Ron Heims has spent his entire career at RDG Planning and Design, moving from architect to IT director to his current role as Director of Practice Innovation. It’s a role dedicated to a question many AEC leaders are sitting with: who is actually responsible for making the firm better at how it works?

In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, Christopher Parsons talks with Ron about what a practice innovation program looks like from the inside. The conversation explores how Ron discovers and prioritizes innovation projects across a firm with too many good ideas, how he uses process mapping to diagnose undocumented workflows before any technology gets involved, and how he brings people with competing opinions together to build consensus around a better way forward. 

Ron also explains how RDG decides when to buy software and when to build it, and how he and his team have developed a suite of custom tools tailored specifically to RDG's workflows, including a project management platform built with agentic coding tools that connects project teams to RDG's Synthesis intranet knowledge in the flow of work.

A big part of what makes the innovation program work is what happens after a tool gets built. Ron talks about his approach to change management and adoption, including how he keeps early adopters close, responds to feedback quickly, and creates the conditions for people to actually want to change how they work. Building better tools is one challenge. Getting them adopted across a multi-office firm is another problem entirely, and Ron has learned a lot about both.

If you lead or manage an AEC firm and you sense that someone should be focused on innovation on a more dedicated basis, this episode is for you.

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In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Nicole Chavas, President and COO of Greenprint Partners, and Hillary Thompson, Principal at MBH Architects, for a candid conversation about what they are learning as they turn AI experiments into meaningful business transformation. 

Both Nicole and Hillary are senior leaders who are also personally building agents and redesigning workflows, which gives them a close-up view of not only what the technology can do, but what it reveals about their firms. Again and again, they have found that building with AI exposes the same underlying questions: What does good look like? Is this actually our standard, or just what we happen to do today? Is the knowledge documented clearly enough to use? And are we redesigning the work itself, or simply bolting AI onto an existing process?

One of the clearest lessons is that scalable transformation often means going smaller, slower, and together. Nicole describes initially trying to move quickly, work largely on her own, and use agents to redesign entire business processes at once. What she learned was that proposal development and project management are really collections of interconnected subprocesses, and that lasting change requires a different approach: involve the people doing the work, break the system into smaller pieces, focus on the highest-impact opportunities, define what good looks like, redesign each subprocess for an AI-enabled way of working, and then train the firm on the new process.

Hillary describes a parallel journey at MBH, where rapid prototyping with firm leaders through an “agent charrette” surfaced her leadership team’s dreams for AI-driven business transformation. Rapid prototyping then exposed the undocumented processes, conflicting standards, duplicated effort, and poor data quality standing in the way of their dreams. In that sense, AI serves as an organizational mirror because when agents struggle, they often teach you something about the business.

But process redesign is only part of the challenge. The other major constraint is change capacity. Nicole and Hillary are both operating in environments where the technology is improving faster than their organizations can realistically absorb change. They discuss experimenting with “good enough” solutions, following the energy of early adopters, sharing successful use cases between peers, building trust with skeptics, and giving leaders closer to day-to-day project work permission to control the pace of change.

The goal is to build a trusted core of people at their firms who can experiment, interpret what is changing, and act as a kind of shock absorber for the rest of the organization. This helps the firm move fast without forcing everyone to experience the full chaos of living at the bleeding edge of the AI frontier.

The throughline is that AI itself is not the point. It is an increasingly powerful catalyst for redesigning the business around the fundamentals AEC firms have always cared about: high-quality work teams are proud of, profitably run projects, happy clients, and engaged employees.

I think you’ll love this one.

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KTGY was founded in 1991 with an ambition to build a firm that would outlast the people who built it. Six founding partners set out to create a firm which would endure from generation to generation — a firm whose culture, values, and capability would compound over time rather than walk out the door when any one person retired. What they couldn’t have anticipated is how deliberately, and how systematically, KTGY would eventually design its way toward that goal.

In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by John Robison, Chief Operating Officer at KTGY, and Donovan Helminiak, Director of Knowledge Management, to trace the evolution of KTGY's learning ecosystem and examine how it has become one of the firm's most consequential strategic investments.

