoping. Yes.

And I think the win, from what I'm imagining and having talked through this with you guys a couple of times before, is from a learner, that feels like a way more engaging format than being lectured at. And I get to meet new people in the breakout and we get to have it be interactive. And I would guess that that hour kind of flew by in a way that it wouldn't have.

So fast. Yeah. Yeah. For us.

Too fast. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think when you're in a big firm, that started as a family, right, a smaller firm. And we all grew up in that kind of environment. You, you continuously struggle with how am I going to transfer culture, meet people, talk to people as human beings, not as a team's message. And those breakout rooms, they sound like a small thing, but they are ways that somebody can say, oh, I did this on a recent project. Let me walk us through this cartooning piece in our breakout room. And suddenly someone from our San Diego office or San Francisco office is like, ah, I have a new, a new resource. They seem to know what they were doing. They may not have ever met that person other than our once-a-year town hall event, and certainly not in an arena where their experience or expertise would necessarily necessarily shine through. So, you know, any, any way we can break the firm down into smaller groups to, to talk, I think is valuable. And when you have this thing, this practice in common to talk about, it really opens the conversation real quickly.

And I think the little side effect too is that you worry about the multitasking with training being virtual and people in different places and expectation that this new format I'm going to join and there's going to be some breakout rooms, I'm going to need to do something, people kind of perk up a little bit more.

Like, so this video is going to go by fast and then you're going to be in a room with your peers expected to have like—

to have listened to it. Yeah. That's a totally different experience.

I mentioned to you the other day that I went into a breakout room and the group kind of went like, oh no, how much longer do I get her in my breakout room?

Laura, I think you told me that the instruction to the breakout room was to have at least experienced people speak first.

Yeah.

Right.

And I didn't say a word.

Yeah.

You know, I just kind of, who's going to be in charge? And one of our younger staff took charge. He ran the, you know, we had to pull up the exercise. We had to do some markups and he ran the whole thing and the rest of us kind of chatted at him while he was doing that. And it was really, really effective. And I think he felt really good about it too.

Yeah.

That he was able to be a leader in that small, small room.

There's so many things I love about this design that you all have come up with, and I know you're going to iterate on it. You already have things you want to do a little differently next time. Maybe we can touch on that. But I want to call attention to, you know, when people hear about using an LMS and having, you know, kind of video-based training, one of the objections is, aren't we going to talk? We're not going to talk to each other anymore. That's how people understand and learn from each other. No one wants to sit around and just watch a wall of videos all day, which I agree with. But what's also true, I think, is not all video is created equal. And, and sometimes you can do really hyper-efficient ones, but not all live sessions are great either. And so it seems like you're trying to figure out how to use video, what it's best for, and how to use live interaction for what it's best for.

And Christina brought this up at the very beginning, and I think it's a really important part of our— I'll call it evolution, but the big training and then the smaller trainings that follow it is the big training to us and the dedicating the hour and starting it off is saying this is important content. We expect you to be here and present and paying attention and all the little tricks Christina said, like, oops, I'm going into an exercise, I better pay attention. Help. But we thought it was important to have that first training live virtual kind of with a cadence of different kinds of instruction to say this is important stuff. And if you're gonna be at Lionakis, we're gonna do it the Lionakis way.

Mm-hmm.

And you need to be here to learn that. And here's the opportunities to reemphasize it that follow. And I, I do think that was the case. We had what, 80 practitioners on the call. Which is a pretty high percentage of our technical staff. Yeah.

Was it required for them to attend?

Not the first one.

It wasn't.

It's not the first one. That makes me think that maybe the next one might be.

I think, I think we'd like it to be mandatory for the practice people, but still with that percentage and now the buzz, everybody's really interested in it.

Yeah. Well, not to, I think the making it mandatory was not a reflection of people didn't show up cuz as you just heard they did, it was more like, this was really good and we need people to be here for it.

And even if I'm a 25, 30-year architect at Lionakis, am I still going to Cartooning 101?

Yes.

Okay. And why?

Well, Laura, you want to take that one? The consistent message.

Yeah. When we were in the executive session with Kay, someone used the word word reboarding.

Yes.

And I think that to me is important that we have those people who have been doing it their way. And it's in the boundaries of the Lyonnakis way. But if we were reviewing their set of documents, we'd be like, I'm not sure about that. And so this is an opportunity for them then to just have, as Christina was about to say, that consistent message when they are the teachers or the project leaders. And so they were all there. They're there. I mean, we had pretty much everybody on that call. So it was, it was really good.

