Stop Starting from Scratch: How to Codify Practice Areas in Your Firm

Welcome to the Troxell Podcast. I'm Evan Troxell and in this episode I welcome Corey Squire and Christopher Parsons in the third installment of our limited series on Knowledge Management 3.0. Check out the previous episodes that I've linked in the show Notes to hear more about Chris and the other topics in this series. This time I'm going to focus on Corey in this introduction. Corey is the Director of Sustainability at Bora Architecture and Interiors in Portland, Oregon. He's one of the most thoughtful and forward thinking voices in sustainable design today, and someone who sees knowledge management not as a support function, but as the engine that drives real impact. Before joining Bora, Corey served as the Sustainability Director at Lake Flato and worked as a sustainability consultant. Along the way, he became a nationally recognized leader in the field, including serving as the lead Author of the AIA's Framework for Design Excellence, the most widely adopted definition of sustainable design in the profession today. In 2023, Corey published People Planet Design, which offers both a philosophy and a toolkit for embedding sustainability into everyday design practice. It's also the only book we know of on sustainable design that includes an entire chapter on knowledge management. At Bora, Corey has helped the firm translate its values, climate, health and equity into a structured, actionable body of knowledge that lives inside their intranet Choco. That system helps project teams move faster, make better decisions, and scale their collective expertise across the firm. In today's conversation, we'll explore how Corey approaches KM not just as infrastructure, but as mentorship, cultural change, and as a critical ingredient in designing a better future. Personally, one of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is the power of shifting from individual expertise to collective intelligence. What Corey and the Bora team have built is not just a platform or a playbook. It's a feedback loop where project teams internalize knowledge, reuse it, and improve it over time. This concept is powerful and essential for any firm looking to scale its values, avoid burnout, and truly evolve its practice. So now, without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Corey Squier and Christopher Parsons. Today we're talking with Corey Squier from Bora Architects, and Chris and Corey know each other much better. This is my first introduction introduction here to Corey, but I'm excited to learn more and go further on this Knowledge Management 3.0 journey with the both of you. So Chris, take it away and let's do an intro for Corey.

Yeah, so Corey, Corey special as you guys will see in this episode or here in this episode, we've Worked together twice. So Corey was a client when he was at Lake Flato and was the Director of Sustainability there. And now he's the Director of Sustainability at Bora in Portland. And we kind of had this weird time in the middle where we weren't working together. And Right. Right at the end. I think this was at the end of your tenure with Lake Plato. Corey, correct me if I'm wrong, but you walked up to me at an AIA Technology and Architecture Practice event and we're like, I need to talk to you about knowledge management and sustainability. I think knowledge management is the secret sauce for sustainability and unlocking that and making all these things that we want to happen happen.

And I think you just like described a Venn diagram. Like, that's what this episode.

It's kind of that Venn diagram.

Yeah, yes, exactly. And so, you know, Corey, just for background for people, worked on the AIA framework for design excellence. He wrote a book in 2023 called People Planet Design, which is an amazing book about sustainability and a bunch of other important things, including he has a chapter in knowledge management in the sustainability book. So that's. That is the Venn diagram. That is Corey, longtime partner, you know, for us, in terms of thinking about knowledge management, especially as we started Moving towards this AI powered era of knowledge management we call KM 3.0. Right from the beginning, Corey was like, I think I see how this is going to be really, really useful for us. But we'll get there later in the episode. So maybe I can just start, Corey with like, how did you get to that epiphany that, like, knowledge management was a thing that was going to be really important for you and for other folks working in sustainability.

Yeah. So here's the story and here is the epiphany. A lot of people work in sustainability, kind of, maybe they're onboarded into the practice or they come to the conclusion themselves that the whole point of sustainability is to convince other people to do things right. And sometimes it's like we need to be more moral. Right. We need to be more ethical, we need to work harder, we need to care more. There's just a normal process which in my book I call traditional practice, which is like how things are done and sustainability is outside of traditional practice. And what we need to do is bend sustainability practice in a way that incorporates these things that we know are important. And I followed that script for a long time. Most of my time at Lake Flayed, I was following that script. I was advocating for sustainability. I had presentations which Were like World War I trenches, where it's like, we are in the trenches. We are trying to get the client to put a little less toxic chemicals in their building. But none of that really ended up making any sense. And one of the reasons is because the outcomes that we call sustainability are just universally desirable. They're better health, they're better daylight, they're better experience. It's hard to separate what we call sustainability from just what we call good architecture. If we start to think about it more clearly, right. Historically, like, those two things have been very, very different from each other. But again, if you dig in, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw a clear distinction, like great daylighting, is that sustainability or is that good architecture? Buildings where people don't get cancer after years of exposure, is that sustainability or is that just like a universal, human desirable attribute of civilization?

You would think that would, like, kind of fall under the health safety of the world.

It would, but part.

Part of practice, but it doesn't.

That's later. We have handrails to prevent people from falling off of buildings, right? Because it's immediate. That's health, safety, welfare. And through the work on the framework for zex, we've actually pulled sustainability into health, safety, welfare, which has been very successful. But back to the question. So why is it right? Why is sustainability this thing that we need to advocate for and fight for? The epiphany that I had is that it's not sustainability. The challenge with sustainability is that it's broad and it's complicated and it's involved and it's deep. And if you need. If you want to be good at. If you want your building to be good at energy performance, you need to understand thermodynamics, right? There's an energy modeling component there. You need to understand how heat flows where kind of where the sun is. If you want to understand healthy materials, you need to understand some degree of chemistry to understand what chemicals are in the building products that we want to avoid, why they're there to begin with, which ones are okay, which ones are bad. And sustainability is not this concept of working harder or doing better or convincing people to be more ethical. It's really just lots of information. And a lot of this information has just not been part of the traditional architectural education for a lot of people who are practicing. I would argue that even today, people who are coming to school are missing a lot of this information. But if we were able to capture the information that we call sustainability, manage it as knowledge, and get it to the right person at the Right time for these kind of very important decisions along the course of design process. We could just incorporate it without advocating for it, without fighting for it. So that was the epiphany. It's like if you set up a platform where people have the right access to the right information, their buildings will just automatically be better. And then me as a sustainability director could just like, step back. Right. I don't have to be as active in the forefront, engaging with people around these topics. I just need to create the platform where people are going to go to for their information. And if that information is better, the projects will be better or the project will be more sustainable.

Can I just jump in here? So, so this, this to me says you've got to have great information to base all that on, which I know we're going to get into.

Like, you need to know what to.

Do foreshadowing here a little bit. But I think a lot of firms are maybe, maybe not in that position. And so maybe just kind of as like before we get into your story about like, how that's been successful it various levels within your practice. What can you tell firms that don't? Because, I mean, one of the things about our industry is a lot of firms have what they consider intellectual property. You wrote a book. That book is available. It's out there. Anybody can buy it. But the only people who are going to buy it are people who are interested or want to do some kind of professional growth in that area or, you know, very enthusiastic about. About that. And then there's like, the realities of practice, like you're talking about, where it's like there's these new baselines, these new table stakes on projects that don't necessarily dovetail into the way practice has always been done. And it's more complexity and all those things. And like, these are the things that are swimming around in, in many practices who don't have a Corey Squire or don't have the content that you're talking about. And I'm just curious if you like.

Such a heaven, but I mean, I thought about this. So when I was at Lake Fleta, we were a firm of 100 people. Obviously, sustainability was important to the firm. We had a team. There were like three people working on this. Most practices don't have a series of sustainability experts on staff. And the majority of firms are small and the majority of architects are sole practitioners. Um, so that was one of the.

Yeah, like 80%. Like, just so people know who are. Who are listening. It's like 80% are solo practitioners like not even a team of five. Right. So.