The conversation goes behind the scenes of how KTGY built four key components of its learning ecosystem:

• ELEVATE Leadership — a year-long, cohort-based program built to teach emerging leaders what great leadership looks like at KTGY

• ELEVATE Essentials — a foundational knowledge program which grew from a pandemic-era intern series into a hybrid on-demand and workshop model open to the entire firm

• ELEVATE Talent Management — a newer program targeting first-time people managers, focused on the day-to-day nuance of leading teams 

• FUEL — a grassroots mentorship community driven entirely by emerging professionals, deliberately mixing offices and experience levels to build connections that wouldn't otherwise exist across seven offices

The old apprenticeship model — learning one project at a time from the people around you — served KTGY well for decades, but is no longer sufficient for a firm with over 400 employees, seven offices, a generation of retiring principals, and a profession being radically reshaped by technology.

KTGY's answer has been to design something more intentional: a learning ecosystem where cohort-based programs, on-demand curricula, and grassroots community reinforce each other, and where building trust is a primary goal.

As we discussed in the episode, trust is the catalyst that determines how fast AEC firms can change and evolve. To move faster, means intentionally investing in building trust and KTGY’s learning ecosystem has proven remarkably effective at doing exactly that.

If you lead an AEC firm thinking seriously about what it takes to build a culture that connects distributed teams, and stays ahead of change, and endures across generations, this episode is an honest accounting of what that investment (and the returns) look like.

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Jennifer Bennett didn't think she had what it took to be a leader. As a structural engineer coming up at Shive-Hattery, she assumed leadership required a natural charisma she didn't have. In 2007 she was invited to participate in the firm's Leadership Development Program and changed her mind. Today she's President and CEO of the 750-person, 18-office architecture and engineering firm, and she runs the program herself.

In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, Jennifer takes us inside how Shive-Hattery’s Leadership Development Program actually works: the cohort structure, the Socratic teaching method, the five curriculum pillars (business acumen, negotiation, high-performance teams, culture and values, emotional and social competence), and the real strategic projects each cohort tackles over their 15-18 months together. She also shares how she builds the trust a cohort needs to succeed and how the program itself is evolving as she brings her executive team in to teach modules so the firm can double how many future leaders it reaches each year.

At its core, Shive-Hattery’s Leadership Development Program isn't just about developing individual leaders — it's about teaching people to lead change in a way that's consistent with Shive-Hattery's culture and to carry that culture forward as they rise. That's part of a bigger act of stewardship. Shive-Hattery is a firm with more than 125 years of history and Jennifer sees investing in future leaders as central to how the firm sustains, evolves, and grows for decades to come. Past leaders invested in her generation; now it's her generation’s turn to pay forward.

If you lead an AEC firm or are thinking about what it takes to build a leadership culture and an enduring firm, this episode is for you.

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In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Jackie Baxley, Principal and Practice Leader for Environmental Health, Safety, and Sustainability at HRP Associates. Jackie has spent years helping HRP evolve from a more organic, apprenticeship-driven learning culture into a more intentional learning organization that thinks carefully about competency, capability, incentives, mentorship, and organizational performance. Her perspective is shaped by the realities of consulting work, where the product is ultimately the people themselves.

One of the central ideas Jackie returns to throughout this conversation is that not every learning experience is trying to accomplish the same thing. Organizations often get into trouble when they fail to define the actual goal upfront. Is the goal simply communication? Awareness? Skills development? Demonstrated competency? Different goals require different approaches, different investments, and different ways of evaluating success.

Jackie walks through the practical frameworks HRP uses to think more intentionally about learning design, including her “inverted pyramid” model of communication, awareness, training, and competency, as well as the EDGE framework: Educate, Demonstrate, Guide, and Evaluate. We explore why awareness is not the same thing as competency, why repetition matters, how HRP approaches skills validation and quality audits, and why some learning experiences work best asynchronously while others must remain in person.

The conversation also explores the operational and economic realities of learning inside consulting firms. Jackie discusses how HRP has worked to remove the stigma around training and development by redesigning incentives, rethinking billability, and treating learning as a strategic investment rather than overhead. We also discuss HRP’s evolving employee lifecycle programs, their growing focus on soft skills and management development, and the challenge of building deeper organizational capability without turning learning into bureaucracy.

