Redesigning Learning for the Next Generation of AEC Talent | Dan Hottinger and Kari Shonblom of BWBR

Hello and welcome to Smarter by Design. I'm your host, Christopher Parsons, Founder and CEO at Knowledge Architecture. And my guests today are Dan Hottinger, Principal and Director of Professional Services at bwbr, and Carrie Schonbloom, Knowledge Manager at bwbr. So our topic is redesigning learning for the next generation of AEC talent. And the reason I asked Dan and Kerry to join us on Smarter by Design is because I've been following their landmark learning training program for almost a decade. And it started back in 2016 as a way to help emerging professionals learn all the technical, you know, skills and issues that they're going to run into in practice. And the interesting thing I think about it is that Dan designed this program because he was doing a lot of QA and CA work, right, and saw the same issues, kept showing up again and again on drawings, and wanted to build a system that would systematically train that next generation to understand the kind of issues that they would run into and, and have the knowledge they need to avoid those issues kind of toward the end of the project. And so that program ran for, it has run for almost a decade. It started again in 2016 with recorded hour long sessions that were then posted to their intranet and they would run about 20 of them a year. And it's been really successful. They spoke about it at our conference in 2017 at K Connect and I wanted to revisit it now because I've been, you know, working with BWBR in AI search betas. They're in our learning management system beta, the LMS beta and BWBR along with everybody else that's kind of joined that LMS beta is thinking we need to rethink the way that learning and development works. We've got this new generation in the workforce. It's a Google generation or a YouTube generation, or maybe you'd even call them an AI generation to some extent. And they expect knowledge on demand, right? They want to be more self sufficient, they want shorter training sessions, they want faster access to that knowledge, you know, when they need it on the project, that they need it. And so it's raising a lot of questions about how learning should work now, coupled with the fact that we now have AI in our companies, you know, systems like synthesis, AI search, and in the future, as we add knowledge agents where people should be able to get more of that knowledge on demand and not have to necessarily go through a course to get it. So it raises a lot of questions about when do we do this kind of short on demand videos or searching Content, you know, in your knowledge system versus when does it still make sense to do live social learning? And that's. There's not a one right answer to that question. This is something that BWBR and many folks, you know, in our community are really wrestling with. And I think you get to see us kind of talk through a lot of the nuances of that, the contours of that, the pros and cons of that. In this episode, we also look at the way that there's even tighter feedbacks, feedback loops between QA construction, administration, and learning than there were in the beginning and how they've continued to evolve that program. So I love this conversation for all those reasons. Toward the end, we got somewhere really interesting, which I can't really think of us talking about too much, you know, in this community, which is what happens when the person who built the learning program, Dan, starts to move towards retirement. Right. It was their idea in the beginning. Obviously, they collaborated with other people, but they were the driving force on making this program happen. They're the thing that keeps it running. What happens when they leave? How do you keep this program running, evolving, thriving, without that person that started it there? So how do you do that? Critical knowledge transfer. So it's a very practical conversation about the future of learning at BWBR and writ large within the AEC industry, and I think you're going to enjoy it. So without further ado, Dan Hottinger, Kerry Schonbloom from BWBR on redesigning learning for the next generation of AEC talent. Here we go.

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Carrie and Dan, welcome to Smarter by Design.

Thank you for having us, Chris.

Hi. Thank you.

Big fan of both of yours. Big fan of bwbr. We've been working together for well over a decade at this point, and there are a lot of things I like about bwbr. We're going to touch on multiple of them today, but I want to start with Landmark learning, which has been really an interesting program, Dan, that you and your colleague Steph Trispas. Shout out Steph shared at K Connect 2017 I think it was. And it's been something that has stuck with anybody that saw that talk. It's been referenced a lot in our community, and I think just for people who don't know about it. Can you kind of go back to the beginning and tell us about landmark learning? What it is, how it got started, what it is today?

Yeah, well, it's really our program for bringing in and working with emerging professionals to really kind of teach them up and get them further along in their career faster as we go along. So the landmark learning session kind of was born out of a necessity to take a five year architect and make them a ten year architect quicker. How do you do that? You know, so the first thing you do is you really need to get buy in from leadership and then once you get that support, then just go. So over time we have really evolved the landmark learning session into a number of different things. But its core thing is always the teaching of the architectonics. Teaching of how to put a building together, teaching of how to work with clients and consultants and all of those, those things that often take years and years of experience to do. We want to bring in the experts and the nextperts to teach the people to do those sooner, quicker in their career and really get them to a point where they're comfortable doing it.

And so that's the target audience is five years or do you go even earlier than that in terms of experience?

We do emerging professionals all the way out to about five, six years in the career. But we also use it for people who join bwbr. You might be five years along in your career, maybe you're six, seven, eight years along in your career, but we still ask you to be within the landmark learning group because there's a lot of times that we talk about processes that we have at bwbr. We talk about how to coordinate with your specification writer, we talk about handing your project off to the construction administrator, what our quality assurance process is and what our expectations of you are as you're working on projects. So it's a larger group, but we do try to catch as many people as possible. Maybe a person who's been in their career for like eight years doesn't need to stay in there as long. But we do have a requirement. If you are 5 years or less in your career, you have to go to and watch a certain amount of videos per year.

So this is new to bwbr. New to the industry is kind of who we're talking about. Give me a sense of this. Is this something that happens weekly? Is this monthly? How many sessions per year? How many people in each session? How much of it's live versus you kind of mentioned video, how much of it's kind of on demand. How does that work out?

Sure. So we do about 18 a year, 16 to 18 a year, depending on schedules and weirdly enough, sometimes even where the holidays land. Right. But we do 16 to 18 a year now. We started with 22. We scaled back to about 16 to 18, mostly because we have a lot of recorded content now. They're all live. We do them via Zoom. We've asked if everybody wanted to go back to the live version. And from my own standpoint, I actually want to keep it in Zoom because we capture a much larger audience in person. We were getting about 22 to 24 people via Zoom. We're anywhere from 40 to 50 people during a session. So it's easier for people to access, it's easier for them to join in. So that's where we are right now. The recording aspect is we record every session and then we post it to our intranet site in case there's any interested parties out there that are not in the group but still might be interested in watching the video so that they have access to it as well. And it also helps the people who have been here for a while. Maybe they. Maybe they feel like the Landmark group is exclusionary, but this allows them to participate or be able to learn some of the items that maybe they didn't know as well.

We even had to go through an exercise where the group. The invite list was getting a bit too big. And this was just in the last year, had to cull it down. People sort of graduated out of it. But you still had several people reaching out and asking to stay on the list.

So what's the. Now that it's virtual, what's the downside of having the list be too big?

So if you are on the list, you are allowed a certain amount of hours per year to watch videos. Any back video that you want to.

Watch, put it on your time card.

And put it on your time card. Right. So we give everybody 24 hours to watch video or go to Landmark sessions. We feel that that is adequate. But, you know, when Carrie says we had to pare down the list a little, Chris we had like 160 people on it. Once you got on, you never got off. So we started thinking, is that even right? I mean, remember, we've been doing this for 10 years, so some of the people in the original group were still on there, and they're project managers now. They're not coming to them. So when you look at it and you say this person's moving towards being a principal this person is working as project manager. Maybe this person zigged in their career and they're writing specifications now. These are people that I want, they're more of the experts that I want teaching the course, not as much just coming to them. So we went through and started culling down the list a little bit. But Kerry's right, there were some people who were, even though they're project managers, they were upset about being taken off the list. So we.

Because they lost their ability to build those specific learning hours?

No, not so much. They just, they wanted to come to the session. You only get the invite if you're on the list.

Got it.

So when we, we let everybody know what we were going to, what we were doing, we didn't just drop people off the list, but we let them know that we were going to be taking people off the list. If you were one of those people, I sent everyone an email and saying, hey, just so you know, you're not going to be on the list anymore. There is an appeal process if you would like to send an appeal to remain on there. And we did get like 12 or 15 people I think that appealed it and wanted to stay on. So we let, we were, we just went, let's just keep them all.

I mean, that's interesting to me. It speaks to the fact that you're creating value or else they wouldn't have tried to stay on the list. And it's interesting to me that, you know, you could be further along in your career. Like you said, you kind of gone more a technical track or project management track and yet you're still going to stuff about door schedules and qa, QC and codes. Have you talked to them? I'm curious. They feel like I've got some holes in my knowledge and I just want to, you know, keep making sure that I'm continuously learning. What do you think the motivation is for keeping going to these intro level sessions?

