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How Lionakis Built a Distributed Network of Design Technology Change Agents

October 22, 2025 Christopher Parsons

Over the past few years, the volume and variety of design technology tools inside AEC firms have exploded. What used to be a finite stack of tools has become a diverse ecosystem: modeling platforms, energy analysis, computational design, visualization, BIM coordination, AR/VR, collaboration tools, automation scripts, and now an entirely new layer of AI-powered tools arriving faster than firms can officially adopt them.

In addition, the half-life of technical knowledge keeps shrinking. What was considered best practice two years ago often needs re-examination today. And as the number of tools grows, the questions multiply alongside them—immediate, project-level questions about how this works right now inside this model, for this client, under these constraints.

All centralized Design Technology (DT) teams, even the strongest ones, eventually reach the same breaking point: there is simply too much surface area to cover. It isn’t just the volume of tools — it’s the diversity of use cases. Every market sector works differently. Every project type introduces its own constraints. Every team has a different mix of skills, habits, and readiness levels. The burden isn’t only knowing the technology — it’s translating that knowledge into the right context at the right moment for the right people.

No matter how talented the individuals, no matter how many hours they put in, a centralized DT team cannot possibly keep up. 

As projects demand faster answers and as tools evolve on shorter cycles, the bottleneck becomes painfully obvious: knowledge cannot travel fast enough through a hub-and-spoke model. When all expertise flows through a small handful of people, it creates knowledge debt, slows down projects, and makes the firm vulnerable when key individuals are unavailable or leave the firm.

So the strategic question shifts:

If centralization alone can’t solve the problem, what kind of knowledge and learning architecture can?

DTSS: A Hybrid Strategy for Scaling

If centralization alone can’t solve the problem, what kind of knowledge and learning architecture can? — is the main question that Kristina Williams, Director of Design Technology at Lionakis, began wrestling with more than a decade ago. She and Design Technology Specialist, Sophie Edwards — who joined the firm in 2023 —  now make up the firm’s core DT team supporting a 200-person practice spread across five offices and four major market sectors.

Lionakis is a California-based architecture, structural engineering, and interior design firm with offices in Sacramento, Oakland, Irvine, San Jose, and San Diego — serving education, healthcare, civic, and commercial markets. 

That means design technology must stretch across multiple disciplines, multiple geographies, and multiple project types — each with its own patterns, constraints, and pace of change. In a firm like Lionakis, there isn’t a single context for technology — there are many local contexts, shaped simultaneously by office, market, and discipline. And when the work lives in local contexts, support has to live there too.

Instead of growing a larger DT department or adding another layer of central oversight, Kristina and Sophie made a fundamentally different design choice — one that feels strikingly modern in retrospect: rather than concentrating expertise in the core, they distributed it into project teams.

In 2013, Lionakis launched the Design Technology Support Specialist (DTSS) program with a simple but powerful premise: if real help needs to show up in real time, it must live close to the people doing the work. So rather than trying to scale the core DT team by hiring more full-time technologists, the firm embedded capability inside the studios — architects, designers, and BIM technicians who remain billable but carry an added role as technology stewards.

At first glance, the DTSS program might simply look like “developing more power users.” But it’s far more than that.

The core DT function stays intentionally light, while its reach is extended through a distributed network of empowered practitioners who sit with project teams, see constraints firsthand, and intervene before inefficiency calcifies. Because support is embedded in project environments rather than external to them, knowledge travels faster. Adoption becomes peer-to-peer rather than top-down. And support shifts from reactive triage to proactive problem-solving.

The Power of the Distributed DTSS Network

The genius of the DTSS program is that it doesn’t depend on a single personality or regular surges of heroic effort. It works because it changes the way knowledge moves through the firm.

Scaling Support Without Scaling Headcount

Instead of the core DT team fielding every question, dozens of embedded stewards handle most issues before they escalate — saving time for everyone involved and dramatically reducing support debt.

Building Resilience Into the Organization

Because capability is distributed rather than concentrated, the firm is less vulnerable to the impacts of  turnover. When people leave, knowledge doesn’t walk out the door with them; it is embedded in the network of Design Technology Support Specialists.

Putting DT Expertise Closer to the Work

Project-level nuance is hard to see from a distance. Embedded specialists see inefficiencies early and are best positioned to recommend contextual solutions that fit the local environment of each office, studio, or market.

Developing Emerging Leaders

DTSS are not just learners; they are force multipliers. The role invites them into a larger field of influence, cultivating confidence, technical judgment, and peer leadership much earlier in their careers.

Growing Collective Intelligence

Instead of bottlenecking expertise through the firm’s core DT team, knowledge flows laterally across offices, studios, and markets — shared peer-to-peer rather than routed up and back down.

This is why DTSS is more than a training program. It is an operating philosophy: knowledge belongs where the work is happening.

And when knowledge lives in a distributed network, the organization is adaptive—able to metabolize new tools, new workflows, and new expectations without overtaxing the core DT team.

