Building a More Adaptable AEC Firm with Laurie Dreyer of Taylor Design

Podcast
Written by Christopher Parsons

I've known Laurie Dreyer, Chief Development Officer at Taylor Design, since I started Knowledge Architecture in 2009, and I've learned a tremendous amount from her over the years about leadership, organizational development, knowledge management, and learning.

A few weeks ago, Laurie and I had a conversation about how to design AEC firms to thrive in an era of rapid, continuous change. We covered so much fascinating territory that when our half-hour meeting ended, I wasn't ready for the conversation to stop.

So I invited Laurie onto the Smarter by Design podcast to continue exploring what it takes to build a more adaptable AEC firm.

Five ideas from our conversation:

1. Sustained simplicity creates capacity. Every unnecessary system, process, and piece of outdated information imposes a small tax on employees' time and attention. Laurie shares how Taylor Design simplified its employee experience, and we explore how firms can reinvest the capacity they recover into better knowledge, learning, and processes. Those investments can create a compounding dividend, provided firms maintain the discipline to keep complexity from creeping back in.

2. Make change with people, not to people. Inviting employees into the process of change doesn't mean waiting for everyone to agree. Laurie shares how Taylor Design uses surveys, employee forums, and other feedback mechanisms to bring more perspectives into the decision-making process, uncover opportunities for improvement that leaders might otherwise overlook, and build greater trust and buy-in along the way.

3. The power of the networked organization. One of our shared mentors, Ed Friedrichs, believed that employees should be no more than two degrees of separation from the expertise they need. We explore how informal networks, communities of practice, and connected knowledge systems help people find one another, share what they know, and solve problems more effectively.

4. Reboarding is the new onboarding. Firms invest considerable effort in helping new employees understand how things work. But what about employees who have been there for 10, 20, or 30 years? Laurie introduces the idea of reboarding, helping experienced professionals learn how their organizations have evolved and adopt better ways of working.

5. Create stable ground for continuous change. Adaptability doesn't mean everything needs to be in constant flux. We explore how shared values, trusted relationships, and clear ways of working provide a stable foundation from which employees can confidently experiment, learn, and embrace new opportunities. Laurie shares how leaders can reinforce that foundation while building a culture that expects and welcomes continuous improvement.

Throughout our conversation, we explore what it takes to build a Modern Learning Organization that can accelerate learning, scale expertise, and thrive in an era of continuous change.

I hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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📚 Show Notes + Resources

KA Connect Talks

Smarter by Design Newsletter and Podcast

Webinars

Books

  • Cadigan, Steve. Workquake: Embracing the Aftershocks of COVID-19 to Create a Better Model of Working. 2021.

  • Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Avery, 2018.

  • de Geus, Arie. The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment. Harvard Business School Press, 1997.

  • Dixon, Matthew, and Ted McKenna. The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Portfolio, 2022.

  • Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little, Brown, 2000.

  • Harding, Paul. Tinkers. Bellevue Literary Press, 2009. Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  • Lencioni, Patrick. The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues. Jossey-Bass, 2016.

  • Sinek, Simon. The Infinite Game. Portfolio, 2019.

  • Warrillow, John. Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You. Portfolio, 2011.

  • Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University

📃 Episode Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Chris: Laurie, a couple weeks ago, we were talking about continuous change, and I didn't want that conversation to end, so I want us to pick up where we left off and bring some other folks into this. You and I have known each other through the whole Knowledge Architecture journey, since 2009, and I've learned so much from you about learning and development and change management and organizational development and all these intersections of things that this community's really interested in.

So you and I were talking about change, and one of the questions I'd love to start with is, how much change can a firm actually absorb? Do we have a limited capacity for change as a firm? And if so, how do we manage that capacity? So I'll just start with a nice light question like that.

Laurie: I think people think they're limited, but we've had events in the world, COVID and other things, where we had to change a whole lot faster than we thought we had to, and people did. So I think there's a sense of, do I wanna change? Do I have a voice in it? Or do I have to change even if I don't want to?

I think that the AEC community is uniquely qualified to change, because if you look at the typical project, things change all the time, right? In most firms I've worked in, even in the office or talking to people on Teams, you say, "Well, who told you that?" And I always say, "And when did you hear that?" Because they said, "Well, I heard this happened on this project." And you say, "Well, it was 2:00.” “Well, I heard this at 3:00." And then we all shift to, "Okay, that's the thing that happened."

So I think to some extent, we're wired for change, but we get overwrought, overwhelmed, perhaps burned out, or just resistant — any or all of the above, and 10 more things we haven't thought of. So I think we think we're more resistant to change than we are. I think we're way more adaptable than we think we are.

Chris: Where do you think the idea that we're resistant to change comes from?

Laurie: Number one, having worked globally, Americans do not like to be told what to do. So the manner in which you go about change and engaging people is absolutely critical, and I think as a culture — and I know you're a history major — we have shown that over and over and over again. However, we're also extraordinarily innovative, so if the idea bubbles up, we are much more willing to tolerate it and won't throw the tea in the harbor.

So I think there's a little bit of both to that. Like, when do we have to change — and the dreaded word, mandate — versus when do we want to change, and we buy in that the change is good and we wanna do it? I think both of those are in us. And I think some firms culturally are more equipped for change.

One of the people I met at a KA Connect many years ago told me they did all their changes at the beginning of the year, and I remember being fascinated. Like, all of them, all at once? And they said, "Yeah, we stack them all up, and then we roll them out in January." It was a rather large organization. And I thought, wow, first of all, I wouldn't be patient enough to do that, but is there a logic to that? And they said, "Yeah, because everybody knows it's coming," and they felt that their firm adapted better all at once.

Chris: And then you spend the rest of the year recovering and adapting to the change, versus just new stimulus all the time.

Laurie: I like Atomic Habits better, because little things where you make it easier for people to do things, and you say, "This'll make your life easier," all of a sudden people are interested. And a little bit at a time is a lot more palatable, and I think it bears a resemblance to how the world actually works right now. I mean, things change all the time.

So I think it's possible for us to do more change, and boy, is it coming at us. Strategic plans used to be five-year plans. I remember way back when they were seven. I remember back when people didn't have strategic plans, and now they do. And now they're four-year, three-year, two-year, one-year updates, because the world is changing that quickly.

So from not having thought about it to adapting to it, I think you also have to hire people who are adaptable to change, flexible.

Chris: There's so many things I wanna follow up on there. Let's start with not being told what to do. There's the famous — and I can't remember the attribution — change management quote, "People want change done with them, not to them,"

Laurie: Oh, 100%.

Chris: which you're speaking to. And so I wanna take that. I agree, I'm like 100%, makes sense. And then also, I think a fair critique of our industry, especially because of the ownership structures and partnerships, is sometimes we err on the side of having to have too much consensus, and it slows us down, and we don't move at the pace that the business is demanding of us.

So I'm trying to square that paradox between, on one hand, we should make change with people. On the other hand, consensus might be too slow. And I'm wondering what your thought about that is.

Laurie: Oh God, you're gonna wanna kill me. It depends. Because if it's critical, like, "Hey, we all have to go home tomorrow," which is different—

Chris: Like a COVID thing. There's no alternative.

Laurie: There's no alternative here. It's not optional. Here we go. So if it's really mandatory or critical, then people react to it differently.

I love to survey people, even on strategic plans. I think it's really important to ask everybody for input, 'cause you also don't know where great change could come from. You think it's from the top, and quite often it isn't. But telling people they have to do something is always risky, unless they believe it's for their benefit and also the firm's benefit.

I think the organizational structure has a great impact. I've been a shareholder partner in a firm, and I've also been in ESOPs, and I'm currently in an ESOP, 100% employee-owned. I think that helps, because we want people to think like an owner. We want to hear from them. It's encouraged. It's ratified. It's part of our ritual, if you will, doing Lean Coffees and doing things where people are asked to express how they feel.

And new employees are always like, "What? What?" And then they see it, and then they become, "Oh, this is not like we're gonna sit here and criticize everything. These are ideas for how to make us better." Are you gonna do all of them? No, you can't. Are you gonna wait for consensus? Probably not. But you can do better, and people, when they feel they're heard, will engage differently. There's already buy-in. Like, when we interview people—

Chris: But the fact that you ask them for their input, you're starting... Yeah.

Laurie: And if you're part of an interview panel, you are subconsciously bought into the success of a new hire. You've already bought in. You've already been a part of a process, so subconsciously you've bought in. So I call it pre-buddy.

Same idea with a change. You float it, you do a pilot program, you test it out, you see. And sometimes they're flat-out rejected, and they should be. But then there's more buy-in, because people feel like they could be heard.

I'm a big lover of surveys. I'm quite an extrovert, but I think a lot of the people we hire who are truly brilliant are introverts, and they're not gonna speak off the cuff, on the fly, in a meeting. They're just not. But if there's a survey, then they can write out what they think, and that's really, really powerful, I think.

Chris: How do you think about the volume of surveying? This is one thing I hear from our clients: "Oh my God, we're over-surveying our people."

Laurie: We have definitely done that. Guilty as charged. So we run a couple each year for sure. We try to do them six months apart, but we just did an extra one this year because of you. I'll blame you, Chris. One of the presenters at KA Connect talked about doing a learning survey — rather than what they thought was valuable, what did people actually feel—

Chris: —versus what they thought was valuable. Yeah, that was Sam Horton from Diamond Schmitt.

Laurie: Yeah, and it was hilarious, 'cause I was like, "Oh, how often have I done that? Thought, 'Well, that's really useful.'" Well, the people hearing it are like, "That's shite. I don't want that. I want this other thing." Ugly as it is, it was more useful. So it kinda got us laughing, so we did our own survey about all the things we've done in the past year. Was it useful? Did you attend? Did you not? If you didn't, why not? But then also just rate it, and then did it give you more confidence or not?.

Chris: Yeah.

Laurie: Yeah. Boy, was that interesting. And then once we did that and started doing it in a really small format after each town hall — we've had technical quality town halls — people buy into, okay, they're actually reading these.

So then the next meeting you say, "Okay, we won't start at 7:00 in the morning." We didn't do that, but you would've thought we had asked them to. But they said, "This is what we'd rather have," and you can make these adjustments to say, "We're not gonna make every adjustment, but we can make the ones that make sense, that most people seem to be in line for."

We do this Zweig White survey every year, and a lot of people started asking for PTO. They didn't want vacation and sick. And yes, we meet the minimum standard for vacation laws, in the state of California and everywhere we practice. However, they wanted the freedom to have a PTO bucket, and a lot of people said, "Hey, this is something we really want," so we made that change. And does everybody love it? No. But most people do, so...

