In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I'm joined by Angela Watson, President and CEO of Shepley Bulfinch, a nationally recognized architecture firm whose work spans healthcare, higher education, and civic design. Angela leads with a conviction she traces back to her time teaching at MIT: that real learning doesn't happen through lecture — it happens through doing, through struggle, and through the kind of exploration that only comes when people are given room to fail safely and try again. That belief didn't stay in the classroom. It became the foundation for how she thinks about leading a firm.
Learning by doing is the foundation of how AEC professionals and firms develop. The problem is that great ideas stay trapped in pockets — one team figures something out, another team struggles with the same thing, and the knowledge never travels. Angela saw that dynamic playing out at Shepley Bulfinch as the firm grew into a national practice, work-sharing across five offices with project cycles too long and feedback loops too slow to rely on informal transfer alone. Becoming a learning organization became an operational necessity, but it turned out to be much harder than it looked.
The conversation traces the full arc of what that effort has looked like in practice and what Angela has learned leading it. Why it's so hard for subject matter experts to codify and teach what they know. Why the traditional apprenticeship model is breaking down as plates get fuller and mentorship gets crowded out. What Shepley Bulfinch learned from building Birdfeeder, their internal peer-to-peer learning platform — what worked, what was too ambitious, and what the firm is rethinking now. And why the harder problem isn't building a course catalog — it's connecting learning to where someone actually wants to go in their career.
The thread running underneath all of it is psychological safety. Angela talks about "Back to the Future," Shepley Bulfinch's reframe on lessons learned — a format designed to celebrate the imperfect and make it safe to share what went wrong. She reflects on what it took for her, as CEO, to model that vulnerability publicly, and why she believes culture is the soil in which any learning organization either takes root or doesn't.
If you lead an AEC firm, manage a team, or are thinking seriously about how your organization develops its people, this episode is for you. Angela offers deep insight into what's worked, what hasn't, and what is still to be figured out on Shepley Bulfinch's journey to becoming a learning organization.
▶ Watch or Listen
Watch or listen to this episode via YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
📺 🎧 YouTube
📺 🎧 Spotify
🎧 Apple Podcasts
📚 Show Notes + Resources
Why Your New Engineers Look Lost for Six Months: LinkedIn article by Nick Heim
Amy Edmondson: A Harvard Business School professor and author whose research on psychological safety demonstrates how creating environments where people feel safe to take interpersonal risks—admitting mistakes, asking questions, and challenging ideas—is foundational to organizational learning and innovation.
Desirable Difficulty: Robert Bjork's learning framework showing that challenges that slow initial performance—like spacing practice over time, mixing related concepts together, and retrieving information from memory through testing—produce superior long-term retention and transfer compared to easier, more familiar learning methods.
📃 Episode Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: Angela, you are the president and CEO of Shepley Bulfinch. You went to KA Connect last year, you're coming again this year, you joined our executive workshop on Leveling Up as Learning Organizations, and you're keynoting at TalentMAX. So, you're clearly leaning into learning and development and knowledge management at Shepley Bulfinch in a major way, and I just want to start with why now? Why you? What's going on?
Angela: I realized teaching and learning is at the core of who I am as a leader, as a person. Curiosity has always been part of my life, and I've learned the most by being in the deep end of the pool. When I was teaching at MIT, I really started to understand how different people are, and how you can energize them through learning they're genuinely excited about. Without curiosity, none of that happens.
That was one piece of the puzzle. And then in 2020, when we rolled out our strategic plan trajectory, we put down a goal and said, "We are going to actually be a learning organization." We like the pieces about ourselves that are about learning, and we want to find a way to, not formalize that, but really strengthen that, and start to try and understand, well, what does that mean?
In a lot of ways, there was innovation happening, there was learning happening, but in different pockets. And the hard part is, if it's only in pockets, you don't have a learning organization—you've got an organization with learning pockets.
This idea of sharing learning, sharing knowledge, and folding that into how we do things better is this hurdle that I think defines a learning organization. And that's what we've been working on for the last 10 years.
Chris: When you were teaching at MIT— How did you learn how to teach? Had you taught before MIT? Did you come cold? What was hard for you? What did you learn about teaching?
Angela: Oh, wow. Oh, that's a great question. When I was in school, I was a teaching assistant, so a little bit rubbed off on me, but I was so young and I've… I gained wisdom and I paid for it with age. I was approached by a former professor of mine to teach in a design class or design studio, that was a mandatory studio within the progression of undergraduate design education at MIT. And he gave me an idea of what he wanted to accomplish and said, "Okay, go do something with that." And so I built this little mini curriculum, and I'd never really done it before, and this is very true to Angela fashion. I didn't go and read a whole bunch of books about how to teach. I just tried to think about, ooh, what are the things that you really need to learn?
What are the complicated things you need to learn? And I ended up with, actually, I think a lesson plan or structure that I'm still proud of today, that was very much about minimal instruction and maximum exploration and learning, and also setting it up in a way... And I didn't realize it until, sometimes when I reflect on this, I didn't realize how this shaped the things I do now.
It was basically a structure of four really short projects, and when I mean short, I mean two-week projects, and then one final one at the end. And each one of the four focused on a couple of things. One was very much a skill, tools kind of thing, and the other one was more thematic around a design problem.
So, designing an addition to the Philip Johnson house he did for himself as his thesis in Cambridge, and at the same time learning how to actually draw plans, sections, and elevations. You had to learn those two things in those two weeks. Quick intro and then just a lot of one-on-one critique.
Invariably, every student would do really well on one of these at least, and, eh, not so great on one of them. But what they got to do with the final piece was to do it again in a different setting and put the pieces together. So it was sort of about practicing the pieces in a safe way where you could fail—and we expected people to not be perfect—but then be able to take those learnings and actually fold them into this bigger thing, that then weighed much more than everything else. In a lot of ways, looking today at how I think about learning and learning by doing it’s very much about that. It's the experience of experiencing what it feels like when it's not going well, experiencing that thing you're bumping up against that you have to find a way around.
When you do that in theory, you have a very different way of absorbing and then being able to redeploy that kind of knowledge, than if you're absorbing it in a lecture format, and so that was pretty formative for me.
Chris: Yeah, I've come across the phrase desirable difficulty a bunch of times when learning about… so somebody has to reach or stretch. It's like weight training. You have to lift something heavier than you've lifted before in order to grow. Right.
Angela: Exactly. It has to be hard.
Chris: How many times did you teach this?
Angela: Oh, I taught that four years in a row.
The other really interesting thing that I learned was delegating. So I they asked me to teach this class in the fall, and then they asked me to teach the same thing in January in one month, basically for same number of credits, because they were trying to create this flow of students being able to take these classes while I was working full-time as I was doing this.
And I couldn't... I was like, "Well, I have to do something different about this January thing." And so what I ended up doing was, really working closely with two teaching assistants that I had during the fall, where I was there every time at class, and they went through the whole, the whole process.
We went through it together. And then in January, I let them drive more, and I would still come twice a week, and they were there five times a week.
Chris: Kind of quick intro lecture-y piece, and they would oversee the learning by doing. Is that how you broke it up?
