In this episode of Smarter by Design, I’m joined by Laura Knauss, President and Chief Practice Officer at Lionakis, and Kristina Williams, Director of Design Technology at Lionakis, for a conversation about how their firm is modernizing learning to scale quality and consistency across their practice.
At the heart of that shift is a deep respect for the apprenticeship model. For generations, one-on-one mentorship has been the foundation of how architects and engineers learned their craft—and it remains essential today. But as firms grow, diversify, and take on increasingly complex work, Lionakis has recognized that apprenticeship alone isn’t enough to provide the consistent, firmwide foundation that today’s environment demands.
In response, Lionakis is repositioning apprenticeship by building a more intentional and scalable learning system that ensures every team member starts from a shared baseline, while still allowing mentorship to do what it does best: helping people apply that knowledge in the context of real projects.
We explore two major shifts behind that transformation.
First, the evolution of Lionakis’s Design Technology Boot Camp. What began as long, lecture-heavy training sessions has been reimagined into a more modular, learner-centered experience built around short, focused video lessons, hands-on exercises, and live, collaborative sessions. Along the way, Kristina shares what they’ve learned about attention, retention, and how to design learning that actually sticks.
Second, we look at how those same principles are being applied beyond Boot Camp to reshape how the firm teaches practice itself. From specifications and building envelope design to programming and coordination, Lionakis is moving away from ad hoc training toward a more strategic learning roadmap that captures core project knowledge, standardizes how it’s taught, and makes it accessible across the entire firm.
The goal is both simple and ambitious: to create a shared foundation that allows any team member, in any office, to step into any project and contribute with confidence, consistency, and clarity.
What emerges is a picture of a firm learning how to operate as a modern learning organization—where knowledge, learning, and practice are tightly connected, and where investment in learning is directly tied to the quality of the work.
If you’re thinking about how to scale expertise, support the next generation of talent, or move beyond training as a one-time event, this conversation offers a clear and compelling path forward.
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📃 Episode Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: Okay, Laura and Kristina, welcome to the Smarter by Design Podcast.
Laura: Thanks for having us.
Kristina: Thanks, Chris.
Chris: Kristina, you are giving a talk at AEC TalentMAX in May titled "Learning at the Speed of Change: Adapting L&D to Your New AEC Workforce." And Laura, you recently shared at our executive workshop a couple weeks ago how Lionakis is rethinking learning at a firm-wide level. Let's start there—can you both describe that shift from your perspectives?
Kristina: Sure. Through my role in design technology, I've delivered a lot of internal training and I'm on a constant mission to design and teach programs in a way that truly sticks with learners. Though we're always continuously improving, there are sometimes things that happen in the world and in our industry that make you require you to think outside the box even more and get more creative with how you deliver training. There's been enough of that to shake things up and make us re-examine how we learn.
Chris: What are some of those things?
Kristina: In the world: AI, of course—a given at this point—and social media, the way people get information and seek information, and all the noise, good and bad, coming at all of us. In the industry: doing more with less. Compared to years ago, there's more documentation, more codes, more litigation, less time, shorter schedules, higher client expectations. You hear the word "busy" a lot, and I think there's clearly something to that. It feels like we're just doing more, there's more noise, and we have to find a clearer path to what we need.
Laura: Kristina talks about it specifically in the learning area—I have to look at it from firm growth, the diversity of our firm, the regional diversity of our firm, and delivering a consistent expectation and consistent model into the marketplace. As we've grown, we've seen so many of our traditional models—that apprenticeship model—start to, if not devolve, have way too many different and disparate voices as teachers or mentors. You start to see the consistency of the firm erode into camps: this is so-and-so's camp for how they teach in their team, or this is somebody else's region. The emphasis we've been making as a firm is saying: no, we're one firm, we have a consistent approach—the Lionakis Way—to how we deliver projects. This is giving us the opportunity to give everyone the same message. It doesn't discount that apprenticeship model, which is still essential in building good architects. But it gives them the toolkit to be good teachers as well.
Chris: Why is having people practice consistently important—beyond just the same message? Why is the Lionakis Way important?
Laura: There's an efficiency piece, right? We're not teaching everybody a different way, so you don't end up confused when you work with a different project leader. But also, a lot of the markets we serve—healthcare, civic, education—those clients move around. They may go from one school district to another, from one healthcare facility to another as leaders. Our reputation follows us, whether it's our San Diego office or our San Francisco office. They're assuming they're getting a level of quality and project delivery from Lionakis regardless of where we are in the state. We love to hear that we have the best drawings or the depth of staff—and we want that to apply to the whole firm.
Kristina: We have a saying for our standards: we want any person, in any place, on any project to be able to fit right in. From the team member's standpoint, if you go work on a different project for a different PM, you're not having to relearn their way of doing things.
Chris: What you said about the apprenticeship model—maybe it's not devolving so much as becoming less central to how you think about accelerating learning and developing people. It sounds like having it be the primary instruction model for the Lionakis Way isn't going to work anymore. But people still need mentorship and support on their projects.