I'll use an example. Susan Goldberg is one of the people who wanted to remain on the list. And Susan is a very accomplished project manager. She's really good at her job. Teams love working with her. But there are things that we talk about now, things like soft skills, how to deal with difficult people on your team or difficult people out in the field. And when she sent in her appeal, she said some of the stuff I don't go to, but the ones that I want to go to, I always learn something in them. And I think that that's very valuable to me in my career. Plus on top of that she also wanted to hear what her teams were hearing. And I think I even mentioned this in 2017. Oftentimes the teams will come to the project manager and say, well, in the landmark session we learned this, and they're like, oh, I didn't know that was a standard. So. So it helps them keep up with the standards as well.

And I will say, from attending these, without fail, there's always some great anecdotes from Dan. So you get like the rich storytelling and those more experienced people like Susan, oftentimes they will chime in with a real world experience or anecdote of their own just to kind of like pile on and say, like, here's a slightly different take on this or what I've seen. And I think that's super valuable. There's always some sort of discussion or questions, interjections that I think add value to it, make it a much richer experience and why people like to attend it live.

Is there a market there that you're missing for Susan now? And people like Susan who don't want all of the things, but some of the things. Do you think there's like an another program or like a more elevated version? I'm curious how you've responded to that.

I have some ideas. Dan. We didn't talk about this, but I.

Had a conversation, we should talk about it now.

Earlier today about like, the landmark is sort of targeted at a specific cohort, but the topics span a variety. And I just had this conversation earlier that there's sort of three different tracks. There's like the technical in terms of technology skills, there's the role specific technical skills, and then there's soft skills. And which audience needs those tends to change, but we're trying to lean more into softer skills. We're finding that with like AI and searchability and like stuff is so much easier to find. How do I do this technical thing in Revit, it's easier to find that stuff. And I feel like from what I've seen in emerging professionals, they need a lot more coaching on the software skills. How to just call up somebody on the phone and ask a question, how to be more direct with people and like build relationships and things like that. So I think with the content shifting more towards stuff that's applicable to a broader audience, it's got wider appeal. That's my 2 cents.

Yeah. I mean, this year we did a lot of soft skills. Carrie came in and did a fantastic session on difficult conversations. And when we got through that one, I watched it. I was part of it at the end. And I thought, this is going to be perfect. We should do this for the project managers. So we took it into the project management group and we did it in there. So we're trying to take the ones that might have more mass appeal and trying to tailor those into some of the other groups as well. Because it's not just. It's not just one group that should hear it, it should be a lot of other groups. So the ones that do have a crossover market, I guess that you would say, if we're in radio land, the ones that have a cross market, we're trying to bring those forward and do them again with a smaller group. Sometimes they're shorter, you know, sometimes we expand upon them. But either way, especially in the soft skills, it's something that everybody can work on.

Yeah. What was nice about that one in particular is we tailored the examples of what difficult conversations might look like for an emerging professional versus a project manager. So it was kind of nice to be able to take it on a little road show to a different audience and make the content match what they needed.

Yeah, that's great. I wanted to ask you about this. So it used to be 22, and then it became 16 a year. And one of the things you said, Dan, was one of the reasons we felt we could do less is that we have such a rich library of recorded sessions. And so I'm curious about that. So if you're somebody going through the Landmark program, and as an aside, I think it's called Landmark Learning because that's the room where they used to be taught. Is that true? Okay. Just in case people are wondering. So, okay, so if I'm part of this, this group, I'm on the list for 20, 26. I'm going to have 16 live sessions. Is that curriculum that goes into the video is that you can also go watch more if you want, with your time. Or you're like, you're going to go to 16 live sessions. And then you should also definitely see these four. These seven. Is that kind of like a hybrid curriculum? I think is where I'm trying to get at.

I would say it's more of a hybrid curriculum. We do record the sessions. There isn't follow on stuff as much as there is follow on on our Beehive site, where we say, hey, we have a video, we're going to post it. And then anybody within the firm can watch it off of that link. But curated wise, the videos that we have, I mean, Chris, like I said before, we've Been doing this for 10 years. This year I'm going to hit 200 episodes. So I was joking around one time that don't I get syndication rates after a hundred?

You know, but it's a million dollars an episode. Just like Within Friends.

Yeah, apparently not. But the thing is, one of the things that I have discovered through Carrie is just the fact that when we're trying to curate these and we're as we are starting to move towards how do we fold the AI into it. Right. Is. Oh, my gosh, we have like four sessions on door hardware. And the problem is, is door hardware continually pops up as one of the problems in our tracking. And so we think, okay, let's pull it out, dust it off. There's got to be a different way to do this to make it better and stick more. So we do it again, and then a couple of years later, we do it again. But now for those 200 videos of door hardware, if a person is coming in as an emerging professional, they've never done door hardware. Which one should they watch? So trying to again cull the herd of all of those videos because our quality assurance standards are morphing with the times and with the different aspects that we do. So we pull it out, we dust it off, we do a presentation on that. And now I've got four or five quality assurance process videos. So trying to make sure that we have the most relevant stuff in there is a big part of the curation. And the uncontrollable part, as I look at it, is how do I ensure that the person who Carrie is working with an emerging professional and that emerging professional is working on an X ray room and they don't know anything about X ray rooms? How do I know that when they say, hey, go watch this landmark video on X ray rooms, that they're getting the most current one?

Right.

That's one of the struggles that we have right now is how do we make sure that everybody's looking at the most relevant thing that we have.

Yeah, Carol. So take us into that. In some cases, when we talk to AEC firms, the challenge is we don't have enough knowledge and we need to start capturing it. And yours is. In some areas, we may have too much. It's an abundance problem. And like, how do we get to the most relevant. There are probably still knowledge gaps that you're trying to fill, I would guess as well. But how are you thinking about that problem that Dan articulated?

Yes. When I inherited our intranet, the page for landmark learning, it was just One running long, long, long list. It was a table and the most recent videos were at the top. It had the session number, it had a description, it had a link to the video and a link to the PDF. And I think just by the nature of the structure of that, people were not scrolling all the way down to the bottom because we didn't have the AI search, we didn't have some of the stuff that has surfaced recently to make stuff more findable. So people were going to the landmark learning page and sort of sticking near the top until they found what they were looking for. Now because we have AI search in synthesis, it's surfacing every little thing that we've ever posted about, like door to hardware, for example. So somebody doesn't know which one is the correct one. So going forward, digital hygiene is top of mind for me that we need to be going back and making sure that we're cleaning up stuff. If we're updating something, let's scrub old outdated content. So that's on me if I need to know what people want to produce. And then I'm doing some searching on the back end to find what do we have already. Another big thing that's top of mind as we're looking ahead to LMS is how are we categorizing all of these 200 sessions? Because it was just sort of like these are the recent issues that we've seen. So therefore this is the recent curriculum that we've developed. But if we're making this more accessible to people to be an off the shelf resource and trying to build like, I would love to go back to some of the old sessions that are still relevant and instead of asking somebody to sit down and watch an hour video, which we know nowadays is a huge ask, let's run the transcript through some AI. Let's get some useful bullet points and like a cheat sheet kind of thing that somebody could quickly reference instead of having to jump to a chapter and rewatch, I think having better ways to categorize this so people can explore and find things that they maybe didn't know what to search for, if that makes sense.

When did you guys start the landmark learning program? What year?

February. A third week of February of 2016.

2016. So you're almost at a decade.

Yeah.

When you got started, my memory tells me that the thing was, Dan, your title, I think at the time was Director of Quality Assurance or something in that neighborhood, yes.

Oh my goodness. What was my title back then? It did not have Director in it.

Okay.

But yeah, it Was it was a manager, A professional or manager of quality assurance.

Manager of quality assurance. So my recollection of the story is you were spending time with the CA team and they were seeing the same issues show up over and over and over again in drawings. And that led to landmark learning and that drove the kind of curriculum as you were developing it. Now that we're almost a decade in, is that still the mechanism that's like, here's what we're going to teach in 2026. It's I'm going to CA and spending time with teams and figuring out where the issues are. Or has that kind of method of topic identification changed at all in that, in that run?

I would say it's changed in that it's morphing. We're trying to make sure we have feedback loops. So, you know, I can go to the construction administrators and ask them what's going on. And we do. So as a matter of fact, we just got done with our. We call it the CA grading. So to keep it simple for that group, I just ask them to give us a letter grade. You know, give us a letter grade on how we're doing. And we track 16 categories. And then we always have one extra question in there. This year, our question is, how are our teams doing in handing off projects to ca? Give them a letter grade. Now, the reason I do that is because when I go and report out to the firm on how we're all doing in our annual report, I like to use that question as a segue into something. So we had already identified that this was problematic. So we are generating and putting together a checklist for handing off a project to the construction administrator. So I'm going to talk about it and say, this is the reason why we're doing it. We're getting a C in this. So we created this checklist to help you teams do this.

