All AEC firms are learning organizations. 

They have to be. From the moment a new firm takes on its first project, it begins a process of continuous learning. Learning how to deliver work, how to collaborate across disciplines, how to listen to clients, how to navigate permitting authorities, and how to translate ideas into drawings and built form. With each successive project that learning deepens and expands, shaped by new challenges, new contexts, and new people.

As firms grow, so does the scope of what they must learn. They learn how to recruit and onboard talent, how to develop people into capable and confident contributors, how to expand into new markets and take on unfamiliar project types, how to adopt and integrate new technologies, and how to navigate the broader cycles of the industry—periods of rapid growth as well as moments of contraction and uncertainty. Over time, many firms also learn how to transition leadership across generations, preserving what matters while adapting to what’s next.

In this sense, if a firm has endured—if it has grown, evolved, and remained relevant over time—it has done so by learning, continuously, and across every part of the organization.

And yet, while learning is ever-present, it is not always intentionally designed.

In many firms, learning emerges organically from the work itself. It is embedded in projects, carried through conversations, shaped by mentorship, and accumulated through experience. It is often rich and valuable, but also uneven—varying from team to team, from project to project, and from one moment in time to the next. It is deeply human, but not always structured in a way that allows the firm to scale with consistency.

For a long time, this has been sufficient. In fact, it has been the foundation of how the AEC industry has developed expertise for generations.

But the context in which firms operate is changing. The pace of work is accelerating. The complexity of projects is increasing while the timelines and budgets are shrinking. The demands on teams are growing as experienced professionals are stretched across more responsibilities, and we’re asking emerging professionals to take on more advanced tasks earlier in their careers than ever before. At the same time, new technologies, particularly those related to AI, are beginning to reshape how knowledge can be captured, accessed, and applied.

In this environment, the difference between firms is no longer simply what they know. It is how effectively they are able to learn, adapt, and apply that knowledge over time.

Over the past year, working closely with firms adopting Synthesis LMS and AI-powered search, I’ve started to notice a shift. The organizations that seem to be gaining the most traction are not just implementing new tools; they are becoming more intentional about how learning happens within their firms. They are stepping back and beginning to redesign the organization itself—how knowledge is created, how it is shared, how people develop skills, and how all of that connects to the work they do every day.

I’ve come to think of this shift as a movement from what we might call a traditional learning organization to a modern learning organization—one that is not defined by any single program or platform, but by a more deliberate and integrated approach to building and sustaining collective intelligence.

To better understand this change, I created a maturity model—one that reflects how learning capabilities tend to develop over time within AEC firms. This model begins with the foundational ways people learn through experience and interaction, and extends through more structured, scalable, and technology-enabled approaches, culminating in the emerging potential of AI-powered, just-in-time learning in the flow of work.

In the sections that follow, I’ll walk through that progression as a seven-level maturity model for AEC firms. Along the way, we’ll explore what each level looks like in practice, where it creates value, where it begins to show its limits, and how firms move from one stage to the next. We’ll also look at what fundamentally changes as organizations become more intentional in how they learn—and why the ability to learn well may become one of the defining characteristics of the most successful firms in the years ahead.

Here we go.

In the last issue of Smarter by Design, I introduced the Modern Learning Organization Pipeline — a practical, end-to-end model for turning learning opportunities into durable capability inside AEC firms. The nine steps of the pipeline move through identifying and prioritizing learning needs, designing and delivering learning experiences, unlocking just-in-time retrieval, and ultimately to measurement and continuous improvement.

At a strategic level, the logic of the pipeline is straightforward. If firms systematically capture expertise, distribute it intelligently, and reinforce it in the flow of work, they become more capable, more resilient, and less dependent on any single individual.

But models on paper are the easy part.

The road to the Modern Learning Organization runs directly through subject matter experts — through their willingness and ability to share what they know — and through the organization’s ability to help transfer and scale that knowledge.

And this is where things get interesting.

If you ask a senior architect or engineer to document what they know, record a short course, or capture best practices from a recent project, what objection would you expect to hear?

For most people, it’s the same answer. “I don’t have time.” Or, closely related, “I’m too busy.”

Picture an iceberg. The visible portion above the waterline is what gets said out loud. “I don’t have time.” “I’m too busy.”