Angela: That's exactly how it worked. And it was great because they learned, they learned to teach as well.
Chris: Hmm.
Angela: And, it was sort of my first really successful way of actually letting go of responsibility. It was very much about learning how to delegate, if we have to use that word. And actually, one of the teaching assistants I worked with back then is our managing principal today.
Chris: Interesting.
Angela: Yeah.Yeah, it's fascinating.
Chris: What happens when you say yes to things.
Angela: Yes, it does. It's scary, though. It's scary.
Chris: So Shepley does learning by doing. You have to. You wouldn't be in business if you didn't do learning by doing. You have these pockets of other learning happening, maybe vicariously learning through others or sharing project critiques or site tours and all those kinds of pockets. What was it that convinced you that learning by doing plus pockets of learning wasn't enough? What did you see not happening as a risk or a challenge, or what was the opportunity that you perceived?
Angela: Well, it's what was not happening. Some of these great ideas weren't making their way into all the teams. So some teams were struggling with things, and other teams were trying out new things and doing really well. And, I mean, the same thing is true about sharing of, of new insights, not just processes, but just new insights and just putting them somewhere. It wasn't enough. It's that learning by doing again, because unless people were really engaging with it, they wouldn't necessarily absorb it and they'd do it the way they'd done it the last time. So there was a little bit of that. It was both an opportunity, but also trying to just make us better at pushing forward and being a bit more innovative, too, in how we were approaching our clients and our project work.
We were just starting to, at that point, get into more data-driven design, both in master planning as well as around some of our areas of expertise in healthcare. So there was really a challenge of trying to figure out how to help people see what was even available and what others were doing in order to be better.
So it was kind of both.
Chris: What do you think the cost was of having— I've heard you use the word silos a lot, so having learning or knowledge trapped in silos. What was that— What was it costing Shepley Bulfinch? Or how was it holding you back? What were the signs that you could tell this was happening?
Angela: Well, people aren't developing as quickly as you might want them to because they don't necessarily have access to the same kind of things. And I mean, this is, this is the silo question, right? If you keep things in one place, they don't get the kind of exposure to other things that will help them get better.
That's true for teams, that's true for people.
Chris: So their development is kind of constrained by whoever their project manager or their team is versus what Shepley's learning.
Angela: Exactly. And then there's just plain information sharing. So at the time, we had people doing programming in completely different tools. Somebody was doing it in a database, somebody was doing it in an Excel spreadsheet. I'm not gonna lie and say that it's absolutely all standardized today.
It's not, because we have people and people have different ways of engaging with the tools. But there was no place... Not even there was no place, there were some places, but the systems were different, and the people felt pretty strongly about this thing that they had been working with for some time.
And that in itself is a silo, right? When somebody's committed to a tool or one way of working, and there are people that are learning how to do that that now follow that path, and then you've got another path going on the other side. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to have parallel paths, but you have to have the ability to experience both so that you can either choose which one's the best one for the right situation, or you could even be somewhere in the middle and take pieces of each.
And that, to my mind, is also a way of learning and actually evolving. So that's also, I think, part of what a learning organization does. It doesn't just sit on its tools, it actually tries to better them all the time. And I think that feeling of being stuck in certain places is probably something that generally we were experiencing at the time, which I think is why people generally embrace this idea of investing in learning.
Chris: There's a guy I follow on LinkedIn named Nick Heim, who wrote a really good piece this week on being a young engineer early in his career. He told the story of working on three different projects, where each project manager had a completely different system for how to organize drawings, how to do communications.
And so he's constantly context switching between which part of the organization he's learning their different systems. And just, take that across all of the employees having to learn all these different systems. On one hand, you wanna have intellectual freedom to figure out a localized tool that works for you. On the other hand, is the cost that all these other people can't move between projects efficiently, and does that kind of demoralize them to have to start over every single time?
Angela: Right. Exactly. Well, and with that also comes sort of the expectations that people have, right? So the expectation that, well, in order to forge a path here, you have to specialize or you have to commit to this thing or the other thing. It's that sort of, that choice— The perception of having to make these choices, that these things are mutually exclusive as opposed to meldable, matchable, combinable and that you can evolve them, right?
So yeah, it's a balance. It is a true balance because I think if you, if you just stick to one thing and you don't change it, the world around you is gonna change because nothing stands still. So we have to change with it, and how that change happens and where we go with it actually becomes vital to how we progress both as individuals and as organizations. And so what are the right conditions to make that happen, right? And I would say that the right conditions aren't to do it always the standard way, but the right conditions are also not to work in complete chaos where there's no way that we can actually harness some of these resources and learn from each other and be better together, right? Because that's the whole point.
Chris: Right. Why else would you have an organization? If you're not gonna learn from each other, then why are you a company? Why aren't you just individuals working on projects?
Angela: Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. And for us, I mean, our mission vision is— the first word in it is “together.” That together we design places or design a better future. And basically, it is about that interdependency and collaboration and the fact that you're not doing any of this by yourself. And that's where I think learning— that there's a learning piece in that too, that is really about how people have to learn how to work with each other in an effective way and learn that they're not always competing with each other. And our world is a pretty competitive world out there.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's interesting. I think two things. One that I'd like to talk about is Shepley kind of becoming— It has been a national practice for a while, but becoming more and more of a national practice over time, and I'm wondering how much of an impact that has had on placing a premium on learning from, going across silos and learning from the best of what Shepley's doing to help synthesize that and try and make that as much of the standard Shepley way as is responsible.
Do you feel like that's true? Do you feel like the kind of work-sharing and national practice was part of that, or is that unrelated?
Angela: I think it's related. I don't know that we were that clear-eyed about it, or that deliberate about it. And actually, it's sometimes hard to sort of figure out which one's the chicken and the egg. But, the fact that we are working across all states or most states, and we're 200 people.
Chris: Right. Meaning you only have five offices. And combining, making hybrid project teams across offices…
Angela: Yeah. We have to stretch, and in order to stretch, you have to share and accelerate the learning. 'Cause if you're only doing it on one project at a time, a project cycle is at best three years,
Chris: Yep. The feedback loop is pretty slow.
Angela: It's really slow. And the bigger the project gets, the slower it is, and they're getting bigger out there.
So I think the two are very much related. I don't know which one came first, but I think the realization is that they are absolutely connected, and the only way that we can stay flexible and be the kind of culture we want to be and perform at that level, that connection and that learning and that sharing and that collaboration has to happen.
Chris: It's interesting. There's this very invisible through line that I think is pretty subtle, but once you see it, it's kinda hard to unsee it. Meaning if you start— Every firm is doing— There's a maturity model to it, right? Every firm is doing learning by doing, and I think every AEC firm I know does a level above that where they vicariously learn through others.
They talk about their projects, "Hopefully this was useful." But then that next step to, "This is the Shepley way," we're gonna codify what we've learned across all of these different healthcare projects or higher education projects, that's a step towards “Now we can actually teach it.”
We have to codify it first before we can scale that learning across the organization. Otherwise, what are we teaching? Just whoever randomly happens to show up and teach project management is just gonna teach it the way that they do project management or the way that they do programming and whatever tool they use.