I think you told me there was like one person in particular that kind of afterwards said like, oh, I thought I understood this topic, but I did not.

One of our project managers in our San Diego office who, they're a new office to us and through acquisition, she was overheard by the rest of the teams kind of throwing down her headset and saying, I thought I knew what I was doing. And I thought, this is a measurement. In an area where it's hard to measure or, you know, the implications of this cartooning thing might not be seen for a year on their project. That was one measurement that they thought, wow, we're valued enough to teach me how to do this the right way.

Can we talk about the, you know, you've mentioned there was this big training, the 1-hour thing, but then there's some kind of cascading follow-up opportunities for reinforcement. Can you talk us through what that looks like?

We had to reflect a bit on why are we doing this live training, right? Because there's the human factor in getting together. But if you think about the idea of not everybody will be doing cartooning when they get off of this call, is this really relevant to them? And are they going to retain it if they're not going to use it right away outside of that exercise? And we thought that with this live training, like Laura said, it's the idea of saying this is important. So that when you do come across it, you know that there was a thing, there is a resource to go refer to while you're doing that task, and that there's a consistent message around it. And we thought that, you know, giving people the opportunity to kind of stew on it a little bit and iterate, maybe they do get a chance to do that task on a project, maybe not in our sense of repeating the topic, generally throughout like maybe a quarter where we'll do a 1-hour training and then a couple weeks later, a follow-up with our, what we call tea times, which are like 15-minute, everybody hops on, talk about a tip, and we go back to work. So we have a couple of opportunities with those where we can either elaborate on the exercises, we can see if it, it had come up for anybody in the meantime. And then another opportunity we have is in our monthly studio meetings that are market-specific, where we'll be asking those markets to dive deeper into their market-specific scenarios for that topic. So it's a third or sometimes fourth touchpoint on the topic.

So like the difference, like cartooning K-12 is different than cartooning a healthcare project or whatever.

Exactly. Yeah. And so it's, we, we feel like that repetition will just reinforce the message that this is important. And there's a message, there's a consistent message that we're trying to deliver around it. And we'll see where that takes us. I don't know how we'll revisit it again after that quarter and what the cycle will be like. Like we do our quarter of cartooning and then does it still be, will it still be quarters? Will it be more than that? Do we revisit cartooning again in a year or two? So I'm excited to see where this will take us.

It sounds like, you know, because there's something about what you just said that kind of contradicts something you said earlier. But I think I understand the difference. So earlier you said like, well, why am I teaching something— someone something if they're not going to use it in 2 hours or this week or whatever? But I think what you're getting at is there are some topics that are so foundational that we want people to have awareness of them, that they exist.

Yes.

Regardless of where they are in their phase. And then there's other things that will only give you that training when we know you're about to use it. On a project.

Yeah. And I think with this, we're more thinking of the former of that. We need them to know that this is important and that there's something there to reference to. We're trying to train that behavior of, or that habit of going to go look for how to do something.

Right.

Because you've been exposed to the message at some point. So it's almost like the idea of the live training is not for them to actually understand when they're done. Exactly how to do that task. It's that, that it's important to know at some point when they're ready.

Right.

It's almost that foundational, how do you become an architect, right? And you have to know there's cartooning out there. You may not need it at that moment. And, you know, Christina and I were in the same studio meeting for our civic practice area yesterday. And one of the nice compliments we got on sort of the training globally was the learning management system is so accessible. People felt like, I don't have to leave the Lionakis way and go to YouTube to figure out how to do this thing in Revit or something else, because our systems were focused on Lionakis and the way we do things, but also as easy easy to navigate and succinct, like if they were out there looking on a YouTube video. And I think that's a really nice complement for this style of learning and how it really applies to our team.

So a job captain, a project manager, and a senior architect start in June and the kind of quarter of cartooning is over. How do you imagine that? What, what happens for them? Do they get assigned this course as part of onboarding into Lianakis and learning the Lianakis way? Are you waiting? 18 months or 24 months to do? Like, how do you think that happens?

Oh, Chris. Christina can answer her thoughts. I think that's the kind of real question that we're up against right now is what does the playbook look like for onboarding by position, getting the language into the supervisors or the buddies. We have a buddy system. So that they know how to steer somebody. I think we're at the front end of understanding what that looks like for us.