Laura: Absolutely. And I think it is about giving teachers the toolkit. Those people in that position—what method am I supposed to be teaching them? How are they supposed to be delivering things? If they haven't been taught with consistency, or they came from another firm that did it differently, how are we giving them the toolkit to make sure they're enforcing the way we want to deliver projects and the caliber of quality we expect?
Chris: So it's not so much that people want to teach things the wrong way—it's that in the absence of a resource, they just do their best.
Laura: Right. And they've been delivering projects a very long time and they've done it successfully. When we have disagreements, we have a way to bubble those up through a committee that helps us decide: what is the way we're going to do this? And then let's all march together.
Chris: So that's the deep "why" behind modernizing your approach to learning. Where were you, what was broken, where are you going—and what are your hopes and dreams for how learning could work at Lionakis?
Laura: I'm going to go way back since I've been here 36 years, and Kristina can do the modern history. I'm not going to complain about how Lionakis has taught architects, because they taught me and I'm proud of what they taught me. But it was one-on-one—one person sitting next to one person, following them around as a mentor. That is still very much what we do, whether it's taking people out on job sites or the incidental learning that happens by overhearing a conversation. But I think we were a little ad hoc about how we taught across the firm. We might say, "I'm so frustrated, everybody keeps doing this wrong," pull them into a room, and someone would teach them how to do it right. That worked really well for those 15 people in the room. But now that we're 225 people, it's very hard to say, "Hey, tomorrow we should learn this thing—I hope you're here." That's really been the impetus for everything Kristina is putting in place. When you go way back, we never knew to teach people differently because it was so strictly apprenticeship.
Chris: So there's the challenge of scaling your traditional approach, and then: is it fast enough to keep up with the speed of change Kristina mentioned?
Laura: Yes.
Chris: How about you, Kristina?
Kristina: I've been here about 14 years and started as a Revit specialist. When I started, the firm was pretty early in its Revit adoption and we were just focused on getting Revit out to people. Even then, we'd do full days of training—getting everybody from a particular market or studio into a room and teaching them about a topic they may or may not use right away. That's what training looked like: getting a bunch of people together and picking a topic that seemed like they should know at some point.
Chris: And that didn't work?
Kristina: It didn't work. I love documenting and sharing best practices, and over time you realize some things didn't land. You thought you delivered the message clearly, you thought you had the right people in the room—and then you get the same questions a couple months later from those very people. When that happens, you go through a moment of frustration: was it me? Did I go on too many tangents? Was it them? Were they not paying attention? Even people who were engaged during training—who were there, asking questions—that frustration of revisiting a topic you thought you'd planted in their heads just leads you to growth, to changing how you do things and really examining what worked and what didn't. That's been one of my life's missions for 14 years: figuring out how to get information into people's heads at the right time.
Chris: So what have you learned?
Kristina: Learning about a topic you're not going to use right away—and I mean right away, like in the next few hours or that week—is not very helpful. You need iteration. You need to learn it, do it, learn a little more, do it, and revisit. Another thing: trying to cram too much into a full day. We'd think, "Somebody just started—let's give it all to them right away before they get busy on projects, and then they'll just know it."
Chris: My window is closing to get to this person; I'm going to get them as many things as I can before they disappear.
Kristina: Not good. It doesn't work. And then there's the format—sending a message in a very long format. I was talking full days; we shortened over time to hour-long sessions, especially during the pandemic when we didn't want to do full days on Zoom or Teams. But now one hour feels too long. One hour of lecture, one hour of talking heads talking at people.
Laura: You know, I've been a school architect my whole career, so I learn a lot from teachers about how students learn. It's funny to me that the light bulbs didn't go off maybe 20 years ago about how we should reach the architects and engineers in our firm, because we know that most people are hands-on learners. But we also have people who need to absorb, go back, revisit, and ask questions. We have graphic learners—I've had us adopt a whole new platform for project management with a much more graphic interface because the architects weren't absorbing spreadsheets. And so I think it's the combination of all the things Kristina talked about, plus the recognition that our people just learn differently. Some will need to go back multiple times to one piece of a video because it isn't sinking in, or go back to the exercises to remind themselves how they got there. That's an important recognition.
Chris: Maybe we can use the DT Bootcamp as a working example. Kristina, I'll let you introduce it more properly—it's a flagship learning program at Lionakis, and at the beginning it was multiple days, all in-person and live. Where's the recall opportunity for somebody who doesn't remember what design options are six months down the road? You've been progressively adapting bootcamp over time. Can you take us through that at a high level?
Kristina: Sure. Our Design Technology Bootcamp is our annual training program—we've been doing it 12 or 13 years now. We take a select group of individuals, usually representation from each market service office, through intermediate to advanced Revit training. The goal is to build a network of people out in the studios who work on projects in DT. We're all overhead, and it creates that network of eyes and ears on projects that help connect us with DT.
When I mentioned the full days earlier, that was actually for a standard new hire—three full days of Revit training. The beginning of bootcamp was three full days for 10 weeks straight: 240 hours. We were basically trying to clone ourselves in DT during that early Revit adoption. We covered everything—even soft skills, we had a book club. It was a lot, both in terms of taking people away from projects and in terms of the learning effectiveness. So we kept dialing it down. What do they really need to know? We don't need to clone ourselves; they just need to be effective in helping their projects. We trimmed the curriculum, became really focused and intentional about what we needed them to know and what outcome we were looking for.