Chris: Yeah, and that's the hard thing. I mean, if you make a change, you're generally not gonna please everybody.

Laurie: No, it's impossible.

Chris: Right. And I think part of what I wanna unpack with you today is what keeps firms from changing as quickly as the times are demanding. And I wonder if there's this kind of like, we know the current status quo works. I don't wanna take the risk of making anybody unhappy. If people are unhappy with the existing conditions, well, they've already gotten used to it, so it's not a new thing. I don't wanna deal with any new problems.

Laurie: Anytime you do something, you're going to get feedback whether you ask for it or not, and you have to be able to take it in. That's how someone feels. That doesn't mean they hate you. It doesn't mean they hate the firm. They just feel how they feel. And the great thing is they're telling you how they feel. They're not hiding how they feel. I'd much rather hear from someone who was upset about something—

Chris: —than someone hiding it.

Laurie: Yeah, exactly. And you're not gonna please everybody. But one of the things you asked us to think about, which I think is hilarious, is two things we do, I think, as an industry. One, we really think we can hit perfection. People don't say it, but they think it.

Why is that? Because they're highly talented, educated, brilliant people, and they strive for perfect. It's who they are. The highest grade point averages in the schools are architects and engineers, and they get upset. They'll still tell you, "I got an A-minus in physics." And it's like, oh my God, that was 35 years ago.

Chris: And they remember the professor's name.

Laurie: They remember. So there is this ideal that we can hit perfection. But a long time ago — I don't remember who told me this, it might have been Ed Friedrichs — there is no such thing as perfection, because we won't all agree on what perfection is.

So if you can hit 80% of the people who want it, keep moving. Listen to the people who are upset with grace and humility, but you're not gonna please everybody. Well, that was Abe Lincoln. That's an easier one for me to know the attribution.

Chris: When you did the PTO change, going into making that change, did you know that some people weren't gonna like it? Had they shared that with—

Laurie: Yes.

Chris: Did it help you with your messaging to have heard specifically why it didn't work for them? Did you make any adjustments? I'm just curious, by reaching out in advance, how did that help you, even with the people you knew weren't gonna—

Laurie: I think it can help, because sick leave usually transfers over year by year, but we allowed the people who had some stocked up to keep it and use it and burn it up. We didn't punish them. Otherwise you run the risk — it's not a high risk, but you run the risk that all of a sudden, "Okay, I'm gonna lose this thing, so I better use it real fast," and that's not what you want. That's not a good business decision.

And Kevin was a big part of that. The PTO bucket made sense. We're not taking anything from anybody. And then we also added in free holidays, because when we counted how many holidays people asked for, we came up with a list of 21 potential holidays that were for religious, social, just all kinds of different reasons, all of them very, very good and important.

So we're gonna close the office for sure on these days, 'cause our offices are actually closed, and on these other days, you get to use free holidays any way you want.

Chris: Mm-hmm. That's—

Laurie: And it could be for... Nobody cares why. It's up to you why, and if you wanna share why, go ahead, but if you don't, you don't have to. So that was a big movement towards the democratization of time off for very busy people, so...

Chris: Because that's not gonna change. We're gonna be busy. We are busy. Things are getting more challenging in terms of project deadlines speeding up. So how can we develop...

This is actually one of the things that I walked away from my conversation with you wanting to circle back to. We talked about capacity for change as an organization, but for individual people, there's so much coming at us in our personal life and our private life. How can we remove stressors from people? And you cited an example of going from 14 systems down to three.

Laurie: Yeah.

Chris: Why are we putting this... It's like a — oh shoot, what do you call it in tennis? Where you fault on your own—

Laurie: Oh yeah, double fault.

Chris: Yeah, right. Or an own goal in soccer, right? It's like, why are we making this harder on people than it needs to be when we can make it simpler? And so I'm curious, tell us the story about that simplification that you did.

Laurie: I think I was on BART, and I read a lot. I like to read. I like to take in new information. I like to learn. And I read this article — I wish I could tell you who wrote it — and they talked about the tech stack. And the way they talked about it was, when you look at all the software people need to use in a firm, this is the stressor.

Because back in the day, you used to say, "Oh, we're upgrading from AutoCAD 13 to 14." I actually remember that weekend, so it's stuck in my head. And you knew that change was coming, and you had time. I mean, there was so much organizational energy that got put into that. But you knew it was coming. There was training for you afterwards, and you all kinda took it in stride, and you were all side by side with the change.

Well, nowadays, you pop open anything on Microsoft on any given day, and there's seven updates waiting for you. And all of a sudden you're like — well, I don't know, you might wanna cut this part — WTF, the new Outlook. Get away from me. It's just like Clippy. You are messing with my life. You've made my life worse, and you did that to me. And I quickly Googled how to undo that.

Chris: And I was not involved in the change.

Laurie: And I was not involved in the change. And I like to keep a lot of stuff open, because then I go back through when I'm keeping up with my list and...

See, they're messing with how people do the work. You said many, many years ago, "You gotta get the work, you gotta do the work, and you gotta run the business." So when we look at how we run the business, "just to live here" is how we reframed it. Just to live here, there are 14 different things or places you have to interact with, let alone do the work.

Chris: And by "live here," you mean this is where I find out what the policies are, this is where I—

Laurie: Exist in the firm.

Chris: —what benefits I have? Just—

Laurie: Do my timecard, do my expense report.

Chris: Yeah, base of Maslow's pyramid kind of stuff.

Laurie: Exactly. Exactly. Just to live here in the firm, these are all the places I have to go. So we were running multiple kinds of software. Some kinds of things — we're a 100-plus-person firm — were on giant Excel spreadsheets. Not a good idea, because the opportunity for data to go astray, I'll call it, is painful.

Directories that were manually updated. Some directories were on Vantagepoint, some weren't. Some were manually updated. Some things were on Drive, some things weren't. Some things were in a separate software to do performance management, but the payroll was over here, but it wouldn't use Azure, so you had to go over here. You had to know multiple passwords. And then if you hadn't logged into something in a really long time, it might have changed on you again.

So when I read that, it was like I had this hallelujah moment: oh, my goodness, we're doing that to people. And Chris, that's not even doing the work.

Chris: Right.

Laurie: Because think how many add-ons and things. We use BIM. One of our employees watches you religiously, Steve. He asked you a question — 'cause I hear you in podcasts go, "Okay, Steve, what's your question?" and then you'll read it. And I think because of you, he came up with the BIM certification program.

It's actually not a certification. It's actually not even really a test. But what it is is free time, paid time, to learn the way we do it. So the traditional Autodesk BIM Revit certification is not useful to us, because we've modified how we work so much that that's actually gonna point you in the wrong direction.

Chris: You wanna teach the Taylor way, not the—

Laurie: So we have LinkedIn Learning 24/7 for every employee. There's a couple things you do just about, do you know your BIM basics? And then we move you through all of the things we think you should know.

So every time somebody says, "I don't wanna take..." it's like, "Will you please just do it? We're giving you paid time." "Oh." And then later, "You know, that was really useful. I wish I'd done that six months ago." So it's actually disguised paid training. And Steve developed that and runs it, because he's the one that's gonna bear the pain also if people can't use the systems efficiently.

Chris: Right. Or if they spend a bunch of time spinning their wheels going to YouTube or wherever to try and go get information, versus finding out the Taylor way, 'cause you've made that available.

Laurie: And you got the wrong directions, 'cause how would Google know how we do it? They wouldn't. How would LinkedIn Learning know? At the lower level, yes. But at a higher level, with all the plugins, they wouldn't. We have all kinds of plugins to make your life easier when you're working in the system.

So once you know that, then you can say, "What can we do about that? How can we make life easier to live here and work here?"

Chris: Right. And a side benefit of that — I mean, obviously there's quality of life and job satisfaction — but when real changes that are necessary come along, people have more bandwidth to be able to make change, because they're not spending all of their resources chasing things all over the place and trying to remember what system to look into.

Laurie: Yes. And somebody at Stanford — I don't remember who, but the Stanford Business School, pretty smart people — did a study on things that upset people. So you've got this: I'm at the status quo, and things that I love about the firm, and then I've got these things that really upset me about a firm. Overzealous administrative processes was on the side of, "That really bothers me, that I have to fill out seven forms and get three signatures, and you don't even have a fillable PDF."

Things like that really bother people. Now, once you fix it, it doesn't turn into a positive — "Oh, gee, what great admin" — but it does remove the negative. So it's an interesting, mathematical way to look at it. But once you remove their pain, then they can spend more time on the things that truly should make you happy, doing work you're passionate about or something like that.

So I read that. Kyle Davey told me about that study, and I was like, "Oh my goodness, I knew that was true." I didn't know it had a name, didn't know anybody studied it, but wow. You can imagine — how many times have you tried to do something where it was just so cumbersome, at a certain point you're like, "I'm not even sure I wanna do this anymore."

Chris: Right. You definitely lose your passion for it.

Laurie: "I'm on step 47." Or you take IKEA — universal. And a tip to everybody: if they tell you you need a dowel there, do not think, "Oh, I can skip that." Oh, no, you will have to take it apart and redo it again. But it's very clear what to do, what not to do, and it doesn't even have language on it.

Chris: Especially, I bet, in that study — I mean, I don't know if they looked at it this way — but I bet some of those procedures also felt imperious, and were not treating you like an adult and giving the autonomy. It's like, "Really? I need permission for this?"

Laurie: Yeah. And Ed Friedrichs's favorite was, "Too much management kills the spirit." That was Ed back in the early '90s. He already had a sense of that, and now people have studied it and turned it into a social science. But if we just think about who you are as a human, I think it's just common sense.

People don't like things that are overly cumbersome.

Chris: So there's a focus here on simplicity and removing friction, whether that's the number of platforms you have to go to, whether it's a process, whether it's finding information like you were talking about with Steve. That's a huge part of it, if we're trying to think about how to become able to move faster, right, as businesses.

Laurie: Yes. And I think it was Arie — Royal Dutch Shell, your—

Chris: Yeah, Arie de Geus, the living—

Laurie: Yeah, de Geus. The only competitive advantage you have is the speed at which your people learn. I think that's still true, only now we're learning lightning fast, and what you knew yesterday might not be true tomorrow.

Chris: The half-life of knowledge shrinking.

Laurie: Half-life is less. Doctors say it's out in three years. I went to the doctor the other day — 'cause I knew I was gonna be talking to you — and asked, "Is that true?" And they were like, "Yeah, that's actually pretty true. It's, like, three or maybe four years on the outside."

I'm like, "That doesn't bother you?" "No," as they were taking notes with AI and asking me how I felt about that. And I'm like, "I'm fine."