Those are socially acceptable objections. They are real, and they matter. But they are rarely the whole story.

Beneath the waterline sit quieter forces of the iceberg— unspoken barriers to keeping experts from sharing knowledge which revolve around identity, legitimacy, confidence, cultural norms, maintenance, and trust. Questions about whether sharing knowledge will actually improve the quality of someone’s workday. Questions about whether the effort will have an impact. Questions about whether they are truly the right person to step forward. Questions about whether the system will support them or simply ask them to do more.

If we respond only to the spoken barriers of “I don’t have time” or “I’m too busy” we miss a major opportunity to overcome more deeply-seated emotional barriers to knowledge sharing.

Over the past 25 years working in knowledge management in AEC — and through countless conversations with subject matter experts, knowledge and learning leaders, CEOs, and project teams — I’ve come to see a pattern. The resistance to sharing expertise is rarely about time. It is almost always about something deeper and more emotional.

In this article, I surface seven of those unspoken barriers. More importantly, I explore what leading firms are doing to address them — through culture, partnership, process, and modern learning infrastructure.

I believe learning and development in AEC is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last twenty-five.

Outside of work, people have grown accustomed to immediate, searchable, personalized access to information. That experience is reshaping what they expect from learning and knowledge inside their firms.

Many AEC professionals now expect knowledge and learning to be accessible exactly when they need it, in the flow of their work, rather than scheduled far in advance. And they would like to be able to find answers to their questions on demand, without having to attend hour-long, day-long, or week-long training delivered in linear formats. That shift is being shaped by generational change, the increased pace of work, and the growing availability of on-demand and AI-enabled tools.

For the first time, AEC firms have a real opportunity to deliver the right knowledge and learning to the right person at the right time. Technology is a major part of that story—including recent advances in AI and video capture, editing, and transcription—but it’s not the whole story. The real shift will come from how firms bring together people, process, technology, and culture to support learning as a core organizational capability.

That kind of change doesn’t happen organically. It happens by design.

I believe the firms that take full advantage of this moment will be the ones that intentionally evolve into what I’ve been calling Modern Learning Organizations.

In simple terms, a Modern Learning Organization does three things:

• Builds and maintains collective intelligence

• Leverages technology to deliver knowledge in the flow of work

• Continuously adapts and thrives in a rapidly changing environment

This issue of Smarter by Design is the first in a multipart series exploring what it means to design a Modern Learning Organization in the AEC industry.

In this issue, I’ll introduce the Modern Learning Organization Pipeline—a practical, end-to-end model for turning learning opportunities into real, durable organizational capability. The pipeline reflects my nearly 25 years of knowledge management work in AEC, insights from the Knowledge Architecture community, and lessons emerging from firms in the Synthesis LMS public beta actively experimenting with new learning approaches. 

Some parts of this model reflect practices that have always mattered: thoughtful prioritization, intentional design, and continuous improvement. Other parts reflect what has changed dramatically—especially the ability to unlock just-in-time, dynamically assembled learning that meets people where work actually happens.

My goal with this model isn’t to prescribe a single “right” way forward for all AEC firms. It’s to offer a shared framework you can react to, adapt, and refine as you think about how learning really works inside your firm—and how it could work better.

Here we go.

A few weeks ago I joined Katie Cash from Smartegies on the AEC Marketing for Principals podcast to talk about how knowledge management is evolving in the AI era. The episode is called “Knowledge is Power: How AEC Firms Are Leveraging Data to Win Smarter.”

The upside of AI for AEC marketing is enormous: faster research, better positioning, richer storytelling, and time saved on repetitive work. But those gains depend on high-quality firmwide knowledge. Marketers are discovering that AI doesn’t magically retrieve the right information from existing systems and network drives — it only accelerates what has been made accurate, structured, and accessible.

This is why marketing teams are increasingly becoming the builders and stewards of their firms’ knowledge foundation.

As I re-listened to the episode, five observations stood out to me about where I think marketing, knowledge management, and AI go from here.

The design technology landscape has fundamentally changed. What was once a manageable stack of tools has become a sprawling ecosystem—and the questions coming with it are no longer just about what the tools can do, but how they work right now, in this specific project context, under these particular constraints. Meanwhile, technical knowledge itself has a shorter shelf life than ever before.