Right. So if you're a solo practitioner, it's hard to have a sustainability expert on staff unless you happen to be one or happen to be passionable, passionate about that. And that was one of the reasons that we developed the Framework for Design Excellence at the aia. Right. So the, a little backstory on that. The Framework for Design Excellence originated out of the COT Top 10 awards criteria. The CODE Top 10 was a sustainability award that AI awarded since the late 90s to 10 kind of exemplar projects that did everything right across the, across the board of like looking great, performing great on energy, performing great on water, focusing on equitable communities, focusing on resilience. And when. And a bunch of years ago, when I was part of the kind of the National Committee on the Environment at the aia, we proposed that this framework, which had been really successful at recognizing high performing projects for 20 years at that point could become the AIA's standard definition. Initially it was going to be sustainable design, but then it was just design excellence. Again, it's hard to separate those two things. And that was kind of the vision. So the AI needed a vision of what is good design in the 21st century. The framework came that vision, and it's simple. It's just designed for energy, designed for water, designed for ecology, designed for change. These are the things we should be focusing on. But the information that backed that up was what was at the time called the toolkit. And the toolkit was kind of the piece that I was the lead author on. And for each of these measures of the Framework for Design Excellence, there was a series of best practices. So if we want to design for ecology, one area that we could focus on is designing for dark sky. And then if we break down dark sky further, it's like, oh, well, we want full cutoff luminaires. We want to make sure that there's no light sites from the outside of the building to the inside of the building. Those kind of collections of best practices are designed to be relatively accessible, simple, not expensive, easy to understand. So this toolkit provided the resources that every practitioner, so sole practitioners, small firms, anybody who's not Lake Flaydo with a sustainability team or Bora with a sustainability team, now had access to not only the vision which is the framework for that excellence, but also the best practice that allowed you to get there. It's not calculation based. We don't say do a simulation, we say, follow this back, get your wood to wall ratio. Right, right. Get Your lighting power density within reason. Make sure that those lighting fixtures are full cutoff. Make sure your sight is mostly permeable surfaces. And we're limiting darkscape for the limit heat islet effect. And the idea behind that, which was fundamentally kind of what came out of that conversation that Chris mentioned earlier, is like, here's my epiphany. We don't need to advocate for this, we need to document it. We need to make the best practices accessible, organize them in a way that they're easy to find and easy to use. And then after we launched the framework and the toolkit, and that was back in 2019, I heard from small firms and they're like, we, we now have the resources to do this right. We don't need an in house expert anymore. None of it was that hard. But we did need it to be organized and provided and we needed to separate what's important for what's not important. And I've seen my like language that I wrote, when I wrote the, the, the toolkit that supported the framework, I've seen that language pulled into vast places kind of in, across the Internet, like firms were pulling that in RFP responses to demonstrate their knowledge in this topic. Award submissions are now asking specific questions related to this framework. So once we were able to define sustainability along these 10 measures in the framework and then provide the knowledge in a simple, accessible way, I think that the general, the performance of the profession has really increased because of that. And again, that was all a knowledge management exercise.

How when you were saying that students are coming out of school and they're just like, they're not trained in certain pieces of information or know things that maybe they should. Is this kind of roughly what you're talking about? Like, would it be great if they read this framework or I think they should totally read.

I mean the framework can be expanded further than it is. Right. The AIA adopted it as their kind of vision for good architecture. Schools should adopt it as their vision for Right. A lot of firms have, A lot of firms use the framework to evaluate and define their own processes. Some schools have. I haven't really seen that across the board. And the students that I talk to are really hungry for sustainability knowledge. A lot of people join the profession or go to artificial school because they really want to focus on sustainability, because they want to make the world a better place. And for whatever reason, I feel like it's been a little slower to percolate air.

When I was in school, we didn't have sustainability class, we had environmental Controls. And I mean, it was the same concepts, but obviously it's a way bigger deal now. And I mean, schools are dealing with a lot that they have to kind of navigate as far as what the curriculum is going to cover. But it does seem like this is. So you answered my question in a fantastic way because the information is out there, it is available, and it's for more than just practice. Right? It is. It should be applied at the educational level as well. I love that kind of insightful. Just comment. Right. Because that to me is like the people who are listening to this show are in school, they're out. They're. They're graduates, they're practitioners. They're on the technology side of practice, most typically. And a lot of the things that the concepts that you are talking about have also been adapted into specific tool sets and that also can work its way back into school. Right. Like Ladybug Tools, Cove tool, things like that that actually are allowing architectural students. And it goes beyond architectural students, but. Right. Like MEP and all these other locations as well. But it really is a way to start to understand, like, why those tools matter because you can actually read the framework that you're talking about and understand at the foundational level what is actually, like, why these things are important.

I think sometimes we kind of fall into the trap of running straight to the tools. And I think the foundation that you're mentioning is the real key part. Right. What are we trying to accomplish? What are the, again, the best practices to get there? And the tools are great for fine tuning after we're most of the way there, but we can get a lot of. We can cover a lot.

Yeah, you want to know why like that. You want to get to the why of it all. And like starting like my class was environmental controls. It's about passive design first. Right. Getting as close as far as you can with passive systems before active systems. And yeah, there's so much, so much.

And we forget that for whatever reason, we forget that. And the context also has changed. Like designing passive first is still essential. We also now have to recognize that there's wildfire smoke that we need to deal with. Right. So buildings that maybe used to be able to function passively from a ventilation standpoint now should be designed to still do that, but also need to be able to shut down and to filter air and to provide systems to cat. So everything's just a little bit more complicated than it used to be. But it's still based on. It's just a little bit, but it's still based on the same premises. Right. Where we start with passive systems and we kind of use these historic architectural best practices that in the past have provided comfort and today decrease mechanical loads and could decrease first cost, but for the same reasons.

So Corey, I think one way to think about what the argument you started with is kind of sustainability used to be an application, but now you want to move it into the operating system. Right. So it's not this kind of like, do you know what I mean?

It's not this thing that you add on top. Right.

Did you install and like, maybe you use it sometimes, like it should be in the os.

This is fundamental to what we're calling artificial design.

And so is this where like I insert a kernel panic joke. I mean, I think you should stop.

I think you hit the line, Evan.

I did.

I crossed. So when you joined Bora, you kind of, at least the way I remember the story you said, I'm, I'm not joining Bora without a knowledge management platform because this is fundamental to the way that I approach thinking about sustainability. So I want to talk about platform, but before I do that, like, did you just take the center, sorry, this, the design excellence framework, and just upload that and you were done, or did you have to do more content that's Bora specific? Like, I'm assuming that this kind of AIA design excellence is kind of like a platform that elevates everybody to a point, but it has to be to work for a single practitioner all the way through a 2,000 person firm, it has to be somewhat generic and not. Yeah, yeah. And so like in what ways is it generic? Is it firm size, is it region, is it building type? Like, how do you have to then take it and build more knowledge that's specific to your company?

Yeah. So the goal when we, when we created the framework was to make it generic. Right. What, what strategies can we say work across the board, regardless of region, regardless of building type? And we went back and forth on things like are we going to do a single family version of the framework? Are we going to do a, like a commercial building versus the frame? We decided not to. And we decided there's enough there within the architecture, just like the world of architecture, that are consistently good practices. You're never like, regardless of your building type, regardless of your location, you don't want to have your class. Facing west is just like one example. So we did make it a little generic and we made it a little universal. And I think that helped sell it. But it also means that Individual practices have to do additional work on it. And so before I joined Bora, but after I worked on the framework, I was kind of a sustainability strategy consultant. I worked with a lot of different firms and I often used the frameworks design excellence as a starting point for a firm to understand sustainability. But it was more of a starting point. And then I would talk to the firms about what is specifically important to you. There's 10 measures in the framework. 10 is a lot to keep in mind. What are the three things that are most important and then the information like.

Corey, what would be an example? Like if a firm said it's these three, like what would those three be like?

