Your Firm Knows More Than You Think—Here’s How to Use It—Christopher Parsons, Knowledge Architecture

AEC firms will start thinking about their workforce as a hybrid workforce made up of employees and agents. And these AI agents you will want to think about like employees in many ways. Now, they're not the same thing for a lot of in a lot of ways, but it's true that they'll need learning and development, right? If you want agents to be able to answer questions to help people, they need to have knowledge in order to answer those questions right. They need to have context in how you know your firm operates.

Welcome to the Bold Brand Show. If you're in the AEC industry and want to grow your firm, we're sharing exactly how bold and innovative firms win more. The sad truth is most firms that are struggling in the AEC industry are still doing things the way we've always done them. But this show is about finding a better way. I'm your host and founder of Bold Brand, Josh Miles. I'm a published author, veteran of the TEDx stage, and a brand strategist with over 25 years of experience with but my superpower is my focus on AEC firms to understand how branding and marketing in the professional services industries is wildly different than for retail brands like Apple, Amazon or Starbucks. So in this podcast we're going deep with AEC firm leaders, marketers and innovators in the AEC industry. We'll focus on the hottest topics and trends in AEC to uncover the growth secrets of the most successful firms and and how firms can create lasting legacies and perhaps what the future has in store. I've got a special deal to share with you from my friends at BizNow. I regularly hit up BizNow events here in Denver and honestly, they're my go to for networking in commercial real estate and aec. Each month they pull together these great panels with heavy hitting speakers who actually know what's happening right now in different markets. Not just theory but but real deals and trends. What's cool is they're not just a Denver thing, they run these events across the country. So if you're looking to stay on top of market shifts or want to connect with people making moves in CRE, it's worth checking out. If you're interested, check out bis now that's bisnow.comevents to see what's coming up. You can use the code bold. That's B O L D. When you Register to save 15% on your ticket, trust me, the connections you'll make are worth it. Special thank you to BizNow on today's episode of the Bold Brand Show. I'm excited to welcome Christopher Parsons, who's founder of Knowledge Architecture and also KA Connect. Let's talk a little bit about Chris's background as founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture. Christopher is responsible for product development, marketing and organizational health. He's also executive producer of KA Connect, their annual knowledge management conference for the AEC industry. Christopher has been a technology leader in the AEC industry since 2002, serving as chief Information Officer for Steinberg Architects and the Information Technology Director for smwm, now part of Perkins and Will. Knowledge Architecture also builds knowledge management software for AEC firms. Their flagship software product is called Synthesis, the leading intranet and AI search solution for AEC firms. Synthesis integrates with common industry software like Deltec, Uninet, New Forma and Open Asset Open Assets. Friends of the Show Founded in 2009, Knowledge Architecture is privately held, employee owned and passionate about co creating and sharing best practices to advance the state of knowledge management in the AEC industry. Chris, welcome to the Bold Brand Show.

Hey, good to be here. Thank you for having me Jeff.

Well, hey, on this show we like to go deep with our guests on a topic that they are knowledgeable and obviously curious to hear more about kind of some deep and bold moves that you've made at Knowledge Architecture. We're going to talk all about knowledge management and how AI has influenced the software here recently. And you know, Chris and I, we've known each other sort of peripherally for, for many years. Finally our our first like in depth conversation. So I'm excited to catch up and chat further with you.

Same.

I love technology. I love kind of geeking out on all things future and what the future holds and I think even though there are a lot of firms who are maybe unfamiliar broadly with the topic or the term of knowledge management or they wouldn't call it that, I think there's a lot in this conversation that could really blow some, some ferns minds. So I'm excited about that. You know, as I always say, as I'm telling my kids, I joke with my kids that I have a wealth of useless information in my head. Actors, names, obscure 90s grunge song lyrics. And sometimes when I'm like trying to remember a thing, it almost feels like if you can picture when you're waiting on your luggage at the airport to come around the turnstile, like you can see it, it's not here yet, but it's getting there. And I feel like Knowledge management maybe is similar or different from that idea.

That's interesting.

Chris.

Yeah, no, I mean I think that's a really evocative, like, kind of metaphor to start with, because it. I mean, I can think of three things that it. That it. That opens the door to talk about. One, this idea between personal knowledge management and organizational knowledge management. So you gave a personal example, I think two is kind of like what knowledge matters and what knowledge doesn't. And then third would be, you know, what knowledge is kind of tacit or, like, deep in your. Kind of your being and what knowledge you can write down and, like, make what we would call explicit in the field of km. So from a personal, like, I think I like that you started personally because, like, everybody manages their own knowledge, whether, again, whether they use the term knowledge management or not. I assume most human beings do not think I am managing my knowledge right now. But, you know, we have a variety of tools and methods for doing that. People write in journals, you know, people build calendars. People build little applications to track all kinds of things in their life. Maybe they track their mileage if they're a runner or whatever it is. So, like, people have ways to kind of, like, manage all that information and to get it out of their head and get it somewhere accessible. So that's kind of taking tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that, like, lives kind of within you. Tacit knowledge is the same root word as taciturn. So, like silent. So you're taking silent knowledge and you're making it explicit, so you're making it visible. And that can be something as prosaic as what's the Weezer album that blah, blah, blah, like you were saying. Or it could be something deeper, like, for what you do is like, what. What makes for a good podcast interview? What makes for a good guest? How do I figure out what the next question I'm going to ask? When do I follow up versus moving to the next question. Like, that gets to, like, deep areas of expertise, which most experts have. They just don't know why they have it right. They learn this thing over time. It's intuit, it's intuitive, it's deep to their. And if you ask Josh to, like, off the cuff, answer those questions I just gave you, you'd probably struggle at first for a while. Better if I could, like, play back a podcast interview you had done last week and say, like, right here, stop. Like, why did you follow up there? And like. And then stop again, like, why did you not follow up here? Why did you just let that go and move on to the next question? So experts and all humans have a ton of Knowledge in their head. Some of it they're aware of, some of it they're not. Some of it write down, some of it they don't. And so I think taking that from the individual to the collective, we work inside firms with 30 people, 100 people, 500 people, a thousand people, like whatever it is in AEC. And so all of these little organisms running around have all of their kind of personal knowledge. But then kind of the reason we work together in companies is to have knowledge add up to be more than the sum of its parts, right? So if my AEC firm does sustainable consulting, you know, or we do healthcare architecture, we do bridge design, like what does it mean to say my firm knows how to do this? Well, it basically means we have experts that know how to do this. And hopefully it means they've written some things down, they've turned things into training courses or best practices or manuals or videos on their intranet that they can use to transfer that knowledge and share that knowledge within the company so that when new people come on board, they can learn about sustainable consulting or healthcare architecture or bridge design. And so this whole idea of knowledge management is around managing your own expertise, but then also the collective expertise of your organization. As things change like crazy, right? So new technologies come out, new regulations come out, new materials come out, everything's changing. So to say you're an expert in 2025 in sustainable design in July doesn't guarantee you'll be an expert in 2028 in July. So expertise is fragile, it's organic and it moves around. And so the whole idea of knowledge management is managing individuals knowledge, but then also the organization's knowledge in the face of change and continuing to learn new things, grow new things, and then forget things that are outdated and don't matter anymore. So I don't know, how's that for a beginning 101 into knowledge management?

