How hard is it to learn how to work at your firm?
I don’t mean the professional knowledge they need to design a building, coordinate a complex project, or advise a client. I mean everything they need to understand about how your organization works: where to find information, which process to follow, who needs to be consulted, and how expectations change when they move from one project team to another.
Some of that learning is essential. Every firm has expertise, values, and ways of doing excellent work that people need to understand. But some of what employees are required to learn is how to navigate the unnecessary complexity the organization has created around them.
In a period when AEC professionals already have so much to learn, I’ve become increasingly interested in how much of that second kind of learning we can eliminate. Can we flatten the learning curve of working at our firms, and give people more time and attention for the work they joined our firms to do?
I think this is an important opportunity for Modern Learning Organizations.
Making the firm easier to work in gives people more room to learn, apply their expertise, and respond to change. The challenge is sustaining that simplicity as the business grows and new demands accumulate.
Becoming an Easy Place to Work
We put considerable thought into becoming “great places to work.” We celebrate firms recognized for their culture, leadership, professional development, and employee experience.
I wonder what we might discover if we also aspired to be the “easiest place to work.”
Imagine an award that recognized how readily a new colleague could understand the firm and begin contributing, how easily people could move between projects, and how dependable the everyday experience of getting work done had become.
That sounds like a firm I’d like to work for.
The products we most enjoy using offer a useful analogy. Product designers have thought carefully about the experience: what we are trying to accomplish, what we need to know, where we might become confused, and how to help us proceed. Well-designed products can be sophisticated, powerful, and easy to use.
We should bring that same intentional design to our organizations. An emerging professional moving among three project teams should be learning about different clients, design challenges, and coordination requirements. But when each team also has a different way of organizing information, tracking decisions, and preparing for client reviews, the employee has another learning curve to climb before they can fully contribute.
An easy place to work would have consistent processes, shared systems, and clear expectations that carry from one project to the next.
That’s good for employees and good for business: quicker onboarding, more flexible staffing, and easier collaboration across project teams and offices. What’s not to like?
The Complexity Tax
Let’s be clear: AEC firms solve complex problems, and sometimes complex problems require complex solutions. The expertise, tools, standards, and coordination practices our firms develop reflect the sophistication and consequence of that work.
Some degree of complexity is valuable and unavoidable. The opportunity is to remove unnecessary organizational complexity so people can devote more of their capacity to the complexity that creates value.
I’ve started thinking of that unnecessary burden as a complexity tax. We pay it by searching for information, duplicating work, repeating explanations, interrupting colleagues, and expending mental effort to remember how everything fits together.
Firms rarely set out to impose unnecessary complexity on their employees.
They introduce new software to solve problems, establish processes to improve quality, and collect information that might become useful. A department creates a spreadsheet to work around the limitations of an existing system. A project manager hacks a process to keep a project on track. A new office leader brings an approach from a previous firm that served its people well.
Taken in isolation, each decision might be reasonable. Employees, however, experience the cumulative result of this creeping complexity. Longtime colleagues learn the shortcuts and workarounds until navigating them becomes second nature. Like fish swimming in water, they may barely notice what surrounds them.
New employees can help us see the complexity tax. Asking someone who recently joined the firm to walk through an ordinary task can reveal steps, assumptions, and inconsistencies that experienced employees no longer question. Looking through their eyes helps us understand how all those separate decisions have added up to make the firm a harder place to work.
Chief Development Officer Laurie Dreyer described a revealing exercise at Taylor Design during our conversation on the Smarter by Design podcast. Her colleagues counted fourteen software platforms employees needed to use “just to live here.” Payroll was in one place, performance management somewhere else, and multiple different employee directories were maintained by hand. All of that came before doing the project work.
The complexity tax also has knock-on effects across the organization. When information is difficult to find or verify, employees interrupt colleagues for confirmation. When core processes and standards aren’t written down, project teams invent their own. When information is duplicated or out of date, people save private copies and build their own little systems.
These are rational responses that help individuals and teams get through the day. But they leave the organization with more versions, more dependencies, and more complexity to manage.
How to Cut the Complexity Tax
Cutting the complexity tax begins with a simple leadership question: what can we take off people’s plates?
As a business evolves, its policies, processes, and systems can fall behind. A rule addresses a problem the firm no longer has. Software remains in use after a better tool has replaced most of its functions. Different teams maintain approaches developed during a period of rapid growth, even after the firm has established a new best practice.
These are opportunities to eliminate unnecessary requirements, consolidate systems, automate repeated tasks, and retire old ways of working.
Here are seven places to look.
