On today's episode of the Bold Brands 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 KaConnect, 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 Dell Tech, Uninet, New Forma, and
OpenAsset.
OpenAsset's 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
of knowledge management in the AEC industry.
Chris, welcome to the Bold Brand Show.
Hey, good to be here.
Thank you for having me, Josh.
Well, hey, on this show, we like to go deep with our guests on a topic that they are
knowledgeable in.
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.
uh you know, Chris and I, we've known each other sort of peripherally for many years.
Finally, our first like in-depth conversation.
So I'm excited to catch up and chat further with you.
Same.
um I love technology.
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.
uh I think there's a lot in this conversation that could really blow some ferns' minds, so
I'm excited about that.
uh 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.
uh Actors' names obscure 90s grunge song lyrics, and sometimes when I'm trying to remember
a thing, it almost feels like
if 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 uh knowledge management maybe is similar or different from that idea.
Phyllis said, Chris.
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 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 em
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 they get 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, 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
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 makes for a good podcast interview?
What makes for a good guest?
How do I figure out what the next question?
I'm gonna 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 into it.
It's intuitive em It's deep to there 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, you know,
knowledge add up to more, 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, know, firm principles, if, you know, if
they're asked what their top five problems are on 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 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'm going to, 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.
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 cause they didn't have the knowledge they
needed to differentiate credibility.
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 after
thought.
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.
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 would 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.
And then you can follow the line into quality or some of the other challenges or
engagement.
Like there's always a question of how could our firm, 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.
uh How might practically like the HR team recruitment uh use a tool like Synthesis to help
understand that better?
Yeah, 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 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, 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, something that was really special about our
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?
well, I kind of knew to do it because of XYZ.
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 at this.
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 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,
they can go off to the races.
Just like, oh yeah, I have this whole thing, there's a 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, em I think about like really the
interview, the people process part of that.
And then out of that, then you can distill knowledge assets.
maybe if I were like, 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.
um 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 chat GPT, 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 me
to personalize this for you?
Because it's probably the thing I'm always saying, hey, make this friendlier.
personalizes in a different way.
Is that a thing that you've thought about with how you return results in synthesis to?
Are there 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 Chat GPT had a baby in
a way, right?
Google in that it's searching all of your internal knowledge and then Chat GPT 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, shoot.
I actually want as a follow-up, like projects that are over 100,000 square feet or
whatever it is.
So can have this conversation with your firm's knowledge.
em 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 wanna have to tell you every single time, I want bulleted list, I want you to
use my words as much as possible, please write it in this tone of voice.
So over time, we're making the technology really kind of easier to adapt to the way that
you wanna interact with it, if that makes sense.
It's like, listen software, want you to love me the way I want to be loved.
oh
yes, that's right.
I don't wanna have to tell you this.
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 gonna start, AAC firms will start thinking about their workforce as a hybrid
workforce made up of employees and agents.
Hmm.
these AI agents you will want to think about like employees in many ways.
Now they're not the same thing 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 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, this is what we expect it to do A, B, and C.
And the idea with agents is it be the same way.
I don't wanna have to tell an AI system 100 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, man, like 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.
uh 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 might be the pain points that they are feeling that would be a good fit for
helping solve this with synthesis?
Sure, mean, when I started the company, you read the bio before, so at 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 ScanSko?
What, you know, how many higher ed projects have we done with X thing?
Like, and everyone listening to this podcast isn't 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 was part of the product,
is make it really easy to get to the source of truth of those, that information, and just
people get self-service to those questions too.
So they don't have to search their CRM or kind of like go onto some network
file to find it like it's in a really easy uh to capture interface.
But also like what 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 what's 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 another, 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 under invested 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 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, K, 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.
I know that um for me it was like late 2019 I did this keynote talk called the rise of the
chief future officer and 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 happened 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 marketer is who's feeling the pain of differentiation or project pursuits or standing
out or telling your story.