I love it. And something that you touched on a little bit, you know, firm principles. If, you know, if they're asked what their top five problems are in their firm or their top three problems, I doubt they would literally say knowledge management or data. They might say something more like we need to win more work or we need to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. How would what you do with knowledge management relate to those things?

Yeah, I think that's great. So just finish your thought, right? So we need to win more work. We need to, we need to differentiate ourselves, we need to do better design. We have quality issues, we have recruiting issues, we have employee engagement issues, like we Want to do some research and development. So whatever that business problem that the CEO or the executive partners wake up and think about, the best knowledge managers I know are connected to that thing, right? And then you work backwards from that and you say like, well, what's the underlying knowledge problem that's preventing us from doing that thing you want to do? So for example, if you want to. Well, we have a client I can think of who historically did kind of like some sustainability work, but they weren't considered a leader in sustainability, but they wanted to be. Right. They thought that was in their kind of 10 year strategy. Like we want to differentiate on sustainability and climate and health and all that kind of stuff. So they needed to bring in outside experts because they didn't have the knowledge. They needed to differentiate credibly. They, that person needed to educate the workforce and teach them how to do sustainability and embed it into the project versus having it be the side thing that you hire a consultant for. It's kind of an afterthought. So like in that case, like to be competitive, they felt they needed new knowledge. You have to acquire it. In another case it might be, look, we do this really specialized form of, I don't know, healthcare architecture. I'm not thinking of a good example, but let's just pretend there's a specialized vector. There's. And the person that knows how to do it, we've only got one of them. So we're at risk. That's what you call critical knowledge. Like we only have one senior expert. They know how to do it and they're like a couple years away from retirement maybe. So like this whole thing like we win work because of this differentiated expertise, but that knowledge is at risk. So then how do we transfer that to the next generation? How do we scale that knowledge so we can do more of those projects and then maybe they decide to stay another 10 years and it's not, it doesn't turn out to be a thing. So, and then you can get, you know, follow the line into quality or some of the other challenges or engagement. Like there's always a question of how could our, does our firm have the knowledge we need and how could we make better use of the knowledge we have? Usually connected to any business problem that you can come up with.

Well, maybe let's dig a little deeper on that. You know, we only have one guy who does this thing and he's about to retire. Either way, you're at risk even if he's not about to retire.

Right.

How might practically like The HR team recruitment use a tool like synthesis to help understand that better.

Yeah, so synthesis is an intranet. We're adding actually learning management capabilities into the platform as we speak. We just went into beta last week. It is a great technology for helping with knowledge management. However, knowledge management is about people, process technology and culture. And I think I would start answering your question, not actually with our product, but like with what process process would look like. And I think some of what I alluded to a little bit with you and trying to figure out how you know how to do podcasts is where we would start. We did a project with a woman named Dorothy Leonard. She wrote a book called Critical Knowledge Transfer. It's awesome. I highly recommend everybody read it. She used to teach at Harvard Business School and mit, and we picked four of our clients to work with her over about six months to do exactly what you're saying. It's like find an expert, find the knowledge is either at risk or whatever. They might be mid career, but like, you only have one of them and you'd like to do 10 projects a year or 20 projects of this type instead of only five because there's a bottleneck. And so we did a lot of different things to work through that. But the core technique that worked over and over and over again is having them talk through project stories. And so, you know, they would go and talk about a project story or a challenge, a time, a challenge they kind of like that they overcame. Or you have something that was really special about a project and then you just keep asking detailed questions. It's like, pause. It's like behavioral interviewing. If you've ever been part of that, it's like, how did you make that decision? Oh, well, I kind of knew to do it because of X, Y, Z. Great. Like, what was the signal that was telling you that was the thing to do? Oh, well, actually, I have this little checklist on my desk that I use, you know, that says we look at this, then we look. It's like, perfect. All right. We just uncovered something like, these experts usually have tools either written down or in their head to help them heuristics, right? To help them make little choices. Or like the thing I asked you about, do you follow up or do you move on? There is intelligence that's buried inside you that figures out how to know how to do those things. So a lot of it is interviewing these experts and taking them through real examples of what they work on and like pressing them when they made hard decisions or interesting decisions. That's where you kind of like start and then once you make it visible to them, and then they can go off to the racers, like, oh yeah, I have this whole thing, the whole philosophy on how this works. Nobody ever asks me about it, I've never talked about it. But like, I have a whole point of view on how this works. So it's really a lot like journalism more than it is about technology. From a technology perspective. Then you can capture those things, you can make them videos, you can add them. In our platform, people can not only watch those interviews, but more to the point, search them. So we index all the transcripts and you can search right to that point. So if at some point in that interview they explain something about the way that they do this flashing detail and you have the same problem, you can search right to it. But more in the case of what we're talking about, I think about like really the interview, the people process part of that and then out of that, then you can distill knowledge assets. So maybe if I were like, let's just use an example since we started there, like maybe I could distill after working with you for a couple hours, like Josh's interview guides or Josh's best practices for interviewing, like, this is kind of the way that you prep, this is the way you do research on somebody. This is the way that you like decide whether or not you're going to ask a follow up. Like there is stuff that you know that you don't know, that you know that through working with a person who's not you, you can figure out. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, totally. And even like the way that you gave the example of me with a podcast interview, do I stay there? Do I dig in deeper? Do I move on? I feel like even the way that I personally work with ChatGPT, that it is learned to do that with me, it'll give me an answer and it'll say, do you want like a friendlier version or do you want me to personalize this for you? Because it's probably the thing I'm always saying, hey, make this friendlier, personalize this in a different way. Is that a thing that you thought about with how you return results in synthesis too? Are there like follow on questions to the data that's returned?

