Want to Hire a Knowledge Manager First, Identify Your Top Business Priority

One on the idea of these new roles. So you know, I follow AIA on Instagram and a few others and they're projecting, you know, new roles for future architects that don't exist today but will in the not too distant future. And I think you did a few of those as well. Like starting to see different roles crop up with the idea of someone kind of owning this idea of being the firm wide knowledge manager and maybe facilitator around all that. What are some of those roles that you are seeing now? Maybe even give some advice on types of firms or where they might fit into firms because we have a lot of listeners that are wanting to be really strategic in how they staff and think about things and this might be a new position that would really make a difference for them, make a big impact. And then I also want you to talk a little bit about the tools. Right. I know you're, you're a tech guy, so talk a little bit about the tools.

Sure.

Not just in terms of what's bright and flashy, but what really works when you have the billable team like strapped at both ends and they can't do anything else and you're going to onboard a new piece of tech. What, what really makes a difference.

There's a lot there. So if I don't get to all of it, please feel free to remind.

Keep me accountable.

Yeah, keep me, hold me accountable. New roles that you start with new roles. But in order to do new roles I have to take a step back and talk about strategy a little bit. So I think when, when something hot and sexy like KM 3.0 and AI powered knowledge management comes around, it's kind of like a lot of times the reaction is who do we hire and what do we buy from a technology perspective? And I think sometimes what gets shortcutted is what are we even doing? So how does this connect to the business strategy? First, for example, let's say that you do have a business development problem or a marketing problem. Like you're not winning at the rate that you think you should be. You just don't feel competitive. That's the thing. Let's say that that's not the problem. You're winning, but the quality is not great or the product management is not great and people are unhappy. Let's say all those things are working, but your employees are disengaged and burned out or don't understand what's going on and what's expected of them. So to me like, and there's only a handful of high level Problems like that that AEC firms are facing, those are the big ones I think that the CEO worries about or the executive team worries about is winning work, doing the work, acquiring and retaining talent, staying competitive and innovative. Like big picture. Like there's a. Obviously we have to be making money, you know, running the business. Right. Those are the big things. So when we're thinking about knowledge management or intranet technology, like synthesis or whatever it is, or learning and development, it's like which of those high order problems are we trying to actually make progress against? Like if the firm has a strategic plan, hopefully it's laid out in there. Many AEC firms as you know, don't have strategic plans. They have like kind of, but principals still kind of know this is more important than that thing. So sometimes you have to kind of extract it out of that. So I say all that to preface roles saying like, I don't start there, I start kind of like with the strategy piece. And then once we kind of understand what that thing we want to make progress against and figure out what the knowledge angle to getting better at that is like, let's just say quality. How can we make progress against that goal with the team that we have today? First to prove that we can to establish value and build some momentum. And what happens then is. And this could be on the. Bring it back to me to marketing. This is around marketing information. You know, it's like how do we move out of this reactive kind of like churn of just kind of running from fire to fire and not building high quality information and knowledge bases. It could be that you hire a person and make them the marketing information manager. That's a title that I see around. But my concern there is the culture hasn't really recognized this. My favorite tool in business is the Eisenhower matrix, which is it combines on two axes. You go from urgent to non urgent and you go from important to from not important to important. And so most people work in the urgent and important. That makes sense. That's logical. And then the next thing they do is they work on urgent but not important. Where they should be working is on important but non urgent. Yeah, that is where knowledge management lives. That is where you sharpen the saw. That is where you build the database so that the next time that you do a proposal, the next time you do whatever it is, you have really good information so you can move faster and with more joy for the team. And project managers aren't annoyed because they don't know why you can't remember the thing they told you six months ago or they told someone else on your team six months ago. So I feel like there's this kind of cultural shift, strategic alignment that happens first you start getting momentum and then you start putting roles in there to help accelerate and make those gains sustainable. So you want someone that's going to come to work thinking kind of top of mind for your organization around knowledge and learning. It's like thinking about these challenges. They can come to work with a non urgent but important mindset, not just a team. You have to be responsive in marketing and business development. It's the job. But for a team to have someone who maybe isn't on that same metabolism and on that same kind of responsive thing that can be proactive even if it's a percentage of a person, although that has all these risks that I'm sure you know and they get overloaded and then can't catch up. I hope I haven't gone too far astray, but I'm trying to kind of like lay out a context before you start putting a knowledge manager, a marketing information manager, an AI data strategist or a learning and development manager or whatever it is like I think establishing the strategy and the culture and the habits first and showing some progress. Then we start talking about people.