And I'm wondering if that has been— 'cause I've watched Shepley on that trajectory towards a little bit more of the Shepley Way. Has that been difficult culturally with a bunch of cr… yeah, okay.
Angela: Yeah. I mean, it's difficult because you listen to… it is really difficult when you're really good at something to codify it. That process is hard because we've learned it through doing, so we know how to do it, but we don't necessarily know how to explain it.
Chris: Yeah, it's all tacit knowledge and intuitive and yeah.
Angela: It's really difficult.
And so, we have this learning platform called Birdfeeder, and we've been encouraging people to teach. It's peer-to-peer learning and teaching. And, well, teaching, first of all, is hard because it's a little bit scary, but it also involves that codification barrier. So how do I describe this thing that I do? With-without saying, "Well, you do..." And, and some people will say, "Well, you do this, and you do this, and you do this," or, "I do this," or, "You should do this." And that's sort of mandating a process.
Chris: Right. It's hard enough to think about how I work, and then I'm gonna tell you not only is it how I work, but it's how we should all work.
Angela: Yes, exactly. And not everybody works the same, and not all our clients are the same, and not all our projects are the same, right? So there is this translation that has to happen that takes it from the very specific experiences that I have to a sort of systematic approach that you can now overlay onto different situations.
And then teaching how to overlay that onto different situations is a whole other element of all of this, right? So it's this nested thing that happens, and it's... it can be really daunting And so I think, it takes time for people to put together a class on library design. What's important? Where do I start? What are the basic things? What are the things I don't even think about because they're like breathing or putting one foot in front of the other when I'm walking? I don't have to think about that. But somebody who's never done it before has to think about it. So there are pockets of things that are very much procedural, and then there are things that are very much situational.
Chris: Right.
Angela: Just like anything.
Chris: How are you helping... I'm presuming the answer. I was gonna go to law school and didn't go. I would've been trained out of that by the time I got through it. Are you helping... let's say I'm that library designer, and I'm nervous about it.
I don't know how to tell people what I do. How do you... Can you help them? Is that something you are trying to do? How do you help somebody figure out how to teach library design? Or are they thrown into the fire like you were at MIT and just figure it out?
Angela: There's a lot of swimming in the deep end of the pool that's going on. I think it's really an opportunity for us to actually focus on that. I'm really glad you asked that question because it's something I've been struggling with and we've been struggling with. How do you teach people how to teach? 'Cause it's a whole other skill. And, something we've been trying to invest in, but it's been difficult because it doesn't really sit squarely in our area of expertise, so it sits a little bit beyond that. And, we're not a huge firm, so we don't necessarily have... We're not so big that we could have a full-time teacher or somebody who would manage this whole system.
Chris: Instructional designer, kind of like somebody that... Yeah,
Angela: Exactly. And the other thing we've been trying to avoid is to make it such a structured sort of curriculum that then can't shift and you can't just go say, "Hey, I wanna teach this class on mid-century modern library renovations."
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: Right? And then there has to be this review process of, "We don't know if you can do that."
So there's a nimbleness that I also don't wanna lose.
But I think it's, how we help people do that is something that came up during our symposium, our level up workshop, and, there was a really great conversation about that that I, that I took away with me to think about, and you're bringing that back to the surface again. I think it's helping people have Empathy? And I'm just - literally thinking about this a little bit off the top of my head.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: Because in order to teach, you sort of have to have empathy. You have to be able to think about what the position is somebody else is in and what their viewpoint is and what they need in order to take the next step, right? Which also fundamentally is a major building block of leadership in general. It's not about what you need anymore, it's what others need.
Chris: Right. so I think an implication of if people can— You said that kind of that skill set is outside a little bit of the core expertise, but if people can learn it, it might make them better project leaders, client-facing business developers, whatever the things are.
Angela: Exactly.
Chris: Do you think that the hard part, we kind of talked about at least two things.
There's probably more, but like one is codifying what I actually know versus, okay, I know what it is that I know. I know kind of the structure, how do I actually communicate in a meaningful way? where, where do you think is harder for your team to... what do you think the bigger barrier is? Or are they the same?
Angela: Knowing what I know or codifying what I know?
Chris: I'm kind of putting codifying what I know and knowing what I know together, but then how do I actually teach it in a meaningful, engaging way that sticks and that people will learn from?
Angela: Definitely the latter I think is harder.
Chris: Hmm.
Angela: I think it's harder, because how do you put people into a mindset that is a learning mindset?
Chris: Right.
Angela: People need to want to learn. They need to want to learn from that person. They need to want to learn that thing, right? So if they choose to learn or engage with a subject rather, I'm just gonna call it that, then you've already overcome a barrier because they're already open to absorbing…
Chris: You're getting at learner motivation. Right, and then how do you— And do they wanna learn it today? If you're teaching them about programming, but they're deep in construction administration, why am I learning about programming today?
Angela: Right.
Chris: Come back in six months when I'm on my next project.
Angela: Right. And then there's the just in time, too. Well, I have this problem right now, how do I find a solution? How do I figure this out, right? And this is where being able to just go and ask somebody is an incredible thing, which is I think what a lot of people miss actually about being in person.
They can't turn to that person anymore. But the flip side of that is that person that you may need may not actually be in your geographic location. They may be somewhere else, so you're still gonna have to get to them in a different way. So I think our world's become really, really complicated with all of those aspects of it.
Chris: I think this is where, I mean, from my perspective, having worked in knowledge management for 25 years, this is where AI is making a huge impact, right? Is just-in-time knowledge because Angela's busy, because Angela's on PTO, because Angela's on a client site, because Angela's... Whatever the thing is, I just don't wanna disrupt her.
Can I find it self-serve? Not saying we don't want people talking to each other. That's not what I'm saying. But it feels like there's another variable in the mix now that hasn't been in the mix before.
Angela: Yeah, it's another dimension in a lot of ways, right?
Chris: I wanna click back to the thing you said around, let's imagine you've asked this person to teach this course called Library Design Fundamentals.
So that's one thing. You do a lot of library design, so that makes sense. But then someone else wants to— I can't remember the exact example. I actually wanna teach a thing on mid-century modern learning design in the Southwest, something, something, something. Which to me, it's like there's a core curriculum versus an extracurricular/enrichment thing, and it's like how do we do— I think how do we do both is what you're saying.
And my observation, I don't know if you feel like this is true at Shepley, has been firms are actually really good at the latter. It's like, Denise is super excited to teach this mid-century library whatever, so who's gonna stop her from doing a lunch and learn two Thursdays from now? But then putting together the actual library design foundations, that's a different level of impact, but then also work… but then also weight that somebody's carrying 'cause this is gonna be impactful.
And so a lot of times that thing doesn't happen. Is that ringing true for you?
Angela: Yeah, it takes much, much longer, A, to convince somebody to do it, and B, to actually put it together. And I think it's also— sometimes what really helps is to not have one person do it, to have two people do it together or three people do it together because it makes the lift easier. There's just more… You're in it together, right? You're exploring something new together, trying to teach this thing. So we've got several of these classes that are part of Birdfeeder that are the 101s or the introduction into, whether it's library design or something else. And they took more time, and they often exist in installments.