Yeah, there's actually two things there that you said that I'd love to touch on. So yes. So you do. When you do a search in synthesis for people that haven't seen it and they're listening, they can just imagine kind of like If Google and ChatGPT had a baby in a way, right? Google in that it's searching all of your internal knowledge and then ChatGPT is, it feels kind of like a chat interface. And yes, you can ask follow up questions and see if you ask, you know, what projects have we done with Atriums in Massachusetts and you know, our kind of company history, you can ask that question like, oh, shoot, and I actually want as a follow up, like projects that are over 100,000 square feet or whatever it is, so you can have this conversation with your firm's knowledge. One of the things you just said about like the friendly, the tone, that kind of piece, you can add that in as well. But one of the things, and maybe we'll get there later in the podcast, is we're starting to work on agents and that basically lets you save some of those preferences, right? So I don't want to have to tell you every single time I want bulleted list. You know, I want you to use my words as much as possible. You know, please write it in this tone of voice like, so over time, like we're making the technology really kind of easier to adapt to the way that you want to interact with it, if that makes sense.

It's like, listen, software, I want you to love me the way I want.

To be loved, right? Yes, that's right. I don't want to have to tell you this. I mean imagine, I mean, it's not that different. Well, let me take it. I'll go even bigger. Like one of the things that we've been really paying attention to and believe is true is that you're going to start AEC firms will start thinking about their workforce as a hybrid workforce made up of employees and agents. And these AI agents you will want to think about like employees in many ways. Now they're not the same thing for a lot of, in a lot of ways, but it's true that they'll need learning and development, right? If you want agents to be able to answer questions to help people, they need to have knowledge in order to answer those questions, right? They need to have context in how you know your firm operates. And so one of the things that's interesting is if you had an intern, you would say like, hey, when I give you this assignment, you know, this is what we expect. It should do A, B and C. And the idea with agents is it would be the same way. I don't want to have to tell an AI system a hundred times. I wouldn't tolerate that from a person, you know. And so we, you know, we shouldn't tolerate it from our software either is kind of the point of view or maybe said in a more positive way that sounded more negative than I meant it to come out. Like one of the great things about humans is you generally don't have to keep doing that over and over again. Right. They learn very quickly and they pick up context. And I think that's one of the kind of potential benefits for agents is you can just the AI tools of the future, you won't spend as much time kind of like hand holding and repeating the same things over and over again too.

So one of the things that's interesting about synthesis is that in addition to some of the things that it does uniquely, it's also like playing really nicely with all these other tools. I can imagine there are a lot of firm principals who they don't even know that they need this thing because they probably don't know that it exists. But what, what might be the pain points that they are feeling that would be a good fit for helping solve this with synthesis. Sure.

I mean when I started the company you read the bio before so but both architecture firms I worked at, I sat between the principals and the marketing department and I watched all day long the thing like you know, what projects have we worked on with Skansko? What you know, how many higher ed projects have we done with X thing like and everyone listening to this podcast that's in kind of marketing gets that right. And so part of what we did in the very, very beginning of synthesis and I did this inside the firms and then I when we launched the company in 2009, this is part of the product is make it really easy to get to the source of truth of those that information and, and just people get self service to those questions too so they don't have to search their CRM or kind of like go on to some network file to find it. Like it's in a really easy to capture interface. But also like what happened is, I mean we can talk about like basic stuff like what's our jury duty policy? Right. Or what's our, you know, like how do I get new business cards? Like all the way at the base level of stuff like that towards learning and development. There's just so much knowledge that needs to be managed. But from a pain point perspective, almost always when people hire us. Well, you know, I think AEC firms generally go through these kind of spurts of growth and then there's like a tricky spot that you get to size wise. So like there's a tricky spot somewhere around 30 people, there's another tricky spot somewhere around 60 people or like 120, where it's like you need to grow past it to have the infrastructure you need to support that company. But if you don't grow past it, you're caught in this nether. You know, they're caught in a profitability trick where like you've either got too much overhead and you're not making money or you've underinvested and your resources are really strained. And so usually we get hired when companies are going through one of those inflection points and the way it manifests is almost always some kind of employee feedback, employee survey, employee engagement around. I can't find the information I need to do my job. I don't know what's happening at the company. I need some learning opportunities like in, it's in that kind of nexus of like knowledge and internal communications and learning development that we play. And it's usually, it's very clear that like as they've grown through, they're not doing as good of a job making things available as they used to, making things clear as they used to giving learning opportunities. Like, you have to change your approach to doing all of those things as you grow. And so a lot of times that's when they're like ka. It seems like you guys could help us with this and can you. So that's, that's, that's when we usually get brought in.

