Why AEC Firms Are Leveling Up as Learning Organizations Now | Turner Fleischer and Greenprint

In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Ellen Bensky, CEO of Turner Fleischer, and Nicole Chavas, President and COO of Greenprint Partners, for a wide-ranging conversation about what it takes to level up as a learning organization in the AEC industry.

As both firms evolve beyond primarily live and synchronous training models, Ellen and Nicole share how they’re building systems to deliver the right knowledge, to the right people, at the right time—while reducing overload and lifting the burden from learning leaders to serve as “air traffic controllers.”

We explore how integrating their learning management systems with their intranets and AI Search is helping their teams access critical information in the flow of work, as well as how that shift is also encouraging more subject matter experts to contribute knowledge, knowing it will reach the right audience at the right moment.

We also dive into the mindset shifts required to scale learning effectively. From navigating the balance between live and on-demand learning, to designing hybrid programs that combine asynchronous content with meaningful human interaction, Ellen and Nicole show how their teams are rethinking training as a design problem—one centered on empathy, access, and adaptability.

This episode is a candid, behind-the-scenes look at how two growing firms are building learning organizations that reflect the pace of modern practice, the needs of emerging professionals, and the realities of day-to-day AEC work.

If you’re grappling with learning at scale, looking to reduce information overload, or wondering how to balance video, in-person, and AI-powered tools, this conversation offers fresh insight and practical ideas.

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📃 Episode Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Chris: Hello and welcome to the Smarter By Design Podcast. I'm your host, Christopher Parsons, founder and CEO at Knowledge Architecture. My guests today are Ellen Bensky, CEO at Turner Fleischer, and Nicole Chavez, COO at GreenPrint Partners. Susan Strom, the Chief Client Officer at Knowledge Architecture also joins us for this episode as a co-host, and our topic is why AEC firms are leveling up as learning organizations now.

Ellen leads an architecture firm. Nicole leads an engineering firm. Ellen's firm, Turner Fleischer has been around for about 50 years, and GreenPrint Partners has been around for just over a decade. Turner Fleischer has a formal learning and development program that's been evolving for a long, long time.

GreenPrint Partners, is much earlier in that journey. And yet both firms are investing in leveling up their firm's approach to learning and development and taking a serious rethink of the way they do it going into 2026. Why? This is what we wanted to talk about in this episode.

Obviously AI is a big factor. The expectations also of newer generations entering the workforce, who are used to on-demand knowledge—they grew up with Google and YouTube and TikTok, and they want knowledge when they need it in the flow of work. So a lot of our conversation was about finding the balance between creating on demand knowledge and on-demand training opportunities versus the time when you wanna go live and in depth and have more human conversations, mentoring, and shared reflection.

This isn't an either/or problem. It's a both/and problem. It's a yes/and opportunity. So a large part of our conversation is about how you know when to lean into each one. We also explored putting new learning experiences into the mix—moving beyond the traditional 60 minute recorded lunch and learn and into new learning experiences designed with adult learning principles in mind.

One of the things we talked about is how administratively heavy learning and development is right now. There's almost an air traffic control aspect to it where you're trying to route the right knowledge to the right person at the right time, and that's heavily manual and dependent on a couple people that make the whole thing go.

Both firms are looking at building much smarter approaches and systems to automate a lot of that and take the burden off of individuals and let them spend more time crafting those modern learning experiences in the first place. 

More than anything, what I really love about this conversation, it feels like we're at the beginning of something.

In some ways, learning and development in our industry has only really incrementally changed over the last 25 years, and it feels like we're at the beginning of something that's going to radically change the way we do learning and development in AEC. Both Ellen and Nicole are right there leading their firms in the thick of thinking about what these new modern learning experiences look like.

It's a thoughtful, ambitious conversation with two leaders who are trying to get this right, and if you're wrestling with similar questions in your own organization, I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.

Okay, so Ellen Bensky of Turner Fleischer, Nicole Chavas of GreenPrint Partners on why AEC firms are leveling up as learning organizations now.

Here we go.

Susan: So Chris, you recently wrote this Smarter by Design issue on Leveling Up as a Learning Organization, and I'd love to know what feels so different and timely about that conversation right now in the AEC industry.

Chris: Yeah, the background of this—for folks in our community who don't know, we've been running a private beta of our Synthesis LMS since late June, early July. We're in three cohorts now. One of the things that's been really interesting in those betas is that the conversation has been 20% about technology and 80% about learning strategy, philosophy, process, team, structure—all that non-technology stuff. That's been the majority of the conversations.

What most of the firms in the beta have kind of—they've all been doing learning and development, but you can't be an AEC firm and have evolved longer than five years and grown and added people without being a learning organization of some sort. As you bring new people on, they have to learn to do their work. As people move to new levels or you take on new building types, all that stuff happens.