Yeah. And I think it's going to depend on the topic for sure, right? A part of me hopes that we'll get to a point where everybody knows about this message that we've recorded and they don't have to necessarily watch it ahead of time to let us— let them know that it's there. Because it's just widely known that we have a way of cartooning and everybody refers to it. So when you're going to work on cartooning, it's— we know and we trust that somebody is going to say, hey, go, go watch this thing. There's a video about it.

Back to the very beginning about consistency, right? When Laura was— we kind of talked about people like project managers aren't necessarily teaching people off, off book a little bit because they're malicious. It's because they don't have a better tool. And so now that project manager can just point them to that course and let them know it's there and say, this is, this is how we do it.

And we want it to be ubiquitous, right? We want enough people to have been in the 1-hour training or the follow-up DTs or in the learning management system so that it comes naturally out of anybody's mouth. Oh, you should just go watch the, the video on this. We, we've got that covered. Go watch this. Rather than saying, Do we have any resources on X, Y, or Z? And if it's ubiquitous and people are talking about it sort of as a base assumption, I think we'd be very happy about where we've reached as a learning organization.

And we already have one person, Kerry, Laura, that you mentioned. He's an engineer. He's going to go down to our San Diego office to help integrate some of them to our Lainakasway, and he's gonna reuse that cartooning course.

Mm-hmm.

So he doesn't have to develop more content. It's already packaged for him. So it's a way for other experienced individuals to deliver the message without preparing the message themselves.

Carrie knows enough about cartooning that he can kind of facilitate the workshop. Yes. The, the kind of exercise part.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really interesting. One of the things that I heard— there's a principal in one of our clients who's leading learning and development also, and he thought one of the most important things that they would achieve would be for the principals and the project managers in the firm to understand all the contents of the learning management system and what's available so that when they see something on their project, they don't have to know exactly how to do everything, but they understand the table of contents essentially, right? And they can say, yep, We have something, go watch this, then we can talk about it.

Yeah.

And I think the, the fact that it's not go watch this 1-hour recording, that it feels so accessible. And you know that when you send someone somewhere else, you're sending them to a good place. You're not sending them to this misery of rewatching a recording from 4 years ago that where they weren't a part of it and they have to sift through and skip, you know, over some parts. I think that they, they'll be able to feel good about what they're sending people to, both in the message and in the format. We had a consultant come in and, and talk about, you know, like coordinating with consultants at a studio meeting. And I know it was recorded and I just, now it, you want it to be in this new format so badly. I, I, I've tried in bootcamp cuz all the past sessions have been recorded in those 1 to 2 hour long segments and I've tried to repurpose those and it just is not, it's not as good. So I hope that we'll be able to do a little bit of a hybrid. You know, I can't ask all consultants that come in to prerecord videos for us, maybe one day, but—

But maybe you can break some of them down into smaller chunks.

We'll learn how we could break it into chunks. And then I was thinking that we could have one of our team members record an intro video to this, like, hey, you know, this was recorded previous time, but listen out for this message. I feel like it's really important what they said there. And, you know, break it up into some sort of fashion, add an exercise to it so we can still reuse some of those. But I think we feel so good about the format, the short format, that we would want to repurpose those long hour recordings.

And learning and development's become more of a language, right? Because we talk about it at all our principal meeting and our market management meetings and in the studio meetings. So that it's really important to me that our content on there is reliable.

Mm-hmm.

So when we do get people to understand what's all available there, that they aren't then finding those things that are aging or no good anymore, or just don't feel right. So that learning and development coordinator position's gonna be important. Obviously what Christina's leading on knowledge management is just to be sure that content is good so that when you are sending people there, it's reliable.