So, so I worked for a firm where, yeah, I consulted with a firm in Southern California where they were very concerned about their clients being put off by carbon calculations or energy intensive buildings because they're doing a lot of expensive single family. But resilience was especially important to them because over the fast number of years in Southern California, it went from a perfect climate to now it's a little too hot in the summer. Right. Used to be perfect air quality, now there's smoke sometimes. So resilience became key to their work. Another firm that I worked for in Colorado, Ecology of Place was especially important. Right. How are we going to restore the landscape through the lens of building this building? Equitable Community is very difficult for many firms that do single family, for instance, while other firms like Equitable Community is like the fundamental reason for their existence. So I'll work with firms and try to figure out what is their key thing, like what is unique to them, what is their individual vision of sustainability that feels authentic, that reflects the work they're already doing. And then we can push it a little further in that area. And the framework we could still apply across the board. All that stuff is still good. But if we're going to prioritize or we're going to put additional emphasis on certain areas, we want it to be an area that already feels like a good match for the firm. So then what I'd work through is like, okay, now you do these specific building types, you're focusing on this specific area. What does resilience look like for an office building or a school? And that's the more specific content that we would get onto an intranet. Right. Beyond what the framework itself is providing.

Right. And if you never, if you're in Southern California, you never practice in the Northeast, you never need to build any of that content.

Right, right. We don't need specialty, for instance. Well, if you're in Louisiana, there's a lot of content about humidity that we need to talk about.

Tell me about Chaco. Like, what. What is Chaco? How does it help the company? Why. Why is it called Chaco? Like, just tell us. Tell us a little bit about it.

Chaco's our intranet. And. And to Chris's point earlier, I did. I didn't make it. It wasn't a hard sell. So I don't want to be like. It was a requirement that we purchased Choco Purchase synthesis for me to join the firm, but I needed a knowledge management platform. I had been successful at Lake Flato with the knowledge management platform that was there. I knew that sustainability is kind of the organization and access of a broad degree of expert knowledge. I was bringing that knowledge. But I can't be everywhere. If I can't offload it somewhere, I'm not going to be as effective in my job. So the package of me and the intranet is what really allows to have the access to the information that they need to provide high performance work. And then what I could do is I can research more stuff. I could talk to clients, I could encourage our employees, I could speak at conferences, I could do whatever else I need to do, but all that information is available. So Chaco, we had a. I think it was on Chris's suggestion when we built our intranet, initially we had a naming competition within the firm to kind of figure out what we were going to call it. Chaco is this javelina that. It's like a. It's like a pinata of a javelina that at some point in Boris history, somebody brought back from a job interview in New Mexico or something like that. It's just this thing that has been hanging out in the office.

Internal culture.

Internal culture, Yeah. I don't know that much about Chaco, to be honest, and I don't even know where the name came from. But it's this thing, and it felt very natural. There's a principal who had been at the firm for like 30 years who was retiring that year, and he made this really strong pitch during our vote that, like, here's the story of Chaco. This is why it's so important to the culture of the office. This is why we should make this the name of our Internet. So it lives on. So that's it.

I'm gonna guess. I'm gonna guess the name comes from Chaco Canyon. Like, it's a natural cultural monument in New Mexico. It's an amazing, amazing. And I mean, it's amazing to think back to ancient times and they were literally doing sustainability.

That's a really good actual design strategies.

Strategies. So that's even a deeper level than I was aware of.

It's incredible. Absolutely. Yeah.

So Corey, like what. So I think kind of what you said is, I'm going to paraphrase, but it's like I can build this digital twin that can answer questions while I'm not here, and people can get 101 answers and 201 answers without me. But when they kind of need to go deeper, like that's what I'm for, is to like something specific to your project or something new we've never explored before. If you just don't understand the condition, it's kind of almost like a flip classroom type situation you're trying to set up.

Exactly, right, exactly. There's like we do a lot of schools in Oregon, for instance, and we apply the same window to all of.

Our schools in Oregon.

We apply the same building closure to our schools in Oregon, and there's no reason why a school in Oregon would change that. Right. It's the same building type, same climate. So we document all of that. Right. And that's accessible. Everyone knows where to go for it. But yeah, if we're doing a school in New Mexico, which we just started doing, we didn't have any information on best practices around the enclosure on a school in New Mexico. So that's where I can come in. I can add additional research and I can support that team and that information will now go onto the Internet. So in the future, if we do another school in New Mexico, that becomes kind of our knowledge base and yes, exactly. As Chris mentioned, I can come in and kind of change things as information becomes out of date or new things become available, or if we're just doing something that we'd never done before, or if there's a weird condition. Right. If there's a 45 degree angle site and then there's this tall building next to it that casts a shadow, we might do something different than a more typical east, west facing kind of building site without any major obstructive context.

I have a kind of a practical question when it comes to getting that information because a lot of times I think many people listening, myself included, is like project experience is locked inside of a project oftentimes or inside of a team. And so I guess just how do you incentivize people to put this information on the Internet and get it outside of the project silo so that it is useful for everybody, I assume that's kind of a cultural thing and it's probably something that you have to continuously kind of beat the drum inside of the.

We're still working on.

Tell us how you do that.

I mean part of that is like some of the knowledge originates in the project team and then has to move to the intranet. Some knowledge originates the Internet and distributes to the project teams which is kind of the more what's what we should be aiming for, the more natural piece. So again those schools in Oregon, the best practices developed within the firm of us doing this type of work, it got documented on the Internet and that gets distributed to the team. So there's no new additional information from the team that needs to get back to the Internet. Now the new things happen. That's the impetus to update our information or kind of push information or push knowledge back to the Internet. So it's kind of in both directions. And because it's kind of a lesser case that the project is developing new information because a lot of the kind of the broad stuff is already covered, it maybe it becomes a little bit easier to make sure that that information gets back to the Internet for kind of future similar cases.

It seems like if people are getting value from the Internet, then they're also providing, providing value back to it because it's. They see that it's just kind of this give and take, right? Like the more you put in, the better the stuff you get out.

And that's a big piece of it. Like and there's kind of different types of different data that goes there, right? There's project data, things like square footages and cost data that we just enter into vision or other database that goes straight to the Internet. Having more projects fill out their information does create that kind of positive feedback loop that you're describing where you know the information is there when you need it and then that encourages you to provide information for your own project.

Corey, you said this thing that I loved. You spoke at our K Connect conference for people that don't know. We do an annual knowledge management conference for the industry called K Connect. Corey spoke last year about unlocking sustainability with knowledge management. You had a slide in your deck that I just keep hanging on to about. It was a two by two around knowledge and culture and how you have to do both. And like you kind of explained what happens if you have great knowledge but the wrong culture or the right culture, but you don't have knowledge. So I wonder if you can take people through that because I think it's really, really helpful way to think about things.

That was like the big takeaway from my consulting work. So when I was at Lake Laid out, I was in one firm. I was dealing with one set of problems and kind of one culture. And then when I launched my own consulting practice, I was working with a lot of firms and I got to learn about a lot of different cultures, a lot of different problems. But what I realized was a lot of the firms are really facing the same challenges. And some firms are able to consistently put out high performance projects like one is the other. Some win a lot of code awards. Some are just recognized for doing high performance projects. And some firms really struggle. Some firms, like they really can't do anything as hard as they try again and again. Trying harder is not the leverage point here. It's knowledge, which is kind of the ultimate conclusion. Really can't do anything above code minimum. And so the outcome of kind of working with all the other firms I realization there was like was two things. Number one is like most firms are dealing with the same issues. There wasn't a huge difference from one firm to another firm. That was one of the reasons I ended up writing a book. Because I thought that I could solve all of that in one kind of one stroke and to be determined how successful that is. But the other piece is like, if you are going to excel, you really need two things. You need the right knowledge and the right culture. And let's say you have neither of those things. You have. You don't know what to do and you don't know why you're doing it right. You're just going to do whatever right. You're going to do code minimum buildings. You're going to do weird stuff. If that's your thing. It's going to be really hard to do anything special. Let's say that you have the right knowledge, but you don't have the right culture. Which means that you know exactly how to create high performance buildings. You understand your passive strategies, you understand mechanical systems, you understand your. Your healthy materials. Whatever else it is, but for whatever reason, the firm's not supporting it. Maybe the lead designer is interested in something else. That person wants a swirly facade and doesn't really care about human outcomes. That's going to be a really frustrating situation, right, because you know exactly what to do, but you're just not able to apply to the projects because of artificial internal barriers. Now the flip side of that, which I would say is much more common and also much easier to deal with, is you're gung ho. You're like, we are ready to step up to the challenge. We want high performance projects. We're all in on health, we're all on resilience. But where do I start? And if you're in that situation, you just need the knowledge. And that's the group that my book was for. That's the group that the framework for excellence was for. And if you're building an intranet, like that's the solution is to get that information accessible and available to that crew. Because now you have the culture that's encouraging you to do the thing and now you know what to do. So the combination of those two things, the right knowledge and the right culture, will lead to consistent high performance projects again, pretty seamlessly, without the advocacy, without the argument, without the fighting, just because that will become the normal course of action.