You were getting a C in handoff from the CA team.

So they're ranging from D plus to.

C. Did they give you more qualitative feedback? They're like, this part's working well. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So in there they can also put commentary in. So it's always nice to go in and do the annual. Within the BWBR forum, which is our noon time thing, I go in there and we go through all the 16 categories and I throw in some of the more interesting comments in there, good or bad. If we're doing really well, I want everybody to know where we're doing well. But if we're failing somewhere or not doing as well. I want to have that going on. It's actually a relatively popular session. People like to go to it. And, you know, in there we also give the opportunity for any CA person who was in attendance to expound a little bit on why they said that or talk about it a little bit more as well. Now, to create the loop, though, you have to be able to check that against something. So within our vantage point system, we have quality assurance tracking. Now we ask our quality assurance reviewers to grade the exact 16 categories. Our mechanical electrical coordination. Good. And we track that data. It gives us a number of different things.

Same questions for all projects.

Same questions for all projects. But for the quality assurance, we also are allowed to track other things, like how many sheets came in, how long did it take? So we have questions all the time that come to us and say, well, how much time should I schedule for a quality assurance review? Well, I can tell you right now that if you have a CD set, you need 18 minutes per sheet. And that's based on the data that we have that we can tell you how much time you need in there. But in addition to that, we can also track. And I can tell you which of our consultants are good and which of them are bad. And we let our consultants know that we're tracking their performance. And the ones that maybe are underperforming, they get a phone call from me, and we talk about it and we say, why?

And is that based on feedback from the CA team or is that from the project teams as well?

Both the CA team and the quality assurance, I mean, it's where the rubber meets the road, right? When they send drawings over, if these drawings are trash, you can see that if they're consistently behind us. And so I oftentimes have principals come to me and say, hey, I've got these three proposals for these three mechanical electrical firms. Which one is best? I can tell them, so we can cut it by market. So maybe it's healthcare, maybe it's S and T, maybe it's higher ed. But some firms are better at the things than others. So I can tell them which ones are the highest rated in the market that they're looking at. So we track all of that to make sure that we're giving the best data to the principals to make educated decisions when they're selecting their consultants as well.

So when you said there's kind of like a feedback loop, that's partly the CA team kind of grading the delivery of the. Of the CDs, essentially. And then that is Informing what you're going to teach the next year because you're wanting to like level those scores up.

Yeah. So the quality assurance scores that are in the same categories, you can compare them against each other. And it's amazing when you do the CA grading and you're looking for comments, it's kind of shocking how many of the CA people have the same grades and very similar comments. And then when you get to qa, again, very similar. They track the same. And then we also incorporated proposal request tracking. So what are we changing out in the field? What are we issuing change orders for? So we have those again in the same 16 categories. So that you can see, okay, here, here's right before we issued. What was the problem out in the field being built? What was the problem? What are we changing in the field? So we have these three items that you can compare against each other. And when you compare that data, there are things that come to the top all the time. So that is what we're using to inform, you know, what we're going to be talking about. So when we're talking about a process and especially how to put a building together, that's where a lot of that content comes from. We also have a workshop every year and we simply ask everybody who is in there, what do you want to learn about? You know, that's where we came up with a lot of the soft skills. For this year's last year's workshop, people wanted to learn about soft skills. They wanted to know, how do I have that difficult conversation with a consultant, with a coworker, with, you know, something like that, how do I make rough decisions, how do I do all these things? So we said, okay, let's lean into that and start teaching those subjects as well. So there's the data, there's what do you want to learn about? But also there are things that we go backwards and say we need to pull this out, dust it off and do it over again. So we have those three kind of categories that inform what we're going to be working on.

Yeah, Carrie, I'm glad we were talking about it over a 10 year span because that gives us some opportunity to learn from that. And Carrie, I'm thinking about there's the individual learning of those emerging professionals, but then there is BWBR learning as an organization. And so I'm curious if you think about some of those 16 categories over 10 years. One would hope that it's different things now than it was 10 years ago because that means the landmark program was learning. Although you have new people moving through bwbr. So for BWBR to learn something that's never a finished problem because you constantly have new people joining the organization or emerging professionals. So I'm just curious, do you spend time on the kind of measuring is the landmark program creating better learning outcomes or not? How does that come together?

I have thoughts on this. I'm going to, I'm going to ramble. You may need to edit this.

Fair enough.

One you hit on. Yes. We're always going to have this problem of emerging professionals who have never done this before. So regardless where they're coming from, this is brand new information. They're going to need to know it. They're obviously probably going to make mistakes as they're learning. So some of this, yes, they have to go through this. I keep thinking can we instead of it needing to be so time intensive with like re hosting these live sessions with the same content with the LMS coming online, can we make this more off the shelf learning for certain things that learners could do some of this on their own. They get assigned the top 10 things that they need to know fresh out of school and then we pair that with maybe some live sessions, some interactive stuff to help it make it sticky. That's the thing that I always concerned about like with the door hardware issue. Like obviously we've had multiple sessions about this. It is findable on our synthesis but people aren't knowing to search it out. So how do we make it?

But it's not assigned right. Currently in the state. So it's like if somebody decides to go look for door hardware they can learn about it.

But Right. They would have to know to go look for it. They would have to know that this is a gap in my knowledge which none of us have. Right. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you're supposed to search. And Dan already said it happens every couple of years when he starts to notice that we're slipping a little bit more and we need some sort of refresher. But that seems like something that could be like a foundational thing that you just need to learn that it doesn't necessarily need to come up in a live session. We can make the live sessions more interactive and we've heard that from a couple of folks. They don't necessarily like to be sit and lectured at. They want to be doing more hands on learning and trying to figure out ways to do that. Trying to make something like door hardware very exciting.

Let's stay with door hardware and making it exciting. Because I think there's probably. And I might have that right example. So Dan or Carrie maybe can give me a better one. But let's imagine door hardware is something that you don't need to be in a live course. Like, you can absorb the material. It's pretty cut and dry. This is how you do it. I feel relatively confident saying difficult conversations probably benefits from some discussion, right? That one, like, yes, maybe there is something that you could watch in advance of a live discussion. But like, you're going to want to go through reps or role playing or like some kind of scenarios or somebody telling stories about those difficult conversations. So are there topics like, if you can, basically, if you want to. I don't know what it means to graduate out of landmark learning, but as you move through the sequence, like, door hardware is fine. We just. You can take that on demand. Maybe that never needs attention. That's a way to kind of get after some of those perennial topics that come up all the time. We always know a new person's not going to have done this before we know this. So are you going to move to more of, I guess, a curriculum, do you think that is? Dan's nodding his head yes. So you can just take it. I think you know where I'm heading.

So I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. Carrie and I have talked about this before at the leadership level. One of the things we've talked about is are there like 10 or 12 sessions that are just. When you start a BWBR, you're just assigned. Right. You know, you're just going to do these. So Carrie and I talked about how awesome it would be to have AI with a quiz so that we know that people are going through and maybe the. Well, first of all, it's. Oh, my gosh, which 12 sessions would you use? You know, so it's trying to pare down and you know, when you talk to our building technology and standards and QA group, they'll be like, oh, we could never do less than 20. It's like, guys, are you serious? You want us to assign 20 videos to everybody who starts here? So it's trying to figure out, where is that happy medium? How do you structure it with a quiz it at the end so they can get credit for having watched it? And then, yeah, absolutely, Chris. I don't want to do door hardware every year. I don't want to do QA every single time we update at one little topic. It would be nice to just have those in the can Somewhere where everybody who comes in gets those. And we know that we can keep track of, hey, did you get through your. You know, it's just part of the onboarding type of thing.

We've also had discussions about trying to systematize this more. Dan is a master at feedback loops and making sure that the right people are paying attention to the right things. You asked the question about how to know whether somebody is sort of absorbing the landmark learning stuff. Is it making a difference? And I think it comes up in annual reviews. And he's talking to the project managers, trying to understand how is the team doing, who's struggling, who can you give a task to and know that they're going to accomplish it without needing extra support. I think that stuff becomes pretty visible pretty quickly. I heard somebody make a comment that somebody's been watching these landmark learnings. They can't architect their way out of a paper bag.