1. Retire the Old Way
Any of this sound familiar?
A new system launches, but the old spreadsheet remains in circulation. Current standards move to the intranet, but another set stays on the file server. The firm establishes a shared process, but individual teams keep following their previous approaches.
During an implementation, keeping these alternatives available can be a smart way to help people make the transition. But once the new approach is established, every redundant path we keep alive consumes employee bandwidth. Someone has to maintain it, explain it, and reconcile differences. Employees have to decide which version to trust, especially when the alternatives begin to diverge and give conflicting answers.
What was intended to support a transition becomes a permanent layer of complexity. These lingering alternatives are often a good place to begin cutting the complexity tax.
There is a point where adoption has to stop being optional. Leaders need to listen carefully, address legitimate problems, and help people make the transition. Then they need the conviction to remove the alternative and make the new way the shared way of working.
Retiring the old way takes a certain courage. An old approach may still work well for someone, or they may simply prefer it. Asking people to let go of those preferences isn’t always a pleasant conversation. But leaders have to weigh individual preferences against the benefit of making the firm an easier place for everyone to work. Sometimes that means asking people to support a new approach for the good of the firm.
2. Consolidate and Connect Your Systems
Once you’ve retired systems and processes the firm no longer needs, look at what remains. Could fewer systems do the job? And where multiple systems are necessary, could connecting them eliminate duplicate or triplicate work employees are doing by hand?
Returning to Taylor Design’s ‘just to live here’ inventory, the firm reduced the fourteen software platforms employees needed to navigate to three primary places. One new HRIS system consolidated functions previously spread across seven or eight systems. Employees had fewer places to go, fewer interfaces to learn, and less to remember.
Consolidation can also reduce the number of places information has to be maintained. But firms will continue to need specialized systems for different purposes. Connecting those systems creates another opportunity to simplify work.
The starting point is establishing one source of truth for each kind of information: where the authoritative record lives, who maintains it, and how other systems use it. Employee information might originate in an HR system and flow to an intranet, while project information may be entered in a CRM and flow to a digital asset management platform. Integrations can allow that information to be entered once and automatically updated wherever else it is needed.
That means less duplicate entry, fewer conflicting records, and less time spent checking which version is correct. A change made in one place can reach the people and systems that depend on it without someone having to remember every downstream update.
A useful way to identify opportunities is to follow a common task from beginning to end. How many systems does someone visit? Where do they copy information from one place to another? Which records have to be reconciled by hand? Those are places where consolidation and integration can make the firm easier to work in while improving the quality of its information.
3. Design and Budget for Maintenance
Imagine opening a new library. You design and construct the building, hire the staff, fill the shelves with books and other resources, and open the doors. It’s a significant accomplishment. But the library has only just begun serving its patrons.
New books will arrive. Information will become outdated. Collections will need to be reviewed, reorganized, and renewed. The building and its systems will need care. All of that requires people, time, and an operating budget. The usefulness of the library largely depends on what happens after opening day.
The same is true inside an AEC firm. Launching software, adding database fields, publishing processes, or creating learning resources is the beginning of an ongoing commitment. Sustaining simplicity requires keeping those resources accurate, accessible, and useful as the business changes. When a process changes, update the guidance and retire the previous version. When information becomes outdated, correct or archive it so employees can trust what they find.
That work needs to be designed and budgeted for alongside the initial investment. Who will maintain the resource? How much time will they need? What expertise or support will they require? A launch budget should be accompanied by a realistic plan for keeping the system useful throughout its life.
One trick I’ve learned over the years is to build knowledge updates into processes the firm already follows. Skills information can be updated during development conversations. Project data can be reviewed at regular milestones. Keeping information current becomes part of doing the work, with fewer separate tasks to remember.
AI can also help with the upkeep. Some of our clients have built Synthesis Knowledge Agents that review new pages, documents, and videos against existing resources, flag potentially outdated or conflicting guidance, and recommend what needs attention. That gives the people maintaining the firm’s knowledge a useful head start: they can review the recommendations and resolve inconsistencies before employees have to work around them.
Designing for maintenance helps keep the firm’s ambitions sustainable. A manageable set of dependable systems, clear processes, and current information can serve people better than an elaborate arrangement nobody has time to maintain.
4. Keep Content Clear and Concise
In our conversation on the Smarter by Design podcast, Ellen Bensky, CEO of Turner Fleischer, described the firm’s work to redo its wiki pages with greater clarity and simplicity. She wanted concise guidance that explained why the firm approached work in a particular way. For Ellen, making that knowledge easier to understand was part of moving the organization forward.