Nice. I know that for me it was like late 2019. I did this keynote called the Rise of the Chief Future Officer, in which I suggested that if there's not somebody in your firm who's looking out for what's coming down the pike in the future, that something that nobody's foreseeing is likely to bite you. And for all the things that happen in 2020, I'm sorry for how accurate that that was, but the main thing that I was suggesting was I think it's a very clear path from somebody in the marketing department to be in that type of role. Somebody because for me, that's usually who's bringing me in on a project, the marketers who's feeling the pain of differentiation or project pursuits or standing out or telling their story. And from what you've said, like even in your past, like being kind of the in between of the, the firm principal and the marketer, do you find that's, that's also kind of who's bringing you in for synthesis or Is that a different path in your case?

Yeah, I mean I'd say, you know, non scientifically like well over half of the programs of our clients are led by the marketing team and brought us in. It's not only that. Right. Operations is oftentimes their CEOs, their design, technology. Sometimes client AEC firms increasingly have a knowledge manager or knowledge management team. But marketing, if they're not leading it, they're a partner in leading it. Because oftentimes internal communications rolls up under marketing. A lot of the knowledge that people really want access to around projects and people like marketing is usually the steward of that knowledge. A lot of the things that happen on synthesis from an internal communications or knowledge sharing perspective, marketing watches for and then turns those into external, you know, blog posts or social media or campaigns. Like if you have a really rich knowledge sharing kind of culture happening on an internal platform that's just like a farm league for thought leadership and content marketing stuff. So yeah, marketing usually is right there, you know, at the center of making all this happen for sure.

What about implementation? I know when, when I was briefly on staff for the SMPS headquarters, it was a major undertaking. We had so many different software platforms we were trying to get spun up all within a couple years. And the role of the technology provider in helping with implementation could really make or break whether this is a smooth transition or whether we'd sit on it for a year and then stop using it. So what does implementation look like and what's the typical timeline to being able to bear fruit from using synthesis?

Sure. I mean I would start by saying, you know, we only work with AEC firms and we really only do this for AEC firms. So we've been in business for now 16 years. We've built over 200 intranets and knowledge platforms for AEC firms. So we've learned a lot of lessons from that. And so we come to the table with an open mind but also a lot of resources, you know. So for example, like a thing that everyone has to do, you know this from websites, but it's also true for intranets is information architecture. It's like how do we organize all this information at level one, level two, level three, that's oftentimes a political fight, you know, it's over turf and like who gets top Bill, you know. Right. Like everyone listening to this probably understands what I'm saying there. So we came in with research back information architecture. That is a great jumping off point, point to organize your intranet. Like we've proven that it works, it's been through user testing. So not just most highly paid person in the room thinks this works, but like really give users like treasure hunts and say, go find this thing. And so it's been proven out to work. So what we try and do is imagine like a skiing metaphor. Like we try and be a chairlift up to the top of the mountain so that you can ski down versus having to walk up the hill with your skis. So we try and put you in a really good position and you still are going to need to ski down the hill. You're still going to need to watch out for moguls. I'm not going to take the metaphor too far, but. So we partner with you with resources, but then we also have a client success team that leads implementation, helps you set goals, figure out when you're going to launch. We stay with you. And I think this is the key part that's important is not only just to launch, but like we stay with you as long as you're working with us as an active client, helping you to set goals and continue to evolve your intranet and your knowledge as your company evolves and changes, which it will, you'll add services, you'll add offices, you'll have ownership transitions. Like, you'll learn to be new technologies. Like, all that stuff happens. And so you constantly need to be updating your knowledge as your firm changes. So in terms of how long it takes, it depends is the only responsible answer to a question like that. But anywhere from like 3 months to 12 months, depending on how much content people want to have in a first launch, how good their content is when they came on board, and what kind of resources they have. But like we say kind of like four to six months is a good average. And then people can go faster or slower. Yeah.

It's funny that you say the thing about information architecture as it relates to websites. I used to think it was like a fun little parlor trick to do in a first new business meeting with a firm and say, I feel like you have some problems with prioritizing what's the most important thing in the firm. And that this department, that department, maybe you don't see eye to eye on what's most important. They would go, how do you know that? Because everything is equal footing on your website. There's nothing that looks the most important. But I feel like once you get a tool like synthesis implemented, there's probably this level set of like, okay, now I can get out all these things. But then also there's probably this next Step of like, oh, what's the first thing that I'm going to do once I have access to this? What do firms find that they can do with this? That was so much work before.

I think it's. Yeah. So it depends. Like a lot of what we do in the beginning is we try and understand that question you asked about pain points. So for someone to do a new intranet, it's a lot like, I mean, there are so many parallels to websites that we could spend a whole, you know, episode talking about that. But one of the ways I like to talk about it is, you know, a website is to knowledge management. I'm sorry, a website is to. Is to marketing what an intranet is to kind of knowledge management. Right. It is not. There's a lot more to marketing than a website, but it's Grand Central Station. Right. Like a lot of things like connect there and it drives people out and it is a destination. And the same thing is true for an intranet. It's a destination, which means it's highly visible to everyone in the company. So this isn't a tool you roll out for just a department. It's a firm wide platform. So if firms want to change the way they're doing things to build a new firm wide platform, there is some defining moment or critical burning issue that's underneath it. And so it could be and oftentimes is around a leadership transition. And with leadership transition can be, I'm just talking to a firm last week. We used to be more command and control and kind of tightly held to the vest under our old leadership. And, and the new leadership really wants us to be democratic and collaborative. And we really want a change in the way that we share knowledge and interact with each other. We want to raise the trust level up higher. And so for a firm like that, like a big point of emphasis for launching synthesis is going to be knowledge sharing. It's going to be our internal blog. Right. Comments. People can share. We encourage people to share the CEO's writing. They're talking about values and mission and purpose and there's just like that's what it is. It's about becoming like a more connected practice where if there's another firm where the thing is, it's like we've done two or three acquisitions over the last five years. So we're like 400 people, but we're really three firms that are 120 people and whatever. So like coming together to act as one firm and getting all of our policies aligned, all of our processes aligned, all of our people so that we know who each other are. Like really just a good employee directory to even know who works here here and getting a good project directory to understand our portfolio that came together across those three firms. Like so if that's the big business challenge, like that would be what people would be a point of emphasis on for launching the platform. So it's back to what you said. It's the thing that's keeping somebody up at night. Like we try and connect that work directly to something big like that.