Over the years it settled at around 54 hours of training. Before the pandemic, everybody would travel to one office to be together—and because of the travel, we'd fit it into about a week at a time. The pandemic let us be more flexible and go virtual, which meant we could break it down further. Since then, it's been in one-to-two-hour sessions spread across a few weeks and across the entire year for the bootcamp cohort.
Even within those one-to-two-hour sessions, they started out with a lot of talking at people, showing them click by click what we're doing, and then having them repeat it while we did it. At one point I recognized that they're just mimicking—they're not really absorbing much. There needs to be a component of them working independently. So we shifted to: talk a little bit, then have them work on an exercise. As soon as they started the exercises, you could see the light bulbs turning on. And even when we shortened the talking portion to 15 minutes, as soon as they started the exercise they'd go, "Wait—what did you just say?" So even 15 minutes of talking was almost too much. You almost need them to dive in right away, with just a little bit to set the stage and access that part of their brain.
Chris: There's a concept in learning development called "desirable difficulty"—you need to put them in a position where they have to struggle, because that's how they learn and remember, versus just clicking along and following Kristina.
Kristina: Exactly. So the exercises started to really feel like something was working. Since then we've focused on exercises quite a bit, and delivering the initial message as concisely as possible. We were part of the Synthesis LMS beta program and started developing online courses through our learning center, which let us prerecord that initial message. When I listen back to our old one-to-two-hour session recordings, I think: I really could have said that more clearly, more concisely. I went off on tangents they didn't need right then, adding nuance that cluttered their brain. Prerecording has forced me to be more concise, and I'm finding I can become a better instructor by doing that.
Chris: Laura, as you've been watching this happen with DT Bootcamp over the years, what was going on in your mind?
Laura: For me, the most exciting part is that this is an area where our newer graduates and younger staff can really excel as technology specialists—as Revit specialists, as experts in an area that some of our 25-year people may not be actively using. It puts them in a place on the team as truly valued contributors. It empowers them to teach the person next to them and not feel like they don't know enough to mentor someone a year or two behind them. When we put them in this position and they're well-taught through bootcamp, everybody comes to them. When you have multiple bootcamp alums in a studio or office, it raises all boats. People are going to them, getting that one-on-one with a peer where they don't have to ask uncomfortable questions in front of the boss. That's a really good way to teach the next generation to be good teachers—because if you want to be a learning organization, everybody has to go in with the mindset that they're teaching the people around them what they know best.
Chris: I love that you said "learning organization" because I've been talking about modern learning organizations for about a year and a half, and you guys are definitely on that journey. There are two specific things I want to cover: modernizing the bootcamp, and then Laura, some of the practice and Lionakis Way work as well.
Kristina, you redesigned bootcamp in 2026 and just ran the first section a couple weeks ago. Can you take us through the redesign and how it went?
Kristina: Being part of the Synthesis LMS beta cohort, we had a lot of great conversations about how to best deliver content to people. That's where some things really clicked for me around short formats and prerecording topics. We said: we have access to this great tool, let's develop all of these for the bootcamp training we'll deliver this year.
We recorded our first module of content, but we didn't just want to prerecord and have people watch on their own—we didn't know if they'd watch it, or at what pace. We still liked having that "together" aspect, because there's a lot to bootcamp in being in a room, talking about it with each other, learning those topics as a group at the same pace. So we decided to take these concise recordings and watch them together as a live watch party, and then everyone would work on exercises for those topics.
I wasn't sure how the live watch party would go—I knew it would be a little awkward to hear myself talking on a video. But I love it. I can deliver my message more concisely, I'm already prepped, I don't have to worry about anything going wrong with dataset files, and I can focus on the more important part: the exercises and engaging them throughout the session. We found right away that they would access the videos while doing the exercises.
Chris: That thing you said before—"I just told you this 10 minutes ago"—right?
Kristina: Exactly. So they need to be able to pause and take it step by step. And that's okay, because they know this resource is there for them anytime they need to do that task. It reinforces the habit of going to a resource and looking for it, because you know it's there and it helps you along the way. Previously they couldn't access it again unless they asked me to repeat it—and I can't repeat it for every person every time they're working on that task on every project. It feels really good to have this packaged, concise message for topics that people are already using.
Chris: To give people a visual: in your learning center you have a learning path called Bootcamp Full-Time with about a dozen courses, each somewhere between 16 and 35 minutes long, including the video and the exercise. For example, a course called "Revit BIM Execution Plan and Kickoff Core" has a five-to-six-minute video followed by an exercise and a quiz. So the general structure is: short video, exercise, course totaling 15-35 minutes?
Kristina: Yes, though the exercise time isn't fully factored into the completion time for some of those yet, and we're still building out the learning path with more courses for the next bootcamp module. But generally—we watch a lesson, which is a short video, then work on an exercise, and that's where most of the time is spent.
Chris: Laura, you're taking this approach to practice as well. Can you walk us through what learning looked like before 2026 and what it looks like now?
