In this interview segment, Christopher Parsons contrasts traditional, ad‑hoc learning practices in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms with the emerging, strategic approach of modern learning organizations. He explains how many firms still rely on informal committees and volunteer‑driven hour‑long sessions, which leads to inconsistent and opportunistic training. To move emerging professionals—such as job captains, project managers, and senior engineers—through the apprenticeship pipeline faster, firms need a systematic way to evaluate and prioritize learning opportunities. Parsons introduces the product‑management RICE framework (Reach, Impact, Confidence, divided by Effort) as a reference point, detailing each component and how it helps assess the breadth (reach) and depth (impact) of a training initiative. He then presents his own DESIRE framework—Reach, Impact, Strategy, Enthusiasm, Demand, divided by Effort—as a tailored tool for AEC firms, emphasizing strategic alignment, learner enthusiasm, and market demand alongside reach and impact. The conversation highlights the shift from whimsical scheduling to data‑driven, fair, and non‑biased investment decisions in corporate learning.
Chapters
And one of the, one of those, I guess the prioritization step, you introduced a subframework, an acronym for kind of testing the idea to see if it's something worth prioritizing. The acronym is DESIRE.
Yeah.
I'd like to talk about it. I also wanna call out that you didn't use RICE, which is a acronym used in product, but like sometimes also comes into these conversations. So on a personal note, I was curious if you, if you played with using RICE and maybe you could explain what RICE is. And then I want to talk about desire.
Sure. I guess just take one more step back that I want to make another contrast to what traditional learning organizations are doing versus modern learning organizations. And I say this with love because I think this is all done from the goodness of people's hearts. But a lot of that, I said the fundamental unit is this hour-long thing. A lot of the ways people get to that hour-long thing and which one it's gonna be is there's some kind of professional development committee or the kind of people that run the lunch and learns or the forums, and they look for volunteers. Like, we have a slot, you know, coming up in April. Does anyone have anything cool they wanna share? And if Susan is available and has something she wants to talk about, that's what gets talked about. And then the same thing for May and the same thing for June. So we follow kind of an ad hoc discovery of what should be taught and are dependent on the enthusiasm and the whims and the schedules of who's available to teach. And I think that has served firms in a reason. It's not like it's been bad, but I think when firms figure out where they're trying to go, this kind of business challenge I talk about around, you've got all these emerging professionals, you want them to get to be a job captain or a project manager or a senior engineer faster than would've happened just by going through the old apprenticeship process, you have to become more intentional about picking and choosing which learning opportunities you invest in. And that's, I think, the shift, you know, that's starting to happen. So it's like, okay, well, how do you evaluate these opportunities in a somewhat rigorous, fair, non-biased way? You know, and that's where I think these frameworks— so you mentioned RICE, so it stands for reach, impact, confidence, and then it's divided by effort. That's spelling out the acronym. That's a, like the standard product management framework. I definitely took some of the things. So I took the R and the I and the E. So the reach is basically how many people will this affect? So we mentioned onboarding before. Onboarding touches everybody. Project management training doesn't touch everybody, but it touches a lot of people. And AECs, NEC firms are constantly creating new project managers. That's the thing you know you're going to be doing. 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. So reach is a thing. The I for impact helps you balance. Okay, so we know it's going to hit X number of people with reach, but does it really move the needle? Is this something that will teach them a foundational skill they're going to need to do their job better? Or is this kind of like nice to have? You know, it's like, oh yeah, it's kind of like cool. I'm glad I know that. Almost like edutainment to some degree.
And play between reach and impact. And I think strategy ends up here too, is new employee onboarding where your reach— if you're only onboarding 5 employees this year, or only if you're onboarding 5 employees this year, low reach over time, high reach, but like in the immediate, low reach but huge impact, huge strategic alignment.
Yeah. Teaching project managers to be better at it, not throwing them to the wolves and to understand the way the firm does project management. Big impact. Right. And so you can go down the line of, yeah, so this thing will, if we do this and we do it well, it will move the needle. So what you're all, what you're getting at is, and the way that it's written is the reach times impact times strategy times enthusiasm times demand is the numerator. And you're going to divide that by effort. So you're kind of, as you're going along, reach and impact, you're building a top line score, right? Yeah. Yeah. So strategy, that one's probably the most obvious. It's like, how well does this thing we're developing align with where the firm is headed? So for example, if a big strategic initiative for the firm is we need to improve quality, like, is this aligned with quality improvement? Cool. If we are trying to move into doing more planning work or consulting work on the front end of our projects, is this moving us towards building capacity to do more planning and strategy work? So that's a good variable. And you ask why I, I kind of moved away from RICE. RICE doesn't speak to strategy. So I felt like that was a super important thing that was missing. It doesn't speak to the next two either. It doesn't speak to enthusiasm. And I think to me that's an important thing. It's like, who's gonna teach this and how motivated and excited are they about the material? Are you just gonna be like pulling 'em through the mud to have them do it? Are they gonna be voluntold to teach this or are they gonna be excited? So that's a, that's a variable. And the last one is demand. It's like, do people want to learn this? Now, sometimes people have to learn things they don't necessarily want to learn. There's some compliance courses we all go through. We don't wake up on Wednesday saying, you know what, I want to do cybersecurity training, but sometimes demand's not that relevant. But you can also say, look, we're talking to our junior people in the lunchroom, you know, or project managers are saying people really want to learn how to do XYZ skills. So like demand is a, it's a factor. So that's kind of a balanced scorecard, if you will, of the kind of reach, impact, strategy, enthusiasm, and demand. And then the big thing you do is you divide that by effort. So how hard is this gonna be for us to move the, the ball up the hill, like in order to make this thing?