This creates an impossible burden for centralized DT teams. No matter how talented or dedicated, they eventually hit the same breaking point: there's simply too much surface area to cover. Knowledge can't travel fast enough through a hub-and-spoke model when every market sector, project type, and team operates differently.

In this issue of Smarter by Design, we explore how Lionakis has approached this problem by making a fundamentally different organizational design choice. Rather than growing their central team, they distributed expertise into project teams—creating a network of 30 embedded change agents who bring design technology support directly to where the work is happening.

What makes their Design Technology Support Specialist (DTSS) program so compelling isn't just that it works—it's how it works. It scales support without scaling headcount. It builds resilience into the organization. And it transforms how knowledge moves through the firm—from hub-and-spoke to peer-to-peer, from reactive to proactive, from bottleneck to network.

But this distributed organizational design also does something else: it creates the foundation for AI-powered learning tools to amplify the network even further. By externalizing expertise from the core DT team's heads into structured digital learning content, Lionakis is making that knowledge accessible not just to humans, but to AI search and knowledge agents that can surface the right answer at the right moment. The human network and the digital infrastructure work together—each making the other more powerful.

This is a story about what happens when you stop trying to be everywhere at once and instead design conditions under which expertise can live close to the work. It's about the shift from instructor to architect, from delivering answers to building systems that help people find them. And it is a glimpse into the future of what the AEC learning organizations of the future will look like.

For as long as I’ve been thinking about learning and development in AEC, the guiding ambition has been clear — deliver the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. It sounds simple, but anyone who’s managed L&D in a design firm knows how complicated that really is.

When people have timely access to the right resources, they are better prepared for the projects in front of them, more confident in their roles, and more likely to grow into future leaders. But timing matters. If knowledge arrives too early—before there’s a chance to apply it on a real project—it often doesn’t stick. If it comes too late, you can miss a golden learning opportunity. 

That’s why the topic of automation drew so much energy in our recent conversations with private beta cohorts about Synthesis LMS. Could technology finally solve the “right person, right time” problem? What if assignments, reminders, and learning paths could run on autopilot?

It’s an exciting vision. But as we talked it through, a more nuanced picture emerged. Automation will help—sometimes enormously. However, you can’t automate all delivery of learning content. Just as we’ve learned with AI, automation without a human in the loop can quickly go off in wild directions. The real challenge isn’t simply automating more, but deciding when and how to keep humans close to the process—ensuring assignments come with judgment, empathy, and context.

We’re about ten weeks into the private beta for Synthesis LMS and the biggest lessons we’ve learned so far aren’t really about technology at all.

At first, there was a flurry of activity in the LMS. Firms jumped in, created content, uploaded videos, and built out their first courses. It was exciting to watch. But what happened next was just as important. Across both beta cohorts, people paused and said, “Oh, I see — if we really want to take advantage of this new technology, if we really want to maximize the opportunity here, it’s going to take more than just building content. We’re going to need to level up as learning organizations.”

And by that I don’t mean throwing away what firms have already been doing. Quite the opposite. These are some of the smartest firms in our community, and they’ve been investing in knowledge sharing and informal learning for years. They have lunch & learns, peer-to-peer mentoring, recorded talks from subject-matter experts, even entire libraries with hundreds of videos. 

Those are strengths, and they’ve served firms well. But what we’re realizing together is this moment calls for something more. It’s not just about uploading content into a new tool. It’s about taking the next step, rising to the next level, and moving toward becoming modern AEC learning organizations.

That means going beyond volunteer-driven knowledge sharing into something more curated, something built around adult learning principles and intentional knowledge transfer. Because while serendipitous learning is valuable, firms are starting to recognize that it won’t be enough — not on its own — to prepare people for the challenges in front of them.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between AI and firmwide knowledge—not just how AEC firms use knowledge to power AI, but how AI is pushing them to care for their knowledge more intentionally.

When employees use AI-powered tools like Synthesis AI Search to ask questions, they’re finding useful answers from knowledge distributed across content silos and content types, including video. But these benefits are also revealing something else: the quality of those answers depends entirely on the quality of the content behind them.

Outdated content leads to outdated answers. Gaps in documentation mean missed opportunities. Conflicting versions create confusion.