And from what you've said, like even in your past, like being kind of the in-between of
the firm principle and the marketer, do you find 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 there, CEOs there, design technology.
Sometimes AAC firms increasingly have a knowledge manager or a 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.
um 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
blog posts or social media or campaigns.
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.
yeah, marketing usually
is right there at the center of making all this happen for sure.
What about implementation?
know when, when I was briefly on staff for the SMPS headquarters, you know, it was, it was
a major undertaking.
We had so many different software platforms.
were trying to get spun up all within a couple of years and uh the role of the technology
provider and helping with implementation could really make or break whether this was 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
kind of bear fruit from using synthesis?
Sure.
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.
texture.
Mm-hmm.
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 built, you know, right?
Like everyone listening to this probably understands what I'm saying there.
So we came in with researched back information architecture that is a great jumping off
point to organize your internet.
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
you
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.
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 gonna 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 internet 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
there'll 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 three months to 12 months, depending on how much content people
wanna have in a first launch, how good their content is,
when they came on board and what kind of resources they have.
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 kind of like 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 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, what's the first thing that I'm
gonna 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 episode talking about that.
But one of the ways I like to talk about it is a website is to knowledge management, I'm
sorry, a website 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 internet, 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 wanna 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
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 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 gonna
be knowledge sharing.
It's gonna 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.
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 and getting a good project
directory to understand our portfolio that came together across those three firms.
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 compliance
when they're working on telling the story of either going through a leadership transition
or post merger or de merger, even uh just like getting their their arms around this multi
office culture and multi office brand is is such an incredibly interesting business
problem.
And I have to imagine that it's incredibly value valuable for those firms that get their
arms around the knowledge
management side as well.
Yeah, mean, because 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 whoever it is to agree that this
is the way we're gonna do things.
So it's the creation.
like Synthesis can be like a change agent tool, but like really we all have to agree or to
agree that we're not gonna force a project management method.
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 the the CJP design.
That's the fictitious firm I use all the time.
The CJP design way is X, you know, or the CJP design way is we don't force you into a way.
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 uh frequently are requiring other firms who 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, 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.
You know another thing that you know 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, 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 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, they seem to be related in my mind, but maybe talk a little
bit more about those two trends.
Yeah, so just 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.
that business is a design problem.
And so this is kind of issue six, which I guess by the time this podcast probably comes
out, we'll 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 like, really like 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
like
Anytime something news 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 gonna 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 would
a really rigorous debate here.
And I think the kind of like the consensus view is it's both.
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, like 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 describe, are you organized by market sector or 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 internet, 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.
Like 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, that's
That's kind of where we got that information architecture is changing, but that it still
is important.
You know, coming back to the marketing and differentiation question, I'm curious to hear,
you know, there's 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 KAA go about differentiating itself from everybody else in that market?
Yeah, that's a good question.
mean, actually, it's funny that these days, really, it's us against SharePoint is what we
see.
uh
that it's us against Microsoft.
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 AEC firm.
When SharePoint went to the cloud, we had to
decision to make, 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-grain control over the tech.
So em 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 Dell Tech and open asset, AC360, Uninet, those kinds 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 Dell Tech 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.
em We are now adding learning management into our platform that's designed for EC firms.
So continue education credits.
We understand all kinds of things around the workflows that matter.
em 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 AEC specific.
You don't get a supported trusted partner
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.
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, a different value added product.
for the market and 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 perspective 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 could almost see the wheels 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.
so just just having the recall and those kind of things and to have that that natural
language search is it's just got to be killer for 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 advance of the conference.
And uh when this goes live, we should be going live, I think, on your final day of K
Connect for twenty twenty five.
I think we're going to be publishing this on August 15th.
uh
you know 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 um it's actually really a good follow up to your last question around differentiation
because all we do is work with AAC firms and that gives us such a...
um
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 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?
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 AAC industry when we got
started.
And so the first conference I thought was gonna 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.
on 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 KConnect in 2010 and now we're at 2025.
It's still the same thing except the things that are, well.
The industry has matured a lot.