The measure is not, I completed the course of success.

Right, Right. It's. It's how they're showing up. You can't fake knowing something. Right. You can't fake your way through every task. So either you're absorbing it and you're applying the skills or you're not.

I think what you said is interesting there because Dan, like the was it building instructors group, it's a building something group that you said.

Building technology and Standards group.

Building Technology and standards. They have 20 things that they think everyone should know. But I would guess that depending on what phase you are in in a project, you would need some of that more than others. Like, if you're in schematic design, do you need door hardware? Probably not. But if you took it, you never get to apply it on a project. So what's the likelihood that you're going to retain any of the thing that you watch? And I'm thinking, I don't know, Carrie, we've had some conversations about this, but, like, I kind of look at the future of the learning and development, kind of like air traffic control. And you're trying to route the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. And you guys have all these knowledge assets and all these people that are in different phases of their career, different phases of specific projects. And how do you land the plane on the right Runway? Right.

Yeah. And as you know, our Project Life Cycle work, I keep thinking to this as a way for us to potentially insert some of these trainings along that Project Life Cycle. So it could pop up as a suggestion to folks. If you already know it, you're Experienced you can ignore this stuff. If you're less experienced, you can say I'm at this point on this type of project. What are the things that I should have done or questions I should ask the client by now? Things like that. Just a more robust checklist if you will. Not that somebody needs to actually check items off of it, but just a reminder, make sure you have done these things because I feel like I'm seeing that a lot more. Dan, I don't know if you are with emerging professionals they want to be more self sufficient. They want to just go search, find the answer, do the task. They don't necessarily want to have to stop and have a long conversation about it with somebody or a lot of them might be too scared to go talk to people or it's just not their style. For whatever reason, some of them want to just be more independent.

It's a very different work styles now. Especially in the emerging professional group that we have now. There is a lot of I want to be able to pick up my phone and Google it. You know, you had mentioned that earlier, I could just search it on the phone and AI will come up with 10 different answers. And knowing what's good and what's bad is the struggle. But yeah, just having people do face to face discussions is sometimes difficult to do. I like to walk around the office and simply just walk up to people and ask them, hey, you struggling with anything? What are you working on right now? You know, things like that. Just see if I can get a feel for how they feel like they're doing. But I do project manager one on one. So every project manager meets with me once a month and I ask them directly, how is your team doing? Do you have anybody that's struggling there? Anybody that could use some help or some things like that. And we try to address that on a person by person basis if we have to. I mean Chris, what we're really trying to do is make people succeed. And rather than just saying go figure it out, we're here to help you figure it out.

Yes, yes, absolutely. I'm curious from that kind of perspective. Carrie, if you've. Well, Kerry or Dan, I know Carrie, you've spent more time on it, so that's why I'm leaning in your direction. Landmark learning historically hour long recorded thing, it was a recorded live thing. It later became a recorded zoom or teams thing. A lot of people in our community are moving towards. Well, maybe it's not an hour long recorded thing. Maybe it's an on demand native thing that's 15 minutes. Maybe that's all it really takes to get to the essence of door hardware. Is that something you all are talking about experimenting with at all within the company?

Yes. Yes. I. I'm waiting for Dave.

I don't know. You're waiting? Yeah, so I. Yeah. So I was talking to Carrie one day and my son is in his early 20s and his whole life is five minute videos on YouTube. And we went to a Renaissance festival. He's watching a glassblower and he's explaining to me glass blowing. And I turned to him, I'm like, how do you know about glassblowing? I watched it on YouTube, you know, so he's watching these five minute videos and I was telling Carrie about this and I was like, maybe we should just do like call them landmark shorts. And we just do five to eight minute videos on very small topics. And that way, as part of the AI search, a person can just grab those shorts and start watching those for just the specific thing that they want to know about, rather than having to wade through 15, 20, 30 minutes, the video to find it. So that's one of the things that we have in the hopper, so to.

Speak, for development right now, is that you take something that was an hour and instead of it being an hour, it's now six, five to eight minute shorts, or are they like literally standalone topics that can be covered in five to eight minutes and it's just a very short course that's like a different modality or do those courses maybe get stitched together into like a learning path or something? Like how. How are you thinking about that?

I think we're open to where the content's going to take us. I have a meeting scheduled with somebody, an expert next week where I'm just going to sit down for an hour. This person has very rich and robust history and stories to share. And I set this up saying, I just want to understand how you approach this one specific topic. All of the mental processing that you do, let's try to suss that out, let's tease it out, let's document this for the sake of somebody else. The things that you would tell them if they came to you and asked you questions. I'm just going to sit and interview you on zoom. I don't know if we're going to wind up with short videos. That's one topic. It's self contained. If it's going to be a series of things, maybe the result is some sort of checklist or something. So it's not a video at all. It's something that we can just say, hey, at this point, or if you're having this type of meeting, cover these five things, ask these five questions. I'm not quite sure yet what the result will be, but I think we're open to both. It could be freestanding or little chunks that you can string together. So like this is part one, part two, part three, etc.

It seems like what I think you're hinting at is kind of a platform shift in that when you went from having live courses that were recorded to like zoom courses recorded, like, the format didn't really change that much. It was more the technology and the ability to reach more people. Where in this moment it sounds like instead of an incremental upgrade, this is like kind of a rethink of the way that you're delivering the technical learning to folks. It might assessing that correctly.

I think so, yeah.

And I mean, for the time being, is it a combination of the two? And are we producing shorts and putting them on our Beehive site? But we're also doing the live sessions for the longer, more complicated, deeper dives into things. So time will tell, I guess. But one of the things that I've always tried to keep in mind is we have to be nimble, not only to the people who are coming into the program, but the better ways of doing things to what we're teaching type of thing. Nobody wants to hear the same 16 things every year.

No.

So making sure that we are always staying out on the edge of what they need and making sure that the style of learning is fitting the group that we're trying to teach.

And I think there's always going to be a place for the longer format stuff because that's where you can have the discussion. That's where Dan or others with a lot of experience can share some real stories that I think are super impactful. If we go back to that door hardware, because we just. I sent us down this rabbit hole the other day. I was like, this seems like a problem that can be solved. Why are we still having an issue with this? And he showed a picture that was from a presentation where he shows this at the end of the presentation. And it's the most complicated door I've ever seen. There's conduits running to it, there's buttons all over the place. It looks like it's going to send you to outer space. And he's talking about all of the questions that you get to ask, like what happens when you open it? Does it Notify someone. When you swipe a key card, does it also turn on the lights? Does it like notify somebody in security? Like all of these things that somebody may or may not think about when they're just throwing in a door. It's got the swing direction they're going based off of a code. You know, it needs to have these things. But they haven't asked these other additional.

Not all doors are created equal.

Exactly right. Definitely not.

Okay, let's stick with door. Door hardware is going to be the name of the episode. Door hardware with Carrie and Dan. It's not. Um, okay, so there's four, let's call it four recordings over the 10 year run on door hardware. Four hours of content. You're kind of figuring out, well, what's the modern way to teach people about door hardware? At bwvr, one of the topics we talk a lot about beyond learning is unlearning. So there may be stuff in maybe some of the older ones that are no longer true codes. Not the best practice. Do you imagine that those recordings from 201719 may just go away and get combined into one gold standard that you continue to update? How are you thinking about kind of like unlearning in addition to the learning piece?

Well, you know, for. I'm going to change the topic, but let's say mechanical engineering and plumbing coordination, we've done that three times too. So it's an, it's an area that we consistently struggle with. And the thing is, when we were going through the 200 videos and I had mentioned to Carrie, oh my gosh, I didn't know that we had somebody in there. But Gary provided me with essentially a trash bin which is drag and drop these ones into the ones that we don't ever want to see again. So I went through and I dumped all of the ones that were too old that I didn't want people watching so that when we come back on, we have the most relevant ones in there. So it's, it's like we were talking about earlier. If I could go back in time and do things over again, I think I would have spent more time curating the content that we had to make sure that Carrie didn't inherit this long list. I mean, Chris, there are so many times I've had people come into a meeting and say, gosh, wouldn't it be great in the landmark if we did a subject like this? And I say, and I go, we did, we did. And then I would try in the meeting to go to that page on the beehive Carrie and I would start paging through it. I'm trying to find it, right. And I always like to use these fun little titles, right. Trash enclosures. I called Trash and Treasures, you know, but if you don't know what that means, then you don't know what to look for. So if I tell you, yeah, Chris, go find the one on trash enclosures. There's not one that says trash enclosures.