A resource can be accurate and comprehensive while still making people work too hard to understand it. Employees need to know when the guidance applies, why it matters, and what to do next. They shouldn’t have to dig through a long page to discover the few sentences relevant to their task.
Keeping content clear and concise requires editorial judgment. Put the purpose and practical guidance up front. Use language the intended reader understands. Remove repetition, outdated instructions, and background that obscures the task. Preserve the detail people need to do the work correctly, and organize it so they can find it.
Frequently used pages are a useful place to start. Ask someone who relies on the guidance to walk through it with you. Where do they hesitate? What needs explaining? What do they skip? A little thoughtful editing can make a recurring task easier for everyone who follows.
Writing clearly and concisely takes time. Blaise Pascal captured the challenge centuries ago when he explained that a letter was long because he hadn’t had time to make it shorter. But that investment pays off every time someone uses the guidance. A little more editorial effort can save many colleagues from repeatedly working through an explanation that asks too much of them.
AI can help with that effort. Turner Fleischer has been using AI, including Synthesis Knowledge Agents, to review new pages against the firm’s standards for clarity, conciseness, and writing style. That gives contributors support in applying those standards and helps the firm sustain the quality of its content as new material is added.
5. Bring Answers and Guidance into the Flow of Work
Employees should be able to find an answer without having to know which department or system owns it. Giving people one place to search across the firm’s knowledge reduces the need to learn where everything lives. That is especially valuable for tasks they perform infrequently, when remembering the process can take longer than completing it.
AI-powered search and knowledge agents can help make detailed guidance easier to apply, whether someone needs to understand a benefit, follow a technical workflow, or find a relevant project precedent. The opportunity is to make the firm’s knowledge available when people need it, with less searching, fewer interruptions, and less to remember.
6. Remember That Technology Change Is Process Change
There is an equation I’ve returned to over the years: NT + OO = EOO.
New Technology + Old Organization = Expensive Old Organization.
It is a useful reminder that buying or building new software does not automatically change how a firm works. A new platform can gather approvals into one place while preserving every unnecessary approval. An AI tool can accelerate a task inside a process that still asks three people to reconstruct information the business already has.
Realizing the value of new technology requires examining the work itself. Do we even need this process? Which steps still serve a purpose? Where should responsibility sit? What do people need to understand or do differently because of the new software?
Ron Heims, Director of Practice Innovation at RDG Planning and Design, described his approach in our Smarter by Design podcast conversation, “Building RDG’s Practice Innovation Program.” Before introducing technology, he works with the people doing the work to map the actual process, including duplicate entry, frustrations, and informal workarounds. Comparing those experiences helps the firm agree on a better shared approach and develop technology that supports it.
Process mapping is an opportunity to cut the complexity tax at its source. Before automating a step or moving it into a new platform, ask whether it still needs to happen. And if so, can it be simplified? The investment can leave people with fewer things to do, fewer handoffs to manage, and a clearer process to follow.
7. Beware the Hidden Burden of Flexibility
Some complexity comes from the decisions we leave people to make for themselves.
Recently, Angela Watson, President and CEO of Shepley Bulfinch, shared an observation with me about the firm’s hybrid practice. Its flexibility allows teams to be assembled across geography and gives people considerable freedom to manage their time. But for some employees, that freedom is harder to manage. They prefer more direction, and Angela wondered whether this reflected a desire for stability: “it’s one more thing to manage.”
That observation stayed with me because autonomy is something many of us value deeply. Giving people discretion can support professional judgment and accommodate their circumstances. But flexibility carries a cognitive cost when people repeatedly have to determine what is expected, what is acceptable, and how their choices will affect others.
An easy place to work can offer freedom while also providing clear expectations and useful defaults. Which days should a project team be together? What hours should colleagues generally be available? How should someone communicate a change in their schedule? A shared starting point gives people something dependable to plan around, with room to adjust when their circumstances or the work require it.
That clarity reduces the effort of coordinating everyday work. People can use their flexibility with greater confidence because they understand what their colleagues are counting on.
When considering where to offer more flexibility, it’s worth asking: are we giving people useful freedom, or just adding another thing to figure out? Are we empowering our employees or just creating unnecessary complexity?
Sustaining Simplicity Requires Relentless Attention
Cutting the complexity tax is a meaningful achievement. Keeping it from creeping back requires an ongoing commitment to simplicity.
The forces that created the complexity burden remain after a successful cleanup. Teams encounter new needs. Software gains features. People add fields, reports, approval steps, and exceptions. New offices and services bring practices that need to fit into the wider business. Each addition usually has an advocate and a reason to exist, while the cumulative burden is distributed across everyone who has to navigate it.