I wanna, I wanna put a pin in that and come back to that. The, the team piece. Christina, we're, we're talking about splitting up things, right? Mm-hmm. And one of the things that splitting up is nice because attention spans, we talked about that kind of before. I mean, we've made it an hour and we have not talked about AI yet, which is bonkers, but we, but we will. So splitting it up is good. Uh-huh. From an attention spans perspective, it's good because One of the things that you shared is like, well, take that consultant thing you were just talking about. There's maybe in an hour-long presentation, 9 core topics, 7 core topics. Maybe what the person needs in the flow of work is just topic 6. And so by breaking it down in the lesson, you can say like, just watch just, just this piece of this. That's what you need to watch. Or if I'm searching, that's all I need to find. And I'm wondering if you can talk about that because you've said you've been thinking about designing courses with that kind of retrieval at the end of a searcher or a learner in the future. And I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, so I come from that, you know, I, I document everything because the satisfaction of sending somebody a link, not to remove the human factor of it, but just I can get them the answer so quickly by sending them this link, right? So having something to send to somebody has been so meaningful in accomplishing our work from the DT side of things that while I was recording, I had the flow of work in mind. I knew that I'm documenting something that somebody in the future will need to access. I'm already thinking how they don't want to go watch an hour-long recording. Now I'm thinking, do they want to watch an 8-minute recording when they only need the 2 minutes? Mm-hmm. And so when I'm recording, I'm thinking, what might somebody have a question on that I would want to send a link to? And that they can just get the answer right there. So it is, it has definitely shaped how I'm breaking my lessons and recordings up. And when I'm introing or onboarding someone to this process, like Brian and whoever else will record videos, I, I try to send them that message too. It's different from a design technology perspective. You know, on the practice side, you kind of need the whole picture and the context, but But it's something to consider when you're—

Do you have an example of mind of like something that you would've been 8, but you realize there's actually 4 questions in there?

Like, uh, it's very Revit specific. Do you want me to get into that? That's fine.

That's fine.

I guess linking CAD files that we use those for existing backgrounds for renovations or site survey files from our civil consultants. And there's a lot of steps in there. Whereas if you were to watch, you know, all the videos, maybe it 20 minutes long, but somebody may already know how to do the beginning of the linking CAD, and they may know what to do once it's in Revit, but there's these specific settings that they missed that are really important that impact the health of the model.

Mm-hmm.

And it's— so if I want to explain just those settings, I don't want them to have to watch an 8-minute video about linking CAD. They've already linked CAD, right? But they miss this 1-minute part of the important settings that you press OK to and ignore. So it's that kind of thing.

That's great. And one of the things that's nice there too is, you know, videos are great, but they're harder to edit than pages. And so by breaking things down into smaller components, you— if the only thing that has changed is the way that Revit has those settings configured, you just replace that 1 minute. You don't have to go back and rerecord exactly 8 minutes or an hour or whatever it is. So it's kind of managing risk a little bit there.

Mm-hmm.

I think it is a little different on practice side. And Christina said contact. There are some things we don't want people to find out of context, right? And so we have to, I think on the practice side, what was most informative for the team was just saying, you need to get your message across in 3 to 4 minutes. Because that forced them to get to the essence of the issue and not pontificate or go into any tangents. And I think, watching that whole 3 to 4 minute video would be important to really understand cartooning. So I, how to differentiate between what we do on the DT or visualization side from the broader topic of practice is going to be the trick here a little bit.

I've been really curious if we, if we saw the 45 minute Brian presentation, how much of, not that he's really good. He's very concise with his messaging, but, but still there probably would have been things that where it needed and did we get most of his message across in 4 minutes?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or like 4 minutes, but there were multiple videos. 3, 4 minutes.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's this great Einstein quote that's one of my favorites ever, which is as simple as possible, but no simpler. And I kind of like use that all the time. And I think with video, what I've been saying is as short as possible, but no shorter. Because sometimes things just do have some inherent complexity and it takes 4, 10 minutes, like whatever it is to get to the essence.

Yeah.

Well, and I think our profession is that way, right? There's something you have to persist through to get to the answer and the response. And so we can't have our attention span so short that we don't persist, right? Right. And get to the right answer. And this is maybe a little microcosm of that.

Mm-hmm.

How we learn to do this profession.

I've also been thinking, you know, yes, it may take 40 minutes to get your message across, but we do still need to consider the learner. Can they absorb 40 minutes? And so it's not that we don't want all of the 40 minutes of content, it's just that we need to rethink how those 40 minutes are delivered. And that maybe be— that's spread out into multiple courses and not thought of as a one, one-hour presentation.

And that's what we learned in the first cartooning one, that it really should have been two.

I should have been saying sessions.

2 hours.

Yeah.

And that, that's a reflection, right? That this exercises and the, the things we needed to demonstrate the how to do these things took longer. Okay. Next time we'll do it in 2 sessions.

So just to, just to make that clear, it sounds like there wasn't any video content missing. It was more time for exercises is what was needed.

Exactly. We actually wish we had like, there was maybe 20 minutes total of talking and video. We wished we would have done 10 to 12 or 15.

