Conversation (podcast/interview) between Christopher Parsons and Corey Squire about the necessity of both the right organizational culture and explicit knowledge for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms to consistently deliver high-performance, sustainable buildings. Corey explains a two-by-two framework (knowledge vs. culture), describes common firm archetypes (neither, knowledge-only, culture-only, both), and argues that combining knowledge and culture yields repeatable high-performance outcomes; the transcript also references Corey's book and practice changes at firms like Bora.
Chapters
Corey, you, you said this thing that I loved. You spoke at our K Connect conference. We do an 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 not. 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 not 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 after 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 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, which means that you know exactly how to create high performance buildings. You understand your passive strategies, you understand mechanical systems, you understand 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, right? 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 Design 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 eats 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 high performance design is your goal, you can do it with knowledge, and you can't do without knowledge. If Glass Towers is your goal, you're not going to be able to do sustainability regardless of how many, how much knowledge you have, right? So 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, 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. 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 place?
Yeah, I'll go back a few years because I think this is. I think Bora 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 Cathodo and 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 principles 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 the ones is that. And saw a presentation around like sustainability and carbon and just like this new way of thinking about design holistically and that 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. Like Bohr has been leading on material transparency for like over a decade. We have an in house spec 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 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.
