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.
Company Wide Teams: A Volunteer Army
Company Wide Teams are AEI’s grassroots framework for peer-led knowledge sharing. CWTs share standards and tools, create consistency across offices and teams, enable workload sharing across disciplines and locations, improve quality, provide training, and implement continuous improvement.
The program began in 1999, when AEI had approximately 400 employees and five offices. CWTs have scaled alongside the firm’s growth, and now, in 2025, support nearly 1,000 people across 21 offices.
Each of the 13 disciplines at AEI has a dedicated CWT.
Each CWT consists of:
One or two representatives per office, depending on the size of the discipline
Two team co-leaders who facilitates the group and drives agendas
Regular monthly meetings, with notes shared firmwide
Working groups focused on top priorities identified by team leaders
All CWT co-leaders meet as a multidisciplinary team four times per year to share ideas and best practices for CWT leadership.
Trust and connection are foundational to AEI’s Company Wide Teams. That’s why, approximately every other year, each discipline’s CWT gathers in person for a summit. These meetings are designed to help CWT members build relationships, align on shared priorities, and recharge the team’s energy. Participants spend time together face-to-face, working on tools, surfacing challenges, and setting direction for the next phase of improvement.
After the summit, CWT members divide into smaller working groups focused on specific areas: quality, specifications, design toolkits, process improvements, or other shared priorities. This distributed model allows progress to continue between summits while staying rooted in the connections built during these in-person gatherings. Summits ground the work in trust and connections—a key to making AEI’s decentralized knowledge-sharing model successful.
Krista Murphy, a Principal at AEI who has led the CWT program for the last decade, likens CWTs to a “volunteer army,” whose “many hands make light work” in building new tools and guidelines on behalf of the firm.
Monthly CWT Meetings: Where Lessons Are Identified and Priorities Are Set
Each of AEI’s 13 discipline-specific Company Wide Teams meet online once a month. These monthly meetings are the lifeblood of the system. They are where new lessons surface—sometimes organically through stories from office representatives, sometimes in response to targeted prompts or firmwide initiatives.
CWTs record meeting notes and post them on FiL, AEI’s Synthesis intranet, where they are accessible to the whole firm.
But identifying and documenting lessons learned is only the first step. Krista Murphy emphasizes the importance of going further by asking:
– Which lessons should we share with the whole firm?
– Which lessons should become tools, templates, or shared training moments?
– Which lessons are ripe for turning into process improvements or knowledge assets?
In other words, just as top priority lessons should move beyond individual project teams, they should also move beyond the CWTs themselves so they can benefit the entire organization.
Sharing Lessons Learned Across the Organization
Here are a few of the mechanisms AEI uses to share lessons learned across the firm:
Tech Talks: Curated Conversations That Scale
AEI’s Tech Talk program is a firmwide learning series featuring short, structured presentations by employees on recent project experiences, technical lessons, and emerging tools or practices. Each of the 13 discipline-specific Company Wide Teams typically organizes one Tech Talk per year. Sessions are hosted on Zoom or recorded on Microsoft Teams, and recordings are uploaded to FiL for broader access across the firm.
Talks are kept short—typically 20-30 minutes—to encourage viewership and respect people’s time. The shorter format also makes it easier for people to prepare and share confidently, and for the firm to scale participation across disciplines and offices.
Tech Talks cover topics ranging from technical to strategic, foundational to future-looking:
Adapting for AI: Delivering Smarter Infrastructure Tomorrow
Advanced Coil Selection
Chilled Beams 2.0
Commissioning Critical Facilities
Heat Recovery Chillers and Heat Pumps
Intro to Controls
Project Management and Cost Estimating
Variable Frequency Drives (VFD) Basics
Water Reuse and Conservation
The Engineering Excellence Series: Bite-Sized Lessons That Stick
In 2021, AEI started a new program to share lessons learned on FiL called Engineering Excellence.
Engineering Excellence posts are short, digestible write-ups that capture timely technical lessons. Designed to be faster and more scalable than Tech Talks, they offer a lightweight format for sharing insights across the firm.
The idea evolved organically during the pandemic, when Tech Talks became harder to produce and the firm was focused on rapidly rolling out its 2019 strategic plan. The strategic plan emphasized engineering excellence as the key to making AEI the firm of first choice for clients and employees.
The result was the Engineering Excellence series: short-form knowledge sharing published directly to FiL. Some posts are authored by Company Wide Team leaders. Others come from individuals in the field or principals in the firm. The format makes it easier to document smaller but meaningful lessons and distribute them quickly to peers.
Krista Murphy points to one post in particular as a strong model. Authored by the co-leader of AEI’s Piping CWT, it shares a real-world problem her team encountered with a client. The story begins with the office trying to solve the issue on their own. When that didn’t work, they reached out across AEI via a Quiz Bowl (see next section), inviting insights from other offices. Still no luck. Then came collaboration with the contractor, a site visit, client engagement—and finally, after three tense weeks, a solution.
Krista loved the fact that:
“She wasn't just addressing technical possibilities in the post, but also the AEI process. What should an office do when they hit a wall? Don’t try to tackle it alone—reach out. That was the real lesson.”