Mm-hmm.

And the rest of the time on exercises.

Mm-hmm.

And then followed up with another, you know, 8, 8 minutes of video. Yeah.

I'm curious. So there's this, and 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 carto— lucky 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. So what we did is we prioritized, we brainstormed what were the most 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. 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, go— 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. That's really great. Let's talk about the team. So Christina, you have been design technology, director of design technology, but now you've taken on knowledge management halftime, something like that. And you've added a learning coordinator and Laura, you're here as the president. Deeply invested in learning and development. So gonna take me through what that could, but that wasn't the posture of Lionakis maybe even 2 years ago or a year and a half ago. So talk about that kind of investment and why you all are making it and, and how that connects to kind of long-term strategy.

I'll zoom out on the long-term and let Christine get into the details, 'cause this is a lot of her vision. When I came in as Chief Practice Officer, this 3 years ago, generally I had recognition that our practice wasn't investing in the same way that our business was investing in what it took to scale it, what it took to be one firm but have multiple locations. And because I come from practice and I'm still in practice, recognized an inconsistency across the firm in the different markets and services. To what we were putting out into the world. And I will say that one of the areas that we were being consistent and were seeing real buy-in to how we delivered work was in design technology.

Mm-hmm.

Because we had the bootcamp, we had production standards, we had the things that we needed and that people had grown to rely on. But we hadn't gotten out of the toolkit and into the delivery of what we do as practitioners. And so Christina and I, I would say, are good at finishing each other's sentences. So when I was talking to her about this, she started to bring some of the lessons from the LMS group and what she was doing in design technology. And our project delivery group was saying, we got to teach people to do this stuff better, you know, and, and I think it was a good convergence of a recognized need, as I mentioned, all these things that are happening in the industry, but just really a good time with our growth to be able to say, this is the time we have to make this investment if we're going to maintain the consistency of reputation that's really important to us as as a firm.

So can I play that back in just what I think I heard? So by business investing, that means acquisitions, growth, adding markets, even our back-of-house systems, even the back of our systems, right?

So everything from our accounting software or our marketing software or things like that, but maybe not as much outside of design technology.

Got it.

On just how do we build practitioners other than the one-on-one apprenticeship model or those ad hoc trainings. That we were doing, and was that going to be the most efficient and effective way to build future architects for this firm and for, for the world? And so I think taking Christina's lessons learned and the deep dive she's been doing in getting this right with the need that we identified on the practice side, just this was the right time to make that investment.

Got it. Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

And I think from a design technology perspective, I, I kind of laugh because A, it's just part of my nature and part of my job to make sure everybody knows our best practices when it comes to design technology. And I think through doing that, and like I mentioned earlier, this, the satisfaction of having things documented, I was doing knowledge management unbeknownst to me for quite a while until I—

which is why she was a natural pick, which is, which is the backstory of all the best knowledge managers that I know. Yeah.

So and then when I learned about what it was and, you know, went to K Connect and met the knowledge architecture team, it's like such a pivotal moment for me and, and how I viewed Lionakis. I all of a sudden came back to work after like a KA Connect and thought, wow, there's so many moving parts and, and ways to grow and in ways that I can connect what I'm doing here in other areas. And design technology also is naturally a, a support role for a lot of the practice initiatives. You know, like I sit on our production standards group and our detail library group, project delivery. In a way to support what they need and how can we execute a new standard in Revit? And so I would, I would sit in a lot of those rooms and hear a lot of those struggles of how, how, how to document something, develop a best practice, deliver the message, train the habit of people following it. And it just was like, this sounds very familiar. I know there's a lot of differences. It's not it's not just technology and a software program, which is a lot easier in many ways. So yeah, a lot of that just carried through. And I think that's where, you know, when Laura became CEO and I was able to work with her more and she offered the opportunity to work more in a knowledge management role, that's where I feel like things really picked up and have started to take shape quickly.

It sounds like listening to the two of you, all these changes we've been talking about, stuff that's external to Lionakis, but stuff that's internal Lionakis, like growth or offices. You've got different markets. There was the pandemic. There's people's use of social media outside the office, their expectations of what technology can do. You've been consistently redesigning bootcamp to keep up with all those changes. And I think what you're saying, Laura, is the way we did practice was not keeping up. With all those changes. And so like you were able to look at Christina as kind of like, well, that's a, that's a way of thinking about doing learning and development that we could take across other parts of our company.