Laura: It was throw them in the deep end. In the early part of a career, that one-on-one model. Over time we've done more training—hour-long sessions, pulling all the project managers together and bringing in an outside trainer to talk about project management. But if you started with us three days after that outside trainer came to the firm, you missed it. When Kristina was bringing back the LMS work she was doing on bootcamp, we started talking about: what are the practice things we need to do every year on a regular basis, and what are the quick-strike things, and how could we apply the same concept?
And I want to say: anecdotally, over the last couple of weeks we've been getting rave reviews from folks in our DT bootcamp and visualization bootcamp. But especially for practice bootcamp, because the delivery is so new. Somebody even said yesterday, "I learned more in that one hour about cartooning than I've ever known in my career." It was one hour, four videos, with an outside consultant doing the videos for us—so we were able to draw on our best resources in short snippets.
The exercise piece put us into breakout rooms that were mixed by position, experience, and how vocal people are—and it was really enlightening how engaged people were at all levels. The younger staff drove and asked questions by inquiry, in a much more comfortable setting than if we'd brought the whole firm together for a training where you had to speak up in a big virtual room or do something in the chat and hope you got recognized.
Chris: So to make sure I follow: people join a big Teams call in the main room, where they do the watch party with the prerecorded videos—four to six minutes each on a couple of topics. Then you put them in breakout rooms to do the exercises, bring them back to the main room if there's more on-demand content, and back out to breakout rooms again.
Laura: That's what we did in the cartooning practice. We learned a lot: how much time do you need for exercises? Do we need to be able to give answers? We're in the process of recording answer videos so that when people take it on demand, they can see how well they did. And this process solidified for us on the practice side: what is the message we're teaching here? Having it codified forces the practice-side folks to come together and ask: do we all agree this is the right person to teach it, the right messenger, the right approach? Because it's being codified in how the firm delivers this training. That empowers our younger staff to say, "That's not how we're teaching that in the Lionakis Way."
Chris: "That's not how you cartoon a site plan."
Laura: Exactly. We've got three other big ones planned for this year and we're going to keep learning with each one.
Chris: What's been the experience for both the learners and the people who were instructing—who would have taught it very differently before? Was it hard to get them to do prerecorded videos?
Kristina: Laura mentioned an outside consultant who recorded some videos—that was because we were already working with them on that topic. We also had one of our architects record videos for the cartooning course. There's always that new-factor nervousness: "What do you want? Okay, I'll go in a room and talk to myself on video—and I need to keep it to how long?" But once he dove in, he was a natural at it. We had someone help edit the videos—we took away the post-production burden, which he really appreciated. That same person even helped him put together slides from a few bullet points—he joked that they were "cartooning his cartooning presentation" for him.
Once he actually got to recording, I think it was a little uncomfortable. But once it was done and he saw the outcome was really great—now when he talks about it in studio meetings and people give feedback, he's said many times that he loved doing a few short videos over preparing a 45-minute presentation.
Laura: And this person is not a natural public speaker. He's a natural leader in what he's teaching. Getting it right on a video ultimately felt more comfortable to him than facing a room full of faces. And there are different ways people teach too—this format really fit him well. I also see this as a great opportunity for outside consultants—mechanical engineers, electrical engineers coming in to talk about a new code cycle or sustainability. This is a chance to memorialize some of that material so that everybody gets it, and doing it in a way that they can stay in their office, record a couple of minutes for us, and then join live.
Chris: So you'd even push outsiders to try short videos plus exercises?
Kristina: We did in the cartooning training, and they said, "This sounds like a great idea, I get why you're doing this." This person has done training at other firms too, and they got it right away.
Chris: What's it like for you and your architect to watch yourselves in a watch party?
Kristina: It was weird at first, but since I've recorded for training in the past, I'm kind of used to it.
Laura: The funny part was that the first thing Brian said to me was, "I thought I already talk fast"—and they played him at 1.25x. I said, "You know what, Brian? It didn't sound too fast at all." I think once he saw it in person, he realized it came off okay. And ultimately he was proud of what we accomplished because he's been trying to get this message out one-on-one for a really long time.
Chris: If somebody has a message they've been trying to get out and it hasn't been effective, they're open to trying new things.
Laura: Absolutely. The frustration Kristina talked about at the beginning—"I thought I just told them this"—that's tenfold when you look at how many architects are trying to teach other future architects. How many times do I have to say this? So they're being pretty open-minded about this.
Kristina: There are others lined up for this format—our IT director, who's been in the same position as me having to teach people about software all the time, said, "Thank goodness. It finally feels like my message will be heard and retained." We hope.
Chris: And from the learner's perspective, I would imagine that hour flew by in a way that it wouldn't have otherwise.
Kristina: So fast—for us and for them.
Laura: I think when you're in a big firm that started as a family, a smaller firm where we all grew up in that environment, you continuously struggle with how to transfer culture and connect with people as human beings rather than through a Teams message. Those breakout rooms sound like a small thing, but they are ways that somebody can say, "Oh, I did this on a recent project—let me walk us through this cartooning piece in our breakout room." Suddenly someone from our San Diego or San Francisco office has a new resource, a new connection—someone they may have never met other than at our once-a-year town hall, and certainly not in an arena where their experience or expertise would shine through. Any way we can break the firm down into smaller groups to talk, with a shared practice in common, opens the conversation really quickly.