The implication of your quote, like there's a famous Peter Drucker quote, that's culture. Each strategy for lunch. And what I just kind of updated was culture eats knowledge management for lunch. So, you know, the culture part's harder, the culture part's harder to have it. You're kind of like running downhill almost, and you can kind of collect the knowledge versus the other way around.

And I mean, in my book I try to address the culture question as well. But at the end of the day, you need to make the decision to do something different. Right? You need to. If, if high performance design is your goal, you can do it with knowledge and you can't do it without knowledge. If glass towers is your goal, you're not going to be able to do sustainability regardless of how much knowledge you have. In my book, I try to talk about, like, maybe you could change that culture. But again, you still have to make the decision to want to do that.

I'm curious, Corey, with what you've experienced at Bora since you've joined and put this into place and kind of got these frameworks in there and watched teams adopt over time. Like, can you just kind of, can you please talk about the behavioral changes that you've witnessed as far as, like the performance of teams and how they're able to address these challenges in their projects that are being built all over the world?

Yeah. So I'll go back a few years because I think this is, I think Bore is a great case study for this knowledge culture piece. So Bora did a lot of glass towers up until just a few years ago. There's a whole section of downtown, a new development around the Pearl District, which just has like 30 story glass luxury apartment buildings Bora designed by half of them and sustainability, connection to the earth. All these things were always values of Bora, but they weren't always evident across the portfolio. They might have been evident in individual projects. And one or more of the principals went to a conference, I can't remember exactly what conference this was. It might have been sign colloquium, it might have been, I don't know. And saw a presentation around like sustainability and carbon. And just like this new way of thinking about design holistically, about we can use architecture design to really benefit the planet. And they got all gung ho about this. And that was a cultural shift. And again, that had nothing to do with me. That's more before my time at Bora. But that was at that moment Bora became the firm that had the right culture but lacked the knowledge. And we had a lot of knowledge. We did have in house expertise. We have some like, we BORE has been leading on material transparency for, for like over a decade. We have an IT has DEC writer who is the chair of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative. But we weren't thinking holistically across the board around sustainability. So Bora hired me as a sustainability consultant to help them craft this vision that was going to be able to apply the knowledge and the focus to be able to live up to this, this new goal that they had. I consulted with Bora for a number of years. Eventually I joined as sustainability director. And one of the reasons I joined Bora was because they had in my mind the perfect culture to be able to apply these things. They just needed the knowledge and the platform to make it consistent and accessible.

I was going to say that's a big thing though, to walk away from a project type where you're successful and you have momentum to then, you know, I mean, there's a certain amount of knowledge you're willing to almost lose there, not to mention revenue and all those things. So that's a pretty big shift.

Yes, it was a big shift and it was very intentional. And it was like our focus is design that does good. And you know, Bora is a, I mean, Bore was founded in the late 50s, so it's not the first time that the firm has reinvented themselves. And a lot of firms through multiple generations of leadership will end up reinventing themselves. And I've seen actually similar things at other firms. Like LPA is a firm out of Texas in California. They won the Firm of the Year last year. They were, they're also 60, 70 years old. Or whatever. They also at some point made a conscious decision. Sustainability is what we're going to do. So I've seen other firms do something similar, and you're right, you do. Maybe you shift your project types, maybe you lose some institutional knowledge to focus on something new. But it also is my hope that firms that were founded in an era when this was not an issue are coming up to speed and reinventing themselves towards where the program is now. So I think it's really important.

What was it like for you to come in as an outsider with kind of the design excellence stuff? You'd already done the book you hadn't written yet to be the directors? I guess you had been a consultant.

I'd been a consultant with the firm for probably two years before. Before I joined.

Yeah.

But still, like, once you're in and like, you're kind of driving an intranet project, you're driving knowledge management, but you're probably the least tenured person of any of the other people that are doing sustainability and the technical excellence and all that kind of stuff. So, like, how do you fuse kind of like outsider coming in with knowledge versus the internal people in the way we've done things? I'm just kind of curious how that.

Plays out, you know, I mean, there might have been just enough disruption in that moment. Right. It was during the pandemic. It was a few years after their decision to focus on sustainability really holistically. But also, like, as a consultant, I had a lot of success as an outsider. And there's a degree of credibility that you get as an outsider that, like, now that I've been a Bora for three years, I feel like I'm starting to erode that like. Like, change might be more challenging moving forward because I'm not as. Like the ideas are not as novel and exciting as they. As they once were.

I think that's a super interesting point. I've seen it myself as well. The firms love to kind of prioritize outside information over their own. And I'm not quite sure what that's all about. It's super interesting.

It's new, it's exciting. It's like you hear something once and it's different from hearing the same thing over and over again.

Yeah, right. Yeah. I'm curious about codifying knowledge. If we could start to talk about, like, how you have approached, like, we talked a little bit about, like, how teams put some information in, but they're also getting a lot out of it. But obviously things just continue to change and like, something Chris and I have talked about before is like this idea that, I mean, there's actually two things. There's. There's this idea that experts don't know what they know. And I think it's kind of difficult sometimes to get them to sit down and write a bunch of stuff. And Chris has shared kind of examples of doing interviews to help get knowledge into these things. I'm curious how you guys are going about that from your point of view, because the other idea that I wanted to bring up here is like, some information should have an expiration date. And then it's like, how do we make sure that the stuff that has expired no longer comes up when people are looking for it? It's like bad, bad, bad. That's not good anymore. That's old. It's expired. Right? It was time to get rid of that. And I'm curious how you guys handle that because. So there's constantly new stuff coming in, but there's also kind of like getting rid of the old stuff that doesn't apply.

So I guess the two questions, the first one is that we have a lot of experts in the office that's kind of a Bora Culture piece, is that we have deep expertise in the areas that we have expertise. We have people who are really interested in digging in into technical detail. And I mentioned our in house spec writer before. He wrote and then curates all the pages related to our assembly systems. For instance, we have some really experienced interior designers, one particularly, who wrote the page on all interior finishes, right? On the floor coverings, on wall coverings, on ceiling coverings. And she had always been the source of knowledge for that information, but she never had a platform to document it before. So it was almost like a relief when we brought Chako onto the scene because she had the same experience that I had. And Mike, our spec writer, had the same experience that had, but with a different set of knowledge. And I must feel like you guys.

Were the Internet in some ways. Like people came to you.

We were the Internet. Like there were. There were clear knowledge bases. But again, people had. We had to answer the same questions over and over again. Even someone like, like the HR manager, right? She was the knowledge base on all this stuff, but it wasn't clear where she put all that stuff. And I think that's maybe a more typical use of an intranet is organizing things like, like, how does payroll work, how does your benefits work, how do out of office kind of processes or PTO work? But we just did the same thing with our design Process, because that's kind of the expertise that we valued in the firm. Now, there's other people that were harder to pull information from, and there's a lot of nuanced information that does live with experts. And I think we got maybe 80% of the knowledge initially because people were so excited to offload it. And there's another 20% that's going to be a flaw going forward. Right. And we just got to make sure that we're capturing maybe, like, relationships, soft skills, a lot of other important things that people with a lot of experience have. But again, as you mentioned, don't necessarily know that that is an expertise that they have become so adorable to them.

You. You guys have done some interesting things, like, for people, like, trying to picture at home, you know, like the interiors page you were talking about. Like, I think they can kind of picture the table of contents. And then there's some, like, you know, here's the way Bora does it, here's why we do it the way we do, and then here are some strategies and best practices and the materials we recommend, etc. But then you've done other interesting things, like the Bora Perfect Project. And I think it would be cool for you to talk about what that is and how you use it and, like, why you invented this, this idea of this borrower. Perfect Project.