You know, as a side point, those are my favorite kind of branding and video kind of clients when they're working on telling the story of either going through a leadership transition or post merger or demerger even just like getting their arms around this multi office culture and multi office brand is such an incredibly interesting business problem. And I have to imagine that it's incredibly valuable for those firms to get their arms around the knowledge management side as well.

Yeah, I mean, cause it's a, oftentimes we're like a Trojan horse for a bigger change that needs to happen. So the act of like putting your project management standards into synthesis and creating the 20 or 30 pages and uploading some videos, like that's not hard. What's hard is getting 200 something project managers or whatever it is to agree that this is the way we're going to do things. You know, like, so it's the creation. So like synthesis can be like a change agent tool. But like really we all have to agree, like or to agree that we're not going to force a project management methodology and we're just going to have loose guidelines versus standards. So there's just all this alignment work. And I think you're probably saying kind of the same thing. It's like to watch firms get aligned on like here's how we're going to work. Like this is the. Now the CJP design, that's the fictitious firm I use all the time. Right. The CJP design way is X. Or the CJP design way is we don't force you into a way. But whatever it is, making that clear is a really important thing to do. Like regardless of how structured or unstructured the actual thing ends up being. Yeah.

Even firms that have frequently are acquiring other firms who have, have or don't have a process for what that looks like. And even some of the guests that I've talked to in the past on this show, as few episodes as we have, we've had wildly different opinions of like oh, well, we just sort of figure it out and see how it's going to go. Or. No, when you're part of this firm, this is exactly how it's going to work. And again, those are things that they could document and easily surface with that tool.

Absolutely. Yep.

Another thing that you and I had talked prior to the show about, I was curious what trends you were seeing, and of course, you came back with a list of, like, all the trends, which was awesome, but maybe if I could pinpoint two of them in particular that I think that are really closely related. Was you mentioned seeing the trend in. In the way that we organize information is actually changing, and then the idea of kind of recording knowledge in the flow of work, and I think those are. Are. Those seem to be related in my mind, but maybe talk a little bit more about those two trends.

Yeah. So just to. To give some context of what you're referring to, so I started a newsletter back in May called Smarter by Design, which basically argues that AEC firms should spend as much energy and time designing their businesses as they do buildings and infrastructure. Like that business is a design problem. And so the. This is kind of issue six, which I guess by the time this podcast probably comes out, will be out of Smarter by Design. It all came from a question that I got at the end of a webinar I ran about a month and a half ago, which was, how is the role of an AEC knowledge manager changing because of AI? Which spun off like a bunch of interviews and surveys that I ran within the AEC knowledge management community to say, really, how are AEC knowledge management teams changing to evolve and thrive in the era of AI? That was the big picture question. So you picked two of the trends. So from an information architecture perspective, what I kind of have teased out, because anytime something new is like this happening, people will stake out kind of wild takes on either end of the spectrum. You know, and it's fun to kind of, like, hear the wild takes and then figure out, like, where things ends up being. So one argument that was being made was, look, AI is so smart that, like, it doesn't make any sense to put any effort into organizing information anymore. It just all goes in one big bucket and just AI is going to be able to find it. And on the other end of the spectrum, you had, you know, we have people in our communities who have library science backgrounds or research backgrounds, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, in the era of AI, information architecture is even more important because that context and the Metadata and the taxonomy and the structure. Like AI can use all that to help find what it's looking for. And if you don't do that, AI is going to get confused and it's not going to understand what's more important than other things. And so it was like, and then we had a call with like our research council, which is kind of our, you know, some of the leading firms that we work with. And they was a really rigorous debate here. And I think the kind of like the consensus view is it's both like at the very kind of top level of information architecture, Level one, level two, level three, an organization that really matters, not only because AI will use it as context, but because you still have humans working in your business and humans will still browse, right, Humans will still navigate that way. But more than that, your information architecture tells a story of who you are, like what you value, like what you put up at level one over level two actually says something you know or do you do describe. Are you organized by market sector, are you organized by department or service? Like all of those decisions, like information architecture makes that explicit. And so as people, whether it's on your website or whether it's on your intranet, as they interact with that, they learn about what matters within the company. And so the thought was you have a very kind of like top level structure. You still put a lot of intentionality into it, but lower levels than that, that's where AI can really shine. You're getting into the long tail of information at level four, level five, level six, maybe just let AI work on finding that out. So that's kind of where we got that information architecture is changing, but that it still is important.