So there are now more more firms using the term knowledge management that have knowledge
managers that have knowledge management teams.
But even for the firms that aren't, like 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 like the things that are happening at KConnect this year is very much around
learning and development and AI.
Like those are the two big things that like most of our clients are wrestling with
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
Z-ers in the office, like so many emerging professionals.
And there's the 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.
so K Connect is great.
You know, it's we're out in Sundance up in the mountains.
em 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 is
get them 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, right?
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.
uh Something that crossed my mind that I didn't ask you out loud and something we didn't
talk about before.
uh Tell me about kind of how your team is set up.
You know, all the amazing features and things that you do.
Are you in the code?
Do you have a team of coders?
Like, what does this look like?
Yeah, so.
um 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 that she's an author also.
like, she kind of like is my design partner.
um My brother's our operations director.
So there's a family, family connection there.
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 em I kind of 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.
um No, I spend, 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 interning
those ideas into software.
And it's just really a creative um gig.
And I'm lucky to be able to work like this.
uh
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.
uh What role is synthesis playing or how is synthesis looking at video or video assets?
Yeah, I am a huge video fan also and it is a foundational technology for us.
we've done two rounds of like massive investment in video.
The second round that we did last year, um 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 ashray not ashtray, or we get revit not rabbit.
And I can just go down the list of like all the stuff that we taught it, you know, how to
understand.
um 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 would take you right to minute 47 and you could watch that thing.
So the ability to like not to have hundreds, mean like Sheppley Bullfinch has up related
over 500 hours of video this year into Synthesis primarily for the purpose of making it
searchable.
Because they've recorded all these QAQC 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 what you said about the nonverbal 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 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 just going 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 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.
um because they'll be in the middle of a meeting and all of sudden someone starts dropping
some knowledge, some magic starts happening.
It's like, cool, let's capture this, because recreating this is gonna be really hard.
So yeah, think video is gonna be just a huge, huge part of our platform for the, mean,
especially now that we're 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.
um A lot of times like the state of the art
for internal continuing education was get a subject matter expert to talk for 50 minutes
to an hour on a topic.
Great, you get your AIA, continue education units or your PE credits or whatever it is.
But that's not necessarily the best learning experience.
Like it's kind of like easy to put that together.
But like what we're finding is people building, like let's do a 15 minute session instead.
How about that?
Like.
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 that make sense too.
So
Yeah, there's a couple photo and video youtubers that I follow one guy in particular is
thinking of did this whole Breakdown and 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 how the work around and oh never mind That's not a thing anymore.
So you had to just create more and more content around that
so if you make it more modular, right, so instead of being like, I'm just gonna make this
up, if that were a 30 minute review, maybe it would have been smarter to make 10 three
minute segments instead, so that if the change is in module nine 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.
There's 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 here.
em But yes, that's right.
In the future.
Um, so we were talking about how one of the big challenges with and A when, when a firm
goes to buy somebody else is when the smaller firm that they're about to purchase, like
all the content is like in the owners or the principal's head.
If there's not another person or another, uh, way to get at that, I'm just seeing how
incredibly valuable this would be for, a smaller firm or for 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, know, 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 book, and I forgot the author's name, but maybe we can
look it up and add it 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 gonna 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 is 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.
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.
it's easier to, oftentimes actually we should say selling might be to the next generation
of owners, coming for internal sale.
So like you're also making a better asset for your next generation to buy into when it's
organized and it's clear and it's a good well-oiled knowledge machine.
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.
um 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.
um think, yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be really interesting.
um We, uh 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.
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.
Is that, 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, again, back to people, process, technology, and culture, from a
people and process perspective, like 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 holistic
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 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.
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.
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 as Josh said.
And then, you know, our website has just got a ton of resources around knowledge
management, around internet.
around AI, so that's knowledge-architecture.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 AC.
That sounds awesome.
I'd love to do it.
Well everybody, thanks for watching this episode of the Bold Brands show.
We'll see you next time.