Yeah. So the idea is we have a page on our website on our intranet called the Board Perfect Project. And it's basically our starting assumption for every project. And what we do is we are clear about where we want to end up. This is connected to our vision. This is the visioning workshop that I kind of walked Bora through when I was a consultant. This is the organizational principle of our intranet, where every piece of information is related to getting us to kind of our ideal goal. So our ideal goal is the perfect project, which is the project that gets everything right. Right. So the. The energy performance is phenomenal. The daylight is great. There's no toxic chemicals. It has a wonderful enclosure. Right. It has, if the power goes out, it functions. People love it for a variety of reasons. And our vision that we set up for a firm is climate, health and equity. And this is kind of a takeoff of three of the measures of the framework for Zynexmos. So again, that what is most specifically relevant to the firm and what's most important. And then we took that a step further and we said, okay, climate is very important. What does that need for a building? Equity is very important. What does it mean for Building, and that's building systems and building outcomes. And then we can document those building systems and build outcomes and say, well, what if we do all of them on a project? That's our perfect project. So it's again, our starting assumption for every project that we design. And we don't always achieve the perfect project, but we always try to achieve the perfect project. And one example is like, mass timber is very important to us. It's important to us because it's regional character from the Northwest. It's important to us because it has lower body carbon. We're very kind of focused on wood sourcing within our practice, so we understand areas of forestry where the lumber is coming from. It's also important to us because it creates great spaces. People love the warmth of wood and respond really well to that. And there's also research showing that wooden spaces will reduce people's heart rate and bring down their stress levels over spaces that are maybe more gypsum or concrete. But not every building is going to be mass timber. And in some practices, if they want to do mass timber, they might be like, that looks like a good candidate for mass timber. Let's do it. Or that one does not look like a great candidate. Let's just do a more traditional system. But what we do at Bora is we say every project that walks in the door is mass timber until it's not. Every project that works in the Bora has zero toxic chemicals. Until it doesn't for some reason. Right. Every project walks in the door, has great daylighting until there's a reason that. That it doesn't. And that's the whole perfect project concept.

Where I heard you call that like a highest common denominator.

Yeah, the highest common denominator.

Right.

Where to start?

Instead of starting a code and working up, you start at this thing. Yeah, exactly.

And that is the idea. And we've been surprised. Right. Projects that we started with highest common denominator, first of all, they're more likely to end up there. And secondly, the project that achieves perfect products project status might not be the one that we expect to. So we can have an ambitious client who says all the right things. And for whatever reason, we might not get there. The example perfect project on our website is a public library that we did with a short budget, and we got every single thing right on that project. And I don't think.

But, like, without that, you. Cory, I think what you're saying is, like, you might have come into that assuming that none of these are going to work. Because this is this challenging project.

We don't have the budget for mass timber. Why even try it? Right? But instead we tried it and we got mass timber. And on other projects where it seemed more obvious we did not get mass timber.

I have, I have a question and then a follow up question. The first one is like, how do you do you put that in front of clients? Do you say, like, do you talk openly about the perfect project with clients to get them on board early so that you're setting that highest common denominator kind of expectation and then obviously you're going through the normal process. The follow up question is how do your teams do they appreciate not having to start with a blank page? I guess would be the way that I would put it. Coming from kind of a similar theme that I've seen across topics on this podcast where it's like technology, old technology. Right. Going back to drafting. Right. Is you start with a blank page. CAD was very similar. BIM is very similar. Right. But now tools are very much speaking to this idea of not having to start with a blank page, using codified information, instructions, things that the firm carries along with it all the time. There's still so many teams that start from a blank page. And I would think that having a resource like this. So my follow up question is way longer than the first one. Right. But it's like this idea of having all that at your fingertips so that you have the whole kit and then the designers and the team starts to put that together in a different way, site by site, I think would be. That sounds fantastic to me.

Yeah. So I guess the first question. So we don't talk to our clients about the board perfect project, and it's not really an intentional decision to not do that. We are very clear about our values. So when we interview a project, we say we are mass tipper experts, we say we are experts in healthy material selection. We will not have toxic chemicals in your project. They will be resilient. They will have great daylight. So we do talk through all the things that we want to, that we want to achieve and we just haven't used the board perfect project language. And that's more of an internal concept. Now to your second point about not starting with a blank slate. I think people really do appreciate that. And I think that if there's just a thousand questions and a thousand decisions that you need to make on a project, and just a thousand, let's say there's 10,000.

That seems low.

That was yesterday.

Let's say there's 10,001. But let's say that 5,000 of those don't need any attention because we've already solved that question as a firm. Right. That means that you could focus on the other things. So instead of trying to make every project mass timber wherever they decide they're going to be a mass timber, you could focus on doing more innovative mass timber. Right. You could focus on kind of designing within a context that already works, rather than throwing out a whole bunch of ideas and kind of maybe or maybe it won't work. So I think when we focus our design efforts by taking certain questions and decisions off the table, we can get further in the detail. We could do more interesting things. We could make our time and design effort go further in the areas that really matter.

It's brilliant because it's so simple. Like, this is exactly kind of an architectural education of developing an architectural language on a project. And then some of the decisions just make themselves. Right. It's because it totally follows the rules. And then you decide specifically where you want to break the rules, and often those are the places you spend a little bit more time and attention, and.

That'S whatever's special about the project.

Yeah.

And we're confident that it'll work. Right. Because the things that we just do are the things that are tried and true. Right. The things that we know will get the good outcomes off. And maybe it's not that different from the way architecture was done, let's say, 200 years ago, before we had electricity in buildings. We didn't get to choose the window or ratio because we couldn't do 100% window. We could do 100% glass. Right. Both because we didn't have the materials, but also because we couldn't cool it. Right. It just didn't work. So we started with the building that worked, and then we designed really special moments in it. And I think that's what we're trying to do today. We're just avoiding all the distraction of the things we're able to do because of technology, but don't actually serve our purposes.

Like, again, it's like the Bora version of graphic standards.

Right.

Like, graphic standards applies to everybody, but you guys have your own. And to me, like, you just flip that open. It's like, oh, that's what I do in this.

And maybe we call them functional standards, Right. Because they're beyond graphics. This set of strategies provides the function that we want in the physical world. We're just not going to question it. We're just going to take it and Move on and again explore those special moments with more attention and more time and more effort.

What's so nice about this, Corey? And like maybe we can link Evan. Corey did an intranet tour of Choco that's on our website, so maybe we can put that in the show notes. But like what you see is that I think the Bora Perfect project is like simple and like in a complimentary way, like it's like a very, it's a, it's kind of a story. So it's easy to like latch onto and understand and it simplifies a lot of complexity that lays underneath it. And I think the way, you know, in technology we talk about this idea of progressive disclosure. So you start somebody with something simple and then you take them into detail, but only when they need it. And so the way you've laid out your intranet is people start at like big picture values, best practices, design desired design outcomes, and then you can work down into the specific strategy or material or detail that you need to support it versus here's just like a wall of information. Go find your way through it.

Yeah, you can, you can stop wherever you want. Right. You can take down one tier and that's fine. Right? You can do that two tiers. But what's most important is like everybody passes the high level information and then you can get as detailed as you need to. So that's kind of like the fundamental structure of how we organize our information.

How is AI changing that for you? Is it changing the way you organize information, changing the way people are accessing information? Like I know you're using our AI search on Choco. We kind of nicknamed it Robocory, you know, as kind of a joke. So it can answer questions even while you're at client sites or on vacation or whatever it is.

What do you, what do you think allows me to go on vacation more often?

Yeah. Yes, that's right.