Kristina: And the little side effect is that you worry about multitasking with virtual training, but the expectation of this format—I'm joining, there will be breakout rooms, I'm going to need to actually do something—makes people perk up a bit more.
Chris: This video is going to go by fast, and then you're going to be in a room with your peers expected to have really engaged.
Laura: I mentioned to you the other day that I went into a breakout room and the group kind of went, "Oh no—"
Kristina: Yeah—
Laura: "How do I have her in my group?" But I didn't say a word. One of our younger staff took charge, ran the whole exercise—we had to pull up the exercise and do some markups—and the rest of us chatted at him while he was working. It was really effective, and I think he felt really good about being a leader in that small room.
Chris: There are so many things I love about this design. I know you're going to iterate on it and already have things you want to do differently next time. But I want to call attention to a common objection when people hear about LMS and video-based training: "Aren't we going to stop talking to each other? That's how people understand and learn from each other—nobody wants to sit around and watch a wall of videos all day." I agree with that. But not all video is created equal, and not all live sessions are great either. It seems like you're figuring out how to use video for what it's best at, and live interaction for what it's best at.
Laura: And Kristina brought this up at the very beginning: the big training, the one-hour commitment, is saying—this is important content, we expect you to be here and present and paying attention. All the little triggers Kristina mentioned, like "we're about to go into an exercise, better pay attention," help. But we thought it was important to have that first training be live and virtual, with a cadence of different kinds of instruction, to say: this is important, and if you're going to be at Lionakis, we do it the Lionakis Way. You need to be here to learn that, and here are the opportunities to reinforce it that follow. We had about 80 practitioners on the call—a pretty high percentage of our technical staff.
Chris: Was it required?
Kristina: Not for the first one.
Chris: That makes me think the next one might be.
Laura: I think we'd like it to be mandatory for the practice people. But honestly, with that percentage, and now the buzz around it, everybody's really interested.
Kristina: Right—making it mandatory was not a response to low attendance. It was more: this was really good and we need people to be here for it.
Chris: And even if I'm a 25- or 30-year architect at Lionakis, am I still going to Cartooning 101?
Kristina: Yes.
Chris: And why?
Laura: When we were in the executive session with KA, someone used the word "reboarding." I think that's really important. We have people who have been doing things their way—within the bounds of the Lionakis Way, but if we were reviewing their documents, we might think, "Hmm, I'm not sure about that." This is an opportunity for them to get the consistent message so that when they are the teachers or project leaders, they're delivering it consistently. We had pretty much everybody on that call.
Chris: I think you mentioned there was one person in particular who afterwards said, "I thought I understood this topic, but I didn't."
Laura: One of our project managers in our San Diego office—they're a newer office, through acquisition—was overheard by the rest of the team throwing down her headset saying, "I thought I knew what I was doing." That was a measurement in an area where it's hard to measure; the implications of cartooning might not be seen for a year on their project. But that reaction was one measurement that said: they felt valued enough to be taught how to do this the right way.
Chris: Can we talk about the cascading follow-up opportunities for reinforcement after the initial big training?
Kristina: We had to reflect on why we're doing the live training. There's the human factor of getting together. But if you think about it—not everybody will be doing cartooning when they get off that call. Are they going to retain it if they're not going to use it right away, outside of that exercise?
We thought: the live training is about saying "this is important"—so that when you do come across it, you know there's a resource to refer to and a consistent message around it. We give people the opportunity to stew on it a little and iterate. Generally, in a quarter, we'll do a one-hour training and then a couple weeks later a follow-up in our "tee times"—15-minute sessions where everybody hops on, we talk about a tip, and then go back to work. We can elaborate on the exercises, see if it's come up for anyone in the meantime. Then there's another opportunity in our monthly studio meetings, which are market-specific, where we ask those markets to dive deeper into their market-specific scenarios for that topic. So it's a third or sometimes fourth touchpoint.
Chris: Like, cartooning for K-12 is different than cartooning for healthcare.
Kristina: Exactly.
Chris: You said something that kind of contradicts something you said earlier, but I think I understand the difference. Earlier you said: why am I teaching something if someone's not going to use it in the next few hours or this week? But what you're getting at is that some topics are so foundational that you want people to have awareness that they exist, regardless of where they are in their project phase. And then there are other things where you'd only give that training when you know someone's about to use it on a project.
Kristina: Yes. With this, we're more thinking of the former—we need them to know this is important and that there's something to reference. We're trying to train the habit of going to look for how to do something because you've been exposed to the message at some point. The live training isn't for them to fully understand how to do the task when they're done. It's so they know it's important to know at some point, when they're ready.
Laura: It's almost like the foundational question of how you become an architect—you have to know cartooning exists. You may not need it at that moment. One of the nice compliments we got at a recent civic practice studio meeting was: "The learning management system is so accessible—I don't have to leave the Lionakis Way and go to YouTube to figure out how to do something in Revit. Our systems are focused on the Lionakis Way but are just as easy to navigate and just as succinct as if I were watching a YouTube video." That's a really nice compliment for this style of learning and how it applies to our team.