And we record all of it, so they're given live, and then they're recorded and transcribed and are available. So their content is available, and people will listen to the recordings. But it makes me also think about needing to redo those at certain intervals because things change—although the fundamentals of library design probably don't change as quickly as some of the more, not idiosyncratic, but more specific things. But it's also an opportunity for people who are becoming experts in that area to teach a version of that course
Chris: To become TAs like your people….
Angela: Yeah. exactly.
So that reminds me, we probably need to do that again. But those then form the core of things that you need to know if you want to be in library design, or probably the core of something you should know if you're just in higher education design, because libraries in higher education are sort of a core of what higher education is too, right?
So it's a multifaceted thing. And defining the... We tried to define that with what we called the bullseye.
Chris: Okay.
Angela: The things that absolutely... The really, really basic things that everybody needs to know. And these things are as basic as, well, how do I do my expenses?
Chris: Across markets, across all the— everybody.
Angela: Yeah, and things that seem just like, really? But when you're starting fresh, when you're brand new and there's, yes, there's onboarding, but there are things that you need to know, right? So it's from the very tiny little mundane thing to maybe some more important things, and then getting to the core that actually has to do with doing the work, with working with others.
And that can include things like, specifics on, say, library design or specifics on how do I plan a project? How do I manage a project? And some of that stuff we can teach in-house, but there are also resources sometimes you need to bring from outside in order to do that, because we're not experts at everything.
I think architects, designers are... We are really good at a lot of stuff. We are really good at putting pieces together, connecting the dots, solving problems. I don't think there's anything architects and designers love more than solving a really amazing problem. But there are some things that, challenges, to your point, like teaching, that people have been thinking about for a long, long time.
There are resources out there, and I think it's just as important to reach out there, find those resources, and then bring them back in. And that's something, frankly, that we have not done as much of as I would like us to, and we're working on getting better at that and being a little bit more focused and structured.
Chris: Partnering.
Angela: Peer-to-peer, but there's partnering.
Chris: Yeah.
I wrote a piece this week about apprenticeship, and I've been hearing so much over the last two years that apprenticeship is dead and COVID killed it, and now there's no more time to look over everybody's shoulders like we used to and all this kind of thing.
The point of view I took is that it's evolving. And one of the ways that I think I'm seeing it evolve is those kinds of things, not necessarily the expense report, but the next layer out in what you described, which is how do we do programming? How do we do a schedule, door schedule?
How do we create a budget? How do we do library design? A lot of that was pushed out to the apprenticeship model. Really, all of the how we work and how we work with others was kind of pushed down to project teams in the past. And what I feel like I'm seeing firms wanna do is take some of that burden off of the project teams to do the foundational “here's how we work,” both from a relieving the burden perspective, but then also from a standardization and quality and consistency perspective.
Do you feel like that was kind of— Am I onto something with this?
Angela: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's something that we want to do because we're also finding that people are really stretched thin there. It's harder for people to find time for some of those in-between things. There seems to be more and more on people's plates, and so they're looking to the firm to help with that, right?
To take some of the stress of having to manage some of those things off of people's plates.
Chris: Meaning, so Angela, just to, so as an example, let's say I'm managing a project, I just get Sarah assigned to me. Sarah's never done a door schedule. In an optimal world, I'd slow down, I'd explain why they're important. I take her through some different examples, give her an exercise. She tries it. I mark it up. But that's the part where it's like, "Meh," just do that thing. Just go and try something, and then show me what you did, and I kinda corre... people are so fast, they don't have the time to slow down and really give people the big picture. Is that what you're experiencing?
Angela: It's harder for them. I think they still want to, and they still explain, but I think it puts so much stress on them because now all this other stuff that they committed to doing they're gonna have to do after instead of maybe reading to their kids. It's the kind of things that you give up because I think people are so committed to the work that they're doing and they're so committed to the people around them that those things are happening, but the plate's getting fuller and fuller, and it's becoming harder and…
Chris: And things aren't coming off of it.
Angela: Things are not coming off of the plate, and I mean, that's a whole other thing we should be learning how to do, right? To not let our plate overflow, which is also a really hard part. It's one of the early learnings that I think we don't do that well in our industry or have not historically done that well because many of us grew up with a myth of the overworked, always working.
We live architecture, we live design, we live our job, when in fact, yes, we do because we think about all those things even when we're doing other things. But we need to make room to have a space to mentally zoom out in order to be able to actually focus on others.
Chris: I really love that you brought that up. I hadn't connected that dot because I think this is a Shepley movement, but I think this is across the industry.
I think there's this... in our first episode of the podcast, Dan Hottinger said this thing. He was at dinner with his, his son, he's like a teenager, and he was saying, because he was kinda, he was getting a little complain-y, which isn't very much like Dan, but he was letting it out a little bit, and he's like, "These kids, they're gone at, they're doing 40 hours. They think they're gonna learn how to become an architect. When I was their age, I was staying nights, I was doing weekends." And his son said to him, "Just because your life sucked, theirs has to, too?" And I'm like, "Perfect." But I think that the idea to try and design better jobs and better relationships with work is happening. And so it's interesting...
If you can kind of visualize the model, if that's a constraint that firms are trying to design in to not burn people out and overwork them, then what gets cut? Something has to give. It's simple. And so we don't want it to be mentorship and learning and development, but that's a very pragmatic thing for me, the project manager, to cut, even though I don't want to, but I'm not gonna not deliver my client their project, right? I have to do that. And if I'm not gonna burn the midnight oil, is that what gets short-changed is the development of the next generation. Maybe this is partly why firms are picking up that mantle a little bit saying, "Well, no, no, no, no, that is not a good thing. That is not a thing we want to cut."
But maybe it's not true that you should also have it on your plate, if that makes sense.
Angela: Yes. You know, the thing that kept going through my head as you were speaking, and we have these conversations a lot about how there's so much on our plate, what are we gonna stop doing? If we're gonna start this other thing, what are we gonna stop? And then the question I always ask is, well, is it stop or is it slow?
Chris: Mm-hmm. Hmm.
Angela: There’s a range. There's a spectrum that you can work within. And I still remember a colleague years ago, saying to me that she was doing too much and working herself into the ground, literally, and got sick. And she told me what her husband said to her, and she says, "Well, I have to do these things."
And he goes, "Yeah, those things are still gonna get done. They're just gonna get done differently." And that stuck with me. This is more than 20 years ago. That statement stuck with me because if we can't do it one way and it's, and the plate is growing, what if we do it differently?
Can we think about different ways of defining what I have to do to be involved with? I think we find this and we're working, I think we're constantly working through this, but people... And I love the fact that our whole team is so incredibly responsible. I couldn't do what I do without them because things happen no matter what happens.
Things get done, which is incredible. And I think with that also comes a sense of incredible responsibility of getting it really right. And I know I have some of that too, that sort of perfectionism of if I can make it better and better and better, I'm gonna keep messing around with it and making it better and better and better, right?
Chris: The project's done when the budget runs out or the timeline. Yeah.
Angela: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's... are there other ways of doing that? Not to do it not as well. That's not what I'm saying at all.