Yeah. So, and, and we're, we're like, we're, we're still rolling this out. We're kind of relatively new to the AI search and, but, but there's real potential there. And, and it's obvious what the potential is already. So this, this is not an actual example that has happened, but a potential that will happen. I'm sure at some point I tell the story and I might have even told the story at K Connect, where kind of one of my proudest moments as a sustainability director was when we were, I was with a project team and we were going through a cost estimate with a client and A contractor around an affordable housing project. And the contractor said, there's going to be a $200,000 cost ad for this non vinyl PVC, say non PVC flooring. And then the client stops for a second and says, like, why are we paying $200,000 for this different type of flooring? And then without me saying a word, every single member of our design team chimed in, explained why we don't use vinyl. There's health impacts, there's kind of equity impacts, generates dioxins, there's end of life impacts. And we were so clear and confident in that messaging that the client said, okay. And the question never came up again, right? And you can imagine another. And I didn't have to say anything, right, because we knew this was part of our values, right? This information on the Internet. Everybody knew what we were going to say. And you can imagine a scenario where we just started hedging. We'll be like, oh, I don't know, we'll study that more. It's like, and it's a good thing to do, but who knows? I'll get back to you later. And that project would have had vinyl in it if that was our response. But instead, we were clear about our vision. We were clear about we're confident in our delivery, we have rehearsed it, we connected to the client's values, and it worked. Now, what AI search on synthesis can do is not just answer questions like, like, why is vinyl bad? Or I don't know, whatever else would ask. It can answer questions like, how do I advocate to a client about not using vinyl? Or how do I talk to a client about using. I don't know. I've never gotten compost and toilets into a project. It's always been a goal of mine. One day, how do I talk to a client about compost and toilets in their project? And the answers that are coming out based on the content, both in my book and also the content that we've just collected on our Internet that is kind of best practices is unique to us and our values. The answers are really good and they're written in conversational kind of way that a project team can just run with. So how do I make a project more resilient? It's not generic answers, it's kind of explicit, like, do this from a design standpoint. And I asked, I asked the kind of AI looking at my book, how do you design? How do you design for resilience? And it had like six bullet points that are all actionable, that you can imagine a team kind of just taking and using that to evaluate their project, or how do I talk about resilience to a client? That answer is really good. And the way that I thought I talked about this at a conference last week, the way I talk about it is I've been saying for a long time, we need to get answers, not resources to our project team. We need to get the right answer to the right person at the right time. And then my solution to that was I wrote a book. It has all the information it needs and the book is 400 pages long. And even though I think that 400 pages is extremely succinct for the world of sustainability, it's still a 400 page book. And what the, the Corey Bot or like the Choco AI can do is extract an answer.

Well, you uploaded your book to Chaco, which I don't think we've said.

Oh, sorry, yes, I uploaded the entire book to Chaco.

Yeah.

And, and that's how, that's how Chaka was able to kind of read my writing and deliver an answer in my voice with information that, that I've provided.

Yeah. And alongside the Internet, which I think. So there's two things there. Like, one, you wrote a lot of this stuff pre AI, but the way that you develop content was very like AI ready in that you didn't just save happy accident by happy accident. Well, I don't know, you tell me, I'll tell you how what I meant. So like a lot of people focus on the what when they're writing kind of knowledge internally. Right. So our window to wall ratio is between 30 and 50%, full stop. Like, that's the end of it. Not like, why is it between 30 and 50%? Like, when would it be 30, when would it be 50? Like, why is this our approach? And when you look at any of the content on Bora's intranet, the why is always involved, like in the who. And like there's a lot more context there, which is great for humans, which is why you wrote it that way. But it turns out it's great for AI too.

So you're right. And I wrote it for, I wrote it for. I did, I wrote it for people, and you wrote it for people. And there's, there's this, this joke that I've made in the past where it's like whenever there's a question, sustainability, the worst answer and also the most accurate answer is it depends. And, and you hear that a lot. Right. And it's like, it depends is always true. Like, what's the. What's the best window wall ratio for this project like? Well, it depends on the context, depends on the orientation, depends on the building type. But it's completely unhelpful to say what it depends on. So that's why it's the worst answer.

But you're saying why it depends. So you are, actually. And then you go on to.

So what I tried to do in the book was explain at a high level, not going to every single level of detail, but at a relatively high level. This is the best answer. This is why it's the best answer. These are maybe one or two use cases where it might be a little different. And this is how you know. But that's it, right? It doesn't go in through every single nuance, it doesn't go on forever of every single possibility, but it provides enough context that the reader should be able to intuit kind of the next step. And I think you're right. I think that's what allows the AI to pick up on that explanation and make it maybe more accessible with no.

Intention at all towards writing for an AI without intention. Right. But people can learn from that, and now they can future proof or AI proof their content to make sure it's more. But one of the things that's remarkable about that story you told about the client and the vinyl floor is, you know, you can imagine a world where people had done their job, they read the Internet, they know what's on it, and they just said, like, no, we don't do flannel floors. But they didn't just say, they all did that. They said, why we don't do it? Which I think is like, that's a wholly different answer. And that's a big success to the way you've done knowledge transfer.

And I think that is. And that's how we've described it to your point, right? The why is there, right? You need to know a level down to. To be able to make the case. And, and part of that is because I. My audience is both our. Our designers at Bora, but they're also the people that. The people that our designers are talking to.

How do you bring emerging professionals into sustainability? And how do you bring them, I guess, kind of period into Bora? Like, how are you onboarding people? How do you get someone from, like, day one to, like, the place where I can answer in front of a client, like, why we're not. Why we're not doing vinyl floor?

So, I mean, so there's two. There's. There's Two. Two things there. Right. And it goes back to this culture and knowledge piece. Part of, part of the cultural piece is that when the team explains to the client why we don't use vinyl flooring, it was everybody from the design principal in the room to like a very junior level designer. And all of them felt confident and empowered to. To make that case. Right. And I've consulted with a lot of firms where two people in that group would not have felt comfortable doing that. That's design principal, who doesn't know the information and is afraid of looking like they don't know anything, and then the junior designer who doesn't feel like they're in their place to be.

So they might know it, but they just don't feel like they can speak out.

The junior designer probably knows it, but doesn't feel like he can speak out. The design principal might not know it because maybe they're all on board with sustainability, but they haven't taken the time to kind of internalize it. The culture that we set up around sustainability at Ebora is that this is a shared responsibility, that climate health inequity is seriously the reason that we do our work. That's the lens through which we do. We look at everything. And. And that means that anybody in the firm should have agency and feel empowered to advance climate health and equity on their projects. And if they stand up to a client and say no, like, they will be lauded by the principals. They will, they will. And a lot of other firms don't work like that, right?

Nope.

Right. You can't say no to a client.

So.

And that's a cultural piece. Right. And that's what we did first. And again, that's why the culture is more challenging. But once you have it there, you just supply the knowledge and it's easy enough. So part of our onboarding for, for new employees at Bora is like, we take this stuff seriously. Right? Our culture is entirely around our vision. It is your responsibility to live the vision and it's your responsibility to educate yourself on the information you need to advance that vision. And it's all right here. And that's basically what I do. Sustainability onboarding with all of our new employees. And we're in a period right now where we're anticipating 20 or so new people joining the firm in the next few months. And I'm kind of thinking about how to revamp that a little bit with AI And I haven't kind of gotten.

Sure yet, but I was on a call yesterday with we do these Community roundtables with, I don't know, 30 clients on the call. And there was a firm that was telling a story. They just onboarded 30 people, and they've got kind of their version of which they do higher ed. So it's kind of like their perfect project, but from a higher ed lens, not a sustainability lens. And when they're onboarding employees, they give them 25 questions that they have to go answer on the Internet. Like saying, go read this hundred page long thing or scavengers. Yeah. And just find the answers and dig and come back and be able to answer these questions. And you kind of reverse the onboarding process.

And AI wrote that guide.

Yeah.

Does it become too easy with AI, Right. Do you just type in?

Well, I think the point is, like, kind of like you see the.

You see the response.

You see the response. And like, so do to. You see the response, but then you can click through and see the underlying resources, but you get a sense of confidence that there are resources to support your questions so that you don't just feel like you have to go look on the Internet, you know, or just kind of like, try not to bug your project manager too much. It's like you can be empowered to go seek knowledge and that it's there on your behalf. And I think that's just a relatively. I mean, I thought it was pretty cool.

Yeah, I know. I love that. I'm totally gonna copy that one.

Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds great.