Chris: So a job captain, project manager, and senior architect join in June and the cartooning quarter is over. What happens for them? Do they get assigned the course as part of onboarding?
Laura: That's the real question we're up against right now—what does the playbook look like for onboarding by position? Getting the language to supervisors and buddies so they know how to steer someone. We're at the front end of understanding what that looks like for us.
Kristina: I think it's going to depend on the topic. Part of me hopes we'll get to a point where everybody knows about this message that we've recorded, and they don't have to necessarily watch it ahead of time because it's just widely known that we have a way of cartooning and everybody refers to it. When you're going to work on cartooning, we trust that somebody's going to say, "Hey, go watch this—there's a video about it."
Chris: Back to consistency. Project managers aren't teaching people "off book" because they're malicious—it's because they don't have a better tool. Now that project manager can just point people to that course: "This is how we do it."
Laura: And we want it to be ubiquitous. We want enough people to have been in the one-hour training, or the follow-up sessions, or in the LMS, so that it comes naturally out of anybody's mouth: "Oh, you should just go watch the video on this—we've got that covered." Rather than "Do we have any resources on X, Y, or Z?" If it's ubiquitous and people are talking about it as a base assumption, I think we'd be very happy with where we've reached as a learning organization.
Kristina: And we already have one person—Kerry, the engineer Laura mentioned—who's going down to our San Diego office to help integrate them into the Lionakis Way. He's going to reuse the cartooning course so he doesn't have to develop new content. It's a way for other experienced individuals to deliver the message without having to prepare from scratch.
Chris: Right—Kerry knows enough about cartooning that he can facilitate the workshop, the exercise part. That's really interesting. One of the things I've heard from a learning and development leader at another firm is that one of the most important things they wanted to achieve was for principals and project managers to understand everything in the LMS—so that when they see something on their project, they can say, "We have something on this. Go watch it, and then we'll talk."
Kristina: And the fact that it's not "go watch this one-hour recording" makes it feel so accessible. When you send someone somewhere, you're sending them to a good place—not to wade through a recording from four years ago that they weren't part of, skipping over sections. They can feel good about what they're sending people to, both in the message and the format.
We had a consultant come in to talk about coordinating with consultants at a studio meeting, and now I want everything to be in this new format so badly. I've tried to repurpose past bootcamp recordings—those one-to-two-hour segments—and it just isn't as good. I hope we'll be able to do a hybrid: have a team member record a brief intro—"Hey, this was recorded previously, but listen out for this message—it's really important"—and then add an exercise to it. That way we can still reuse some of those long recordings while working toward the short format.
Laura: And learning and development has become more of a language at Lionakis. We talk about it at all our principal meetings, market management meetings, and studio meetings. It's really important to me that our content on the LMS is reliable—so when people do get familiar with what's available, they aren't finding things that are aging or no longer accurate. That's why the learning and development coordinator position and what Kristina's leading on knowledge management are so important: to make sure content is good and reliable when you send people there.
Chris: I want to put a pin in the team piece and come back to it. Kristina, we've been talking about splitting things up—and one of the benefits beyond attention spans is that within an hour-long presentation, there might be nine core topics, and somebody in the flow of work might only need topic six. By breaking it into lessons, you can say, "Just watch this piece." And if I'm searching, that's all I need to find.
I wonder if you can talk about how you've been designing courses with future retrieval in mind—for a searcher or a learner down the road.
Kristina: I come from a place of documenting everything, because the satisfaction of sending somebody a link to get them the answer quickly is so meaningful for our work in DT. While I was recording, I had the flow of work in mind—I knew I was documenting something that somebody in the future would need to access. They're not going to want to watch an hour-long recording. Now I think: do they want to watch an eight-minute recording when they only need two minutes? So when I'm recording, I'm asking: what might somebody have a question about that I'd want to send a link to, so they can get the answer right there? It's definitely shaped how I break my lessons and recordings up.
Chris: Do you have an example?
Kristina: Something very Revit-specific: linking CAD files, which we use for existing backgrounds on renovations or site survey files from civil consultants. There are a lot of steps, and if you watched all the videos it might be 20 minutes. But somebody may already know how to link the CAD file and what to do once it's in Revit—they just missed these specific settings that are really important for the health of the model. If I want to explain just those settings, I don't want them to watch an eight-minute video about linking CAD. They've already linked CAD—they just need this one piece about the important settings that people click through and ignore.
Chris: And one of the nice things about smaller components is that they're easier to maintain. If the only thing that's changed is how Revit configures those settings, you just replace that one piece—you don't have to rerecord eight minutes or an hour.
Laura: Yes. And I think on the practice side, it's a little different—Kristina said "context," and there are some things we don't want people to find out of context. What was most informative for the team was just saying: you need to get your message across in three to four minutes. That forced them to get to the essence without going on tangents. Watching that whole three-to-four-minute video would be important to really understand cartooning. Differentiating between what we do on the DT or visualization side versus the broader practice topics is going to be the trick.
Kristina: I've been really curious—if we'd had Brian do that 45-minute presentation, how much of it would've been things they didn't need? He's very concise, but still. Did we get most of his message across in four minutes?