Coming back to the marketing and differentiation question, I'm curious to hear. There are some really big players in the intranet space in particular, especially when we're talking broader than just aec, but some very big enterprise players. So how does KA go about differentiating itself from everybody else in that market?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, actually it's funny that these days, really it's us against SharePoint is what we see. Like it's us against Microsoft. And you know, Microsoft to their credit, has made sure when we got started, we were actually built on top of SharePoint because we built a wrapper around it to make it beautiful, to make it integrated, to make it AEC specific. We provided support like SharePoint used to be really, really hard to get up off the ground and get working. And so that was kind of the beginning of our business was you don't have to choose like you can still use the SharePoint thing but like we're going to come make it like really work for an agency firm. When SharePoint went to the cloud we had a decision to make. We could either rebuild the product on top of the SharePoint Cloud offering or we could kind of rebuild our product from the ground up which is what we chose to do. The latter, we built it from the ground up to give us just fine grained control over the tech. So when we go against Microsoft most firms have like an enterprise license agreement so they get SharePoint for free. So our position is not only competing with a much larger firm but that basically distributes their product for free. So we're in a position where we have to create not just like be 1.2 times better or 1.8 times better, like we have to be 5, 10 times better than the offering. Like that's a good forcing function on us. So we try and differentiate on a variety of ways. You mentioned integrations before. So deep integrations into Deltec and open asset AEC360 UniNet those kind of platforms which shows up in those employee project directories I talked about. But now with AI search that question I said before is on like how many higher ed projects have we built in Massachusetts? Over 200. Like that data we search from Deltec within our platform and do it in that natural language way and just return you results which is just like a game changing way, you know to get access to that kind of information. So that kind of like that's a piece of what it is. We are now adding learning management into our platform that's designed for AEC firms. So continue education credits. We understand all kinds of things around the workflows that matter. I mentioned the kind of the knowledge that we bring to bear in terms of best practices and understanding that we've done it for AEC firms over and over again. And I could go through a variety of different product things that are different and knowledge that's different. We bring a community to bear. So you become part of this community where you share and learn from other AEC firms. So really it's not like it's a head to head, apples to apples, US versus SharePoint. It's like SharePoint has a lot of strengths but it doesn't come with community. It's not AAC specific. You don't get a supported trusted partner to help you implement it. And if that doesn't matter to you, if you just want the Cheap thing that comes from Microsoft. I shouldn't say the cheap thing. If you want the. That was a little, that was a little more cutting than I meant it to be. But like if you're, if you're optimizing for cost over value. Right. Or if you don't necessarily need a partner, or if the integrations don't matter, or if the industry specific stuff doesn't matter, then that's. And there's plenty of firms that will build on that. So we're just trying to build a, just a different value added product for the market. And, you know, it seems to go pretty well.

You know, the, the one thing that is sort of like that luggage on the carousel thing for me is when, when clients say to me, prospective clients are like, oh, what have you done in the hospitality space? Or have you done work in the hospitality space? I say yes. And then I've got to, I can almost see the wheel spinning, like, wait, what did we do? You know, my first Firm started in 2002, so like pushing 25 years of doing professional work for these clients. And so just, just having the recall and those kind of things. And to have that, yeah, that natural language search is, it's just got to be killer for clients and customers. But you know, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about K Connect because I know we're recording this a little bit in ADV of the conference and when this goes live, we should be going live, I think, on your final day.

Okay.

K Connect for 2025. I think we're going to be publishing this on August 15th, so I'm looking forward to here a couple weeks. What are you most looking forward to this year at K Connect?

Well, maybe if I could, maybe I'll just talk about a little bit about what K Connect is and why we started it and then kind of come to present. So it's actually really a good follow up to your last question around differentiation because, you know, all we do is work with AEC firms and that gives us such a, it gives us a marketing advantage, but it gives us a kind of a support service delivery advantage too because we can just train all our energy into understanding what AEC firms need, how to make them successful, and then tell that story in the marketplace. And I mentioned that thing about knowledge management being people, process, technology and culture. Well, we've kind of covered some of the technology stuff, but like how do we learn about the people, process and culture piece that's done through community. And so ever since I've been Working when I've wanted to learn something or figure it out. Like, my first move has been to pull people together who are working on it and learn from them. And so when I started knowledge architecture in 2009. Well, let me go even further back than that. When I was working at Steinberg and smwm, I learned about knowledge management. I really wanted to bring it to my AEC firm. But there were no books about knowledge management for aec. There were no conferences, there were no best practices, there was no software. So I was kind of in the dark alone reading a bunch of stuff about some law firms over here and NASA over there and the army over here and, and trying to say, like, all right, how can I piece together things from these companies that are much larger than us, that are very different than us to try and make it work inside an AC firm? So when we started the company, yes, we had a product, but always from the beginning was, I also want to help with that other piece. It's like to serve, basically answer the questions that I had back when I was getting started. It's like, how do we actually do this? Like, what does a knowledge manager do? How do we set up a knowledge management team? To your point, about, like, what are the burning issues? Like, how do you connect this to what executives care about? Like, all these things were not written down by anyone in the AEC industry when we got started. And so the first conference I thought was going to be 20 people in Chicago when we did it. And instead, like 80 people showed up and signed up. So there was this kind of like, latent, like, demand to connect and talk about getting better with knowledge management. And so we record all the talks, we put them online for free. And the vast majority of firms in 2010 didn't have knowledge management departments. They didn't even use the term knowledge management. But all the things that knowledge management is internal communications, learning and development, lessons learned, expertise transfer, managing marketing, data. Like, I could keep going down the list. Like, all the firms do that and they're all struggling with those things and they want to learn from their peers about how to get better at it. So like, that was the genesis for K Connect in 2010 and now we're 2025. It's still the same thing, except the things that are. Well, the industry has matured a lot, so there are now more and more firms using the term knowledge management that have knowledge managers, that have knowledge management teams. But even for the firms that aren't, we're still educating the market around, like, look you have all these challenges, There's a name for that thing and you can be more intentional about it and you can get smarter by design. Right? You can tackle those things and get better. But now the things that are happening at K Connect this year, it's very much around learning and development and AI. Like those are the two big things that like most of our clients are wrestling with. They're the things that we're working on from a product perspective. Because I think there's this, you know, there's a generational, on the learning side, there's a generational transition happening. We talked about critical knowledge a lot, but there's this idea that we have so many gen zers in the office, like so many emerging professionals. And there's this sense that like, we don't have 30 years to turn an emerging architect into a 30 year architect. We want to upskill them faster. Right? We want to put them into more difficult situations faster. We want them working on harder problems faster. And that's probably a combination of really intentional learning and development opportunities, plus AI to be able to be kind of like a co pilot for them to like learn, get answers quicker, solve problems faster. And so those two twin ideas really are kind of wrapped up in what we call Knowledge Management 3.0, which is the AI powered knowledge management era. Like it's just going to change the way that we, it already is changing the way we think about knowledge and learning in aec. And so K Connect is great. You know, it's, we're out in Sundance, up in the mountains. We're there for like three days with people that are really passionate about learning and knowledge and want to help each other. Like, how much better does it get than that? So that's why I'm excited to see some, see some old friends and meet some new people and talk about those topics.