Can I ask about your book, Corey? I'm curious from. I think I can count on one hand how many authors have been on this podcast. Unless there's people who haven't told me about the books they've written. And I'm included in that too, because I've written a book and I know how thankless it kind of is. And what I mean by that is like, of course there's people who buy your book and get value out of it, but in a big picture sense, like, nobody writes a book to get rich. And so I'm curious what your goals were with that and then like, kind of how you've seen that play out in the profession, but also at Bora because of the way that you've kind of taken that and put it into this ecosystem that your firm operates on as well.

So I think that the reason I wrote the book was because I thought we were having the wrong conversations in the world of sustainability. And part of that was because of this epiphany around knowledge management that Chris led with at the beginning. Part of it is just that there are no good resources that seem modern and applicable for students or also just architects who want to understand this stuff. And the last piece is like, the information that is available is pretty theoretical. There wasn't anything practical. So the way that my book is laid out, there's three parts of the book. The first part is theory. And the theory says, what is sustainability? How does it connect to design? Why do we want to do this? What are the kind of underpinnings of this whole thing? And maybe that gets to Chris's point about, like, how do you have that conversation? And I felt that was fundamental to lead with. And if you. If you pick up a book like Sunlight, the Light is a great book, but I sometimes make fun of it just because it's a little dated. It came out 50 years ago, and that's kind of still the classic kind of sustainability or environmental control architecture book in school today. That book doesn't start with a theory around why we should be doing this in our buildings. And I think that's something that we really need. We need a common language to talk about sustainability.

So we're back to why again, Just.

Like we're right back to why. We're right back to why. And that's like, why we start with vision. That's why we don't jump into simulation software. When we talk about sustainability, we need to be intentional. We need to be clear about what we're trying to accomplish. Part two is called practice. And this is when I talk about culture. This is when I talk about design process. This content was completely absent from any. This is what I talk about knowledge management. This content was completely absent to any other resource around sustainability. There's like, understanding sustainable design and understanding how sustainable design fits into the context of architectural practice the way it's practiced today are two completely different things. And knowing sustainable design does not make it any more likely that you're going to design sustainable buildings that get built in the real world. Right? So that became incredibly important. And then the third part of the book I call Design and what it is is the best practices along a series of building systems. So best practices around windows, best practices around structural systems. I imagine that trees could be a building system. So best practices around trees. I imagine that building occupants are a building system that we don't often consider. So there's best practices around that. Now, that third part of the book is it's my take on a lot of other things that have been written. It's like the way that I think Sustainable design should be done and it's through that best practice lens. But the first two parts of the book, the theory and the practice, I think are, that's, that's the novel material. That's the reason that I had to write the book where I felt like I had to write the book. Because we were talking too theoretically about sustainability within practice. We were talking, we weren't talking practically about process, about how to actually get this stuff done, and we weren't talking really effectively about the why we're doing this. Right. Are we doing this to save the planet? Like, what does that mean? Are we doing this because the lead checklist says that if we do this, we get a plaque on the wall. I think that's why a lot of people were doing it. Fundamentally, my take is human thriving is the reason we're doing this. Let's, let's talk about what that means. Let's talk about that connection to design. So, and then through my consulting work, like I felt we were all hung up on the same thing. And if I provided this, this, this guideline, this kind of consistent kind of through line from theory to practice to design, any firm, like whether you're a single practitioner, whether you're a five person firm, whether you're a big firm, there's, there's big firms who have been using my book for their, for their sustainable design process. Like it's kind of a one stop shop. It could solve the, like, instead of, instead of the 10 years that I spent like in circuitous routes to figure this stuff out. Like you could just start on day one.

You're giving people like a chair lift up the mountain that's they don't have to walk up with their skis over their shoulder.

Exactly. That's the plan. Right? We don't all have to figure this out on our own. Right. And I mean, maybe I didn't figure out perfectly, maybe other people figured out differently, but I figured out a system that works. And I've worked with enough firms to know that it works. And then I've documented it. So other people can now just take the chairlift right up the mountain and get started. But yes, it is a thankless process. You spend a lot of time by yourself thinking. You spent a lot of time asking people to read drafts and feeling bad that you're like asking them to redraft. The reception has been positive and I feel the audience that I was writing for is extremely small. It was like people who care deeply about sustainability, maybe they're in a dedicated sustainability role in a firm. Maybe they want to be, maybe they think their firm could do better and they just don't know what to do. And like the number of people in that position is like what, 200? So. But I think it'll grow. I think that, I mean, Bora never had a sustainability director before and a lot of other firms have not. I think that this will be a normal role for firms of about 50 and above. There are sustainability teams. And I think as sustainability becomes less of a niche saving the world thing and more of a, like providing real benefit and value to clients, like a technical overlay to design, I think it'll grow. And I think. But every time I hear one of those people, like a new sustainability director at a firm who's never had one before, who cares deeply about this stuff but doesn't know where to start, and they get my book, like five times someone has reached out to me and said that they've been in that position and that's been kind of rewarding enough for the whole process.

But then the impact that person will then have on that business and all those projects.

Right. Way more than that.

Yeah.

So you've recently started consulting to other firms and helping them kind of on the Bora platform.

Yeah.

And I'm curious to know if you start talking with or working with one of these clients, like, how do you, how do you get them started? Do you say, read my book and then I'll come speak to you? Do they hire you as a consultant? Do you have like a program? Like, how do you build it? Help people build a sustainability muscle, you know, within the company.

So I've been doing this in a few ways and I guess just to start off, I think this is really important kind of broadening, broadening sustainability expertise beyond my own firm. And I think that I haven't solved everything in my firm and I think that not everybody in my firm is convinced that I should be going out and doing this specifically, maybe project teams who want more face to face time and less chocolate time for whatever reason. But I think it's really important and I think that we are not 100%, but we might be 80%, we might be 90%. And with, with a chunk of my time, if I could bring another firm up to 80% rather than getting Bora to 85%, I think that is like a net positive for the world. So the way that I, the way that I work with, with, with other firms is in a few different ways, I'll do visioning, visioning workshops similar to what I did for Bora. Like, fundamentally, we need to start with what's important to you, what reflects your values, and then we can move backwards from there into the strategies and resources. And I can work with firms to understand what their vision is. I'll also work as a kind of a consultant on projects. So we have this new project. Often people come to me because the client is interested in sustainability, though I don't think that's necessary. Like, we just want to do a really great job on this project. We did another set of eyes, maybe external set of eyes, like, what should we be focusing on to achieve whatever our goals are? So I'll work with the project. I've even interviewed with, like, as a consultant through Bora. I've interviewed with other firms as a sustainability expert, and we've been awarded projects through that, which has been also pretty rewarding. And I'll also kind of take a look at internal resources that our firms have and talk about whether those are the right resources, how accessible those are, how we can get those to the right people. So that's. That's kind of. That's kind of the program. And beyond, beyond myself, like, again, there is a breadth of knowledge and deep expertise within Bora around material health, around resilience, around mass timber, around wood sourcing. And I can bring these people in. So it's not just me. It's a team that we have of five or six people. These people are 100% billable on board projects, but they have the expertise, like, they're not a standalone sustainability team, but they have the expertise that we can just get out to other firms as that say.

But if you were to pull one of them in, like, if that were to happen in the future, now you have to do more knowledge management. Right? You have to do critical knowledge transfer from each of these experts.

Right.

To be able to backfill with an expert, you know, that's kind of maybe can take over, you know, for them.

Exactly. And I think. And that is. That is the plan, right? Like, we. We need to get this knowledge out to everyone, both internally and externally.

The thing you said about firms is interesting. You have a slide. Sorry, Evan, did you want. Am I good?

No, go ahead.

You have a. You have a slide in your presentation from K Connect where you kind of show this chart I'm trying to draw with my hands. But, like, maybe I shouldn't because of audio. But, like, you have, I don't know, like, say they're 10 projects, and each one is like 10 or 20%. And then you've got one that's at like a hundred percent.

Sustainability project.

Yeah, sustainability project, Right. It's like we're going to push all our chips into the table and this project is going to be the hero project.

Right.

For sustainability. And we're at the rest. And you, you kind of argued it's better to have all of them at like 70% than that one hero project.