Chris: Not to lower your standards.
Angela: Right. But, and this is where it starts to get a little scary, like how can we delegate differently? Can we share responsibility differently? Do I have to do all the one-on-one conversations with my whole team?
Do I have to have that many, quote-unquote, "direct reports," or can we find a different way without inducing too much hierarchy, which is true in teaching and working and all of those things? A way that we put responsibility for leading and guiding and teaching on the folks in the earliest part of their career.
Chris: Right. I mean, you get at something that's so important to how I've seen firms attack… again, let's say that Sarah's the subject matter expert in library design, and we've asked her, maybe like you said, we've partnered her with two other people. But still, if those three are the subject matter experts,they have a hard time remembering what it was like to not know what they know, and so partnering them with more emerging professionals to help them.
"Wait, wait, I don't understand. You just used this acronym. I don't know what it is." Someone that can, really kind of pull it out and slow them down and have a conversation around the work and then figure out... Again, that you can try and have the empathy, or you can have somebody that's actually in that position right now kind of as part of that learning design team.
Angela: Yes,
Chris: And what I've also s- there's this kind of… I like when you said Shepley doesn't have to know everything, we can partner. But then even within that, the subject matter expert can partner either with an emerging professional or, and I've seen Shepley do this well, the knowledge and learning management team, whatever that means.
That might not be like FTEs or fully named people, but like Jess Purcell and your team, your director of design technology shared some amazing work at KA Connect last year around partnering with subject matter experts on a variety of topics and taking what used to take them 100 hours to write down a process doc and shrinking their commitment to two to four hours, because they would interview them over video and they would handle a lot of the production, the sequencing, how do we actually make this a learning thing?
We could take some of that, the codification piece and the delivery piece, we can take some of that delivery piece off their plate and lighten their burden, but still have them involved in shaping what the thing is.
Angela: Yes, that's so true. And, that has been an incredible thing that has really charged up the ability to do more things. And I think you brought up AI earlier. I wonder if codification is something that we can get some help with on that front too,
Chris: Oh, for sure.
Angela: So that it isn't— That we don't have to— Again, one person doesn't have to know it all.
What Jess is doing is getting at exactly this idea of: How do we do it differently?
That's... I mean, totally. I do this all the time, and I hadn't really thought about it in the way that you just framed it, but AI is great if I've got something that's deep in my brain that's tacit that I wanna communicate, I'll have 45-minute, hour-long conversations in voice mode with AI, and I'll ask it to help me...
Chris: It will help me stumble my way through what it is that I'm actually thinking. And I can have it ask me questions. Even for our podcast today, I had it help me prepare. It's like, what do I think Angela's gonna answer? What's some stuff that I haven't... there's so many opportunities to have it be a partner and to not have to do it alone,
Angela: Exactly.
Chris: That, yeah, I think that will change.
Again, it's like if we don't wanna relax our standard of quality and we wanna educate people, now well, we say we like design problems, that's a design problem, right? That's a business design problem, not a building design problem.
Angela: Yes, exactly.
Chris: Org design problem, right?
Angela: Exactly. And, one thing that I was thinking about last week was design problems are not ones you can solve immediately often. They require a bit of distance or running through a whole bunch of extraneous things and then being able to examine those things and learn from them.
So in a lot of ways, design is actually a learning process…
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Angela: Right? And what seems like a perfectly obvious solution at the end, right, 20/20 hindsight, is something that takes some time because you couldn't see that solution earlier. And what you just described that you're doing with AI and that we do with people and which was what happens in design dialogue is exactly that process of discovery, right?
It's the discovery of things that we have all the pieces for, we just can't look at it from the right perspective in order to see the picture that the— all the pieces make without walking around it a bit, and that walking around part actually takes time.
Chris: Yeah, and then letting your subconscious work on it a little bit and then come back to it with an insight because you stopped thinking about it.
Angela: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: When you and the... I don't know who was involved in writing your strategic plan. I'll just say board, but you can correct me. And you decided to put learning organization as a goal there. What, what did that mean? What were you gonna do differently? How would… if you were becoming a learning organization?
What was the thought process there?
Angela: So it was the board, it was actually a lot of the firm too. Everyone— the majority of the firm participated in it. The hard part, just as hard as codifying, is figuring out how to measure, how do we know when we're doing well?
Chris: Yeah.
Angela: Oh, it's something I struggle with. And, I mean, the first thing we did is we actually said, "Look, we're going to build this learning platform."
And we created a timeline, and we had some pretty lofty goals for how this— what this was going to look like and, put a budget to it. And I would say we, over the last, ooh, five years, we probably got 40% there. We got pieces of it, and it's still alive and it's still working, but we didn't quite get to some of the pieces that we thought we might need, and we're taking another run at it now.
So I think what we realized we needed to do is we needed to name it. We needed to put a budget to it. We needed to put people, quote unquote, in charge of it or make them responsible for it. And that worked because again, we have really responsible people.
Chris: What were they trying to do? So they have a budget, it's a brand, they've got people, but what was the North Star? How would they know, is it that someone from Houston can work on a project with someone in Boston and they can on-ramp faster? Is it that if people are saying that they— you do employee engagement surveys and they're like: Well, I actually do have the tools I need to do my job.
I feel like I can get access to... What did good look like?
Angela: Yes. Yes, feeling like you have— you can find the resources to learn that, people can develop expertise faster. They can find answers in the moment. They can find them both synchronously and asynchronously. That we had a growing catalog or rather, repository of these learning tools and whether they're lectures and even things like somebody going out and presenting at a conference, bringing that back and doing it for the firm. Why wouldn't we do it for the firm when we do it for the outside world?
Chris: Yeah.
Angela: Resources, having those available in a place on Finch, and it's gotten so much better because of the way Finch, our intranet, which thank you, which we — I don't know what we would do without it. It's become so much easier to find information.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: And so what we were trying to build, so we cobbled together in a lot of ways our own, our own, learning platform by figuring
Chris: It was before we started building ours.
Angela: Well, we— like I said, we were bootstrapping it a lot and 'cause we didn't like a lot of the things that were out there. They were either too big or too cumbersome and needed too much management, but also weren't as flexible, I think.
And I think what we're finding now is that the flexibility of being able to access that information without having to keyword it quite in the same way is just opening up a huge, not just this huge world of getting access to things that you would have had to know how to look for before.
It's sort of the equivalent of browsing the library as opposed to needing to go through the catalog and finding that thing, right? And so being able to look at that book. But the fact that we used to do this in person, you'd go to the shelf or to the section, and then you'd find all these other things.
I don't know how many times I used to go to the library, look at one book, go, "Well, that's not really what I wanted. Oh, but this one over here, that looks really interesting."
And without the physical environment, we don't have that anymore. And so I think going back to your original question, that wasn't something we intended.
Chris: Right.
Angela: Something that I think was part of the story that we were trying to achieve, which was the story of having people teaching each other, sharing information, that that information and that learning, that wisdom was available for others, and that this was a key component which we never quite figured out how to get off the ground, but I think is still really important, and that's the learning system as an individualized system.