Most firms were doing knowledge sharing, lots of lunch and learns or informal mentoring, learning on the project, which are all great things—firms should continue doing that. But what I think the LMS unlocked for them was a broader picture. It's like, well, we're not really doing systematic knowledge transfer. We're not understanding a system of how people learn the way that we do things in our company. If they want to become a project manager, do we have a systematic way of helping them go through that journey? If they want to start working on retail projects because they've worked on commercial projects, do we know how to do that? 

It's raised all these questions about how to be more intentional. Can we do it more by design rather than being serendipitous?

So much learning and development is, at least according to the folks in our cohorts, X person is interested in this topic and they're available next Thursday, so they'd love to talk about it. It's a lot of catch as catch can, and we kind of go with what we have. I think what has come out of this—in order to have a good learning management system and good delivery, the bigger picture question is, how do we get more intentional about being a learning organization? And they take a step back from actually creating content and start having these much bigger conversations.

What I try to do in this issue is reflect back what I'm hearing in the community—they feel like this is a really great time to level up because the business is changing super fast. Baby boomers are retiring, there aren't that many Gen Xers demographically, so millennials are getting put into these leadership positions and management positions faster than ever before. How do we upskill them more quickly? 

You've got all this technology change with AI, with video tools becoming more accessible. You've got this expectation out of your workforce that I want to get stuff on demand. I want it to be quick. I want it to be to the point. I don't want to sit in an hour-long course six weeks from now. Just help me get the knowledge I need to keep making progress now.

I think that business driver, technology driver, workforce driver—it just feels like this is a moment for AEC firms to really rethink how they're doing learning and development.

Susan: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm feeling the same thing. I'm in the same sessions with you with our LMS beta firms and this is so clear. 

Ellen and Nicole, you are not in all those rooms with Chris and me—you are in different rooms in your firms, and you came up to us at PSMJ Thrive about two weeks ago after this article was out and said, this really resonates with me. So I'd love to hear what feels so timely and urgent about this leveling up learning in your organizations right now from your perspective? 

Ellen: Absolutely. Our story is so funny with this because we spent so much time thinking, “Oh, we have TF Academy. We don't need an LMS, and we do this all.” What I love about this is what I love about so much new technology, whether it's AI search or anything—it makes you reflect back. Suddenly we have so many applications for an LMS that exist in our organization, and it's almost like every day we're thinking about a different use case for it.

Now it's almost like, okay, slow it down. Let's try it out in one area. For example, People and Culture onboarding—we're doing this, but are we doing it great? No, we're not doing it great because it's a bunch of meetings to set up and it's one at a time and it takes two people's time and it's not that efficient, and there's only so many hours in a day and in a week. But wait a minute, if we can put this up on an LMS and have it be a learning path that somebody coming into the organization goes through, we've just become so much more efficient. I'm sure at the end of the day, it’s so much more effective. 

Now we're looking across our studio and thinking, what else are we doing that we could be doing better if we leveraged the LMS? That's across current workflows. That's across learning training that we're not doing. That's across tacit knowledge transfer of people. I feel like we're in front of a fire hose with the LMS. It's all coming at us now. We've unlocked all of the different ways to dream about this, and now it's sort of like, okay, let's try and let's get a system in place so we can start codifying more of this within the system. 

I'm super grateful to be in this space where we can take that look across everything that we've got going in our studio and determine how many paths are we going to have and how are we going to implement this and how are we going to use it.

Susan: What is different about using the LMS for something like onboarding that, for you, seems like it unlocks all this other potential? What's the—and I know the technology difference, but I'm curious about the opportunity that you're seeing. Could describe it more?

Ellen: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm grateful we've got a deep learning and development team, so we can take their adult learning principles and we can leverage it into how we're creating content to have the best impact. As opposed to the person who has the time meeting with the person, and sometimes those conversations don't necessarily go where you want them to go. We can be more intentional with what we want to learn when we get it up in the LMS. While sometimes it's good to have a free-flowing conversation, sometimes you really want to make sure that the information you're presenting and how you're presenting it is going to actually impact somebody's ability to take it in and learn while the other person isn't in the room.

Chris: So like quality?

Ellen: Yeah. I think there's a space for everything, but I think what we're looking at is, okay, what is the design of our courses going to be? We're working with our L&D team to intentionally figure that out, to try and achieve the best outcome, right? Then when we think about it across many things that we do, we'll be able to replicate a lot of the same theory behind it faster and get more out. Because once you open that mindset, everybody wants everything. It's like, oh my God, I want learning, not technical learning. I want this kind of learning. I want all the knowledge from this partner's head. All of a sudden I want it in here.

Susan: Yeah. That's really interesting. Thank you so much for sharing that context. All right, Nicole, I'd like to hear what resonated for you?