Chris: No, I mean, I had Chris Myers on the podcast early on, from Johns Hopkins, and he said, "Half of what you learn at the beginning of medical school, before you finish, is already outdated."

Laurie: Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Chris: Stunning. And—

Laurie: That's real evidence. Mine's anecdotal, because I decided to test it on a doctor.

Chris: Well, that's fine. We have different research methods.

This feels like it's in that bureaucratic, too-much-process stuff, but I'm gonna pivot more towards practice standards and the way that we work.

I just wrote a piece yesterday for the newsletter, trying to explore this question of, on one hand, we want standards because they help us scale quality, we can accelerate the way people learn, we have consistency — especially if we're multi-office like Taylor, and we're working and sharing across offices.

All these reasons why standards are good. And if we didn't have them, it would be chaos, right?

But I got this question at KA Connect, at the conference this year, from somebody from a big engineering firm — a really great firm — and she's like, "I hear all this. I get it. Of course we should codify standards," whatever.

She goes, "But at what point do we reduce the ability for the company to innovate because we've so overly prescribed how we work?" And we end up getting really good at running yesterday's business, and we aren't...

Laurie: That's a great quote.

Chris: Right? I mean, we're experts in running the 2024 version of our company. And I'm curious how you think about...

You've been in some different firms with some different cultures, so maybe even a longitudinal look at this: "You're gonna take away my autonomy. I can't innovate," versus, "Oh my gosh, it's chaos in the office because we don't have a way of doing things." How do you think about that?

Laurie: I think there are things that you need standards on, and I would say that a lot of the live-at-work tech falls in that category. That's about efficiency and people understanding good GUI, good interface, logical ways that they can work within that system and get their things—

Chris: —We're not gonna give you multiple ways to put your time card in.

Laurie: No, we're not.

Chris: So we've got some things that are non-negotiables, where we're not gonna debate the standards or the process there. That implies that there are things that you don't like, and then what else?

Laurie: There are other business operation things. I think having a decision tree. I've worked in companies that work by consensus. It was very painful.

I was actually told once, in one company, "We don't wanna talk about that." And I said, "But isn't that something we need to resolve?" "Yes, but we might not all agree."

I stopped and I thought, "Oh, wow, okay. But isn't that the point of talking about it?" So, a different life, different time.

Chris: What do they call it? You don't have a PRI. So a PRI is a primary responsible individual for making a decision. Do you do that at Taylor? Do you have, "This person's gonna make these calls"?

Laurie: For the most part, yes, but there's a lot of calls people can make on their own. But we have signature authority, and who can review fee proposals, and all the things where you actually need to have someone paying attention, because someone, without even meaning to, could make a pretty critical error.

So we've got all of those normal kinds of standards in place. And if you've ever worked anywhere, you know that all companies are trying to do a lot of the same things, but we all do it differently. So carrot-led or stick-led or... I once got a red dot — not at Taylor — a red dot next to my name.

I had one late time card in five years, and it just stayed red the rest of the year. I was like, "Okay." And I'm like, "That's harsh." So you wanna have forgiveness if someone died in their family, or they were in a car accident and didn't quite get a chance to get their time card in on time, but they were darn close.

Things like that. You wanna have some sanity.

Chris: More grace than Spanish Inquisition energy.

Laurie: I like that. Yes, more grace than Spanish Inquisition. Yeah, I like that.

A quote that I like — it's not mine — Karen Stephenson, PhD, Anderson School of Business. Someone Ed ran into, and he brought Karen Stephenson in to talk to us about networks, and hierarchical organizations versus networked organizations.

And she was fascinating, because the way she put it is, you need enough hierarchy — like the human body — for the skeleton to stand, or else it's not gonna move. But you need enough tendons and muscles and everything to have the fluidity. So to me, it's a spectrum of when it's, "We've all gotta do it this way."

Like, you guys, let's not argue with the IRS. We just have to accept it. But over here, the flavor of coffee we have in the office, we can do whatever we want, right? Come on, it's a spectrum. But networked organizations are more nimble, more fluid, have better relationships, and they typically outperform.

So she was studying Charles Schwab, and they were in San Francisco, and she kept trying to figure out... She's looked at seven types of networks that people belong to in an organization. You need to be connected to at least one to feel a part of the organization, which is something I've carried with me since then.

And she could not figure it out. They weren't hired on the same day, didn't go to the same school, didn't work in the same department, didn't play music together, weren't on the company softball team. She went through all these different things. One day, she's walking into the office and she's like, "Man, there's seven of them."

What were they doing, Chris? Smoking. They all took the same smoke break, and they solved each other's problems, and they—

Chris: That was their little community of practice.

Laurie: That was their weird little network. But they all got to know each other, and they all got to trust each other, and they all helped each other solve problems.

So I love stories like that, where humans with the freedom to innovate will.

Chris: Yeah. Etienne Wenger wrote the book on communities of practice, and one of the anecdotes that's always stuck with me in that book is that one of the first communities of practice he studied was Xerox repair people. So they'd go out all morning and go fix a bunch of broken printers and copiers or whatever, fax machines, come back at lunch, and just unload everything that happened that day. And that's where it started.

Like, "Oh, I ran into that thing too, but here's actually the hack and the workaround." So they had built a little community of practice around lunch, around grumbling about their printers and copiers.

Laurie: Well, and one of the sessions you had a couple years ago, with one of the doctors, was that people don't remember data, but they remember stories. And if you teach the stories — like the Xerox repair people, or the doctors, or in this case the smokers — then they help each other solve problems. So they're...

I think we're wired to wanna solve problems. It's just a matter of who do we know, who do we talk to? And then Malcolm Gladwell — people who are hubs. Your job is to not block the information, but to send it through.

Chris: You're a connector, right? That was in The Tipping Point, I think.

Laurie: Yeah, it was The Tipping Point. Thank you. And I remember reading that going, "Oh, that's what HR should be. That's what learning—"

Chris: —should be. A connector.

Laurie: And that's what Synthesis is. It's a connector. You come here, and then you get shot out: here's your subject matter expert, or here's the document, or here's the template. You're a hub for the knowledge wheel.

Chris: Yeah. I think the three things were: you were a maven, so you were a deep subject matter expert; you were a connector; or you were a salesperson, and you could help people understand change and why things mattered. And that's how you got change to happen in The Tipping Point, was combining—

Laurie: And I always felt — are you a depth of knowledge? I'm not. Are you a generalist? I am. And that also helps you... I don't know that I'm selling anything, but you know how to connect the dots, or connect the people, and then they solve their own problems.

Chris: How does this idea of a networked organization come back to being able to change more quickly, a higher volume of change, metabolize change? How do you think networks benefit from that? Or how do you think the ability to change relates to being a networked organization?

Laurie: The more people you know... At its essence, EQ is you're as smart as the people you know. So if you know people — and there are seven, maybe twenty networks you belong to in an organization. I call them engagement communities, where you feel connected to an initiative, or the wellness group, or whatever it is.

We have an innovation studio. Once you know those people, then you can tap into them and ask things differently or come up with different ideas, and you kinda know where to go with them. So I think a network just means there's a more free flow of information. The people who have the information aren't holding it in, like, "You don't need to know that. That's on a need-to-know basis."

That's not helpful and never was. Learning should be open to everybody. Knowledge should be open to everybody. There are extremely few things that people shouldn't have access to.

Chris: So you've mentioned Ed Friedrichs a couple times, and we're probably gonna return to Ed, 'cause he was a huge mentor and inspiration to me and to you — former CEO of Gensler. One of the things I learned from Ed, he had this saying about two degrees of separation. So Kevin Bacon's got six degrees, you know.

And so what he would say is, within an organization, you should be able to find the person who knows the thing, or find the person who knows the person who knows the thing.

Laurie: Right. And if you go to the connector, that's one degree, and the connector should be able to send you straight out to the other side, to the person that you're looking for. His concept of "ask an expert" didn't work, because none of the people who were experts wanted to be called one. Because I think there's a humility to experts — they know they don't know all bajillions of things.

Chris: The more they get to know about their subject material, the more they're convinced they don't know about their subject.

Laurie: Correct. So there's that inverse relationship with people who say, "Well, I'm really an expert." And relative to where they were, they are. Relative to the rest of the world, they may not be. So as soon as we took out the word "expert," it went fine. But it didn't have a good start, because that one word got in the way.

But Ed meant it to be complimentary to people who had deep, deep knowledge. And then once we got rid of the word, it started to go again.

Chris: What word did you use instead?

Laurie: I forget. I'm gonna have to ask — ask a friend, or ask a coworker, ask something. But it became very, very vanilla, right? And then the notion of subject matter experts — people were even uncomfortable with that.

"Well, I know a little bit about that." And I was like, "Actually, you know a lot about—"

Chris: —just playing coy a little bit. Well, sometimes they don't wanna be advertising that people can come to them for all their questions.

Laurie: What? "And come ask me all your questions." Do you remember the guy you had from Arup? At this last year's KA Connect, there was a guy who worked at Arup, 'cause I said, "Does anybody remember the five stars lessons learned?" And how exquisitely he changed the language so that... 'Cause, you know, "What did you do? What was the problem?" And it's like, "What did you learn?" instead of, "What went wrong?" And just that one change, people said, "Well, this is what we learned."

Chris: Calling them knowledge—

Laurie: —say, "Oh, here's all the things that..." And then, who needs to know this? Boy, the next person. Those last two exquisitely phrased things in his star enabled people to actually talk about what had gone wrong, dot, dot, dot, because it wasn't perfect.

With the standard of care, it doesn't have to be perfect, and yet the world keeps thinking that we're going to be perfect. We can't be. We're not building a Toyota engine. We're doing very complex work with no known outcomes. And I think from systems thinking — simple problems, simple work; complicated work — you still need to be a subject matter expert to know exactly how to get to the known thing on the other side.

And if you're doing healthcare work in California, boy, is that true. You need to know how to get through everything, and how to work with HCAI and have a good relationship with them, and get to the other side. But complex work, we don't know the outcome, but the client has to trust you enough to work with you to get there.

So it's kinda baked in that there's gonna be change, a lot of it. So I think if you're doing really complex work, your people know how to cope with change a whole lot better than other people might, because you're already in a very complex change environment with the project work.

Chris: Or are they so wiped out from the project work that they're like, "Oh my gosh, don't mess with my day-to-day existence"?

Laurie: No, that's real. I mean, that could be, for sure. Like, "Oh my, I can't do another thing." Totally get it. But that's why we need to make everything else as much easier as we can. And then can they innovate? Can they come up with new tools that they need? Because they're on that end of rapid change, and you're not quite sure where it's gonna end.