This is how a firm becomes a harder place to work. It happens through a series of well-intentioned decisions. To avoid this fate, leaders need to be relentless about monitoring the accumulation of complexity and questioning whether each new demand earns its place.
I think weeding is a useful metaphor. What we want to grow—roses, squash, basil—needs room, sunlight, water, and nutrients. Weeds spring up and compete for those same resources. Keeping a garden healthy requires regular attention to what we’re cultivating and what is crowding it out.
The same is true in a firm. Unnecessary processes, redundant systems, and outdated requirements compete for the time and attention people need to do meaningful work. Preserving simplicity means continually noticing and removing what gets in their way.
This is why I think sustaining simplicity is a virtue worth cultivating. It expresses a commitment to treating people’s time and attention with care. As a firm grows, its people should benefit from its expanding capabilities without having to fight through an increasingly tangled organization to use them. Achieving that takes continued design effort and a willingness to keep editing the business.
Annual planning is a wonderful opportunity to focus on simplicity. Most AEC firms make lists of new initiatives they will start. What if we gave equal attention to a list of things we will stop doing? What can we take off people’s plates this year?
AEC firms are full of people who can imagine something new and bring it into existence. Sustained simplicity asks us to apply that same care and ingenuity to deciding what we can remove. We need to become as skilled at editing as we are at adding.
Reinvesting the Simplicity Dividend
What happens to the time and attention we recover by cutting complexity?
We can reinvest it in further simplifying the organization and making it easier to use.
In our Smarter by Design conversation, Laurie Dreyer described how simplifying Taylor Design’s systems and processes had created more room for proactive knowledge management. Fewer tools and less complicated systems helped restore sanity to everyday work and created capacity for the firm’s learning and development team to dedicate time to knowledge management. People could devote more of their time to work that made the best use of their capabilities.
That is the simplicity dividend. Reinvesting it creates an opportunity for the benefits to compound.
Think about paying down debt. Once you eliminate one credit card with the highest interest rate, the money that went toward servicing it becomes available to pay down the next one. And so on and so forth.
Unnecessary complexity creates a similar recurring obligation, paid in time, energy, and attention. Remove one source of that complexity burden, and some of the capacity it consumes becomes available to simplify something else.
Knowledge capture is one place to reinvest. As I explored in Modern Knowledge Capture: How AI-Enabled Teams Are Changing the Way AEC Firms Capture Expertise, interviewers, editors, and producers can partner with experts to turn what they know into guidance others can use. Giving those partners time to capture an expert’s recurring explanations can reduce interruptions for the expert and give colleagues a dependable, on-demand way to find answers in the flow of work.
The benefit can extend into the next round of continuous improvement. The expert has more room to contribute best practices, processes, and stories. Emerging professionals can make even more progress independently. Some of that recovered capacity can help experts transfer even more knowledge.
This is how the virtuous cycle of simplicity gains momentum: reduce complexity, recover capacity, and reinvest in making the firm even easier to work in. Do this again. And again. And again.
Over time, the firm can accomplish something more consequential than a series of isolated efficiency improvements. It can become progressively better at improving itself.
Simplicity Creates Room for Work and Life
Every hour people spend fighting unnecessary complexity is an hour they aren’t spending serving clients, exploring ideas, helping colleagues, or developing their expertise. Cutting the complexity tax gives people more time and attention for the work that matters most.
It can also give them time back outside work.
In our conversation, Laurie spoke about Taylor Design’s longstanding commitment to an actual forty-hour workweek. Simplifying its systems and processes supports that commitment. Less time spent chasing information and working around cumbersome processes means a better chance of doing meaningful work, finishing a reasonable day, and going home.
People who aren’t exhausted by navigating unnecessary complexity have more energy for an occasional push when it matters. They also have more room to think, learn, and recover and more energy for their families, friends, and interests outside the firm.
Mary Oliver’s phrase “one wild and precious life,” from “The Summer Day,” comes to mind here. The time people spend navigating complicated systems, reconciling conflicting information, and working around unnecessary requirements draws from that one wild and precious life.
By simplifying our firms, we can give some of that time back.
That is what makes sustained simplicity worth the effort. Whether the dividend goes toward capturing knowledge, serving a client, helping a colleague, or having more of an evening to enjoy, we have reduced the amount of someone’s life consumed by the complexity tax.
AEC firms already bring extraordinary care to designing places where people can live and work well. By sustaining simplicity, they can bring that same care to designing firms that help people do meaningful work and still have the time and energy to live rich, fulfilling lives beyond it.