The post ends with three crisp takeaways and a note of gratitude to the team. For Krista, it’s a perfect example of what the format does well: it shares not just what happened, but how the team worked through it, and how others can learn from the process.
While Engineering Excellence posts vary in topic, tone, and authorship, their unifying goal is simple: help AEI’s engineers avoid common mistakes, learn from each other’s experience, and improve the quality of their work—with minimal time investment and maximum reach.
Quiz Bowls: Tapping into AEI’s Collective Knowledge
Quiz Bowls are one of AEI’s most distinctive quality assurance and learning tools. These lively, interactive sessions give project teams the chance to pressure-test their thinking with senior engineers and peers—sometimes across offices, sometimes across disciplines, and often under the friendly scrutiny of seasoned leaders.
It begins with a project challenge. The gnarlier the better.
Here’s an example of a recent Quiz Bowl prompt:
“There’s a building served by a utility transformer Delta-Wye—2500kVA into the building with 3000A main breaker switchgear. The owner reports intermittent opening of the main breaker 2–3 times a year, no pattern. The equipment is about 15 years old. What would you investigate?”
The format varies by team and moment. Some Quiz Bowls are structured, recurring peer reviews. Others are spontaneous. Sometimes they are held in person, sometimes over Teams, and sometimes entirely on FiL as a Virtual Quiz Bowl through posts and comments.
While the format is flexible, the intent is clear: elevate design quality, surface lessons learned, and accelerate shared learning. The idea is to get more eyes on important or ambiguous design challenges, often in real-time, before issues surface in the field.
Sometimes a Quiz Bowl is sparked by uncertainty. Other times it’s a quality check on the way to a major deadline. Either way, the tone is inviting—not punitive.
As Krista puts it, “Even when I’m feeling good about things, I want to know what I’m missing. That’s as much a part of a Quiz Bowl as solving a problem.”
Though Quiz Bowls operate as a parallel workflow to Company Wide Teams, they’re closely aligned in spirit. CWTs champion the practice, promote it, and integrate lessons from Quiz Bowls into shared standards and tools. As Krista says, “CWTs are about quality, training, and continuous improvement—and Quiz Bowls support all three.”
They’ve also become an important expression of AEI’s engineering culture: transparent, rigorous, and curious. There’s even a bit of friendly competition to Quiz Bowls—teams striving not just to defend their ideas, but to learn from each other, see around corners, and continuously raise the bar.
Operationalizing Lessons Learned Into Tools and Guidelines
As we’ve seen in the examples above, AEI has multiple ways to share lessons learned throughout the organization. Equally important—if not more so—is the practice of operationalizing those lessons into firmwide tools and guidelines. This ensures learning doesn’t just live in meeting notes or recordings; it becomes embedded in how work actually gets done.
In other words, future project teams at AEI benefit from the lessons without ever having heard the underlying story.
It’s worth noting that at AEI, the word "policy" tends to raise eyebrows—maybe even cause allergic reactions. It’s not that the firm resists consistency; it resists rigidity. AEI doesn’t want policies that stifle innovation or discourage critical thinking. So instead of enforcing standards and policies, they build and share tools and guidelines.
“Policies is a bit of a cringy word around here,” said Krista Murphy. “No one wants to have to follow strict rules that do not account for client and project specific needs. So how do you have efficiency and consistency without mandating firm policy? Well, we offer tools. We have design toolkits. We have pilot programs. We have recommended practices. We’re not telling you you have to use this—but we sure as heck recommend it.”
That distinction—between offering and mandating—is fundamental to AEI’s culture. They pride themselves on client-specific, innovative engineering, not cookie-cutter solutions. And they believe the best way to encourage adoption is not to impose from above but to empower from within.
“We really believe every client is different,” Krista said. “Our mission is to deliver engineering excellence and innovative solutions for complex projects. We’re not a one-size-fits-all firm. We don’t want to produce groupthink or repetitive behavior. We want to be accepting of multiple ways to do things.”
Of course, some tools—like panel schedules or Revit families—do benefit from reuse. But even then, AEI resists the urge to require them in order to support individual client needs. Instead, they share tools that have been tested and refined by the teams who actually use them.
“Here is a whole group of people—including two representatives from every office—who have gotten behind this,” Krista explained. “And if you don’t like it, there’s a forum to suggest a tweak to the detail, the intranet page, or the BIM process. You’re not holding up improvement at the top. You’re empowering people to make something better—and make it better quickly and incrementally.”
That’s what gives AEI’s tools their strength. Rather than publishing a rigid playbook, they maintain a growing, living library of shared resources, including:
Standard Specifications
Standard Details
Standard Basis of Design
Design Toolkits
Revit Families + Tools
Standard Schedules
Templates, checklists, and more
And if someone creates something new that works? There’s a clear path for adding it to the library.
“We have a forum to bring that new thing into the repertoire of tools people can choose from,” Krista said.
This is where the Company Wide Teams shine. They’re not enforcers—they’re stewards. They help the firm divide and conquer the work of turning lessons into usable, durable resources. They ensure good ideas spread—but without forcing every office to solve problems the same way.