As a response, AEC firms are becoming much more attuned to the importance of maintaining high-quality, up-to-date knowledge across the business. They’re not just investing in AI. They’re investing in the knowledge powering the AI—acquiring it, updating it, and retiring it when it no longer serves the firm.

This raises an old but important question:

How do you keep a large intranet from decaying over time?

Instead of treating a new intranet launch as a one-time project, it may be more helpful to think of it like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Crews begin at one end, make their way across, and by the time they reach the other side, it’s time to start again. The goal isn’t to finish, but to stay in motion—a continuous cycle of proactive care. And the earlier you can establish that rhythm, the healthier your knowledge base will remain.

That’s why I want to revisit a story from the KA community that feels even more relevant today than when it was first shared at KA Connect back in 2019. It’s the story of how AKF Group, at the time a 500-person multidisciplinary engineering firm with nine offices in the U.S. and two in Mexico, built a simple but powerful process for keeping their knowledge fresh—and how that process became the foundation for what we now call Essential Content Reviews.

You can read more about the Essential Content Review Framework on our website, under Intranet Best Practices. But what I want to share here is the origin story—how one firm, led by a thoughtful and practical knowledge manager named Shannon Kaplan, created a rhythm of content care that’s still shaping how our community maintains knowledge today.

Every day, on every project, lessons are happening inside AEC firms. But without the right infrastructure, those insights often remain tucked away in meeting notes or siloed with project teams—making it likely that future teams will repeat the same mistakes on their projects.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With the right infrastructure in place, AEC firms can learn faster than one project at a time and turn individual insights into organizational knowledge.

At Affiliated Engineers, Inc. (AEI), Company Wide Teams (CWTs) provide that infrastructure. For more than 25 years, these peer-led, cross-office teams have served as the scaffolding for firmwide learning, continuous improvement, and leadership development. The idea is simple but powerful: Don’t just share lessons, learn from them—and not just as a project team, as an organization.

The structure is clear and repeatable. Project lessons are identified and prioritized during monthly CWT meetings. From there, lessons are shared across the firm through a variety of lightweight formats: curated presentations, short-form write-ups, and open technical forums. When a lesson points to a deeper need, it’s operationalized—transformed into templates, toolkits, or shared guidelines—improving how the whole firm works.

Of course, none of that happens without trust. AEI has also invested deeply in building a culture where people feel safe naming their mistakes, confident their insights will help others grow.

What follows is a look at one of the most durable and dynamic knowledge-sharing programs in the AEC industry—what it looks like in action, and what other firms can learn from it.

Over the past year, much of the conversation around AI and knowledge management in AEC has rightly focused on technology. Generative AI platforms, AI search offering, and emerging capabilities like AI agents are transforming how firms surface and share what they know. 

We’ve also spent a lot of time exploring the benefits: how AI can support emerging professionals, elevate subject matter experts, improve onboarding, streamline marketing, and accelerate learning and development, to name a few.

But one deceptively simple question from the Q&A session at the end of our KM 3.0: Connecting People to Knowledge and Expertise in the Flow of Work webinar has stayed with me:

“How is the work of AEC knowledge management teams changing because of AI?”

In many ways, that question became the organizing impulse for this issue—because KM 3.0, this new era of AI-powered knowledge management, isn’t just about technology. KM 3.0 is also about people, process, and culture, and how AI is reshaping the work of knowledge management teams.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with some of the most thoughtful and forward-thinking KM leaders in our community—members of Knowledge Architecture’s Research Council and others leading mature programs across firms of all sizes. 

And to be clear, not everyone doing this work has “knowledge” in their title. Across the AEC industry, we see knowledge management being led by a diverse mix of roles—knowledge managers, design technology leaders, operations directors, IT leaders, marketing and communications professionals, learning and development leads, innovation strategists, practice leaders, quality assurance directors, and even CEOs.

Regardless of their title or department, what they share is a deep investment in how knowledge flows across the firm and a commitment to making it more usable, accessible, and strategic.

What follows is a synthesis of 12 key trends—emergent patterns in how the smartest KM teams are evolving their work to thrive in this new era of AI-powered knowledge management.

The idea behind Shive-Hattery’s Plus One program is disarmingly simple: when you’re heading into a client meeting, proposal interview, or project kickoff, don’t go alone. Bring someone with you. Someone earlier in their career. Someone who wouldn’t normally be in the room. Have them observe. Encourage them to ask questions. Invite them to lead a small part of the meeting.