Who Makes Up the DTSS Network

Lionakis currently has 30 DTSS across the firm — roughly 25% of all production staff. That ratio means that on any given project, in any studio, there is likely someone sitting only a desk or two away who can provide guidance in real time. These individuals are architects, designers, structural BIM technicians, and emerging professionals — not “IT” or “support staff,” but peers who understand the project context and the stakes of the work.

Each DTSS goes through a structured DTSS Boot Camp before taking on the role — a program originally shaped by a small team in its early years (2013–2015) and stewarded and significantly evolved by Kristina after she became Director of Design Technology in 2016. What began as a promising concept became a durable system once she took it under her wing and continuously refined it to meet the firm’s changing needs.

DTSS remain billable in their studios, but now carry a second responsibility: serving as local stewards of technology, workflow quality, and continuous learning. They are the eyes and ears of design technology in the places where the work is actually happening.

Importantly, they are not an informal help network or an “ad hoc committee.” They are selected intentionally, invested in meaningfully, and supported as part of a system.

This intentionality matters because it sets up what comes next: the program is not primarily about knowledge transfer — it is about identity shift. DTSS Boot Camp is where that transformation begins.

DTSS Boot Camp: From Individual Contributor to Change Agent 

Boot Camp is where the DTSS role turns outward — from “my work” to “the work around me.” It is where participants begin to understand themselves not only as modelers or designers, but as stewards of practice inside the firm.

The cohort is intentionally small and the sessions are conversational. Participants gain a window into how other studios operate: how a healthcare team manages documentation under strict regulatory pressure, how a civic studio balances public transparency with design iteration, how education projects navigate community engagement while moving at speed. They come to understand design technology as a living system — one that behaves differently in different project environments.

Because the format is immersive and relational, the mindset shift begins early. Graduates don’t return to their studios as “people who know more about Revit.” They return as people who are expected to see differently — to notice patterns, to intervene early, to improve the work around them. The role creates a lens, and once you’ve seen through it, it’s hard to unsee.

One of the most striking pieces of feedback Kristina has heard from DTSS graduates is that the program changed their perspective about their role in the organization. Once they were trained to look for inefficiencies, they could no longer “walk past” them. It wasn’t a task added to their job — it became part of their professional identity.

DTSS leave Boot Camp wired to advocate for better tools, smoother workflows, and stronger practices. They are the connective tissue between projects, between offices, and between what the firm intends and what it actually becomes.

That mindset shift — from individual contributor to steward and change agent — is what gives the DTSS program its strength and staying power.

The Day-to-Day Role of DTSS

The impact of the DTSS network is felt not in big announcements or new policies, but in the quiet, steady way the work gets better. Their impact is felt in the daily rhythm of project life — in the way teams learn, the way problems get resolved, and the way knowledge stays current across the firm.

Teaching in Small, Continual Moments

After Boot Camp, DTSS become gentle amplifiers of learning inside the firm. At Lionakis, this takes the form of short, firmwide knowledge sharing sessions called “DTea Times”—five-to-fifteen-minute Teams calls that keep new ideas circulating. The concept has proven so useful that it has spread across the organization: Ops Tea Times, ITea Times, and Design Tea Times now carry the same spirit of peer-based learning. Teaching becomes less of a classroom event and more of a cultural habit.

Providing Real-Time Project Support

Because DTSS sit inside the studios, support is not distant — it’s immediate. Teams can turn to a colleague who already understands the project, the deadline pressure, the client expectations, and the quirks of the model. Help arrives in the moment of need, not after an escalation. This keeps projects moving and reinforces a sense of momentum rather than interruption.

Stewarding the Firm’s Knowledge Base

DTSS play a quiet but essential role in maintaining the accuracy of shared knowledge on Leo, Lionakis’ Synthesis intranet. They help ensure that resources match reality — updating documentation, refining standards, and identifying where guidance needs to evolve. Lionakis’ production standards guide — a fully annotated mock set with linked best practices — originated from this stewardship mindset and remains one of the most used resources in the firm.

Helping the Firm Stay Adaptive and Resilient

Working so close to project conditions, DTSS notice shifts early — new tools gaining traction, pain points emerging in a specific market, or workflows beginning to drift. They become an early-sensing mechanism for the core DT team, helping the firm adjust before pressure turns into disruption. They act as connectors between real conditions on the ground and the strategic decisions that shape practice.

The day-to-day work of DTSS is not flashy, but it is foundational. By keeping people unblocked, keeping knowledge accurate, and keeping learning alive in the flow of work, they strengthen the firm quietly and continuously. This is how stewardship becomes culture — not through policy or mandate, but through presence, relationship, and the steady rhythm of support woven into daily practice.

What’s Next? Leveling Up the DTSS Program through Synthesis LMS + AI Search

As successful as the DTSS model has been, it has also surfaced a quiet constraint that every learning system eventually encounters: there is only so much live instruction a human can sustainably deliver. 

Kristina still loves the part of Boot Camp where she and Sophie get to roll up their sleeves with participants — solving real project problems, talking through judgment calls, translating nuance into practice. But teaching the fundamentals over and over via live lecture has become a tax on time and energy. Not because the basics are unimportant, but because they are exactly the kind of knowledge that should be durable, reusable, and available on demand.