Chris: Or four minutes, but with multiple videos. There's a great Einstein quote I use all the time: "As simple as possible, but no simpler." With video, what I've been saying is: as short as possible, but no shorter. Because sometimes things have inherent complexity and it takes four, ten minutes, whatever—to get to the essence.
Laura: And our profession is that way. There's something you have to persist through to get to the right answer. We can't have our attention spans so short that we don't persist. That's maybe a little microcosm of how we learn to do this profession.
Kristina: It's not that we don't want all 40 minutes of content—it's that we need to rethink how those 40 minutes are delivered, spread out into multiple courses rather than one one-hour presentation.
Laura: And that's what we learned from the first cartooning session—it really should have been two one-hour sessions. The exercises and demonstrations just needed more time. Next time we'll do it in two sessions.
Chris: Just to clarify: it sounds like there wasn't any video content missing—it was more that you needed more time for exercises.
Kristina: Exactly. There was maybe 20 minutes of video total, and we wished we'd done 10 to 12 minutes, with the rest of the time on exercises, and then followed up with another eight minutes of video.
Chris: I'm curious—and I don't know if Lionakis will identify with this—but one thing I hear from clients is that practice training tends to be organized around who's available and interested. Someone wants to talk about mass timber, they take May; someone wants to talk about cartooning, they take June. Well-meaning, but ad hoc. It sounds like you're putting more rigor into what gets made.
Laura: Absolutely—we were not too long ago in that mode. We're really busy in our day jobs and can't keep losing focus, pivoting to whatever someone wants to talk about for an hour. So what we did was prioritize: we brainstormed the most important practice issues, aligned with investments we've been making through outside consulting on refreshing some of our approaches, and then our project delivery team prioritized the top four areas that needed to be addressed this year—ones we thought could carry a consistent message that would have a life beyond the initial training.
Why that's important: we still have a business to run, and part of what we're trying to do is build the next generation of architects for this firm and for the world. We're trying to maintain consistency, get more efficient—because there are fewer architects entering the industry than leaving it. We need our architects spending their time doing architecture, not figuring out sheet layouts. We didn't want to be distracted by training efforts, at least not in this model, that weren't filtered through that lens. If you want to gather on our design couch and talk about somebody's mass timber project, great—we encourage that, and we have design couch sessions for exactly that. But the energy going into our LMS-based sustainable practice training is going to be focused. We got general agreement on what those four areas were for the first year.
Chris: So you have a core curriculum, and if people want to create and share electives, go for it.
Laura: Exactly.
Chris: Let's talk about the team. Kristina, you've been director of design technology, and now you've taken on knowledge management, roughly half-time. You've added a learning coordinator. And Laura, you're here as president, deeply invested in learning and development. That wasn't quite the posture of Lionakis a year or two ago. Can you talk about that investment and how it connects to long-term strategy?
Laura: I'll zoom out on the long-term and let Kristina get into the details since a lot of this is her vision. When I came in as Chief Practice Officer three years ago, I had a recognition that our practice wasn't investing in the same way our business side was investing—in what it took to scale, to be one firm with multiple locations. One area where we were consistent and had real buy-in was design technology, because we had the bootcamp, the production standards, the things people had grown to rely on. But we hadn't extended that to the delivery of what we do as practitioners. Kristina and I are good at finishing each other's sentences. When I was talking to her about this, she started bringing lessons from the LMS group and what she was doing in design technology. Our project delivery group was saying, "We've got to teach people to do this stuff better." It was a good convergence: a recognized need, our growth as a firm making the timing right, and the desire to maintain the consistency of reputation that's really important to us.
Chris: So "business investing" means acquisitions, growth, adding markets—but maybe not as much, outside of design technology, on how to build practitioners other than the apprenticeship model and those ad hoc trainings?
Laura: Right. Everything from accounting software to marketing software. But maybe not as much on just how we build future architects. And was the apprenticeship model going to be the most efficient and effective way to do that at our scale? Taking Kristina's lessons learned and the deep dive she's been doing—combined with the need we identified on the practice side—it was just the right time to make that investment.
Kristina: From a design technology perspective, I kind of laugh because making sure everybody knows our best practices is just part of my nature and my job. Through doing that—and getting satisfaction from having things documented—I was doing knowledge management without knowing it, until I went to KA Connect and met the Knowledge Architecture team. That was a pivotal moment for me and how I viewed Lionakis. I came back to work and thought, "Wow, there are so many moving parts and so many ways to grow and connect what I'm doing here to other areas."
Design technology is also naturally a support role for a lot of practice initiatives. I sit on our production standards group, our detail library group, project delivery—in a way to support what they need and how to execute a new standard in Revit. I'd sit in a lot of those rooms and hear the same struggles: how to document something, develop a best practice, deliver the message, train people on the habit of following it. It sounded very familiar. Not exactly the same as technology and software, but a lot of it carried through. When Laura became president and offered the opportunity to work more in a knowledge management role, that's where things really picked up and started to take shape quickly.