So not something where one size fits all, but it's about finding even different ways of learning the same thing for different people, because everybody has a different learning style, and connecting it to the things somebody wants to learn. So this is the whole library thing again. I keep thinking back to college advising days of somebody who actually understands what the offering is and then has a conversation ideally with a student or this person that talks about what they're trying to achieve and then can help them find the resources that are available to take advantage of.
That was the dream, which I realize now was a lot.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: And I think was too much at the time.
Chris: To create kind of that math— it's the... Was the dream too ambitious in terms of the surface area of the number of topics or domains of knowledge that you wanted to capture? Was it in scope or was it like an impact? Where was it too ambitious?
Angela: I think it was in scope, although people were willing to do it. We had a whole system of pairing people. It was that.
I think it was also... It was really unfamiliar. It's not something that exists within the traditional firm corporate culture, right? I mean, you have the mentor-mentee relationship, which is a whole other topic. So it's related to that, but we also were starting off with a tiny course catalog, so we didn't really have this huge thing. I think I underestimated just how much it would take for somebody to understand what all the pieces are, and then the time to…
Chris: Are you talking about the learner or are you talking about the people running the program?
Angela: The people who were these learning advisors that would have these conversations with folks.
I think there's so much we put on them to both understand how to help somebody on a path—that's a whole skill in and of itself—to understand the resources that are available and to even be able to connect, and this was the big one that we're working on now, how somebody's desire for learning connects to what their desire for their career is.
Chris: Right.
Angela: Connected in the professional world. And even at the very beginning, we were asking ourselves that question, and we didn't have an answer to it. So we said, "Let's just see how far we get and see if we can make this work." But it's popped up again, and I think it is an integral part to how people think about their progress and how they wanna grow and evolve.
So learning isn't something for learning's sake. Learning is really about this thing that I need to do and want to do because I'm trying to go somewhere.
Chris: I wanna acquire a skill or a capability that will allow me to then move to the next level or be more effective or, yeah.
Angela: Right. And what is that next level, and what is that somewhere? And I think what we underestimated that that conversation is fundamental to even figuring out what somebody wants to invest in with the time that they have.
Chris: Did you underestimate... That's interesting that, I could take it two ways. One is you have kind of career pathing and the kind of competencies that you need to kind of move along a career path well-articulated, but matching people to those paths is hard. Or did you actually realize we need to actually figure out what it means to be a project manager and kind of map out the competencies? Was that the kind of blocking piece?
Angela: That was a piece of it, and that's actually also really difficult because, again, one size does not fit all because you've got a range of things that you need to know or could know at different levels of that.
Chris: So little fast-burning projects versus a five-year healthcare project. D- it's project manager is a different job in…
Angela: Yeah, it's a completely different job depending on what kind of team you have, who you're teaming with, whether you're doing it by yourself. You know, it's geography, geopolitical context. You name it, right? It is, it is completely different. So we started doing that as well, and I think people actually gravitated towards that.
But it was also, again, that codification of what you need to know in order to do this job is difficult, because you can come up with some things and then you can come up with about 10 other exceptions.
Chris: Right. And then, I mean, just to make it more fun, how do we know that you actually know it? Taking a course doesn't mean it…
Angela: Exactly.
Chris: So how do we measure competency at these tasks that we already… yeah.
Angela: Right. And how do you do it without it feeling like, "Well, if I do this, then this happens." Right? And for some people…
Chris: Meaning if I take Project Management 101, within the next six weeks, I should be able to project manage a project sort of thing.
Angela: Exactly. Yes. So it is a nested problem, and I think what we found is when we poked at it, we found a whole bunch of these things and didn't have solutions to them. I think knowing more about it now, we're trying to or working on building a framework that takes some of these things into consideration.
And the trick to it is, to keep it a flexible framework. And those are the hardest ones to build because you gotta have movable joints, and they can't be entirely black and white because if it's too brittle, it'll break. And I think that's what we found, when our entire world of working changed in 2020.
Chris: Yeah.
Angela: That we had to be nimble.
And I think the same thing is true for this whole conversation and for this whole challenge because the kind of work that, as you said earlier when we were talking about the apprentice model, right? The apprentice model of being able to look over someone's shoulder or look at all the drawings and mark them up at the end of the day and leave little notes on things.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: Technology has changed. The way people physically work together has changed. And so how we inhabit this profession has changed, and it's going to change even faster. I mean, that's the thing. We look back and we can see all the change. We have a much harder time looking forward and seeing the change, but it's coming.
So how do we build a flexible system that allows us to get at the key components of what humans need to learn about other humans in order to be able to work within whatever system is out there, which for me always comes down to communication. That to me is the most— If, if I could teach anything perfectly, it would be for somebody to— for people to become incredibly strong communicators.
Chris: I think you're— I mean, I think it's interesting what you said because there's, about the looking forward, because I think while it's true we don't know what the next three to five years will bring, I think even if you do kind of scenario planning, I don't think there's a scenario you could imagine where becoming a better communicator, and communications won't be more important in three or five years than it is today.
I don't think there's a world where Shepley being able to learn faster and adapt more quickly isn't im- more important in three to five years than it is today. So you don't know exactly what it's gonna look like, but that skill of being able to learn quickly and communicate seems like a durable investment to make as an organization.
Angela: Yeah, I think they're foundational in a lot of ways. They're foundational in also, a lot of the changes that we're experiencing with how different generations work with each other and, back to the silos, right? People have different priorities. And I mean, we experience this every day working with our clients, working with consultants, right?
So we're working with people who aren't doing exactly the same thing we are. The better we can be at really communicating clearly, and that doesn't mean clearly like I say it very clearly so you can understand.
Chris: My diction is perfect.
Angela: No. But it's me saying it in a context that makes sense to the person who's listening so that they can actually engage on, on this subject that we need to talk about as opposed to talking past each other. And I think…
Chris: We had a speaker at KA Connect, I wanna say it was 2012. It was Jim Kent, who was the chief marketing officer at Thornton Tomasetti at the time. And he said, "Look, my job is communications, and I define it very simply. There's something that's in my head that I want you to know, and the degree to which what was in my head you understand and have, have received, that's communication."
Right? It's like, it doesn't matter how clearly I wrote it, the brand, the font, whatever that is. Did I move my idea or feeling or emotion, whatever, from me to you? Did it transmit?
Angela: Yes. Yes.
Chris: And knowing that people receive information differently and all the things, right?
Angela: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Exactly, because otherwise you're talking about different things. You're not talking about the same things. And that again, fundamental to teaching, fundamental to advising, fundamental to leading teams, fundamental to setting direction.
Chris: Mm-hmm. What— And so as you come to kind of... How long are your— What's the, what's the kind of scope of your, your strategic plans? Is it a five-year, 10-year? how long, how far ahead does it look?
Angela: It started as a 10-year and, in fact, we've rolled it out in 2020, which was a little wild at the time because we worked on it in '19, and then this 2020 thing happened. We're like, "Well, okay. W- let's, let's wait a couple of months and see if this totally blows everything out of the water." And it actually didn't, so there was a lot of that flexibility that really worked, which was great.