Somebody once told me, "Be like a river to head for the goal. But while you're on the way to the goal, the goal might change." 'Cause what you learn on the way to the goal might make you move the goal to a different place.

Chris: Right. I remember Ed talking about that. I'm gonna go back to the network a little bit more, though, 'cause he told me that right when we were starting our company, and he had all these little things. He's like, "Make sure any piece of knowledge in your system, there's a person's name next to it."

And so that's part of supporting that two degrees of separation. It led me to write a talk that I gave many times called "The Connected Practice," right? That became the vision: how can we make our businesses more connected, both in person and also digitally? And it drove a lot of the decisions we made product-wise, to make it easy to find people and easy to share information.

And that was, let's call it 2012. It's 14 years later. You implemented Synthesis at Taylor last year. Well, what month is it? October? Yes. Starting last year. How important — in terms of why you did it, and priority-wise — where was making Taylor more networked?

Was that part of your goal with implementing, or did you already feel like you had built a network and you were trying to achieve something else?

Laurie: I don't feel like I built anything. I think I walked into a firm that had great DNA and was already networked, and already had these flavors of possibility, I'll call it, because it was already there. The DNA was there. And we were already working across offices, and we had people who we called borderless, like you were a service person to anybody in the company.

We expanded offices, as many firms have and will do and continue to do. So yeah, pretty much, because you wanna find the best person for that thing, and when you're small enough, you can do that a lot more easily. As you start to grow, you start to need more systems and systems thinking, right?

Chris: Yeah, 'cause how do I, in Sacramento, know there's a person in San Diego who can do the thing?

Laurie: Exactly.

The thing, right. Do the thing. So I think it's baked in, but I think you have to put a lot of effort into making sure people stay connected and are engaged somewhere — in a community of practice in the company, somewhere in a group that's meeting, that's on a career track that you're interested in.

Maybe you're interested in sustainability or wellness or whatever it might be, so that you are connected beyond the project work to other networks of people. We also have a firm-wide meeting every Monday. That's been true in many firms I've worked at, where we all just level set for the week: here's what's going on that we know about.

Our front page of Synthesis has a master calendar for the whole firm. Who's got office lunches going on? Who's got... We call them owners lunches. Every office has one every month. The most highly attended things are the firm-wide meetings and the office lunches, because we're an ESOP.

And that's where the Lean Coffee happens, where people bring up what they want to talk about, what's—

Chris: Can you talk about Lean Coffee for people that don't know what it is?

Laurie: Yeah, yeah. I don't know that I'm well-equipped.

Chris: I can help. I've done it too, so between the two of us, we can piece it together.

Laurie: We put out tons of Post-it notes and pens, and if you're new, people are going, "Why are these here?" So we'll go through updates, and here's what we're doing out in the community, and here's our next office lunch, and here's some...

Just a little bit, five, 10 minutes. And then you get to write any question you want on a Post-it note. What about this? What about that? What about the other thing? And then we gather them all up, and then we bucket them, because they usually start to follow themes. And so then you look at the themes, and we spend three minutes on...

Well, you vote. Like, the most important thing we want to talk about is the temperature in the office. It could be — who knows? I have seen that. Eleven people want to talk about that, or five people want to know this or that or the other thing, and then we try to do three minutes each. And then at the end of three minutes, you get to decide: do you add one more minute, because you want to round it up?

Chris: So you can vote whether or not we keep going or whether we stop—

Laurie: Whether we stop or not. We try to end on an hour, but if people wanna stay over, they can and do.

And then at the end of a Lean Coffee, we talk about, what did you like about that and what can we improve? Not criticize. What can we do better? And so that becomes a part of all of our learning programs. Again, that was there before I got there. At the end of every deck you see is, what did you like and want more of, and what could we do better? And anything could end up in the do-better bucket.

Chris: Yeah, we always wrap our community meetings with kudos and even-better-ifs, right? That's exactly the same, more or less.

Laurie: Even better if. I like that.

Chris: Even better if. Yeah.

Laurie: We do our kudos on the Monday morning meeting. Kudos to project deadlines. Kudos are firm-wide. The Lean Coffees tend to be a little more office-ish.

Chris: So you're getting at something. The answer to that question reminds me of a thing I used to say all the time around what the intranet was. I'd say your intranet is a mirror that you hold up to your organization. And so I think what you were saying is when you walked into Taylor, there was already a culture of being a network in place, with a lot of institutions and habits and beliefs and mindsets and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So if you put a technology that can network people on top of a culture that's already networked, it just accelerates and amplifies that behavior, right?

Laurie: I think it can only help. It can only help. And COVID drove us all home. Well, depending on where you were and what was happening to your children, it was just all over the place, right? But the technology and the commitment to technology was already there long before I got there.

So we were already networked, technologically networked. And then you have to have trust. You never were watching what people were doing, so you have to have trust they're gonna be able to keep doing what they were doing. But we still created technological barriers, so this in-person thing is still very important.

We are human animals, so social anthropology is we wanna be together. But we can still be networked in person, and we can still be networked technologically, but even better yet if you have a knowledge management system where you know you can go there and find, within two degrees of separation, a person, a product, a template, a something.

Or you can write a quick review. We get them daily. "I wish it had this," or, "I wish..." The other day somebody said, "I wish it was easier to find the Woodworking Institute things within this technical format." So I went in there and looked, and he was right. It was hard to find. So then you say, "Okay, we can do better. We can make that better."

Chris: Right. But the key there, right, is the follow-up and making it better. You build a virtuous cycle flywheel if people give feedback and you respond, and then you make it better, and then they give you more feedback.

Laurie: Yes. Oh, I like that. Virtuous cycle flywheel. Yes, that's what it is.

Chris: I combined two ideas into one, like, just—

Laurie: Love that. I love that. That is what it is, because once you know you're being listened to, you can become fully engaged in it.

Chris: And I think if we're talking about moving at the speed of change these days and how quickly information changes, you have those feedback mechanisms set up and you have the resources—and I wanna talk about this a little bit—to respond to the feedback, so that people have really high-quality information that they can trust, which lets them move faster, so they don't have to go around and ask 10 people, "Do we know what the thing is?" Because they can trust that the thing that's written down is accurate.

Laurie: Correct. And one of the things that confronts us with AI—and we're using AI, I don't know anybody really who isn't. I mean, anybody who tells me, "I don't wanna use AI," and I'm like, "Didn't you use Siri to get here?" "Yeah." And I was like, "Okay, I'll just leave that alone." But how would you know you found the wrong thing if you don't have your knowledge management put away well?

You could find the wrong thing, or, with the best of intentions, find a template that somebody didn't archive. You found something, but it wasn't the right thing. So by cleaning your garage—I call data cleaning cleaning your garage—you make it a whole lot easier to find anything in the garage.

I was listening to a podcast the other day that said 85% of Americans cannot put a car in their garage 'cause they have too much junk—

Chris: Is that right?

Laurie: —and they have storage units instead. And I'm like, oh my goodness. Yeah, I'm gonna have to tell my husband not to watch this, 'cause we can't put a car in our garage either. Different reason. Nonetheless, it won't fit.

But data cleaning is like cleaning the garage. If you can see the things in your garage, then you can get the tool you need. You know exactly where it is. It got put away. So to me, it's like cleaning your garage. And nobody's data is clean. Nobody's perfect.

Every year at Knowledge Architecture, you meet somebody that says, "Oh, but it's such a mess." I said, "Everybody's is a mess." And it's a constant state of flux.

People did the best they could with the information they had at the time they did something. Don't look back too much. Look forward, like what do you actually need, and drive towards that, and you won't have as much pain, anxiety, or guilt over it. And I think that's what keeps people from starting also.

Chris: Well, that and—I was combining this garage idea with something you said earlier around the overly complex administrative procedures. I like what you said, like if you can see it and you know where it is and you can get to it quickly, you'll use it. But if your garage is a hot mess and it's gonna be 10 minutes to try and figure out where the thing is, you just won't do it, right?

Or then you start a new little mess in your living room to get to the things that you would like to get to in your garage, but your garage is too complicated, so now I've got a quick-access pile in my living room or something like that.

Laurie: It's like, how many tape measures do I have?

Chris: Right.

Laurie: Eight. My husband found them and put them away.

Chris: So from a knowledge management perspective, if you're a project manager and the data and the information are not well organized and easy to find, it's only rational behavior that you're squirreling away things on your desktop to make it easier to get to them. Because it's so demotivating to go try and find things if they're not well organized and findable.

Laurie: Right, or if it takes too long for me to get that product using the technology that's available. You might remember back in the day, you'd go into an office, you'd flip your stuff on, and you'd walk to Starbucks. You had enough time to walk to a Starbucks, get a coffee, and walk back, and then maybe by then your stuff was up.

And now if something was that slow, I'd throw it out the window. But if you take away people's speed, you've upset them, and every time you change something, you take away their speed. My work was gonna take me this long. It's like getting in a traffic jam of bad data, or a traffic jam of I can't find what I need.

Chris: At a time of day when you shouldn't have run into a traffic jam, like a surprise traffic jam. Yeah.

Laurie: Correct. Correct.

Chris: 'Cause if it was a known traffic jam, you would just organize your day differently, right? Yeah.

Laurie: You would, or you'd find a way around it, because you'd know it was there. Something different.

But I think that keeps people from starting. And it kept us from starting, because we had some places with some data that was incomplete, places where we had data that was complete but hadn't been fully vetted to make sure it was okay—and it turned out it mostly was.

And then we had stuff that people had brought in historically, like photos, like OpenAsset. We hired a project manager from OpenAsset. I just called them up and said, "I got a problem and I wanna hire you to help us solve it." And they said, "Why?" For a very small amount of money, I said, "I want you to tell us what we don't know, and I want you to help us figure out quickly how to solve it. So we're gonna give you access, and then you..." And they helped a lot.

Had I used OpenAsset before? Yes, because I met people from OpenAsset at the very first KA Connect. Do I know how to do all that stuff? No. But you get experts to come in and help you. I just say, "What's the best practice in most firms?"

I had to learn to say that about 100 times. Well, 'cause they don't wanna criticize you. And so then they tell you, "This is what best practice is in most firms." I'm like, "Thank you."

Chris: Right. Versus saying, like, how are we doing? You say, "What's the best practice in most firms?"

Laurie: Exactly, because then you don't have to criticize us. Do we need four hundred keywords? Do we need twenty? Do we need a hundred?

Chris: Can we start with 20 and see how that goes? And yes. Right.

Laurie: Correct. But we all have those issues. I don't think those are unique. But you think they're unique 'cause they're in your own little guilt bucket that rides around outside your—

Chris: Actually, I think that there's a pretty wide range. I mean, I think most firms have had that tendency to wanna charrette out every data point they're ever gonna need about a project. And some firms did that, it failed because it was so big they couldn't make progress, and then they stopped.