I think one of my favorites was me, myself and I small projects.

Right?

Yeah, so.

So, you know, maybe I should have been a little bit better in the naming conventions as well. But it made me realize that if I can't find it, then the person who needs to find it can't find it either. So this is one of the things that I think over the next year we're going to work very hard on to get the curation up to speed and much better and much more accessible and findable and everything for the people who need it.

And this is why we're trying to retroactively go back and add some metadata, some abilities to filter and categorize this content from. Maybe it's a project type, specific. Is it a specific part of the process, a specific technology, whatever the case might be, so people could explore a bit easier. Because right now you sort of have to know very pointedly what you're searching for. Have somebody recommend it to you so you know that it exists and you can go find it. Versus I am curious about this thing. I don't know what's out there. I don't know who to ask. I just want to see what's available to me. And we have had some emerging professionals dig into it that way. We had somebody, I think I gave you the anecdote that somebody said internally that they were emerging professional, was talking to some other classmates and they were like, how do you know all this stuff? And he was like, oh, we have this great thing at my firm on our intranet. It's sort of like our own personal YouTube where there's all these videos that I can go watch about how to do all these things. And he found it super helpful to just sort of explore on his own. But that took a lot of initiative by that individual. It wasn't necessarily curated and presented in a way that offered that exploration.

And not all individuals are gonna go pursue at that level of self direction. So it sounds like at a high level there's some curation happening. And then, Carrie, I think what I'm inferring from what you're saying is, and Then when stuff does make it into synthesis, lms, additional descriptions and custom fields and metadata to help make it more discoverable, potentially some of that stuff then gets put into some of these. I don't know if you're gonna call it foundations or essentials or figured out what your language is, but something that all new BWBR people should go through over time. And then you're going to need some that can be delivered depending on what type of project or what phase of project you're in. And then you're exploring BWBR shorts. Do I have this right? This sounds like this is your world right now. Is there anything big I missed?

When you put it to us that way though, it sounds kind of overwhelming. So no, I mean I think you're right on there. I think we've done a great job of putting together content. We've done an okay job at putting in a place that's accessible to everybody. And I almost feel like I should write down BWBR foundations or BWBR essentials for that. For that quick those quick 12. Do you have it? Okay, I was like. Because otherwise I feel like I'm. Tomorrow I'm going to ask Carrie, what was that? What did Chris call that?

Well, this will be available on YouTube. I think there's also to me a question about like what happens with the people that have been at BWBR for longer and or have more than five years of experience. Like it sounds like the most acute problem is emerging professionals. That's why you've put so much time into it. Is it fair to say that like there's not as much need and that's therefore you haven't spent it there? Or have we just not talked about the learning development program for that other audience within bwbr?

We have a lot of other stuff that I think this has been a catalyst for and the inspiration for others. We've got other now up upskilling programs for specific market sectors. So if somebody is new to healthcare, new to behavioral health, there's a series of upskilling videos that walk you through the project type and some of the common things that you'll see in that project type. One thing that's sort of top of mind for me is thinking through. We've got a couple of potential cohorts that we could do something similar to this emerging professional group. But the one sort of in the mid level, how do you start to prep folks for leadership roles? Is something that we've talked about and that's a lot of soft skills yes, you need to know your way inside and out of the technical role to be able to mentor others in that role. But there's a lot of new soft skills that you don't necessarily learn. So how can we be more intentional about that? And then once you're in that leadership role, I've heard some anecdotal feedback that there needs to be more self awareness because you still need to learn and practice your skills in terms of communication and directing folks and mentoring folks. Once you are in the leader roles, one is helping you understand the business and how the business works and the new things that you would be privy to and responsible for if you become a leader. And then that continued like development, how do you really start to get the most out of your teams? How are you continuing to develop in that role?

There's a book that you might like, if you haven't already read it, called the Leadership Pipeline, which I've heard about from multiple companies in our community. And it kind of is exactly that. It goes through these kind of predictable turns from being an individual contributor to managing a team, to managing a market. It's not AEC specific, but it's very, it's professional services specific. And it kind of talks about all these like almost changes of identity you have to have as a person at all these different forks in the road, you know, that you go through. He's written a new book that I've just finished called the Specialist Pipeline, which kind of takes that a little bit further. And it's like people that go down a technical contributor route. And how do you create the right career opportunities for people that want to specialize in ambulatory care or whatever. The thing is, how do you set up an organization that can let people specialize in a really effective way? So good stuff there.

I'd be interested in reading that. You should send that over after this.

Will do. We'll put it in the show notes too.

All right, thank you.

But sort of the converse of that specialist I keep thinking about. Maybe I'm jumping ahead to one of your future questions, but this program, living on past Dan's retirement, let's say he wins the lottery tomorrow and he's like, see you later. Yeah, I'm off to travel the world. I feel like so much of the success of this program is because of who Dan is as an individual. Like I said, he's a master at getting feedback from folks. He's very self aware and very willing to take commentary on what he can do differently. I think you genuinely, Dan, want To show up and be the best for your team and support your team and help people succeed. And you made a comment the other day about how you, because of recessions and things that you lived through, you wanted to make yourself the Swiss army knife. You wanted to experience everything and be able to be useful in every area of the business. And I feel like we don't have as much opportunity for an individual to do that now.

People have to hyper specialize more, is your thinking or that or.

Yeah, it's just a harder jump, especially as we get bigger. Right. Maybe you had the advantage of doing this stuff when the firm was a bit smaller, so there was more flexibility to sort of like, wear different hats. But I keep thinking about especially the way we're organized down. Like somebody comes up through an architecture track. If they want to switch and become a project manager, they're jumping to a whole nother track. There needs to be, obviously, the need within the firm, but it feels more formal of a jump. And if they want CA experience, like, we have a dedicated CA team. So how does an individual start to get some exposure to some of that stuff? I don't have an answer for it, but I'm thinking, how do we find more people like Dan that maybe we don't need a bunch of Swiss army knives to do our project work, but we definitely need somebody like Dan who can lead something like this because he's so good at weeding through what doesn't matter to get to what does matter. He cuts out all the clutter really well and he hears what people are saying. He's like, oh, I see what the problem is. The problem is here we're going to do some training on this or we need a new process improvement here. There's got to be a better way to do this. And I feel like that's such a unique thing that I'm trying to figure out how to bottle that or replicate that.

Because you've got two challenges with replacing Super Dan. One, there's the skills and systems and knowledge and processes he has. But as have watched Dan now for almost a decade, it's also care. And that's the one that, like, seems harder. Like, I've seen that Dan, like, it's harder to tell somebody to care more or make them care about this thing. And so, like, finding people who can both do the thing, but then also have that, like, thing in their gut that makes them want to do it, even when there's resistance and there's obstacles and deadlines and all those kind of things. Like that. That seems like that's going to be part of the challenge too.

Yeah. And I think back in 2017, one of the questions was, is how do you find the time to do all. And my response was, it has to be a passion project. You have to care about what's going on and where everything is going and where people's careers are going. And it's important to me to be able to have that kind of. I know that everybody's in good hands. We have always been a firm where we do a lot of. In the NFL, they call it draft and develop, and we have found a lot of success in that.

And by that, I think what you're trying to say is you try and get people out of school and grow them at BWBR versus trying to poach a 20 year person from another firm.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah. I think we've had a lot more success doing that. And 2022 and 2023 kind of demonstrated that to me very clearly in that sometimes we had to back up. And your reference earlier, unlearn some bad habits from firms, people who had been at another firm.

So I've done project management this way at my old firm. And they're like, cool, but yeah.

And pause. For the sake of the podcast. He's saying 22, 23. Because we onboarded a significant number of staff.

Yes, yes. Thank you for getting that context. So you ran that experiment that prove that you like draft and develop.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah. And I think I've mentioned that to Carrie. I think we're way better served to bring people out of school, teach them how to do the job the way that we would like to see it done, and clients serve the way we would like to see them taken care of, and buildings built in a manner that we would like to see in.