If you lead an AEC firm, manage teams, oversee operations, or are thinking about how to scale expertise more intentionally inside your organization, this episode offers a thoughtful and highly practical conversation about designing learning around real outcomes. A conversation about clearer goals, stronger capability development, and building modern learning organizations that keep getting smarter, by design. 

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In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I'm joined by Angela Watson, President and CEO of Shepley Bulfinch, a nationally recognized architecture firm whose work spans healthcare, higher education, and civic design. Angela leads with a conviction she traces back to her time teaching at MIT: that real learning doesn't happen through lecture — it happens through doing, through struggle, and through the kind of exploration that only comes when people are given room to fail safely and try again. That belief didn't stay in the classroom. It became the foundation for how she thinks about leading a firm.

Learning by doing is the foundation of how AEC professionals and firms develop. The problem is that great ideas stay trapped in pockets — one team figures something out, another team struggles with the same thing, and the knowledge never travels. Angela saw that dynamic playing out at Shepley Bulfinch as the firm grew into a national practice, work-sharing across five offices with project cycles too long and feedback loops too slow to rely on informal transfer alone. Becoming a learning organization became an operational necessity, but it turned out to be much harder than it looked.

The conversation traces the full arc of what that effort has looked like in practice and what Angela has learned leading it. Why it's so hard for subject matter experts to codify and teach what they know. Why the traditional apprenticeship model is breaking down as plates get fuller and mentorship gets crowded out. What Shepley Bulfinch learned from building Birdfeeder, their internal peer-to-peer learning platform — what worked, what was too ambitious, and what the firm is rethinking now. And why the harder problem isn't building a course catalog — it's connecting learning to where someone actually wants to go in their career.

The thread running underneath all of it is psychological safety. Angela talks about "Back to the Future," Shepley Bulfinch's reframe on lessons learned — a format designed to celebrate the imperfect and make it safe to share what went wrong. She reflects on what it took for her, as CEO, to model that vulnerability publicly, and why she believes culture is the soil in which any learning organization either takes root or doesn't.

If you lead an AEC firm, manage a team, or are thinking seriously about how your organization develops its people, this episode is for you. Angela offers deep insight into what's worked, what hasn't, and what is still to be figured out on Shepley Bulfinch's journey to becoming a learning organization.

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In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Clark Quinn, a cognitive scientist who has spent his career translating decades of learning research into practical guidance for organizations. He is the founder of Quinnovation and co-founder of the L&D Accelerator. His work is grounded in a simple conviction: most organizations are leaving enormous potential on the table — not for lack of effort or care, but because the science of how people actually learn has rarely made it into the room where learning decisions get made.

In most AEC firms, learning and development didn’t start with a formal strategy. It emerged organically. Executives responsible for talent came up through practice. L&D leaders stepped into their roles because they wanted to make their firms better, not because they were trained in the discipline. Subject matter experts shared what they know without ever having been taught how to teach.

As a result, most learning organizations in the AEC industry were largely built by accident rather than by design. And in that gap lies a significant opportunity: to create learning that doesn’t just inform, but actually improves capability and performance.

That is what this conversation is about.

Clark walks us through the science that most accidental L&D leaders never had access to. He explains why training so often stops at information transfer, what it really takes to design for performance rather than content delivery, and what the research says about learning design that actually moves the needle. We explore the shift from content-heavy training to practice-led learning, how to identify the root causes behind critical performance gaps before reaching for a training solution, and how to determine whether learning is even the right intervention.

We also step back and look at what a true learning ecosystem requires: not just courses, but performance support, job aids, communities of practice, mentoring, and the cultural conditions where learning compounds over time. Where knowledge is shared openly. Where failure is discussed. And where leadership sets the tone.

Finally, we go deep on one of the most important dynamics in any AEC firm: how to effectively work with busy and highly billable subject matter experts by drawing out what they know, pairing them with skilled learning designers, and building a coaching culture that makes expertise transferable at scale.

If you lead an AEC firm, build learning programs, or teach others what you know—and you’ve largely been figuring it out as you go—this conversation offers a foundation for doing it smarter. By design.

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