And other firms failed, realized it was a failure, and it's like, "You know what? Let's start with 20, and let's figure out something we can sustain, and prioritization." And so, yeah, the instinct to try and go do the whole thing is, I think, human, or specifically AEC human, right? But—

Laurie: Exactly. And the older your firm—we're almost 50 years old. Do you go back to the beginning of time? No.

Chris: Last five years?

Laurie: RFPs are gonna ask you for the last... I picked the last five, and the OpenAsset people said, "Yeah, probably only the last five."

Chris: All right. Right.

Laurie: I was like, "Really?" We went five, but we did exactly that, and we also hired some outside help that has built things, which was hugely beneficial to us, to help us know which way to go, because they've done it before.

But this notion of I have to have everything that anybody ever wanted to know about this project is just not gonna happen. Or if it does, kudos to you. I wanna meet you.

Chris: You've added some new resources to the knowledge and learning infrastructure in terms of people—or not really? Were you giving people more time, let's put it that way?

Laurie: We've rearranged things so that there's more time, partly because when we took the tech stack down to three, then there's a lot less time spent in an orderly garage, which means, "Hey, I can do this other thing I've been passionate about. I can do knowledge management."

So we talked to Susan, your Susan, and said—this is Kevin, our CEO, president—"What does a good knowledge manager look like?" That didn't come from me. I was just the conduit. And she came back with a description, and we all went, "It's this person."

And in fact, Susan was that person at the firm she worked in. Wants things to be put away, wants things to be orderly, wants a clean garage, doesn't like it if it's not clean—

Chris: Wants the madness to stop.

Laurie: —wants the madness to stop, and also received so many of the questions. Part of it is for the good of the firm, but part of it is also your own self-preservation, so that you can get your work done.

Chris: We've had multiple clients over the years where they saw it, and they're like, "I am Synthesis at my company. I'm the human Synthesis. I actually need a product, not me routing all the questions." Yeah.

You said something really interesting that I just wanna—I think I heard that you created this dividend from having simplified systems and organized information that you could reinvest in further simplifying and getting better information.

And it's again another one of those positive flywheels: you start getting organized, you have more time, you can keep getting organized. It's like compounding, the eighth wonder of the world, compound interest. Like you're talking about knowledge compound interest here.

Laurie: I like that, knowledge compound interest. And now stuff is starting to show up on LinkedIn. But again, you had a funny thing the other day about the algorithms—eh, they change them every three days—but about how disparate HR systems can create so much turmoil, and not just for the HR department.

The HR department will figure it out, believe me. But for all the poor employees who are trying to find stuff. So when you streamline... So we bought an HRIS product that took seven or eight different systems and brought it down into one. We did a ninety-day implementation in sixty days. When I say we, I had very little to do with it.

I have an extraordinary group of people I work with. And why? Because we had to flip the payroll at the end of October. We also were able to negotiate to get their best project manager, which was very helpful. Then we flipped on the payroll at the end of October. Why? Because in November, we were changing carriers and had to set up open enrollment in this new system.

That went a hundred times better because it was so much easier for people. They didn't have to go here and here and here. And that lasted through November. And then in December, you give people a break. Come on. It's the end of the year. End of the year is tough in accounting and in HR and everywhere else, because you've got to flip all your switches to get into January.

So we might have seemed like we were taking a long time, but there was a method to the madness, and other groups were still cleaning data and prioritizing—to your point, do we need a hundred pieces of data, or do we need five, or do we need four? So there was a method there, so that then we knew the HR data was clean. Vantagepoint was the accounting; that data's squeaky clean. The project managers—

Chris: I mean, I think what you're saying is you were trying to build trust, so that when you brought people into this environment, it was organized and ready to go, and it was a clean garage.

Laurie: Yes. A clean garage. And if you don't know what the tool does or you can't explain it, it shouldn't be in the garage. It has to be, I don't know, in an outdoor shed or in a storage unit from that podcast. Because if it makes no sense and people don't know why it's there, or it's bad, you could archive it maybe for your history, but you don't want it out there. So you're cleaning, you're cleaning—

Chris: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Laurie: And the cleaning never stops.

Chris: Yeah. We did a workshop in Austin, before the pandemic, and we were lucky enough... We had two of our clients design the project together. It was a new central library. And they somehow got this guy to give us a tour who was the head of the library system facilities, and he had seen it all, for the whole county.

And he just was killing us with all of his observations. And at one point, he was telling a story about something that was gonna be designed, but then he was lucky enough to be consulted as a user, and he's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, how are we gonna clean it? How are we gonna take care of that?"

And he's like, "Look, guys, life is 90% maintenance and 10%..." It's like, so you have to optimize for operations and maintenance, because that's most of what we spend our time doing, you know?

Laurie: Well, and this is... We do a ton of work in very complex environments in hospitals. There's running the hospital, there's the doctors and the nurses who deserve good space. I mean, when you hear someone say they had to go out into a stairwell to be on their own to scream, you know how tough their life is, right?

And then there's the patients, right? And then there's the poor facilities people that are trying to make all this stuff keep running. And then where do they go and what do they do? I think data maintenance is very much like that.

There's a famous Bruce Bartol quote: "When do you need a Post-it Note? When do you need a database?" Because when databases—I go clear back to Clipper, dBase III—

Chris: Clipper, that's a throwback right there. I had someone ask if Synthesis was compatible with FileMaker Pro the other day. I'm like, "Wow." And I looked it up. They're still making it.

Laurie: Awesome.

Chris: Yeah, still rolling. It's got an MCP.

Laurie: I went to Lotus school when my cousin gave me a copy of Excel 1.0, which you can pretend is a database, but it's not. But you can make it act like one, kind of.

But anyway, you go through all these little things, but the wasted time and maintenance of these things if you don't need it—hence Bruce: when do you need a Post-it Note? Because when databases came out in Microsoft, everybody was building a database, and he's like, "No, no, no." It was really funny.

Chris: Because what he saw is that now we're incurring this future obligation to maintain and keep this thing up to date.

Laurie: Yes. The cost of it is not getting the data. The cost is the maintenance of it. Getting it the first time is easy. Getting it from there on out is very hard, and always has been.

Chris: So I wrote down this phrase in that last segment that I wanna workshop with you. I wrote down "complexity tax cut." 'Cause it feels like that story that you told about what you were doing in the fall with the different HR systems—I think it's Bamboo, you said you were using Bamboo—and then you did open enrollment, and then you did this other thing.

It's like you just saved people a ton of time and energy and complexity. But the flip side of that is now you have to have the vigilance to keep complexity at bay, because it has a way of creeping back in, and data has a way of becoming inaccurate over time. The drift happens so quickly.

Laurie: It does. And so if you can build it into an existing process where everybody looks at it once a year... So we're about to do a workshop on skills. Well, we're using an outside facilitator, because everybody has a different idea. Is experience a skill?

Chris: Skills, you mean like skill definition and mapping and competencies?

Laurie: All of that. All of that. And I attended a few of the breakouts at KA Connect, and nobody has a perfect answer—which is cheaper than therapy, to find out there is no perfect answer out there. But I was still looking for one, even though I don't believe in perfection.

But we're having a facilitated discussion about, again, what you just said. What does the company need? What does the company need? Better than that, where do we put it so employees keep it up to date, or how do we envelop it in a process that already exists so that it's just a natural upkeep? Because from year to year, you're gonna learn more, you're gonna do more, you're gonna get new certifications, new licenses, new whatever.

How do we engage you in that to make sure that all of that is up to date, and that you're doing that on your own, rather than a third party—namely someone on the admin side—doing it for you? 'Cause that's a lot of work.

Chris: So you're starting with designing the maintenance process, you know?

Laurie: Correct. Yeah. In this case, yes.

Chris: What did Louis Kahn say? "When I design buildings, I imagine them in ruins." Something like that.

Laurie: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: And it's like, you know that's gonna happen, so how can this thing age and evolve well?

Laurie: Age well. I believe he was one of the professors for Ed Friedrichs.

Chris: Oh, interesting. See? All the connections.

Laurie: The dots.

Chris: Can I take a complete sideways turn?

Laurie: You can go anywhere you want. It's your podcast.

Chris: That's right. It is. Hiring for adaptability—or hiring and developing people who can be adaptable. Are you thinking about hiring differently, given this time that we're in and how fast things are moving? Is it not different? What are you looking for? So somebody coming into an environment that's like a VUCA world, with all this volatility and change—does that factor into your hiring process now? That was a long way of asking a very simple question.

Laurie: Well, you described reality, right? I think it's really hard to talk to people about what they're passionate about, and sometimes people will tell you and sometimes they won't. So we try to train people, and we have questions that you can ask, all of them open-ended of course, about what are you passionate about?

What are some of the roles you've had? What are the ones you enjoy the most? Why do you enjoy it the most is more important. How do you approach creativity? What's the most innovative thing you've ever done? Do you have any regrets? What's the worst set of drawings you've ever seen? I mean, there's millions of questions you can ask people, always with a why or tell me more, because—

Chris: You're getting at behavioral interviewing, right? You want them to—

Laurie: Oh, 100%.

Chris: —talk about their actual experiences, not their thoughts and feelings about it.

Laurie: A hundred percent. I don't care if you know the answer to anything. I care that you are ethical—ethics over expediency, another Ed-ism—that you're hungry, you want to do well, make things better, and those typically are innovators, or people who want process improvements or improvements.

And you're humble. Lencioni's The Ideal Team Player hits it well, because you work in a team, you understand you're only as smart as your team. And sports teach us you win when you should lose, you lose when you should win. But if you're part of a team, you're so much stronger. So if you can collaborate, and you wanna make it better, and you're ethical and want a better world, and you're curious about it, then you're probably gonna be okay in the environment.

Chris: So you're asking them for examples of these things that they did. You're trying to tease out: do they have these values that we're looking for?

Laurie: Yes. "Tell me about a time when," and then they tell you about their time. "And tell me more about that." And I've also got lots of stories from decades gone by of things people have said to me that were fascinating—and not in a good way.

Chris: Upon further review, we—

Laurie: Upon further review. But we look for cultural fit first. Would you be happy in a networked organization that's not very hierarchical? Would you be happy here? Because if we hire you and you're not happy here—pardon?

Chris: Do people say no to that question?

Laurie: Well, we don't ask it directly.

Chris: Do you think that there are people that are looking for more of a hierarchical organization versus a networked organization?