The field, which is interesting because it goes back to landmark learning and why it's been so important to you. So if the philosophy of the company is draft and developed, well, man, getting those first five years right, really important.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And we are, from what I've seen, we're a pretty rigorous firm. Not that we're necessarily rigid, but we have a lot of process in place and it's for the sake of not having to reinvent that every time. If you just know what's expected of you, you can just go and do it. And I think Dan sort of glossed over this, but I feel like part of the secret sauce of landmark learning is the robust QA process that he put in place to Support that. And I just asked him the other day what came first, the landmark learning or the QA process. And he said landmark learning came first, but he needed a way to prove that it was working. So he was getting feedback from qa ca, now we're doing PR requests, getting these grades, but he needed the QA process to have these defined checkpoints to say we are absolutely doing a QA review at this point so we can see where the project is. Find these issues earlier on and we make people sign off on these checkpoints to enforce that they're happening. And again, that feels like it was so successful because of the person that put it in place. Like you were able to get the accountability of folks to actually do this. And I think it's because you've done a lot of hand holding for what I've seen. You check in with people individually, you always have a story about why this is important. That's something I think about a lot. If somebody were to start their own program like this, it seems a bit daunting because even just mentioning so casually, yeah, we're tracking all this stuff in vantage point. If somebody's not already doing that, the immediate pushback, I don't want to do all that data entry. Who's going to do that? We were lucky enough to have a person in place to configure the technology so that it had the fields and the views that people wanted to see to make that as easy as it could be. And then you were able to get the CA team on board because CA team and QA team, because they're the ones doing a lot of this data entry stuff. But I think you've been able to prove that there's value to the team because now people are scheduling the appropriate amount of time for a QA review. They're not getting backed up and backlogged. And it helps to project staffing for the QA team, things like that. You've been able to very clearly draw the line to the value long term.

Yeah. And I do want to clarify for people watching though, we've had a QA process for a very long time.

It's 100 year plus firm. I would certainly hope so.

But the modern, the modern formalized quality assurance program is what Carrie is discussing. Carrie, I also appreciate the fact that you didn't use the term flit about. Dan likes to flit about, which he brought up in a meeting one time.

I have this way of trying to give Dan a compliment and I say it in just the wrong way when he's in the office. Office. He's very intentional about walking around. And I see him stopping at people's desks just to catch up, see what they're working on. And he's done that to me a few times where some spontaneous opportunities came about from these conversations. So I view Dan sort of as this, like, pollinator of knowledge and building relationships. And because I view him sort of as a pollinator, I was like, oh, yeah, he's sort of like a. Like a butterfly or something, like, flittering about the office, just like sprinkling good conversations and building morale and all of these great things. And I. He just hung onto that.

Flittering about this, this thing you're talking about is my dad's favorite management lesson. He always used to talk about, well, my favorite practice is management by walking around. That's what he called it, you know, and like, just. He's like, that's the best way to take the pulse. You can, you know, see what people are doing. You're not waiting for something scheduled. And it sounds like you can call it flittering around. You can call it management by walking around.

Whatever it is, yours is a lot better, more fun.

But once you've named it, I mean, this is. We're really kind of dancing around with Dan a little bit is critical knowledge transfer. Dan has a set of very valuable skills that have made this machine go. And not all. All of us will not work at our companies forever. And so, like, how does the machine have any chance to keep going of maybe even not getting better as the company goes on? And you're putting your finger, at least from you've observed, is a key ingredient is the management by walking around. So maybe as you start looking for replacement, like that's a key thing like that you can figure that's out. And maybe Dan doesn't know that. Right. You can see that because you're observing Dan as a outside person. These systems, like, obviously the stuff is in Deltec. That's good. I'm glad it's not in Dan's notebook. It's actually in a formalized system. But, like, then there's still the culture of BWBR that like, has the people actually do the things. Like you can be in Delta and nothing can happen happen. So it's actually to make it happen. And Dan's kind of, like, ability to make sure that the machine keeps turning. Yeah, it's an interesting. It's an interesting problem to solve. I hope you don't retire anytime soon, Dan. I want to See what you do with the through this, the kind of like replatforming of the learning. Because I'm interested to see your kind of like lens on all these new opportunities and see how that plays out. That's been being selfish, though I will.

Admit I selfishly want him to stay forever too. Because you mentioned the KA Connect. I was in the audience. I didn't work with Dan.

That's right.

That was my first year at KA Connect. I didn't even know Steph at the time Steph and Dan were co presenting. I just knew, hey, this is a firm that's in the same region as me, in the same cities. I should get to know these people. And they presented and I was like, oh my gosh, they're doing such awesome stuff. And Dan said a line on stage, we don't have 20 years to train the 20 year architect anymore because you can't just learn from experience. You have to accelerate that. And that stuck with me. I think that's why that talk has had staying power. So I've been like a fan girl.

I may have said that 500 times since that talk in my career, like over and over and over again.

Yeah, I like emailed that to everyone. Like when I came back to my other firm, I was like, this is. We gotta be doing stuff like this. Like I said, it can be very hard and very daunting if you don't have that personality. Because you can't just say, we're gonna be doing some data tracking. We're going to be hosting these sessions. If you don't have the passion behind it to like orchestrate and bring it all together.

Dan, if you were to give that same quote today, my sense in everything I'm watching in our community is that that problem is even more acute than it was when you said it. Buildings have gotten more complicated, technology's moving faster. People are having to do things earlier in their career than they ever have. There are less Gen Xers than there were boomers. And so demographically we need millennials and Gen Z to step up sooner. Do you feel that that's true in what you're seeing? Like you have to go even faster, deeper with them than you did in 2017?

Yeah, I mean, it's a very different learning style. Like we had mentioned before, you know, the video format versus going over and talking to somebody and things like that. It's a two direction teaching path that's kind of turned into. Chris, I need to talk to the people, the senior PAs and the project managers and and talk them through what they have to do to. You know, I like to use the Jerry Maguire line. Right. Help me help you. Okay. These are the things that you need to do with your emerging professional group. They're not going to call you. Okay. Give them feedback, direct feedback directly to them. Walk them through these things. Be very granular in your approach to it. You know, don't be very blunt and upfront. Sometimes you just need to kind of coach them through it. And then on the other end, to some extent, you actually even have to even talk to that, the other side and say, hey, you need to get a little bit of a thicker skin. You need to say it as nicely as possible. But you know, teaching them how to receive the constructive criticism as well is important. But yeah, the soft skills, the software, hands down, they are so much farther ahead than we were 10 years ago coming out of school. Period, period. They know the software, they got it down. They can do tasks ridiculously fast. Maybe it's not well, right. Or maybe they get the task done and they decide, I want to watch YouTube for a little while before I ask for another thing. But making sure that the project manager has their plate full. Making sure that they are moving along in an efficient manner, not only through their assigned work, but helping them with their career. Take note of what they want to do. Ask them is there anything that they have an interest in. So we try to track that here too. If I know that Carrie wants to work on medical projects and that's her thing, then we will direct our efforts into that as much as possible to develop her where she wants to be. Yeah, it's different. You have to pay a lot more attention, you have to be a lot more intentional and you have to be a lot more nimble. That's not working. Let's try something else.

With draft and develop, I want to combine draft and develop with the. We don't have 20 years to develop a 20 year architect. One of the things that I think that I'm hearing in that quote is that people were starting to recognize back then that the traditional apprenticeship model was starting to run into some problems in terms of just one project at a time. Somebody over my shoulder now I've done a bathroom detail like over the course of 20 years, I've seen enough of everything that I become a well rounded architect. And from the complexity, speed thing we just talked about, I think what people. And then obviously there was the pandemic and then there was hybrid and now there's kind of like people in Slack or teams and that kind of thing a lot and in zoom. So there's that piece of it. But I'm also wondering just the sheer knowledge that somebody needs to master if they were coming out of school right now, that what you'll ask them to learn over five years versus 20 years ago, what they had to learn over five years. And if even the goal anymore is I'm going to kind of see a little bit of everything, we're going to accelerate that and I'll have it all in my memory and my hardware in my brain. Or is it more like we need to teach people to be really flexible, to find the right information on demand to apply to the problem that they're going to come across? I'm thinking we talked about that idea of landmark foundations are essentials, Right. And then Carrie talked about a level above that. So look, maybe we'll call that 101. Maybe a 201 is like upskilling into health care, upscaling into ambulatory care centers, or upskilling into whatever the building type is. If I've only ever worked on higher ed projects and now I get put on a health care project, it seems to me like part of what I feel like you're building, I'm thinking about the matrix, right. Where they plug the knowledge pack into somebody's brain, right. And now they know how to fly a helicopter, but they don't need that six months from now. So it's being flexible and knowing where to acquire the knowledge on demand that you need versus. I've just gone through enough of these sessions that I've through osmosis, gotten everything I need to know. That was a very long winded question, I acknowledge. But like, that kind of feels like that's a thread that's in our conversation a little bit.