Nice. And that's, that's an annual conference.

That's an annual conference. Yep, yep. And we record all the talks still and we put them online. So if people can't make it out to Sundance, then they can just go to our website and catch up and see what we had to talk about.

Nice. Something that crossed my mind that I didn't ask you out loud and something we didn't talk about before. Tell me about kind of how your team is set up, you know, all the amazing features and things that you do. Are you, are you in the code? Do you have a team of coders? Like, what does this look like?

Yeah, so I personally spend like 90% of my time doing marketing and product design. So that's where I live is kind of thought leadership on one side, product on the other. And the kind of the way those two go together is actually really, really important. And then my design partner is my wife. So she's in the business about 25% of the time. 30 she has it, she's an author also. So like she kind of like is my design partner. My brother's our operations director, so there's a family connection there. And then outside of me, my wife and my brother, then there's two like really clear teams within the firm. There's the client success team led by Susan, who's our chief client officer and that handles anywhere from sales to implementation and onboarding to ongoing like adoption and client success and support. So like that's one half of the business and then the other half is engineering. So that's led by our director of engineering, Sean. So I kind of sit up, sit, sit, sit at a team with Chad and Sean and Susan and me. The four of us make up our management team and that really covers the kind of the business functionality within the company. But I do not code anymore. I have not coded since 2009 or 10. Like it's been a while. It's a good thing for everybody. No, I spent. I just get really excited doing, I guess, you know, in some ways, like what I told you, marketing and design, it's really all writing. In some ways like it's really, you're either writing about ideas or you're turning those into ideas into software. And it's just really a creative, creative gig. And I'm lucky to be able to work like this.

So anybody that knows me knows I'm a huge fan of video, especially for aec because it's such a great way to like get across who you are and your personality. And you know, we're always trying to work with people we like know and trust. And video is just a really great kind of go between for somebody you haven't really had a chance to work with directly or even meet in person. What role is synthesis playing or how is synthesis looking at video or video assets?

Yeah, I, I'm a huge video fan also and it is a foundational technology for us. So we've done two rounds of massive investment in video. The second round that we did last year, well, I should start by saying you upload native video into synthesis and we transcribe it. But we actually built an AEC specific video transcription model so it understands all the jargon in the Language. So we get ashrae, not ashtray or we get revit, not rabbit. And I could just go down the list of all the stuff that we taught it how to. You can do chaptering, you know, but we. The thing that's really interesting about video is that it's all searchable within the platform. And if I were to like search for, I don't know, something about this grab bar and it was in a training video at minute 47, it would not only find it and put it into an AI search summary, but you could click on it and it would take you right to minute 47 and you could watch that thing. So the ability to like not to have hundreds, I mean like Shepley Bulfinch has uprelated over 500 hours of video this year into synthesis, primarily for the purpose of making it searchable. Because they've recorded all these qa, QC meetings and design crits and town halls and learning lunch and learns and training programs. They've got all this amazing archive of video now. It's just all searchable. And you know, some of our clients have been saying like video is the new pages. Right. Because it's so much easier, like we were talking about critical knowledge transfer. It's easier to interview somebody and ask them about their work than it is to ask them to write it all down and to document it. And so there's like so many things that are good with you that you said about the non verbal and the, the emotion and the tempo and the pacing that comes through. But it's also from like a subject matter expert perspective, a lot easier to just get them talking than it is to ask them to get, to get them writing, which is huge.

Yeah. Even if you're not using the video as the thing you're going to publish.

Even if you're not used to publish.

It as a paper or as a Whatever.

Yeah. And so you've got that option. It's either a way station to the knowledge asset you're trying to create, or it's the knowledge asset itself. Or it could be both because you're trying to help for people that have different learning styles. So you, maybe you publish the video, but then you use the transcript to make a really nice like write up of the key themes and like takeaways, you know, from what was covered in that session. So yeah, video is huge. I mean, we're seeing more and more firms trying to record more because they'll be in the middle of a meeting and all of a sudden someone starts dropping some Knowledge, you know, some magic starts happening. It's like, cool, let's capture this, you know, because recreating this is going to be really hard. So yeah, I think, I think video is going to be just a huge, huge part of our platform for the. I mean, especially now that we're adding a learning management system. Right. That's another huge part of this. And I think what we're also seeing is a transition to shorter videos. A lot of times, like the state of the art for internal continuing education was get a subject matter expert to talk for 50 to 50 minutes to an hour on a topic. Great. You get your AIA continuing education units or your PE credits or whatever it is. But that's not necessarily the best learning experience. It's kind of easy to put that together. But what we're finding is people building. Let's do a 15 minute session instead. How about that? Like let's, let's not make this thing an hour long or maybe do three 15 minute sessions over time. Which. One thing that's interesting if you start thinking about videos as knowledge assets is they can become liabilities as knowledge changes really quickly. So now there's something at minute 50, right. Which isn't true anymore. It's not as easy to edit a video as it is to edit a page and go fix that issue. So shorter videos also carry less risk, they're easier to make, they're less of an ask. And so that transition to shorter videos has all kinds of momentum behind it. And those are just a few of the reasons. There's other reasons. They make sense too.

So yeah, there's a couple photo and video youtubers that I follow. One guy in particular I was thinking of did this whole breakdown of how this particular camera works and then all the, all the pluses and minuses and they did a firmware update and now all of a sudden the camera works very differently. And all the things that he was like, oh, this, I wish this worked, but this is out of the workaround and oh, never mind, that's not a thing anymore. So he had to just create more and more content right around that, right?

