The Hidden Cost of Knowledge Silos in AEC Firms

So, Shepley does learning by doing. You have to. You wouldn't be in business if you didn't do learning by doing. You have these kind of pockets of other learning happening, maybe vicariously learning through others or sharing project critiques or site tours and all those kind of pockets. What was it that convinced you, like, that kind of learning by doing plus pockets of learning wasn't enough? What did you see not happening as a kind of a risk or a challenge, or what was the opportunity that you perceived?

Well, it's what was not happening is some of these great ideas weren't making their way into all the teams. So some teams were struggling with things and other teams were trying out new things and doing really well. And I mean, the same thing is true about sharing of new insights, not just processes, but just new insights. And just putting them somewhere wasn't enough. It's that learning by doing again, because unless people were really engaging with it, they wouldn't necessarily absorb it and they'd do it the way they'd done it the last time.

Mm-hmm.

So there was a little bit of that. It was both an opportunity, but also trying to just make us better at pushing forward and being a bit more innovative too in how we were approaching our clients and our project work. We were just starting to, at that point, get into more data-driven design, both in master planning as well as around, you know, some of our areas of expertise in healthcare. So there was, there was really a challenge of trying to figure out how to help people see what was even available and what others were doing in order to be better. So it was kind of both.

What do you think the cost was of having I've heard you use the word silos a lot. So having learning or knowledge trapped in silos, what was that? What was it costing Shepley Fullfincher? How was it holding you back? What were the signs that you could tell this was happening?

Well, people aren't developing as quickly as you might want them to because they don't necessarily have access to the same kind of things. And I mean, this is, this is the silo question, right? If you keep things in one place, they don't get the kind of exposure to other things that will help them get better. That's true for teams. That's true for people.

So their development is kind of constrained by whoever their project manager or their team is versus what Shepley's learning.

Exactly. Exactly. And then there's just plain information sharing. So at the time we had people keep doing programming in completely different tools. So somebody was doing it in a database. Somebody was doing it in an Excel spreadsheet. I'm not gonna lie and say that it's absolutely all standardized today. It's not because we have people and, and people have just different ways of engaging with the tools. But there was no place, not even there was no place, there were some places, but the systems were different. And the people were pretty, you know, felt pretty strongly about this thing that they had been working with for some time. And that in itself is a silo, right?

Mm-hmm.

When somebody's committed to a tool or one way of working, and there are people that are learning how to do that, that now follow that path, and then you've got another path going on on the other side. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to have parallel paths.

Mm-hmm.

But you have to have the ability to experience both so that you can either choose which one's the best one for the right situation, Or you could even be somewhere in the middle and take pieces of each. And that, you know, to my mind, is also a way of learning and actually evolving. So that's also, I think, part of what a learning organization does. It doesn't just sit on its tools. It actually tries to better them all the time.

Yeah.

And I think that feeling of being stuck in certain places is probably something that generally we were experiencing at the time, which I think why, why people generally Really embrace this idea of investing in learning.