And I will say that, you know, a lot of things when Christina and I have been talking about my vision for learning and development and how we track it and why can't, why doesn't this plug into this in the right way? I'm that kind of person or a big picture person, and she's in how do we get it done in a way that is effective. And so she has the same vision, but has this kind of toolkit because of what she's been learning and doing to get us there and see, see the way forward. And I think that's been a good marriage of our skill sets, but also both of our passions, mine for building practice and hers for seeing how we implement and make it systematized, the things that we're trying to do that are going to make us more effective.

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 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? And so they think every problem is theirs to solve. And the reality is there are people more talented than us in solving those problems 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? 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.

Mm-hmm.

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?

Mm-hmm.

And I said, Christina, I think that Regina would be great for you, right? Mm-hmm. 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 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. 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 support your ability to get there. And now you can see like, well, if I invest a dollar here, maybe I get two 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. Right.

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. Jump, 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.

I was just going to reiterate, like getting there faster and with less frustration.

Yeah.

Is really the goal there.

Well, I thank you both for taking time to share all of your work. First of all, for doing this work and being willing to talk about it. I think it's going to be very inspirational. It has been for me. And I know other people in our community and I'm I'm really excited by what you're doing and we're just at the beginning of this transition. So I'm really excited to see where Lionakis is a year from now, 2 years, 3 years from now. So thank you all.

Well, Christina is our rock star, so.

Oh, thank you.

Christina is, but I am so excited. We know we've worked with Lionakis since 2012 and it's really great to see Laura, you in this role of an executive sponsor for this work, just clearing some obstacles out of the way also, cuz that's I totally agree.

I can't, we didn't even get to talk about that, that having buy-in and support from Laura has been a game changer and makes me like my job because I've heard so many times, you know, how often people have to fight for buy-in and they're spending all their time convincing that this might be the right direction to go. And there's, we don't have that here. We have the this great vision coming from Laura and to trust from her and what I learn and share back with her. And we can just make good progress quickly because of it. It's awesome.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Laura, when we, when we look at the firms that speak at K Connect and that we feature and that really do the best work with synthesis, they always have a strong executive sponsor doing exactly the work you're doing. 'Cause that's what lets people like Christina Cook and do her thing, right? Is you kind of made it possible. So So it's great to see you two working as a team. This is really fun and appreciate you being willing to share.

Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. Okay. Oh, one more thing, Chris. I've been meaning to ask you, cuz I've been listening to the podcast and the theme song is so cool. I feel like one minute you're thinking about knowledge management and then you're rocking out listening to this great song. And I tried to find information about it thinking, you know, what is the song?

And yeah. Yeah.

I thought maybe you could share the story on that. And also in the limited amount I could find, it seemed like this group is from Chicago. So I'm wondering why they're taking the BART. I could see why they're walking and taking a bike, but it's so— please tell us the story on the song.

The lead singer in this song is a guy named Sean Mann, who is our director of engineering.

Okay.

And he was in a band called The Parents. Sean did go to University of Chicago. Chicago, but then moved to San Francisco. And funny story, right after he moved from Chicago, I was the IT director at SMWM, an architecture firm in the city, and I hired Sean to be our network admin. And this was his first job, like, out of college. And we worked together there, and then we were able to come back together at KA. But he was telling somebody in our firm, it's like, oh, I went to the East Bay for the first time and it was so exciting. I took the BART. And this girl who was like a San Francisco born and bred looked at him. She goes, the BART? We call it BART, dude.

Yeah.

So then he like made a whole whole song about like why it's the BART and got us all bandmates in. So yeah, that's the story of "We Took the BART." Okay.

I love it.

Yeah, that's great.

Thank you.

Thanks for asking. I was waiting, I was wondering how long it was gonna be for someone to ask me the backstory of that song.

So, so someone hasn't asked you off, off offline yet?

That's the first person that's asked me offline.

Okay.

Wow.

So good question.

Now I have to go back and listen.

Yes. Yeah. That's not, I encourage it.

Yeah. All right.

Yes. Thank you all. And then actually this will cue the song, so.

Acho cool!

Cuz I don't need to drive a car, I get some money out of plastic car anyway. You wanna cross the bay, just make sure you don't stay too late. From Coma or Dublin to Millbrae or Orinda, San Bruno or Ashby to Concord or Daly City. My favourite transportation, no matter what your station, wherever I need to be, I take the YRT.