So if you make it more modular, right? So instead of being like, I'm just going to make this up, if that were a 30 minute review, maybe it would have been, it would have been smarter to make ten three minute segments instead. So that if the change is in Module 9 of his little thing, he can just swap out that three minute piece or whatever it is. You kind of can de risk it by like spreading it out.

Yeah, a lot of the courses that I've bought are that style. They're those much smaller chunks. And so they can always add to that topically something that we talked about with the AEC Advisors team a few weeks back. So that episode will have been maybe two episodes before this one goes live. Trying to do the math in my.

Head, we're in the future, but.

Yes, that's right, in the future. So we were talking about how one of the big challenges with M and A when a firm goes to buy somebody else is when this smaller firm that they're about to purchase, all the content is in the owner's or the principal's head. If there's not another person or another way to get at that. I'm just seeing how incredibly valuable this would be for a smaller firm or a firm, not even necessarily a small firm, but a firm that's in the market to be sold to have a way to have socialized all that data and to, you know, it. It's not just stuck in somebody's head or on, you know, one proposal that we did three years ago.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, there's a book and I forgot the author's name, but maybe we can look it up and add in the show notes or something called Built to Sell. And the premise of the book is whether you're selling your business or not, you should build it as if you were because it's going to put you into good behavior. Like what you just said, you know, like if you're a buyer, think about how much more valuable it is to buy a business where all of their procedures and their knowledge is all organized and documented. Like it's much more clear what they're buying. If you're buying the one like you talked about, it's like you're just, you're crossing your fingers and it's, you're just hoping for the best. Right. And. But the thing that's so great about the way that book is meant is like, but if you don't plan on selling, that's still a better business to run anyway. One that's organized and has all the knowledge accessible and easy to find. And you have a good knowledge management culture. So either way, if you get really organized and manage your knowledge well, you're a much more valuable potential acquisition target. But if you have no intention of selling, it's just a better place to work and it's easier to train. And oftentimes actually we should say selling might be to the next generation of owners or you know, coming, coming internal sale. So like you're also making a better asset for your next generation to buy into one that's organized and it's clear and it's a good, well oiled knowledge machine. So it will just make your business more valuable regardless of what your end game is, I would say.

Well, Chris, before we let you go, I got to ask you this question. I feel like this is a bit of a cheat for you because you're like a trends machine and I think like me, you sort of live in the future. So. But I'm curious what your bold prediction is for the future of the AEC industry. Trends marketing. Something else that you see kind of coming that's not here yet.

Well, I kind of talked about this wild idea that we're going to be managing an agent workforce alongside our employee workforce. So I won't use that one.

I think I do love that idea though.

Yeah, I mean I think it's going to be really interesting. I think we're going to see the convergence of knowledge management and learning and development beyond just the technology like we're doing coming together. They've oftentimes been these kind of like two islands inside a company, different technology, different people working there, which has caused so much friction. You know, if you're, if you've got a, if you're a subject matter expert and you've just done a, I don't know, we just did a design share or something like that, does it go in the intranet, does it go in the lms? If it goes in one, do I link back to the other? If you're an end user and you need to find an answer to something like where do you go? So from a technology perspective, like having siloed systems didn't make sense. But more to the point, getting back to people, process technology and culture, from a people and process perspective, we should be thinking about the best way to upscale our emerging professionals. Not the best way to like treat the best practices as a thing, treat their training as another thing. Like we should be looking at that holistically end to end. Like how do we capture knowledge, share knowledge, how do we distribute knowledge, how do we then retrieve it? Like it should really be an integrated knowledge and learning management workflow. Like that's my kind of view on it. And I think it's, you know, for your audience maybe it's like imagining like marketing and business development don't talk to each other. Like it's kind of like that. Like, sure, you could run A business where marketing and business don't talk to each other or barely talk to each other, but man, and just throw it over the wall and it's like, now it's your problem. Marketing, oh, I couldn't do it because of business development. Like that ain't great. So imagine like the tighter couple. Like, you know, I'm not saying they all have to be the same exact department, but the tighter integration between marketing and business development, better outcomes. The better integration between knowledge and learning and development, better outcomes. So I think we're going to see the really, the consolidation, whether it's kind of rolling up into one department or if you see really, really coupled partnerships. Like, I think it's almost kind of bonkers now that I see it this way, that it's been so segregated for so long. It just seems like it's, there's so many forces pushing us all in that direction. So that's what I think is happening.

Well, hey Chris, tell us about where our listeners can find more about you and or Knowledge Architecture in K Connect.

Yeah, I am Most active on LinkedIn so people feel free to hit me up. I think it's Christopher J. Parsons, but you should be able to find me. I would recommend the Smarter by Design newsletter. I'm trying to every two weeks take a really like 50,000 foot view of what we're seeing in the industry. Either profiling firms that are doing really great work or kind of like looking at trends, you know, kind of. Josh said. And then, you know, our website has just got a ton of resources around knowledge management, around intranets, around AI. Like so that's knowledge architecture dot com. So I think those are the three best places to get started.

Excellent. Well Chris, it has been awesome having you on the show today. We may have to do a part two just to geek out on whatever else in aac.

That sounds awesome. I'd love to do it.

Well everybody, thanks for watching this episode of the Bold Brand Show. We'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us today on the Bold Brand Show. For all of today's show notes and links to our sponsors, head over to Boldbrand show. Be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter where I'll update you on the latest episodes and other exciting things happening at BoldBrand. If you like today's episode, do me a favor and share this episode with a colleague over at BoldBrand Show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, subscribe Spotify and everywhere you get your podcasts including YouTube where you can watch full versions of each episode and join the conversation by commenting below. The Bold Brand show is produced by yours truly, Josh Miles, and is a product of Bold Brand, llc, a branding and video agency for AEC firms based in Denver, Colorado. Visit BoldBrand.com to learn more or hit that orange button up top to schedule a time to chat about your your branding or video project. Catch us next time where we chat with another bold innovator in the AEC industry. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.