So that was an amazing learning experience. It's a 10-year total, so we just did an update to just kinda look at, well, where are we? So let's not... And that's another thing is like not, not— don't revamp the whole thing, but tweak it and figure out, do we need to redirect a little bit? So we're due for another one in 2030.
Chris: So we're in '26, so there's four years left, and as you think about the learning organization piece of that, and you, you kind of— You haven't said it, but I think you're kind of saying we're gonna reboot it or try Birdfeeder 2.0 or there's something else coming. As you're thinking about that, it feels like you learned some things in 1 point— Birdfeeder 1.0.
So I'm kind of curious to talk about what you're coming to Birdfeeder 2.0 with, and I'm picking up something. I'm wondering if, one of the things you do is be less ambitious in scope, understanding how deep these things are, or do you stay in the scope and add more resources and more advisors?
What are you gonna do differently with this swing?
Angela: I think, yeah, I don't think throwing more at it is gonna solve what it is we need to solve.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: I don't think making it more rigid is gonna solve what we need to solve. I think it's actually getting simpler in some ways, and getting at the root of the thing that is going to be that spark that is going to be the catalyst. And I think it's this framework that we're trying to figure out that connects to how people move through their professional career, how that connects to their personal learning, and how it connects to not only the teaching and learning part, but also to leadership and communication. Because I think they're all connected.
Chris: You made it more complicated or over-invested in Birdfeeder 1.0? How do you make it simpler? What needs to go?
Angela: I think the learning advisors, that was too complicated
Chris: What were they asked to do?
Angela: They were asked to meet with individuals, talk to them about what they wanted to learn, and then help them find the right thing.
Chris: So they were helping them navigate the system, essentially.
Angela: In a lot of ways, I think the system navigation is something that is going to be possible to be solved with technology.
Chris: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think I say that very quickly. I think it will be helped by technology. I do think there is a role, and it's interesting to see where this sits.
Michael Leckman from Diamond Schmitt is speaking at KA Connect this year. He kind of started Diamond Schmitt's university program. He's a Design Principal in the firm. And his vision is he wants every principal and design lead and project manager to understand the catalog very, very well, so that when they have someone on their team who hasn't done wall sections or curtain wall or CA or whatever the thing is, they know the learning resource and they can connect them to it in the flow of work.
What I'm inferring from a learning advisor is they're kind of looking out for Denise overall, for her career trajectory and trying to mix and match learning opportunities, which maybe is also a good role for someone to look at the arc of your career. So the apprenticeship piece can actually get better.
It's like instead of me having to teach you curtain walling in the moment 'cause you're gonna start doing this thing, we have a learning resource. Do it, and then we'll talk about what you learned and how to apply it to this project, or you'll do an exercise. And so I wonder if there's a way to have the project teams be more of that navigator role too, if that makes any sense.
Angela: Yeah. Yes, I think so. I think there's going to be the whole human component, which is the people that—the peer network or the network of the project, and I think there are different networks that exist in a firm. There's the network of people that are learning the stuff you're learning. They're the people that you connect with informally that are mentors that you pick. And then there is the project team, which changes constantly and maybe, maybe more— one more than others. I also think there is going to be a way that you can pretty much ask the question of whatever technology AI evolution there's going to be to say, "I need to figure out how to do this. I do best with this kind of resource. What do we have available?" And it would be able to find that. So I think there is the understanding of the catalog, which is something that we were talking about, something that I believe is going to be an easier thing to solve.
The harder thing to solve, I think that we need to concentrate on, and that's that more pointed, putting our resources there, is the conversation of where do I want to go? Because the self-identification
Chris: In my career?
Angela: Yes. The self-identification of I need to figure out how to be able to do that curtain wall right now.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: People do that based on the problem or the challenge that they're facing. But the conversation of do I want to go out there and be responsible for bringing in work, or am I incredibly fulfilled by working on the most complicated details and creating these really advanced, innovative ways of thinking about energy efficiency and modularity and whatever else it is on these exterior facades for these incredibly big buildings? That's something that gives me joy and that I find my emotional capacity to invest in to be really strong. So, how do I make that distinction? And it sometimes has something to do with shining a light underneath that thing that we thought we wanted because that's what we learned in school, or that's what our friend did, or that's what we're watching in the movies, or…
Chris: That one pays more.
Angela: Yes. Well, that's the— I had my law school bout at some point too, where I was like, "Well, I should really... 'cause that's what I'm doing." And then I'm like, "No, don't think so…”
Chris: I was a history major. What was I gonna do? I mean, luckily technology took off and saved me from...
Angela: I apologize to all the lawyers listening. Yeah. Well, and, hopefully the lawyers that are listening are happy doing what they're doing as lawyers. But it's not, it's probably not my cup of tea.
Chris: It shouldn't do it by default or because you wanna make more money. I think that's the point we're making, right? That shouldn't be the reason that you get into law or become a principal or do business development or whatever it is.
Angela: Yes, because work-life balance, I mean, I know there's so much talk about there, right? And how it is or isn't balanced. But if you're enjoying what you're doing, you have to balance it less, or you have to counterbalance it less. Yes, there's just plain time commitment with whatever it is, soccer games and pageants and time with family. But there's also the emotional commitment that comes with that, and if I love what I'm doing and I'm fulfilled, it makes me happy,
Chris: Hmm.
Angela: That's something less to counterbalance with other things. And so I think this conversation that's fundamental to the learning conversation and making the learning organization successful is also helping people figure out why they need to learn things and for what they need to learn things.
Chris: 20, 30 minutes ago, we talked about this kind of learner motivation thing, and there's the micro motivation, which is we have a deadline and I gotta deliver, versus the macro motivation, the more long-term motivation is who do I wanna become as a person, and what do I wanna do with my life here on Earth and my time and my energy, and how much of that is on me to figure that out versus how much can an organization help me have a dialogue about figuring that out and maybe try some different things, and if it doesn't work, can I back out and try another thing and kind of figure out what my path is?
Angela: Yeah, exactly. I think that's where if we can help, if we can find a way to help with that, that's probably the biggest service that we can bring to somebody. And that's motivational, and it's also the hardest thing to figure out.
Chris: It's the hardest thing for Shepley to figure out how to describe that, or it's the hardest for the... Okay.
Angela: It's the hardest thing to describe, figure out what the scope is, figure out how to prepare people to do that. Because again, you might have one or two people... I mean, we heard from somebody recently, at our latest event, that was doing a leadership development engagement that was pretty intense and concentrated and really required a person who was really good at it to lead it. When you have one person like that it’s not enough for a firm of 200 people. So it's finding and developing the ability to do that, to have those conversations. Which luckily though, again, overlaps with some of the things that we try to teach everybody, which is the ability to talk with people about what they're facing. Put yourself in other people's shoes. Because when you really think about what's fundamental about what we do as designers, we don't design places for ourselves. We design places for other people.
Understanding what is going to be good for other people and not just beautiful to photograph and win an award on or do the thing that the code says, which you have to do, but really good design is going to be about creating places for people—other people. Not us designer people, but other people. And in order to do that, you have to be able to ask those questions and have those conversations to understand what somebody else needs.
So I think fundamentally that ability to then have the conversation with somebody about what their career needs is related. Yes, it's slightly different, but they're both rooted in the same kind of skills.