Chris: Listening to both of you: all these changes—external ones like AI, social media, client expectations, and internal ones like growth, new offices, new markets, the pandemic—you've been consistently redesigning bootcamp to keep up. And what you're saying, Laura, is that practice wasn't keeping up in the same way. So you were able to look at Kristina and say: there's a way of thinking about learning and development that we could take across other parts of the company.
Laura: And I will say—Kristina and I have been talking about my vision for learning and development, and how to track it and connect it all in the right way. I'm the big-picture person. She is "how do we get it done effectively." She has the same vision, but she has the toolkit from what she's been learning and doing to see the way forward. It's been a good marriage of our skill sets and both of our passions—mine for building practice, hers for implementing and systematizing the things that will make us more effective.
Chris: And you added a learning coordinator recently. Can you talk about why and what the hope is?
Kristina: Part of it is: how are we going to get all these very busy people to document their knowledge? We need somebody to help with that. If I'm there helping edit someone's recordings, it's going to slow our progress. We need someone who can handle a lot of the coordination—helping with recordings, creating lesson descriptions. This individual uses AI really well and can leverage it to create content even when she may not be deeply familiar with the topic.
Laura: I'm very focused on raising the efficiency of our technical staff because I'm worried about the future when there won't be enough of them. So I've been looking for ways to have expertise outside of assuming practitioners have to do everything themselves. For example, why have everyone try to learn visualization at the highest level? They need to do it as a design tool and to communicate competently—but they don't need to manage every button in the rendering. So we hired someone better at it than the architects. And the person we have in the learning and development coordinator role worked with me for almost 20 years as a right-hand administrative person, and was looking for more. I said to Kristina: "I think Regina would be great for you." And she said, "If I could get Regina, I could do this and this and this." Suddenly her long list got a little shorter. All of those things start the engine going—people see results much more quickly, and you're not taking practitioners away from their actual work to solve problems that somebody else could solve.
We did this really well on the business side—building an accounting team, a marketing team, an HR team, so practitioners weren't doing that work. We just hadn't looked at our practice through that same lens: how much better could practitioners be if they had the support of experts in other areas? That was the birth of how Kristina started imagining how the learning and development knowledge management group could expand.
Chris: You're now in a position where you have a clear vision of where you want Lionakis to be, you understand how knowledge and learning support getting there, and you can see: if I invest a dollar here, I might get two back over there. It sounds like the positive flywheel is spinning.
Laura: Yes. And we have this limited resource, and our ability to grow from a revenue standpoint is in many ways tied to how many technical staff we have doing that work.
Chris: The bottleneck on growth.
Laura: Absolutely the bottleneck. And if we don't support them on the things they don't have to be doing, we'll never get over that hump. I feel progress in that area.
Kristina: Getting there faster and with less frustration—that's really the goal.
Chris: Thank you both for taking the time to share all of this work. First of all, for doing this work, and for being willing to talk about it. I think it's going to be very inspirational. It has been for me, and I know it will be for others in our community. We're just at the beginning of this transition, and I'm really excited to see where Lionakis is a year, two years, three years from now. So thank you both.
Laura: Well, Kristina's our rockstar.
Kristina: Oh, thank you.
Chris: Kristina is, and Laura, I'm so glad you're in this role as executive sponsor—clearing obstacles out of the way. That's everything.
Kristina: Totally agree. We didn't even get to talk about that. Having buy-in and support from Laura has been a game changer and makes me love my job. I've heard so many times how people have to fight for buy-in and spend all their time convincing leadership. We don't have that here. We have this great vision coming from Laura, and trust—and we can just make good progress quickly because of it.
Chris: Laura, when we look at the firms that speak at KA Connect and do the best work with Synthesis, they always have a strong executive sponsor doing exactly what you're doing—because that's what lets people like Kristina really cook. It's great to see you two working as a team. This was really fun, and I appreciate you both being willing to share.
Laura: Thanks, Chris.
Kristina: Thank you. Oh, one more thing, Chris. I've been meaning to ask you—I've been listening to the podcast and the theme song is so cool. One minute you're thinking about knowledge management and then you're rocking out. I tried to find information about it and couldn't, and it seemed like the group is from Chicago—so I'm wondering why they're taking the BART. I could see walking or biking, but can you tell us the story of that song?
Chris: The lead singer is a guy named Sean Mahan, who is our director of engineering, and he was in a band called The Parents. Sean did go to University of Chicago, but then moved to San Francisco. Right after he moved from Chicago, I was the IT director at SMWM, an architecture firm in the city, and I hired Sean to be our network admin—his first job out of college. We worked together there and then were able to come back together at KA.
He was telling someone in our firm that he went to the East Bay for the first time and was so excited—"I took the BART." This woman who was San Francisco born and bred looked at him and said, "The BART? We call it BART, dude." And so he made a whole song about why it's The BART, got his whole band involved. That's the story of "We Took The BART."
Kristina: I love it.
Laura: That's great.
Chris: Thanks for asking—I was wondering how long it would be before someone asked me the backstory of that song.
Kristina: No one has asked you offline yet?
Chris: You're the first person.
Kristina: Wow.
Laura: Now I have to go back and listen.
Chris: I encourage it. Alright, thank you all—and now cue the song…