That’s it.

But inside that simple idea lives something incredibly powerful.

Shive-Hattery is a 600-person architecture and engineering consulting firm based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with roots dating back to 1895.

Plus One is both a knowledge strategy and an employee engagement strategy. It helps the firm transfer wisdom from senior staff, build client continuity, and develop future leaders in real time. At the same time, it helps early-career professionals feel seen, valued, and included in the real work of the firm, years before they might otherwise have had the chance.

It’s one of those rare practices that builds both business resilience and human connection.

In fact, I’d argue that’s part of why it works so well. It sits at the intersection of what firms need and what people want. Firms need succession planning, leadership development, and client coverage. People want mentorship, growth, and visibility. Plus One delivers both, and it’s exactly the kind of habit that helps a firm become a learning organization.

And because it’s lightweight, repeatable, and aligned with the natural rhythms of project work, it scales easily. 

Over the past month, I’ve been researching how the role of the AEC knowledge manager is evolving in the age of AI. One theme has come up again and again in surveys and interviews: AI literacy is quickly becoming a core responsibility of KM teams. In many firms, knowledge managers are stepping into a new role as AI educators, guides, and shepherds.

They’re the ones helping colleagues understand the art of the possible. Teaching prompting techniques. Introducing good habits like verifying sources. Navigating the messy intersections of internal data, external tools, and firm-specific workflows.

But a question keeps tugging at me:

Do we need to elevate everyone to the same level of AI fluency? Or will the future of AI learning look more jagged, role-based, and use case specific?

If you didn’t have the good fortune of meeting Ed Friedrichs before his passing in 2021, here are a few high-level facts: Ed was a visionary architect and firm leader. He played a pivotal role in shaping Gensler into the global design practice it is today. He joined the firm in 1969, founded the Los Angeles office in 1976, and served as Gensler’s President and CEO from 1995 to 2003. Under his leadership, the firm grew significantly in scale, sophistication, and ambition—while also codifying many of the cultural principles that still define it.

But for me, Ed’s legacy began long before I launched Knowledge Architecture—before I even knew what knowledge management was.

I first met Ed in 2005 at a conference called Firm of the Future, hosted by ZweigWhite. The conference brought together forward-thinking leaders to explore where the AEC industry was headed in the next 10, 15, 20 years. It was a fantastic premise, and it launched me on the path I’ve been walking ever since.

That event introduced me to firms that were being intentional about how they managed knowledge. These firms were investing in research, building systems for innovation, sharing what they learned internally, and connecting people across offices and disciplines. No one at the conference was using the term “knowledge management”—at least not that I can recall—but that’s exactly what they were doing. They were trying to make better use of what they knew.

Ed was one of the speakers at that conference. I attended his talk, then stayed afterward to ask questions. I later found him at a meal and sat next to him, eager to learn more. He was generous with his time—patient, encouraging, and deeply thoughtful.

What I didn’t fully realize until recently—when I went back and reviewed the old conference program—is that Ed didn’t just speak at the event. He chaired and designed it. He was the one who brought those people together. He shaped the experience that set me on this path.

Looking back, it all makes sense. The connecting thread running through the entire conference—the idea that architects and engineers shouldn’t only design buildings and infrastructure, but should also design their firms to be smarter—was Ed’s idea. His point of view gave the event its energy, its distinctiveness, and its sense of possibility.

That conference was the moment I first began to see knowledge management as a tool you could use to design a better business.

When Tricia Esser, KTGY’s CEO, initially brought up the idea of building a leadership development program from scratch, John Robison, COO, was skeptical.

John was already deep in the research process for leadership development programs. He had lined up a shortlist of external options: Stanford executive education, Korn Ferry programs, Vistage coaching networks. These were proven, respected, turnkey solutions. Why reinvent the wheel?

But when Tricia had a memorable conversation with a client who had built their own leadership development program in-house, everything changed.

She asked the client, "Isn’t building your own program a huge time commitment?"

The client answered: "Yes. Can you tell me something more important you're working on?"

That question landed hard.

Tricia and John realized they couldn’t entrust something this important to a third party.

That was the moment ELEVATE began.