Chris: While also managing expectations in terms of how quickly this can or can't happen, and it's a complicated matrixed organization that's project-based and trying to— There's only so many slots to do so many roles and… yeah.
Angela: Exactly. It is complicated. It's very human.
Chris: Hmm.
Angela: Very human is very complicated because I think humans are not particularly straightforward.
Chris: I wonder how this combines what people want to learn and what they need to learn a little bit. And, there are parts of everyone's job, I think, that aren’t the most exciting thing that they get up for in the morning, but you still have to learn the skill.
Angela: Yes. Yes. For me, that's meeting notes. But yes, you're absolutely right. That's such a good point, Chris, because often we don't know what— or we may even know it, and we don't wanna do it because it's hard. And again, back to the point about when something is really hard, you're probably learning something pretty fundamental or something pretty important because you're working through it. So it's less about, I don't wanna say tools. And it's less about predictable processes and more about situational awareness and response in some ways, which can be really difficult and difficult to learn.
Chris: You brought up in our workshop psychological safety, which I think is a great topic. I'm sure you've read Amy Edmondson's work on this, she's my go-to. Find books by Amy Edmondson. Oh my gosh, amazing.
What I think you're hinting at, and maybe I'm off base, is yes, the knowledge and learning piece of it. Understanding what it means to become a project manager—here are the things you need to learn, whether you want to or not, delivering them at a time when people can absorb it, want to absorb it. There's a whole art to developing people, and it's changing with the apprenticeship model. All of this stuff is changing in AI. But there's this kind of... You're circling around, I think, how can I let people understand that Shepley Bulfinch has my back and is thinking about me in the long term, even if I don't have—I do some things I don't wanna do in the short term, or I have to—maybe it takes a little longer than I want it to to get there.
Maybe I'm surprised. Maybe I'm thrown into something faster than I'm ready for it. But that there is, this kind of environment built on trust and communication and transparency that I think is foundational to a learning organization that, look, the only way you learn as an organization is that you mess up sometimes.
And so that's true for the company, and that's true for teams, and that's true for individuals.
Angela: Yeah, completely agree.
Chris: I'm curious, as you think of—'cause I've heard you talk about the relationship between a culture of learning and psychological safety. What is it specifically at Shepley that you've tried to do to increase psychological safety or shape an environment that's conducive to learning?
Angela: Yeah, and it's hard because people don't like to mess up. They don't like to mess up in front of themselves. They don't like to mess up in front of other people, right? We hold ourselves accountable. We—I mean, there are a couple of things that we've implemented. We have one that I think I've mentioned at some point, we call it Back to the Future, which is a way of talking about things that happened or a project.
Chris: So it's lessons learned without calling it lessons learned.
Angela: Yes, it's kind of, if I could go back—what things would we do again? And what things might we do differently, and what could the outcome be?
Chris: What do I wish I'd known when I was getting started? That kind of thing.
Angela: Yeah, exactly. and I think it's also reinforcing when people talk about things that—where something went wrong, and they figured out a way to solve that problem, to celebrate that.
To actually celebrate the fact that something didn't go the way they had expected. Something didn't go perfectly.
Chris: It's an opportunity to learn, right? Is that what... That's what you're saying.
Angela: It's celebrating the imperfect. So celebrating the fact that somebody actually learned from it and is sharing that learning. So, we try to, and this is hard actually, to encourage project spotlights that we share with the whole firm, not to just talk about the things that were amazing on this project and that it did incredibly well, but also talk about the struggles.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: What were the things that we were struggling with? Whatever that was. Could be small things, big things. And it's also really up to leadership to constantly reinforce that we want people to share questions that come from things going wrong on our intranet, on our learning platform, on Finch.
Chris: And that starts by having leaders do the same. Model that behavior.
Angela: Yes. And sometimes even... And when they, when they don't, and they maybe don't understand the importance of it, is having that conversation and helping people understand, right? That's why it's important. It's not about saving face. It is about sharing a learning and actually being perceived as much stronger as a result, and much more resilient.
Chris: Yeah. You're kinda hinting at, yes, sharing that specific lesson. Hopefully, we absorb that and we find a way to not make that same mistake again. But it sounds like the fact that they are sharing it is actually even more important than the specific technical issue or issue that happened on the project.
It's because it's building a culture that does that.
Angela: Yes. Yes. And, we still have more work to do on that. We're by no means 100% there. But yeah, that's the... It's also, and, this goes against some of the more traditional beliefs of: Leaders have to be perfect, leaders have to know everything, leaders have to be strong. They don't get to have problems. They don't get to be sick. They don't get to do any of those things. They don't get to make mistakes.
Chris: No sick days.
Angela: I still remember one town hall, I completely—I can't remember if I couldn't remember a person's name or used a totally wrong name repeatedly for them. Thanking them for something and totally used the wrong name. And then the next morning, I woke up thinking, "Oh my God, I just did that."
Chris: Yeah.
Angela: And so I went on the Teams chat. This was a town hall, so this was the whole firm. I'm like, "what?" And went on the Teams chat and, did the @ whoever the person was and said, "Hey, I'm so sorry. I totally realized I got your name completely wrong. I don't know why I did that. I am so sorry."
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Angela: And got a really nice, "Hey, it's fine," back. But I think it was hard because I'm like, well, I'm not only going to admit that I messed up totally, but I'm also gonna call attention to the fact that I messed up to people who didn't even notice.
Chris: Right.
Angela: So not only am I admitting to it, but I'm also like, "Hey, guys, look. Look what I did," right? And so... But it's funny, once you do it, it gets easier.
It's the first time you have to do it, it's like, oh, yes..
Chris: Makes it easy for the next person. They saw you do it, and the person that wasn't there also saw you do it, and so now they know that that's something... In a positive way, right?
Angela: I hope so. I hope so. And that's a little thing, right? It's a tiny little thing, but I think it doesn't matter if it's a big thing or a little thing, the emotional context is very similar.
Chris: I wrote down while we were just talking that culture is the soil for the learning organization.
Angela: Yeah.
Chris: I feel like that's, to me, it's what makes it possible for it to flourish and grow. And it can grow in bad soil, but only so far and so well, right? You know, plants are very resilient.
We see them growing in all kinds of crazy places. But, it feels like leadership is tending that, right? That is one of the core roles for the learning organization. Weed out the things that don't matter so that things have enough room and space to be able to grow.
Angela: Yeah, and just because you thought something was a weed doesn't mean it's actually a weed.
Chris: Oh, well, fair. A weed is just what we call a plant…
Angela: Oh, I... Yeah, this, this is a real rabbit hole for me.
Chris: Okay. That's good. Somehow we managed to make it all the way through this conversation without getting into the bird metaphor thing again…
Angela, this has been great. I really appreciate you setting aside time to talk through all of this, and I'm very excited to see where Bird Feeder 2.0 and learning organization goes over the next few years at Shepley.
Angela: Thank you. I learned a lot during our conversation, and I really appreciate your insights and pointing out some things I'll definitely take away and be able to add to the things we're thinking about. So I really appreciate that. It was really fun. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you so much, Angela.