Yeah. First of all, I'm going to say that your first part, the apprenticeship model, in my mind, that is dead. That's just. It's not going to work. First of all, with a lot of the emerging professional groups coming out now, we have conversations with a person who's out of school for six months and they're like, how come I'm not going to interviews? How come I'm not in every single meeting? How come I'm not? So the expectations of this group coming out are way higher. I never would have dared have a conversation like that. When I started my career, I knew that I had to sit and learn and do stairs for a while and then do the exterior wall sections and details and things like that. That was just part of the apprenticeship program. That is not in anybody's mindset anymore. I want to be as important to the project as possible right now. And I get it. I get it.

Where do you think that comes from? Like, do you think that's because some people would say, this generation super entitled. I hear that. And I'm kind of like, it may be that they're super ambitious. What's the sense that you get about that?

I would say twofold. The super ambition thing is a big part of it. Right. It's an Instagram culture. Everybody wants to be as important and as visible as possible right away. And that's not just online. That's in the firm. Right. I want to look and be important, and I want people to seek me out. I want people to want me to work on their.

They're trying to build a personal brand for themselves within the firm. Yeah, but.

But I think it's also the immediate gratification of everybody, not just the emerging professionals. I can go on Amazon right now and I can order anything I want, and it shows up at my house the next day. It's that immediate gratification thread that everybody has. So it's that and the immediacy of everything that I want to be as important. So, okay, we can try. Let's try this. Let's figure this out. See if we can. So we try to. Those conversations are kind of weird when. When you have to have it with an emerging professional who is saying, why aren't I at the interview? How come I'm not going to every client meeting? Why aren't I the one running the construction meeting?

What's weird?

Because when you're talking to them, it's hard to say you're not leading the conversation because you don't have the expertise. We don't take you to the interview because we only take people to the interview who are contributing. The presenters are going, this is not a place where you sit in the background and listen and learn type of thing. Some people are really good at that kind of stuff, and that's what they want to do.

When I say.

Yeah. When I say weird, Chris, I think what I mean more is those are difficult conversations for a person in my position.

Right.

Or maybe the project manager or the principal to have with them. Because, you know, one of the things disappoint them.

Yeah.

And one of the things that I always talk about with leadership and with the project manager group is you want to be the person that your teams want to work for. People want to Work for people who support them. People want to work for people who on their projects that they deem as this person is going to support my career and help me advance. And so having those conversations they see as counterproductive to that.

Right. By having to, like, manage expectations. They don't want to have to. And I think many people don't want to do that. Well, I had to do it this way, so you have to too. You know, this kind of like, hazing ritual kind of thing. I don't know. Maybe you have some of that in your.

You're hitting on something that I just hate. I despise that. I'm sure I've told Kerry before, I hate it when people say, that's the way we've always done it. No, you have to do it this way because I have to do it this way. Again, I'm going to use my son as a reference, but during COVID I was upset and I was at the dinner table and I'm like, if people would just put another couple hours into their week. And I said I had to work 65, 70 hours a week just to get noticed at the firm. And my son didn't even look up from his food. And he said, so because it sucked for you, it has to suck for everybody.

Perfect.

And it stuck with me. And then I was like, it was kind of a revelatory moment. I was like, oh, my God. Yeah, he's totally right. You know, so. So that's another thing that we started talking about is how can we break that cycle of we expect you to work 65, 70 hours. First of all, it's not going to happen. We're getting 40, period. People want work, life, balance now. And I get it. I wish I would have had more of that when I was younger in my career as well. That's kind of where we're going with that. I don't want people to have to experience what I experienced when I was early in my career.

But I think you do a good job of setting expectations. From what I've seen and heard, I agree with you that I think it's a multiple faceted issue of why people have higher expectations or are expecting certain things to happen sooner in their career. I think you already hit on it that we have come to a culture where we don't have this anticipation loop. Anything we want, we basically get it on demand. You're not like planning and then waiting and then you finally get the thing even look at architecture programs. Those keep getting condensed shorter and shorter. You can get your master's degree so much faster. Like when I was in school, I've got my undergraduate degree in architecture, four year program and then you'd go to a three year master's program. Now I think it's what many schools are doing, like a five year, like fast track kind of thing. So you're getting out of school and you're expecting the same mentality like we can just fast track everything. And then I also remember seeing peers that are not in the AAC industry. I think there's more opportunity for younger folks to advance faster in other industries, but not necessarily in architecture because it, I mean, going through the licensure process, right, that takes years, that takes a long time. You just can't advance quite as quickly as somebody in big corporate America or finance or something like that.

So we call this podcast Smarter by Design because my belief is we should put as much time into designing our businesses as we do our buildings and bridges and infrastructure. And I think what we're getting at here is a pretty interesting design opportunity. Is like, Dan, from what your son said, right, of course, wouldn't we want to create the kind of business where people have better work life balance if they could be more fast tracked in their career? Why not? I mean, obviously there's things like the AIA and licensure requirements which might put some kind of governor in that. But could people become capable of going to interviews earlier in their career than they used to be? Perhaps. But I think part of what you're getting at is I think there was probably tacit knowledge, Dan, that wasn't said out loud of, yeah, we just kind of all know that when somebody gets here, that's when they get to do xyz. And what I've seen in our community over the last five years is way more effort on writing down role descriptions, progression paths, making that super transparent and clear so that you've got your sighing a little bit. Dan. So we got expectations.

What is it we did exactly that we spent a lot of time doing role profiles and creating, for lack of better term, for me, anyway, this is just my opinion. It's almost like we're creating a ladder, you know, and people want to make those steps within their career. They want to be Architect 1, Architect 2, Architect 3 and be able to move up. But when you're writing the role descriptions, how do you differentiate between an architect 3 and an architect 4? What do they need to know to make that step? Because what ended up happening is once we got the role profiles, everybody's like, wow, yay, we got the role profiles. This is awesome. And now they're saying, hey, I've met all the requirements. I should be an architect three now. So now we're having those conversations. So, yeah, we're one of those groups that put a lot of time into that.

So what's the problem? So you've written down what's expected between three and four, but the part that's missing is what you haven't defined the skills or know how to measure the skills or having the learning to help people do it. Like, what's the part that's missing?

I think there's the firm need to have a senior architect versus architect two or whatever it is. So there has to be the match between, yes, you have the skills, but we also have the need for that role on enough projects that we can staff you at that level.

Got it. Right. So. So we've got four quarterbacks in the death chart and we can only put one on the field at a time to stick with the NFL metaphor. Okay, got it. So that's the rubber meets the road is opportunity versus capability and readiness and then patience to wait for your. To wait for your shot.

Yeah.

And I don't know that that's necessarily a new problem. I think it was just making the role profiles more visible. People were seeing it, oh, this is the step above me. I feel like I qualify for that.

I should therefore get that role because I'm qualified. Therefore, now I get these opportunities. Yeah. That's interesting. What do you two think about, like, if I were to say, what does BWBR look like as a learning organization in 2030? You don't have to go deep into the. If you're thinking like hopes and dreams for how you can even imagine the way that it looks. If it all goes really well over the next five, four and a half years. What does that mean?

I would say continuing all the great stuff past Dan's retirement.

Okay. Right.

Like finding that secret sauce, trying to distill that. I'm still trying to figure that out.

So it's kind of a resilience. Like the organization's more resilient in. In some ways.

And again, I think it is finding the folks with the soft skills and the passion, because I think that's a lot. Yes, Dan is very well rounded in all of the technical skills and role specific skills, but it's really those soft skills that bring it all together and trying to. I think about this a lot. Like, how can you identify that in folks without having to go through some trial and error of giving them opportunities to lead and manage people or try new things. Is there a way to identify those things earlier on, identify the potential in people? How do you know who's great in an interview until you send somebody to an interview? Right.

Yeah. I mean, or could you simulate, you know, before you go on a live interview? This is a course, actually. We do mock interviews. Right. And we kind of. They actually might learn that they're not ready.

We were just talking about that internally actually. We saw smma. Ryan posted something about using an AI assistant for presentation training on a big interview and he said it was very enlightening. And I was like, that's great. You should be doing more of that stuff for manager leader training. How are you dealing with issues on a team? How are you delivering that difficult conversation to an emerging professional that want a higher role than we are able to offer right now? Some of that stuff I think could be really beneficial.

Dan, what about you? Whether you're still at BWBR or not in 2030, we don't know. We're not going to get into that. But what do you hope that the kind of the learning organization looks like then?