This is where Synthesis LMS changes the shape of the program. Shifting the foundational DTSS Boot Camp material from live lecture into a high-quality, on-demand curriculum — refined once, updated periodically, and accessible whenever a learner needs it — means humans can do what they do best during live sessions: coaching, context, judgment, and stewarding real growth. 

Instead of spending instructional time “covering” content, Kristina and Sophie can invest their time helping people apply it.

But the impact doesn’t end there. Once the DTSS curriculum lives inside Synthesis LMS, it also becomes part of the firm’s broader knowledge infrastructure. Every video, transcript, explanation, and troubleshooting pattern becomes searchable through Synthesis AI Search. 

This creates a second kind of decentralization inside the firm. The first is human — distributing expertise into a network of embedded change agents so support can live close to the work. The second is digital — externalizing expertise into knowledge platforms so it no longer relies on the memory or availability of experts. When knowledge is both distributed across people and stored in a way the whole firm can access, learning stops bottlenecking through any single individual.

What begins as training material for a small cohort becomes institutional intelligence available to anyone in the firm — designers, emerging professionals, new hires, future DTSS candidates, even curious power users. A DTSS might encounter an unfamiliar problem six months after Boot Camp and instantly resurface the right resource through AI search or an LMS lookup — without waiting for Kristina or Sophie to explain it again.

In this way, the DTSS program stops relying on memory and starts relying on access. Knowledge is no longer tied to the room in which it was first delivered. It becomes something the organization can return to, reinforce, and build upon over time. LMS provides the structure; AI Search provides the discoverability; the DTSS network provides the human connection that turns knowledge into practice.

The result is a major leap in capability: DTSS learn faster, need less reteaching, and have more time for stewardship. And the firm itself becomes more self-teaching — not because every person becomes an expert, but because the path to expertise becomes frictionless, repeatable, and right-sized to the moment of need.

And just as importantly, the shift protects the people who have been carrying the teaching load the longest. With the basics handled by the system, Kristina and Sophie regain the time and creative bandwidth to do the work that actually energizes them: coaching, experimenting, innovating, solving hard problems, and shaping what comes next. They are no longer running on a treadmill of repetition — they are leading a learning ecosystem. 

The sustainability of the DTSS program is stronger not just because the content is scalable, but because the humans who steward it now have room to thrive.

Kristina Williams: Designer of a Modern Learning Organization

The lasting strength of the DTSS program is not accidental — it is architectural. 

Kristina Williams didn’t simply run a program; she designed one. She treated knowledge and learning as something that requires structure, care, and intentionality so it could scale beyond the core DT team.

In doing so, she made a crucial shift in her identity — from instructor to designer. Instead of trying to be the person who could answer every question, she built a network through which others could carry knowledge forward and make change. Instead of her and Sophie serving as the hub of every workflow, she created conditions under which support could live close to where the work happens. 

The success of DTSS is inseparable from this design instinct: she architected a structure that does not depend on the individual heroic efforts of the core DT team to succeed.

And the firm noticed. Recently, Lionakis formally expanded Kristina’s role so that half of her time is now dedicated to knowledge and learning management across the firm — a clear acknowledgment that what she is leading is not “support,” but system design. In other words, the organization recognized her as not only the steward of its tools, but the architect of its knowledge and learning infrastructure.

This is what modern knowledge and learning management leadership actually looks like: less about “delivering training” and more about designing conditions through which people can learn sustainably, repeatedly, and in the flow of work. It is a recognition that teaching and learning cannot remain a serendipitous add-on — it must be treated as a core business function, and like every other form of design, it requires intention, structure, iteration, resources, and craft.

In many ways, Kristina’s work is a living embodiment of the Smarter by Design philosophy: that AEC firms should design their knowledge systems with the same rigor and intentionality that they bring to the buildings, bridges, and infrastructure they create. Kristina didn’t just improve how learning happens at Lionakis through the DTSS program — she designed a learning ecosystem, one in which a distributed network of change agents is supported by a knowledge and learning platform that can deliver the right knowledge to the right person at the right time.

Closing Thoughts

One of my favorite books on organizational design is The Living Company by Arie de Geus — a study of institutions that have endured for centuries. His central insight is as relevant today as it was then: “the only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors”. Not to deploy more technology, but to metabolize change more quickly than the environment demands.

This is why distributed learning matters so deeply now. A centralized team cannot update a firm’s knowledge base fast enough on their own. And no amount of documentation can replace the judgment required in real project conditions. But a network of change agents can. A network notices new challenges and opportunities immediately. A network efficiently spreads knowledge through relationships. And above all, a network learns faster than a hierarchy.

This is the heart of Smarter by Design: treating learning as something you design into the organization, not something you bolt on afterward. In the years ahead, the firms that thrive will be the ones that intentionally create the conditions under which their people — and their organization — can adapt faster than the environments around them.

Onward.

Go Deeper

📽️ Watch Deep Dive: The Power of Embedded Change Agents — Kristina Williams’s KA Connect 2021 talk on the Lionakis DTSS program

Watch this to see how the DTSS story first unfolded, a more detailed look at the Boot Camp program, and what the early challenges and breakthroughs looked like.

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