Why AEC Firms Should Apply Design Thinking to Modernize Their Learning and Development Programs

So the reason we started a newsletter called Smarter by Design, and now the podcast, goes back to this idea that AEC firms should spend as much time designing their businesses as they spend designing buildings or bridges or roads or whatever they're working on. And what I love about this conversation is it's been very much a design conversation. It's how can we create a better experience? And the users are— it's user-centered design, right? At the heart of building a really good learning organization. It's informed by adult learning principles, but it's done with empathy. It's not just the most efficient way to get content out if people feel like it. It's really like, how do we design ourselves as a learning organization? And it reminds me, there's a book called The Living Company by Ari De Geiss, and in that book, he studied the companies in the world that had lasted the longest. He's got some 3 or 4 or 500-year-old companies in that book, and the famous line in it was, The only long-term sustainable competitive advantage is learning faster than your competitors, right? And learning, you could substitute the word adapting. It's all in there around evolution. And I think what you're both talking about is this thoughtful, not science project kind of chaos, but we have to keep changing. We have to keep moving quickly, but you want to do it in an intentional, calm, strategic, thoughtful, user-centric way. That's what I'm hearing from both of you.

Yeah, I also feel like I'm constantly redesigning my role. In that speed. A year and a half ago, I did not know the word knowledge management until I saw your article. I did not know the word adult learning principles. And now just in the last few weeks, I have this whole new vision about learning at our organization. And I'm like, do I need to become an instructional designer now? Like, you know, I, it's just, and, and this is what I love about my job. What I love about being a CEO is to continually reinvent, but How I choose to reinvent my role has implications for the business because it's all in service of that business. So that, that's, yeah, part of the fun. I personally do well with that change, but my job is then to minimize, to create positive change for the team so that they can do their job better. You, you use the term like the half-life of knowledge I think is shrinking and that I feel that so deeply, just how quickly things change so much faster than before and how can I keep up with it? And keep my team up with it in a way that's not overwhelming and is maybe energizing as much as possible.

Yeah, I had a really interesting experience today where somebody couldn't understand the process of how to develop a new guide on Newton, and they dove in and they just threw a bunch of information up and it wasn't thought out and it wasn't organized. And then they were frustrated because they got feedback that, now, did you think about this? And And so I was like, wait a minute, let's just think about it. If you were in a project, you start with schematic design. You have to design how this thing is going to look. What is your intention for this? And then you get into design development where you then codify that and you start creating. Okay, that's what I thought. But now what does it look like and how does it work together? And then you move into construction documents and you're like, okay, now I'm going to add the heavy details and How is this thing gonna actually be built? And I was like, that's all we're doing when we're creating and codifying knowledge, right? You have to have your idea and your design and then you gotta put it together. And they were like, wow, I get it now. And it's like, it, it, it is all design and it's all design. I mean, our, our purpose for our company is we make lives better by design and I use it. In conversation 10 times a day. I'm like, look what we're doing. We're creating something new and we're doing it by design. We're thinking about it. We're intentionally thinking about how this thing is going to happen. And to your point, Nicole, and that's why I love my role.