Well, as Carrie noted, I'm hoping to win the lottery between then and now. But I think that if there were a way to. What you just touched on just a bit ago when I was thinking about it at the same time you were talking about it, is, is there a way through the AI and finding what people are searching for to be able to start identifying that? You know, Carrie started searching for this. She's been looking at all the medical stuff. She's been looking at all the modalities of imaging. She clearly wants to work in medical. We should start steering her in that direction. Is there a way that we can.

Yeah. Get intent from.

Get intent from the person who's going into the learning program to see if we can identify future leaders, to see if we can identify future medical planners, things like that, that we can start directing our energies into to make sure that we can fill those gaps that we have coming up down the road.

Yeah. As you mentioned, the ambition, Right. Is it elevated expectations or are they just ambitious and trying to capitalize on the folks who are ambitious I think would be great. And something else that we've been talking a lot about these really technical learning, technical training. I would love to see us sort of like we've got that locked down. Let's start exploring how do we upskill creativity? How do we upskill design thinking? I say This a lot. It's just my perception that it seems like that's such an innate thing. How do you get people who maybe don't lean that way naturally to elevate that type of thinking to be more creative? Because I think that's in the world of AI and stuff like that, I think the more technical things are what's going to be automated. And it's that human creativity that's going to set us apart from competitors. So how do we foster that?

So I have two more questions for you guys and I know this question is for Dan. Carrie, you might have a way to answer it too. Looking back at the kind of almost 10 year run of landmark learning, like, what is something that you feel like you've changed your mind on, that you felt like this is really important when you got that program going to, like now I completely look at this differently.

You know, I think when I started down this path, I thought that a solid learning program, you could address any need as it came up, oh, we have a problem here. We can fix it through learning. We have a problem here. We can fix it through learning. I'm sure any high school teacher would laugh at me for saying that because what I didn't take into account is just learning styles change. Things happen in the world that change things, right? So we started Pre pandemic in 2020. When we all went home, this was alive. We were all getting together in the same room, sitting elbow to elbow, and then we had to retool and kind of zig and zag for the times, which was, hey, we're all in the distributed environment now. We need to use the landmark session as an opportunity to teach people how to do architecture remotely. So now we have to learn zoom. We have to learn how to run a zoom meeting. Things like setting up your microphone, making sure that people are muted, making sure that you're not blowing your nose. Before noise cancellation became a thing, making sure your dog's not in the room. Just silly little things like that. So we had to learn to zig and zag like that and then fast forward again another couple of years and now we're in the hybrid environment. What are the rules around the hybrid rules? Meeting internally, meeting with clients, things like that. Are they hybrid? Are they in person? What's going on? So it's learning how to zig and zag and morph with the times and with the changing styles is important. And I wish I could have told myself that back then because back in 2017, I thought, man, this is easy.

I think what you were saying was anything can be solved with an in person learning in this room in an hour versus learning is going to get way more complicated than that to do it effective. And you were also, you weren't a single office firm, but you were more of a single office firm.

Perhaps back then we only had one other remote office. Yeah, right.

And now you've got multiple other offices and more people in those offices. So that's a whole different problem than teaching in the St. Paul office.

From my perspective, I think it's not specific to landmark learning, but learning in general. I feel like it's okay for us to be less formal and less rigorous about some presentation needing to be perfect and polished. With AI and some of these other tools, I feel like we can do more with less. And I'm trying to take pressure off of people and let them know, if you want to document something, just have a conversation with me. We'll record it. I can use AI. We can get some valuable meaty stuff out of this without you having to do a lot of preparation, without you having to stand in front of a bunch of people and have this whole song and dance, this big show about what you're going to share. So I think that's one big shift that I'm seeing is we can be a bit more casual or off the cuff with what we're capturing or how we're capturing it and get more value out of it. I can do more with less.

To me, underneath that, more with less, though, I feel like there's an element of speed that's underneath that, that things are moving faster and the learning windows are getting shorter. So we have to move faster and not be as precious about things in order to meet the need.

Exactly, yes. Thank you for pulling that out.

No, that's good. Okay, final thing. You guys have been very successful in your careers in knowledge management and learning management. There are firms that we talk to that are just really kind of getting started on a more formalized learning organization journey. Do you have advice for folks getting started that you can reflect back on?

I guess I would say I have a couple of things. I have been to conferences where people have asked me the same question and I usually tell them the same thing, which is just start. If you sit around trying to figure out the perfect program, you're going to sit there working on it forever. Just go and dial it in as you go along. Every firm is going to have different needs. Every firm is going to have a different mix of people and everything that we do may not quite fit your organization as well, but be nimble. Make sure you're able to go back and forth with the times. I mean, over time. What happens is at bwbr, it's very normalized. It's just part of our culture now is that we do a lot of continuing ed when we do interviews. A lot of emerging professionals ask us if we do a continuing ed program. We are able to say yes. And now we just put it into our interview processes that, hey, by the way, we have a continuing ed program, which I think that a lot of these candidates that we have coming in here see as a benefit to them, that we provide for them, which I think helps us get those good candidates that we want. Durability of your program comes with persistence and apathy is death to your learning program. The minute you're like, oh, I'm too busy, I can't do that this week, I'm just going to cancel it. You do that enough times because it's really easy to do, then your learning program starts to die.

I think that's so interesting, that last part you said that my people that have heard me talk a billion times, I've mentioned the Eisenhower matrix, right? Which is on one axis you have non urgent and urgent, and then the other you have not important and important. And so firms always work on the important and urgent stuff as they should. Usually urgent and not important kind of ranks non urgent and important. And I think what we've been circling around a lot today is the work of landmark learning is non urgent but important. And I think one of the keys that I've kind of teed out to this is all the way back to the insight that started it. And then as you've kind of built more of those connections, whether it was CA grading or the tie to quality assurance, is when you're too tired or too busy. It's not just connected to learning for the sake of learning. It's like being connected to something very specific that the firm cares about, which is better quality, better design, better outcomes for clients, better project management. And I'm wondering, Dan, if that lands for you. Like, if you feel like when you're tired, you're like, you have like a deeper of why.

Yeah, I mean, but it's also. It's important to me as a person. Yes, it's important to me as a person. I know that it's important to the firm as well. And like I said, as it, as it becomes more ingrained into the culture at bwbr, you know, there's a certain pride that you take in making sure that this program is everything that it can be. You develop project partners as you go along. Carrie and I talk about a lot of stuff when it comes to the learning programs, but we also, for the data things, we talk to Elise and talk to the digital practice person or Andrew to make sure that we're hitting all of those things. So, you know, everything's a partnership. I really enjoy working with all of them. And I think to all of us, there's a certain importance level that kind of transcends the too busy matrix or important versus not. I think everybody realizes that it's important, and that's a good thing.

But that's interesting because your first advice was start small, but I'm feeling like you're also saying, and go together with partners. And. And maybe there's some bit of, like, I don't want it. It's an accountability partner, but like a motivation partner. And it, like, it's fun to do in a group.

It is.

Yeah. Yeah.

And. And I. I guess maybe I came across wrong. I. I'm saying just start.

Just.

Just get it started. You'll develop those partnerships as you go along. I think I mentioned in the presentation, don't be open to outside considerations. I held Steph at arm's length for months, and then by the time I let her in and let her know what was going on, the process improvements that she. That she suggested were like, I can't believe I never thought of any of this stuff. This is awesome. And it helped the whole thing. And then as we folded in another group, and then we folded in another group, and we started talking about the data that we could collect to prove out that this is actually working. So be open to having discussions. This is not a pride project. This is a thing where it's got to be important to you. It's got to be more of a passion than anything about I own this and this is mine type of thing.

Carrie, anything for you.

Yeah. My advice would be be okay with a smaller sphere of influence. In the beginning, I've always sort of gone where the water's flowing. I may think something is more important, but there's real energy and ability to influence this one particular thing. Go with that. Be okay with that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because I feel like energy is contagious, and I love working in a team with other people who want to contribute ideas, and I love how things morph and change and we can be additive to the environment and what we're working on. Because if you go too big, too fast, all you're going to run into are the naysayers. You can't do this. You can't do this. We can't change that. It's going to wreck this other thing. So if you can start smaller and get some positive momentum there, people start to see the ROI of what you're doing and that helps you grow.

That's fantastic. I thank you both for joining me, for sharing your knowledge with this group. I always get inspired every time I talk to both of you, and today was no different. And I'm looking forward to sharing this out with our community. So thanks again.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you, Chris hey, thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, you can subscribe for new episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Really, anywhere you get your podcasts. And if you've got comments, feedback or ideas for future shows or guests, you can email us at smarterolodge-architecture.com thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time.

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