Right.

And you almost just made that argument. It's better to have more AEC firms at 70% than have bored at 100%.

This, I mean, and this argument is a through line for I think all of my work. And it goes back to like the Pareto equilibrium, right? The 80, 20 rule. If we can spend, if we can spend 20% of our effort getting to 80% multiple times, we can have such a bigger impact. And sometimes you need to get to 100%. Right. But in the world of sustainability, we're gonna get a little, a little better energy performance. We're gonna get a little, a little better. Like we don't always need to get to that. And an example that I share to make this point is that an optimization curve has a flat top.

Yeah, the S curve, right? Yeah, exactly.

And if you could edge a little bit along the top of a flat optimization curve or you can get up the steep side, and if you can get up the steep side, you're going to have way more of an impact. When I was in college, I signed up for like, when I was in the middle, I signed up for like six classes and I was like, well, I'm not going to do very well in all these classes, but I'm going to get a good amount of information in six classes and overall I'm going to learn more than if I took four classes that got hazen.

So it's, I did the exact same thing, Corey. That's the same thing.

Yeah, it's like a disease that I've had my whole life. But it's about scaling impact. And I think that sustainability is like, it doesn't matter if one project is really sustainable. That does not help, it helps the people in that project. But that's not the point of sustainability. Sustainability is a broad kind of civilization wide change of perspectives. And we're going to get there by having a broad impact on a lot of projects, talking to a lot of people. And I think that's one of the things that's been so helpful with knowledge management, like starting with Lake Plato's Intranet, going to the AI's framework for design excellence, writing my book, Building Chaco. It's all the same theme where getting the, like, there's nothing special about holding on to knowledge.

Well, right. It frees up. Like, you know, it's interesting. When I first started knowledge management, people used to say, well, knowledge is power and experts aren't going to want to give it up. Like, I don't hear that as much now as I used to, which I think is kind of an interesting cultural shift. But I think what you've. We've talked about, Corey, is like, when you write that stuff down, it actually kind of creates white space in your brain to go learn more stuff. You know, like from a growth mindset, you can kind of like offload it. And now I can go deeper.

Now I can learn more. And there's always more to learn, right? Even if I didn't try to learn more stuff.

Right.

There's new things happening all the time. And then also the process of writing helped me understand maybe contradictions within my own thinking. So everything, like, I knew all the same stuff. But it became clearer after I wrote it, totally. So and that means that it's clear then, now I think about it more clearly and then I can share it more. More clearly. And I would have written it if I wasn't going to share it.

I. I just wanted to draw, like, a connection here because I think that the thing that I keep hearing in all of these, you just laid out kind of all those different pieces of your career trajectory and, like, all of them center around humans, right? I think that's super interesting, right? And it's like this idea that this is a new definition that I've heard recently, just so well put about what leadership is, and it's helping other people win. I thought that was a fantastic definition for leadership, and that's what I'm hearing, right? It's like, this doesn't need to stay locked up. It doesn't need to stay locked up in me. It doesn't need to stay locked up in our firm. It doesn't need to stay locked up in our Internet or other experts in our firm. And I think that I hope that's the message that really comes out of this episode. Like, obviously there's like some super practical takeaways, but I think, like, big picture, this is what our profession really needs. And I'm not complaining in any way because, like, there's no shortage of super amazing experts like you guys coming on this podcast and doing exactly the same thing. Like, the list is long, but in the grand scheme of the profession, it needs to happen even more. And so I'm really happy to hear it. But I hope that that's a big takeaway for the audience.

And that really resonates with me. Going back to that story that I shared of my proudest moment as a sustainability director. I was sitting in the back, I didn't say a word. The team knew what to do to talk to the client.

Such a proud moment about vinyl.

I mean, I can't resist saying that what you figured out is that you made sustainability sustain because it could go on without you.

Right?

Like creative momentum in that moment.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's interesting.

In technology we talk all the time about because like people will say in RKA community, but then in architecture in general who aren't in our industry, like, they'll say to me, like, I can't believe you get competitors in a room together sharing knowledge with each other or presenting in front of each other, like how they do what they do. And you know, what I always say is like this technology industry is the same way and they say agree on standards and compete on implementation. And I feel like there's a similar thing here. Like you're trying to raise the baseline. It doesn't mean that you're not going to still go try and win a project against another firm and do the best possible version of the.

Because we can do the thing better that we all agree is the right thing. That's the implementation to beat inhabitation. Yeah, but, but yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, in, in your group with the K community, with other groups I'm a part of and like inter firms sustainability communities, like not only do people want to do that, that's like what people like really desire. That's the, the best time of the year if we can get, get together with the people at other firms who are our competitors who are working on the same stuff.

Well, right, because there's like 200 of you, as you said. Right. And that you're. A lot of them are on their own island, in their own company. And so like these are their people and so they get to like, you know, connect and share. Yeah, that's great. I don't know, Evan. I think this has been great. Do you have any closing question?

I don't. I'm good. I think this has been a fantastic conversation. I really. So many key insights that I've soaked up and I think that that's going to translate well for the rest of the audience.

Well, thank you so much. This was Totally fun.

Corey, I think maybe I'll do a closing comment on something that I. I was kind of noticing a through line. This is something I say all the time in knowledge management. And I think you said it about sustainability, but didn't, like, come out and, like, say it, say it is there's more knowledge in your firm than you can manage. Like, it's just not going to happen. Like, and so this idea of, like, starting with whether it's values or whether it's your company strategy and what's important to you, to then establish that vision so you know what knowledge matters more than others. And that could be sustainability knowledge or design technology knowledge, or it doesn't matter what it is. Like, that kind of like almost like how you said, like you had to write the missing part of the book that was missing. It's like people just don't start there. They just kind of like dive in. Like, oh my God, there's so much knowledge to manage. Let's do all of it. And I think your argument is you don't have to manage at all. You have to, like, kind of prioritize and be intentional and go after the things that really matter to your company and your building types or whatever those are. So I think that's. I just wanted to underscore that because I think it's a really, really important point.

I think that's an important point. And like, and again, like, right from the beginning, sustainability is challenging because it's broad and because it's deep and because it's complex. Right. That's why we felt like we had to advocate for it. The people who were saying no to sustainability, they just either didn't have the time or they didn't. They weren't actively against it. You make it simple and you make it desirable, and you do that through prioritization and values and it's an easy sell. Right. It's what everyone wants already.

Instead of arguing you don't love polar bears enough, and then you get into this weird thing.

Yeah. I mean, that's not going to get you anywhere. But a lot of people do it, right. And they do it because they don't. They maybe they haven't yet realized that the person they're talking to is on their same side. They just need to prioritize aligned values and focus a little bit.

Yeah, you both just said it. Right. It's about aligning values. And the example that you shared of sitting in the back of the room and everybody else making the argument about vinyl is the outcome of Having that really clear, prioritized information that aligns with the firm's values. That then that's the stuff that comes right to the surface in the moment when it's needed the most.

Just.

It's not like you can't weight everything equally. Right. There are things that have to be weighted way higher. And that's a value alignment. And that is super. Super.

The word priority actually was. It tended to be singular. If you go back to the Latin. And priorities. So we've butchered it. Priorities is actually not supposed to be a thing. Just to be clear.

Right. That's true. 38. I have 38 priorities. Which one should I do?

But you could have three. Three priorities is fine.

Three priorities is cool. I think we've agreed in the modern age. Three priorities.

Three is okay.

Five maximum.

No more than I used to say. Three plus or minus two?

Yeah. Love it. Perfect.

Well, thank you both. This has been a great conversation packed full of great takeaways. And I can't wait to get this out to the audience. We'll put links to everything that we've talked about. I'm going to throw an extra one in here. Corey, Just for use is the V compost toilet.

Oh, I'd love it.

That's a great.

Upload it to the Internet.

You should. And it's fantastic. I just did a project recently where I did my first one and that.

Congratulations.

Invaluable. Invaluable. But links to everything that we talked about in this episode will be in the show. Notes. And thank you both. This has been a fantastic conversation.

Thank you, Corey. Thank you.