“We’re not trying to create a guideline so people are so efficient they don’t have to think,” Krista said. “We’re trying to provide tools where it makes sense—and we’re sharing knowledge to the best of our ability. That’s the objective.”
This approach doesn’t slow down innovation, it amplifies it. When people aren’t afraid to try new things—and they have a way to share what works—great ideas move faster.
Cultural Wisdom: Focus on the Lesson, Not the Mistake
One of the most important cultural questions AEI has wrestled with is deceptively simple:
How do you get people to admit their mistakes, share what they’ve learned, and capture those lessons so others can benefit?
It turns out how you share matters as much as what you share.
The goal of sharing lessons learned isn’t to spotlight failure or assign blame—it’s to surface insights that make the whole firm smarter. That means stripping away names of individuals, clients, or even specific projects. As Krista puts it: “Focus on the lesson, not the mistake.”
Some lessons are too hot to share as-is. In those cases, the team pulls out the core technical issue and re-frames the scenario as a more universal design challenge.
“There’s no way we could have recorded this particular hot case and posted it on the intranet as it was,” Krista said, referring to a recent lessons learned session. “But by focusing on the core of the incident—what happened and what should have happened—and removing the client name and project details, we were able to share the story in a way that reached a much wider audience.”
The frequency of these moments matters, too. AEI doesn’t just share one or two lessons per quarter—they share dozens, sometimes hundreds, each year. In Madison, for example, the Electrical Company Wide Team runs through ten lessons learned in a single meeting, and those meetings might happen six times a year. That’s 60 shared lessons—each one reinforcing that learning is normal, expected, and not tied to personal fault.
“When you’re presenting 60 lessons in a year,” Krista said, “it’s not about any one person’s mistake. It’s about what the collective group can learn from the experience.”
This is how AEI is building a learning culture: not by punishing errors, but by making improvement routine.
Over time, it stops being scary to share a mistake—because it’s no longer your mistake. It’s the firm’s opportunity to get better.
What’s Next: From Ad Hoc Learning to Intentional Training
For more than 25 years, AEI has been building and refining its Company Wide Teams program—an infrastructure for identifying, sharing, and operationalizing lessons learned. It’s a system designed to put project knowledge directly into the hands of employees, in the flow of work.
All along, training has been one of the program’s core mandates—alongside quality and continuous improvement. And training has happened: through Quiz Bowls, Tech Talks, and Engineering Excellence posts. But until recently, it’s been largely ad hoc—informal, distributed, and situational.
Now, Krista and the CWTs are working to take that training mandate to the next level. The opportunity isn’t just to share knowledge—it’s to design learning. Structured, intentional, and built with AEI’s younger engineers in mind.
“We have all this information on FiL—design toolkits, 101 videos, process guidance—but our younger folks didn’t even know it existed,” Krista said. “They said, ‘It’s just too much. We can’t find it.’”
To meet that need, AEI is launching a new Intro to Engineering page, designed for engineers early in their careers. Built around three “springboards,” it will offer curated access to essential knowledge:
A Technical Springboard for design toolkits, discipline intro 101 videos, and discipline-specific how-tos
A Professional Springboard for soft skills like communication, relationship-building, and running an effective meeting
An Industry Springboard that introduces AEI’s project delivery models, contracting basics, and financials overview
The rollout will be phased—starting with the technical springboard, then expanding. And wherever strong content already exists, AEI will link to it rather than reinvent it.
CWTs will remain central—not just as content creators, but as curators and stewards of training resources. They’re ideally positioned to manage toolkits, champion best practices, and align learning efforts across the firm.
AEI is also preparing to take this work even further through Synthesis LMS. For Krista, the platform offers a way to formalize what’s already working—and create structured, scalable training experiences led by the CWTs themselves.
“There’s been a lot of desire for more formal training than what we have,” she said. “I’m excited about making the Company Wide Teams responsible for what those courses might look like.”
Closing Thoughts
In the decade-plus I’ve been watching this program evolve—from my first glimpse in 2013 to the present—I’ve been continually impressed by its thoughtfulness, intentionality, and durability. This isn’t a flash-in-the-pan initiative. It’s a living system that has grown stronger over time and I believe it’s been a key contributor to AEI’s sustained success.
It also illustrates something I say often: great firms spend as much time designing their business as they do designing buildings and infrastructure. AEI’s Company Wide Teams are a case in point. They’re not just supporting project work—they’re building the future of the firm. And they’re doing it consistently, collectively, and intentionally. They’re becoming smarter. By design.
Go Deeper
🎥 Watch Engaging Engineers with Company Wide Collaboration at AEI — Krista Murphy’s KA Connect 2019 talk on the origins and evolution of the Company Wide Teams program.
🎥 Watch The Evolution of Knowledge Management at AEI — Krista Murphy’s KA Connect 2016 talk on the origins and evolution of AEI’s Knowledge Management program.
🎥 Watch Improving Knowledge Flow: The AEC Lessons Learned Pipeline — my KA Connect 2018 talk outlining the Knowledge Architecture's Lessons Learned Pipeline framework.