Laurie: Yes. I think if you've worked in a hierarchical organization before, which we can usually see, and you enjoyed it, or you worked in public service—it was more likely a hierarchy to pay, but I mean, everything's strictly hierarchical—then that's what you're used to. Also, if you've run your own company for a really long time, it's very hard to come back into an organization.

Chris: I've even heard if you've worked at a large organization where you had all these resources and you had people and teams and systems, it's hard to go back to something a little bit more—

Laurie: Yeah, all of those are factors, and just asking, "Why would you wanna work here?" So you look for cultural fit first, and then the technical expertise on the backside. Do you know how to do the work? If you know how to do it, that's sure an advantage, but if you don't know how to do it, if you've got the right attitude—Southwest: hire for attitude, train for skill.

No matter what, I don't care where you've used BIM, you'll be using it differently with us, because we have that many plugins and that many shortcuts that we've built in because of the complexity of the work we do. So that's a given: we're gonna commit to you that you're gonna have a learning environment. We're gonna commit to you that you're gonna learn here.

Chris: But you need to commit to us that you're willing to be open-minded and learn and adapt and—

Laurie: Exactly. Exactly. I worked at a couple of global organizations, and one of them did this test that measured adaptability. I was telling you about that. Because the number one failure—I think there's actually two—the number one failure on a global assignment is if you want things to be a certain way and you're moving to another country. That's not a good risk to take for the company, because it's not gonna be the same. That's just part of travel.

Chris: You should be going almost because you don't want it to be the same.

Laurie: Correct. You're looking forward to the adventure. And second is: is your family okay with this? 'Cause you're gonna be plugged into a whole social network at work. Your poor family's wondering, "What about me? Where do I fit in? All the things I used to do back in the States—what am I gonna do in this new place?" Right? So they're interconnected.

But if you have a sense of adventure and you like to travel and you've traveled a lot, you've already got that built in. So it's not a simple answer, and it's not a checklist. It's a back-and-forth, a dialogue.

Chris: Yeah, but I think we've had this, because we're a technology company, but we don't have VC or private equity. We're not trying to just grow like a rocket ship. And so it's like, look, if that's the thing you're looking for, go chase a lottery ticket. You would be coming and joining the wrong company.

But if you want something that's stable and mature, and people treat each other like adults, and we actually make money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's a good fit. And so you wanna create, I think, a culture that either attracts or repels because it's strongly defined to some degree.

Laurie: 100%. And we pay full benefits down to 20 hours a week, and everybody thinks that's insane, but I don't. Because you have talent out there that might not wanna work full-time, but you need that talent. And we're happy to make sure you're insured and healthy. Healthy people—I mean, just why wouldn't we, right?

And then also—and I had to question this when I was hired—we have a 40-hour workweek, and everybody goes, "Well, everybody does. What is it really?" And I'm like, "No, it's really a 40-hour workweek." It's extremely rare that people are asked to work more than 40 hours. On occasion, at the top level, sure. Will I work more than 40 hours? Yes, but I signed up for that.

But if you actually have a 40-hour workweek, you can recover, you can take time off more easily, your dog doesn't bark at you wondering who you are when you come home. You can see your family. We have a lot of people with a lot of kids. Give people the flexibility to start and stop when it's convenient for them. There's still a drop-off parent and a pick-up parent. There always has been. It used to only be women, and now it's divided. But this is just basic humanity. Then you can attract—

Chris: I think it's connected to the simplicity idea, right? So why do people have to stay 55 hours or 60 hours a week at work? Well, there could be some other maniacal things that are going on, but some of it is it takes them forever to get the basics done. They spend a lot of time each week looking for information, making things up, trying to remember which system of the 14 they have to go to. And so by simplifying that, you could probably give them some of their time in their life back. It's back to the simplicity tax cut thing again.

Laurie: The simplicity tax stuff, and it's more efficient, and you still got your work done. Because I've worked 24/7, 365, globally. I've done way more than a million miles. I'm sure you have, too. It was an exciting time, and I loved it at that time, but it's not human. I think we've learned a lot.

I also used to wear skirts and dresses and high heels to work, and I certainly will never do that again. And every generation, it makes us better, more human, more connected to the idea that you should have a life outside the firm. You need to build that in.

I went to a stress management class once, and we had to fill out this questionnaire, and it said, "When do you get your stress recovery?" And I said, "Oh, on Saturdays." And they said, "No, it has to be every day." You have to walk or run or do whatever your thing is, play music, whatever it is. You have to build that into your life, or you're not really recovering; you're just waiting for a heart attack.

Chris: Yeah. There's a podcast I really like called Excellence, Actually, and their episode this morning was about recovery. The three guys that do this podcast are on the spectrum from professional athlete to semi-professional athlete, but they also write books, and they're type A overachievers. And they're talking about, as they've gotten into their 40s, what it does to their body and their mind to not invest in recovery. And it's so important.

Laurie: Well, grit is toughing it out in the game. That's grit. But that's not smart. Resilience is recovery, because look at these athletes. You work out, and then you run, and then you work out. There's a whole method.

Chris: Yeah. Stress plus rest equals growth. That's mechanically how the body develops. You stress a muscle, and then you let it relax so it can rebuild, and you're stronger the next time, right? Otherwise, you're—

Laurie: If you're working 55 hours a week, when are you getting any recovery time? When is your brain getting any recovery time? How could you possibly innovate? 'Cause when you have stress—I messed up my hand—so when you have stress, your blinders come in like this, and you don't see the world of opportunity anymore. How could you, right?

And I think most people have worked in environments like that and probably not enjoyed it. Now, to have a moment like that or a week like that, yeah, I can take that, because it's gonna be done. Bamboo was a little bit like that, but then we took December and said, "No, no—"

Chris: But you've got the gas in the tank to take something like that on because you've been taking care of yourself, right? And then you can—

Laurie: Yes. And a committed team that was not inclined to want to fail. They were very, very committed to getting it done, and they were very smart about it.

Chris: I heard a word from you that I'd never heard before earlier this year, and now it's one of those things like the Volkswagen thing—I'm seeing it everywhere. The word that you told me was "reboarding."

Laurie: Oh, yeah.

Chris: And now I'm seeing it around. You said it in front of some people in our community, who told some other people, and now it's becoming a thing. So what is reboarding, and why is it important?

Laurie: This ties directly into the modern learning organization. We have people in our firm who've been in the firm 25, 30, 35 years, like that long—committed. And so they've evolved with how things have gone, and they've done quite well. But sometimes you get people that are stuck in a pattern. We tell the new hire, "This is how things work," and then they go into a project environment.

You had this the other day, and you said, "And this project manager does it this way, and this one does it this way, and this one does it this way, and it's..." And you're supposed to adapt to that while you're still learning. So reboarding is: things have changed fast. If you onboarded more than 10 years ago, a lot has changed.

So we did a lot through Taylor University, which was around long before I got there: these are things you need to know that have changed. And some of that's built into the Monday meetings, so that's a gentle way of reminding people: this is something we changed; this is why we changed it. And so to try to reboard people, I think, is incredibly important.

Chris: Because they were heads down in their project, and maybe they didn't know that it changed.

Laurie: Like, I started in Excel 1.0. I think 10 years later I finally took an Excel class, and a lot of things had changed. I still use quick keys, but it changed, and it's better, but I was still stuck in 1.0 'cause that's what I learned, right? And you have to tell yourself, "Okay, time for you to go take another class," right? Time for you to level up your skill in this.

Chris: Yeah, I had a quote from Katie Robinson from LS3P in the piece I put out yesterday that said, "The hardest thing to ask people to change is something that's working for them."

Laurie: Nice. I like that. She's smart.

Chris: Yes, amazing. But the "for them," I think, is the important part of that sentence, right? It works for me, but then when you connect it to, well, what does it do to these people that are working on my project? If I need to swap in a different architect, they're gonna be lost.

Laurie: Correct. Hence our BIM certifications. We have project management tools. How they run teams might be different, or how they have meetings might be different, but the basics should be the same. The basic framework or outline should be similar. So there's a lot of variation.

Because if we have a strong foundation that is a standard, then you can create all kinds of things. You have more time to create more creative things. But it's just like those of us who remember Paperclip—or for me, I don't want the new Outlook. I'm dreading the day.

Chris: You're talking about Clippy, the assistant?

Laurie: Oh, Clippy. I hated... I would say out loud—I'd swear. And initially I didn't know how to turn it off, and then somebody showed me how to turn it off. But then every time I went to another office, it would magically appear again. Like I was being stalked by a paperclip. It's not fun.

Chris: So project management—actually, there's another thing that's come out of the community this year that I think is fascinating for making change. Corey Squire from BORA, another smart guy in this—

Laurie: Love him. Yep.

Chris: —talked about the high-performance sustainability culture at the firm and making change, and he showed this diagram of an apple with a bite out of it. And it's like, we made change at the top level of the organization and at the bottom. The hardest part to get to change is the middle—the people that are actually running the specific projects—and get them to know the new thing.

And this reboarding question gets right at that middle of the organization. I'm just curious to see how you think about it. On one hand, this is the way Taylor is going now. On the other hand, being flexible to hear that there might be more than one way to do things. How do you balance the coercion of getting people, for the good of the organization, to do it this new way versus leaving some autonomy? And how has that reboarding gone?

Laurie: In some places it went really well. In other places, it was a complete miss. What we did is, like, "What do you need to know about marketing?" But our leader, the principal in charge of marketing and business development, started having individual meetings with people—and that worked way better—to talk about business development and business development goals, and then went back through the organization to other people, so they all got the same information at the same time. So different methods used by different groups, I think, is appropriate.

Our practice leader is extraordinary—looking for the creative thinkers, looking for the people who can design and understand medical planning, and understand that in order to be good at any of these things, you have to learn how to put the building together—and has started a whole round of classes on technical quality and engaging people in that. So taking everybody who touches the production side, I'll call it, because that's where the work is done. The project manager has a role, but the whole production side is much, much larger, and they have to work together, because if they don't work together, we're working at odds against each other, right?

So having people who have that passion and drive to want to level everybody up to a certain place, I think, is part of it. I do not have that charisma that our practice leader does.

Chris: To get people to want to level up and keep driving and getting better?

Laurie: Yes, and a lot of our staff have been asking for that for a long time. We're hybrid. We're hybrid to stay. That means things aren't gonna go as fast. But when people are new, we ask them point-blank to come in three days a week, because they'll learn faster. And then we'll decide later how we do it from there. So you still have autonomy.

They're not perfect weeks, I tell people, and if you're sick, for goodness' sake, stay home. But they're not perfect weeks. But if we embed you with people who are really smart around you when you're in the office, then you know them, and you can get help from them quickly. And now we have Synthesis; we can support you with some pretty good stuff.

Our practice leader built out—we had it in the second phase—he built out everything before we launched. He was so excited by it. He spent hours. And here's the thing: it's also really beautiful. I look at it and I go, "Man, that's—"

Chris: Because he saw that it would give him leverage to have that all in one place, and that he could just point people to the resource? What do you think motivated him to build it out in such a detailed way?

Laurie: It gives us leverage. And he's a designer in his heart of hearts, and he wants beautiful design, but you've gotta understand the code. You've gotta understand how documents go together. You've gotta understand ASHRAE, HCAI. You've gotta understand these things. They're all part of the building blocks of creating beautiful spaces.

So that's really important, and then people see that and they say, "Well, I wanna be like that. I wanna learn that." So then it's using the old school of mentoring in your learning model, but there's also a lot of pieces now where we can fill in different ways of learning.

It always cracks me up. We have Amber Books and Black Spectacles, both common. And I'll hear people say, "Amber Books is great. I hate Black Spectacles." Ten minutes later: "Oh, I read Black Spectacles on BART, and it was wonderful. Who would use Amber?" People are just telling you who they are, and they're both right. You can't have just one way to deliver learning. It's gotta work for that person.

Chris: So I'm familiar with Black Spectacles, but not as much with Amber. So the learning modality is different in the two platforms?

Laurie: Black Spectacles—I know who developed it; they came out of Gensler—is all very logical and very much along the text, and it's heavy, heavy reading.

Chris: Okay.

Laurie: Amber Books is almost all video. You're watching someone take the light assembly apart and looking for the UL rating and doing all that. It's very much more tactile, video. And I tell people, "You should flip back and forth as much as you want. However you learn is the way you should learn."

Chris: How are you thinking about that as you're implementing Synthesis LMS and you guys are developing more courses there? How are you thinking about that nuance when it comes to developing your own content?

Laurie: I liked one of—I forget who did this—but the meet-you, get-to-know-you video, and then let's follow up with questions. Now, interestingly, Kevin, our president—he'd already gotten there, I think, because he's technologically there. You watch four videos before you meet Kevin, and he meets every single person that joins the firm, without fail, and then he gets to know them, right?

So you watch these four videos that are about our strategic plan, and our footprint, and where we wanna go, and what our markets are, and the long game. We like The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. This is how we work with people. We are not enemies with the contractor. We are not enemies with HCA. We are a team with lots of players. So they watch all that, and then they meet Kevin, and then they can talk about whatever they wanna talk about, right?

So he'd already gone there, but when I saw it at KA Connect—I forget who it was; I think Kristina, another brilliant person—I thought, "That is a beautiful mesh of me as a human." I can watch this video again and again if I miss anything. I do that on YouTube, on demand.

Chris: At my own pace.

Laurie: Exactly. I was helping a neighbor with roofing, and I was like, "It's been a long time since I roofed anything." I watch it on YouTube, and I'm like, "Ah, zinc nails. Yeah, okay. Forgot about that." It's beautiful, and I didn't have to read a manual. We get more out of that, right?

And then you get to meet Kevin, and some people are like this, 'cause they never met the person who ran the company at the place they came from. And now they're meeting someone who's an ordinary human being with a family, who's funny, talks about his adventures and his travels and what he sees as a future for the company, what the plans are for the company, where we see it going, what the strategic plan is. It means a lot to people, and then they feel like they can say hello to him, and they do.

Chris: Because they might feel like, "Well, I shouldn't bother him." But the incentive, right? The incentive is like, "I'm gonna be meeting with the CEO. I should actually really learn this stuff, not have it on a second tab while I'm doing other things," right?

Laurie: I'm not gonna say that wasn't an influence, 'cause it should be an influence, I would hope. Yeah. But that was video content we already—

Chris: Yep. Yep. But I—

Laurie: So you guys did this wonderful thing where we were able to take... We threw a lot of video content out. I mean, a lot. But the ones we were able to take in, we chapter. So our knowledge manager now takes the firm-wide meeting on Mondays and puts it into chapters. So if you miss it, it's already in there in chapters, and you can look at your little five-minute bit.

Chris: Yeah, but I think what you just said about the throwing—you threw some of the videos out, right? I've seen many be like, "Ah, we did this lunch and learn from 2016, and maybe someday somebody's gonna need to watch the thing," right? And it's hard. It's the storage unit versus the garage, right?

Laurie: What's the movie theater? Do you wanna go watch a bad movie?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

Laurie: Joe Versus the Volcano. Sorry, Tom Hanks. Worst movie ever made.

Chris: Tom Hanks. Oh—

Laurie: But every other thing he did was brilliant. He just had a bad movie.

Chris: I'm not gonna end on Joe Versus the Volcano. As you think about winding down '26 into '27—Taylor becoming a modern learning organization, all the things, knowledge, change—what are you excited about looking forward?

Laurie: We have our green screen, we have our video equipment. We've already tested it on the technical quality town halls. I now have my Blue Yeti—thank you, Chris. We're gonna have more interviewing of some of the people who are thinking about retiring, some of whom have even offered to come back and do more if they can be helpful to the company, which is awesome.

And critical knowledge loss is very real, and I think COVID made it worse, because those people put their heads down and drove for the line for their clients. That was hard, but it also removed them from training the next gen as much as they might have. Not that they don't want to. Right? It's the push and the pull of our times. And then if hybrid is here to stay—and for us it is—then how do you balance all those things?

So our learning management team, already formed, already has color-coded PowerPoint covers and pads, and I mean... I was like, "I just need to get out of the way." They're just running, right? And they're having a glorious time, and they're really excited about the building of something better.

Chris: So you're gonna do these critical knowledge interviews. What do you think you do with them?

Laurie: One of the KA Connect presentations, it was this great... This guy from Long Beach, and he looked like the Silver Surfer from 1972. And they just started interviewing him about different kinds of surveys and LIDAR and—

Chris: Yeah, this is the Fuscoe story. Yeah, for sure.

Laurie: —and there's a ton of content in there. So we've come up with a list of questions, and we've asked multiple people to add questions like, "What would you like to ask this individual?"

So he's amazing. Our guy's name is Bill, and you can't have him. He can look at a set of drawings and just... And then he's, "That's wrong, and that's wrong, and that's wrong." And he just... And—

Chris: Just deep intuition, deep smarts that he can do.

Laurie: —reads the proposal, and he tells you what you didn't put in. So not just marking up what's there, he can see what isn't there.

And one of Malcolm Gladwell's books is, like, firemen and police, like, they walk in and they just... They said, "Get out." Some weird instinct happens where he has that level of technical knowledge, that's extraordinary. Our practice leader does too. We have some people that really, really know their stuff, and some of them are quite introverted.

So this might be the way to get more of that content—

Chris: —than asking them to do a presentation in front of the whole office, that kind of thing. You just more interview them and pull it out slowly with project examples and those kinds of things.

Laurie: Exactly. Respond to something, yes. Create something is hard for people. If you give them a draft or a markup or here's an outline, I think they can do really well. But they're also super busy. So we got a lot of work in front of us.

Chris: We're running a webinar in a couple weeks on critical knowledge agents. So people have been doing these recordings for like... We first really started talking about that in our community in like 2017. And there was always these questions like, "Well, what happens to these videos?"

And like over time, they become searchable, you can split them into courses. But now we've had a couple firms like EUA and Shepley who are building agents around those. EUA built one around a retiring guy who does all the specifications. And he just has like hundreds of emails, like really thoughtful, detailed emails he's written people over the years on solving these problems, and they're just feeding it in.

And so they can ask detailed questions, right? And Shepley had all these long videos about their medical planner who'd retired. And it's like, well, they can ask Jennifer. They've got all these crazy stories, and like, when did this go wrong? Or when does it go right? Or what do you look for?

It's not gonna replace that person, obviously, but to be able to bring some of that insight as another voice into solving a problem just seems so valuable.

Laurie: Well, it inspired us to think about it differently: that we had content we can still chapterize, but that we had a lot of content we needed to go get, and time is of the essence.

Chris: Yeah. That you had to acquire, not just organize, but had to acquire. Yeah.

Laurie: Yes, and it'll also allow us to edit, like just take whole sections out—this section's still relevant, this section is not.

If you chapterize, you can toss things in and out quickly. So that's in front of us. I'm very excited about that. I'm very excited for all the work they're doing, and there's still a lot of work to do. I called it phase two work. So we still have a lot of things that we want to do that we haven't done.

So we have sections that are still under construction. Put your ideas here. Like, what would you like to see in this section? Give us some feedback. So we still have a lot of that work to do as well. And then we've had learning and development as a part of the company, but we could be doing so much more.

You had a question about a new hire, and then how do they become a part of things. And I had a new hire ask, "Do I have a coach?" And I said, "Yes." And then I immediately went and looked—oh my goodness, did we forget to give them a coach? And we did. And I got on screen and I said, "Tell me what you're thinking."

"Well, what does that mean?"

Chris: What does having a coach mean?

Laurie: Yeah. And I thought, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, you're right. We never—

Chris: We need to explain what a coach is and what it's—

Laurie: We didn't explain it to anybody. And then I thought, oh my goodness. Well, so now we have, I think it's an ambassador. Chrissy came up with a really good name. Chrissy and Lauren think of everything.

A really good name for, like, this is to introduce you to the firm, but this person is with you to teach you how we do the work, and explaining it. So they immediately, within like 48 hours, had gotten all this content up about it. But just that one question, you realize you hurdled over something you shouldn't have hurdled over.

Chris: Which is why involving people in making change is so important, 'cause they will see things that you... They expand your aperture and your field of vision, right?

Laurie: Yes. Yes. And it's different, and that's also different from a mentor. So these are all nuanced things, and every once in a while you'll find someone who might be able to do all of them, but it's rare. And then do they have the time to do it and do it well? Which is why I like the little pods of people together at least a couple days a week to help each other through things.

Chris: I mean, you've described so many different things, whether they're cultural or technological or process-oriented, that I think come together to make a really interesting mosaic of what makes a modern learning organization that can thrive in chaotic times. 'Cause I don't think we think it's gonna get simpler or slow down.

There's a great Jeff Bezos quote that I love, right? It's like, instead of thinking about what is gonna change, think about what's not gonna change, 'cause you can design around that. What he would say with Amazon is, in the future, do people want things faster or slower?

Faster. Do they want them cheaper or more expensive? Cheaper. Do they want more selection or less selection? More selection. Great. Let's figure out how we design a company that can go on that trajectory. We don't have to know exactly what technology does or who wins what election, but those are things that we think are first principles.

And so, the stable things. And so can you design around stable things? For Taylor, you've said a few things like, we're gonna be hybrid, so we can design around hybrid, right? We're gonna be networked. We can design around networked. We're gonna be looking for adaptability. So we can build around those things without knowing exactly what's gonna happen.

Laurie: Yes, and we're in markets that are undergoing a lot of change. Even if we don't like the change, our clients need us to show up with how are we gonna work around this change. So we need to think about that when we show up, and we have a design strategy and an innovation studio. They do a lot of research, and they publish it on Thread, our Synthesis, and at first they were like, "Well, nobody's gonna wanna read that."

It turned out to be the most highly read thing on there. Like, well, here's what's coming. Here's what we hear. Here's where the research is showing us that things are possibly changing. One of our very best innovators—we did a thing on rural hospitals, and he said, "They might not be under as much threat as other hospitals."

I said, "Explain that to me." And he said, "So maybe we have to think about it differently." But again, an incredible research wing, so that if you're on projects, you wanna be able to talk to your clients about things. And then, in healthcare and in organizations, do we centralize? Do we decentralize?

Do we have standards? Do we allow innovation? It's the same thing. It's this big spectrum, and you're constantly moving back and forth on it.

Chris: Are we organized by market? Are we organized by office? Do—

Laurie: Exactly. And then different healthcare organizations—do you have a template or do you not have a template?

Or we have a template but we hate it, so come over here. It's eternal, and it's always gonna keep moving, and our job is to adapt to what the situation has, where we can help our clients think about this, and our employees, because they're working with our clients, think about this, so that there's not just one answer—there's a broad spectrum of answers.

And I used to say some people, they hear about a project and they're designing it in their head before they ever get back in their car. And that was back when people drove to work. But you can't approach it that way. You don't know enough. Your client doesn't know. Just like we didn't know what questions to ask when we were building Synthesis, so we had someone come in and help us.

If we don't have the right questions, we don't even know we need something. I didn't know I needed an iPhone until I saw one. I was like, "I have to have that." I didn't know I loved LinkedIn until I saw it. I have to have that. Somebody invented the thing that I've dreamt of but didn't know that was it, but that's it.

And I met the first CHRO of LinkedIn; we became very good friends. He wrote a book called Workquake. Steve Cadigan. And his theory is—and what he did at LinkedIn to be able to attract people, this is when people weren't even talking about Facebook yet—is say, "Okay, you give me three or four years," whatever it is, "and I will make sure you learn and grow faster than anybody else, 'cause I understand you're probably gonna leave.

"But what do you wanna learn while you're here?" So he sees the future of work more like a basketball team: that people are gonna move in and out of organizations more fluidly and in and out of work more fluidly. I don't know if that's true. I think that's true for tech companies, but it's an interesting thing, just how much it's changed.

Our grandparents probably worked for one company or stayed on one farm, and that's just not true anymore. It's never gonna be true again.

So then how do we adapt?

Chris: There's a book called Built to Sell, and the premise of the book is, even if you're not gonna sell your company, you should build it like you were gonna sell it. And I feel like this workquake insight, it's like you should treat your people as if they're coming through a three- to five-year rotation.

Give them interesting things to learn, then they might stay, right?

Laurie: And that was his whole theory, and it worked. It worked 'cause you want people who want to learn, right? And so the faster you learn, why would we penalize you, right?

And if I'm learning and I'm growing and I like the people I'm working with and I have a good boss, why would I leave? Exactly. Because stable ground and working with good people is priceless.

Chris: There's this psychology idea, and maybe you're hinting at it with the stable ground thing. It comes from child psychology, but it applies to adults, where you give somebody a nice safe base that they can then go explore from, right?

That's what makes children really comfortable, is they can take risks 'cause they've got a solid foundation.

And I think as professionals, it's like that for us too, though. We wanna have some stable ground to return to, but then we can launch our expeditions from that stable ground.

Laurie: I think that's beautiful. We might be bigger than we were when we were children, but there's a piece of us that's always looking for that stable ground, right? And that's why some people, I think, are resistant to change, 'cause stable ground means status quo. Maybe. But if I go out here and explore, that doesn't mean I didn't learn something here.

I did, but now I can move over here with my knowledge, right? So there are interesting things there, I think, to explore for companies. Because if you're learning, I think you'll want to stay.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, although there's a book called Tinkers, which won the Nobel or the Pulitzer six or seven years ago, and there's this great scene where it's set in a rural—I think it's like upstate New York or something like that—and there's a guy that would go to each community with the big cart of all the stuff, and he'd come through every several months, and that's when you'd buy your soap and your nails and whatever from this guy and his cart.

And he's showing this woman the new soap, and it's got a new design box, and it's 10 cents more. And she's like, "I want the old soap." And he's like, "No, but the new one, it's better." "Does it clean the clothes any different?" "Nope." "Does it, like, smell better?" "Nope." "So what's better about it?" "It's new."

And she goes, "But I want the old soap." "You can't have the old soap." And it just goes on for like three pages of this back and forth. But sometimes I think with people, the change resistance is like, "It's just new soap. Is it any better? It costs more and it's different, but is this improving my life?"

Laurie: Well, and it's like that with all the technology we have, and—

Chris: This is where I'm going. Yeah, exactly.

Laurie: Yeah. And I have password holders because everybody... I mean, at a certain point it's almost insanity, right? We think we're making life better by doing all these things, but are we?

Chris: So I think that's the question we need to ask when we're making a change: is this just new soap with a new design box that costs 10 cents more, or is this gonna actually change somebody? 'Cause I think we need to pick our spots a little more carefully in a time where there's so much change going on.

Laurie: I agree. And also, being able to look at sunk costs, the psychology of a sunk cost, and still be able to walk away from it. Because I've been on software conversion teams where there were a lot of sunk costs, and we became aware that this thing wasn't gonna work, but nobody wanted to hear that.

But you have to be smart enough to say, "Cut your losses, walk away, learn something, but don't beat yourself up about it. Move on to the next thing." But I think a whole lot of people get really stuck with, "But we put all these hours in." Yep, we sure did.

Chris: I mean, people have such higher loss aversion than they have, like, the positive feelings they get from something actually working. They'd rather not fail more than they'd rather win.

Laurie: Both from your amygdala, right? The fear—fear of change, anger. I spent all those hours working on this thing. Yeah, it's—

Chris: Oh, what's the name of this book? It just came out. It's called, like, Jolt, I think, is the name of the book. These guys did this research during the pandemic. It was this once-in-a-lifetime research opportunity because everyone was on Zoom.

And so they worked with sales organizations, and they recorded all the sales calls. They got access to all these Gong or Zoom or whatever sales recordings, and they were trying to figure out why it's getting harder and harder to sell software. And what they learned was that people have become so afraid of making the wrong choice that they do nothing, right?

They like the new software. They think it's gonna be better, but if they mess up, they're afraid that they're gonna be the person that said, "Let's go do this," and if it fails... So they just don't wanna do it. They just drag it on forever. They want more and more information, more and more research.

They're just trying to crowd any doubt that this is the right decision out of their mind. And then sometimes it takes so long that the opportunity to win, to do anything, just passed. So it's that fear of failure that can be so keeping people from changing that I think it's so interesting to think about it that way.

Laurie: My dad's favorite quote was—'cause I'd call and talk to him. He was very, very Norwegian, very like, "There's no bad weather, there's just bad clothing." Yeah. So he said, "Well, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?" I was like, "But..." And then I'd say, "Well, I would do this." And he goes, "Well, then do that."

And I'd say, "But, Dad, I might fail." And he'd be like, "Yeah, you might. So what? You strike out too. You play ball. You're gonna win games, you're gonna lose games. So what? You're—"

Chris: We had a guy—my first job out of school, I was in the technology consulting part of a management consultancy, and they brought in a guy who was a former astronaut, but before that he was a Marine and he was a POW in Vietnam. And he was a motivational speaker, keynote kind of guy for our conference.

And the story he told that I've never forgotten is, "When I decided I wanted to go into the space program, people were asking me, 'Aren't you nervous? Aren't you afraid?'" He goes, "What are they gonna do? They can't send me back to Vietnam. I've been in the worst part of my life already.

"It'll never be that bad again. So now I can't fail," right? Like it's—

Laurie: My dad was a combat vet in World War II. So when we complained, he said, "Nobody's shooting bullets at you. Keep moving. You don't have any problems." He wasn't mean. He was just very matter-of-fact. Like, "Keep moving. I'm still here."

So maybe it's that... 'Cause I know they've done studies on recessions and downturns: there's actually this great innovation, because either people lose their fear or they just hit, like, "If I don't do something," or, "It's not ever gonna be that bad again."

I don't know what that is, but there's something there too about innovation.

Chris: There's a perception—I've read this and talked to so many entrepreneurs over the years—that entrepreneurs are swashbuckling risk-takers, and they just have no fear, and they just jump off the cliff and build the wings on the way down. There's a lot of these clichés.

And the entrepreneurs I know that are good, they've actually looked at the risks, right? Yes, they might jump off the cliff, but they've double-packed a parachute, right? They've mapped out the terrain. They've run the scenario a bunch of times, over and over again. But what I think entrepreneurs see is it's riskier sometimes to not jump and to stay where you are.

You know? It's better... What's it? Better to be a moving turkey than a sitting duck, or something like—

Laurie: Yeah, eight steps forward. Every 10 steps, you're gonna take two wrong, but you're still eight—

Chris: But you're still making progress, right?

Laurie: Right, and I think there's definitely something to that. Better to be in motion, because you're gonna be quicker, it feeds the system, it motivates people. Because there's a danger in doing something.

I've worked at firms long ago, like, "We can't have an associates program." And I'm like, "Why not?" "Well, not everybody will make associate." And I'm like, "Yeah?" So there's a risk in doing it, but there's a risk in not doing it. So what's the best thing for the company? What's the best thing for the company?

And you can manage these other factors. You can do things to help manage those other factors and talk to people about, this might not be your year, but next year could be your year. Let's talk about it. What does that look like? You can manage that differently. But maybe that's where the fear is as well.

And I'm not saying I'm not afraid. I'm quite the worrier. I have a worry gene.

Chris: Yeah. Sure, sure, sure. But yeah, somebody on LinkedIn last week was writing about how there's ROI, but then there's RONI, so the risk of not investing. And you should look at that at the same time you're looking at the ROI—like, yeah, what happens if you don't invest? And this gets back to the Bezos thing.

If you're thinking, what does the future look like? That gives you some more stable ground to make those bets, right?

Laurie: Yeah.

Chris: Laurie, we've covered so much ground. This has been so fun.

Laurie: It's been totally fun. Thank you.

Chris: This is exactly what I hoped it would be, so thank you so much.

Christopher Parsons
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