Nicole: Yeah, so we're small. We're 38 people. And we're just starting to dip our toes into learning management. Our world has very much been what Chris talked about where it was just serendipitous opportunities, lunch and learns, a monthly staff meeting where you hope you can get some information out that everyone can absorb, and then a lot of content sitting out on drives that no one ever really read. 

One of the messages that I've been hearing from our team this year has been one of information overload. There is just so much information, whether it's trying to get them up to speed on HR practices, new project management processes, new skills they're supposed to be developing to grow, and it's too much information. They don't know how to get it when they actually need it. It comes to them when they're not in the space to really take it in, and then when they actually need it, they don't remember what it was. 

I've been feeling a little bit paralyzed about how I can address this for my team other than just keep trying to get information to them constantly. So one, just seeing that this is a problem for everybody, but then two, seeing that there's actually conversations happening and a path forward to try to address that was just really exciting for me. How can I create a learning management system that can help make that information available to them when they need it so that there's paths ready for them to go?

I don't need to be the one hovering over them—oh, are you, do you need this information now? Are you ready for it? How can I get it for you? I can focus more on building amazing content and having it be at their fingertips.

The other thing that's a little bit unique to us is that we're very multidisciplinary, so we have urban planners, civil engineers, and landscape architects, and we also very much have a learning culture. It's something we screen for. We look for all of our team members to be intellectually curious and they love to learn from each other. So we not only need them to learn their own discipline, their own skills, but they benefit from learning. The engineers benefit from learning how planners think and how landscape architects think, and it makes them better engineers and they're just crying out for ways to learn from each other.

And it’s also happening on projects where they're working together or maybe they get to see it on a staff meeting, but to have more opportunities and for everybody to get to learn together is also something that people really, really want. Seeing this learning management system as a way to try to actually better curate that and capture that and have it accessible at any time for everybody, I can just really see elevating our ability to truly be a learning organization.

Chris: It seems like, Nicole—I'm playing back what I think I heard you say—on one hand you have an approach, which is we're just going to broadcast, so we have this new thing we're going to tell everybody all at the same time because that's efficient. Or you do the—I like the word you use—hovering, where you're constantly having to figure out, well, I'm not going to broadcast, I'm just going to hold onto this thing and I'm going to move this thing to that person, this thing to that person. And we've been using this metaphor of air traffic control when we've been talking about learning and development—trying to land the right plane at the right time and get people safely to their gate.

We don't have to torture the metaphor too much, but it seems like the middle ground is really the alternative. The great one, right? Not the crazy labor that you have to do hovering as a learning person, but then the broadcasting thing's not great for your people. The sweet spot is just getting people what they need at the right time. Is that kind of where you were going with that?

Nicole: Exactly right. I think a lot of it has been overly reliant on me to be in the right room to hear the need and make the connection—oh, did I hear you're wanting to learn about this? Let me connect you to so and so. And that is not a sustainable path. I need to take my brain, as a founder and the COO, and help get that out there so people can make those connections themselves. And I can remove myself from being that air traffic control and I can focus on building the content, which is something I'm really excited to kind of shift to.

Chris: So you are the LMS right now…

Nicole: Yes. So true. Yes.

Chris: One of the reasons I wanted to bring the two of you together, besides what Susan said about you both being in Chicago at PSMJ, is that you're both very senior in your organizations and led and drove the implementation of Synthesis as a knowledge base. Now your organizations are doing the learning management stuff. Ellen has a great story of them building something like 700 Wiki pages in six months or whatever you guys did during implementation. And Nicole, similarly over Christmas break, you basically built your intranet while watching TV. Is that kind of what happened?

Nicole: That's right.

Susan: You’re very talented.

Chris: I'm kind of curious and maybe we can start with Nicole. Why now in this journey for GreenPrint, going back to maybe intranet knowledge management, but as you look forward to learning and development, why did that become an important thing for you to invest in at this point in your journey as a company?

Nicole: We grew a lot in the last couple years. We were about 10 people in 2020 and then in 2020 business really started booming. We grew to 20. Last year we acquired a landscape architecture firm, so we added a whole new discipline to our business. Then we hired seven more people this year. So with that growth came a lot more people who needed to get up to speed, more processes I needed to institutionalize a bit to take us to the next level. When you start hitting that 20, 30, 40 mark, you really have to get a little bit more institutional in how you run the business.

My little system of employee resources, Google Drive, policies and procedures was starting to falter, and I was getting into that air traffic control mode, trying to connect older employees with new people, catch older employees up to what we've been doing. And that's when the stress really started to build. It was not working. Then I saw—it was Susan, you did a webinar on something and presented Synthesis and I was just like, this is it, this exists. I didn't know this was an option. I thought I was going to have to keep building things myself. This is made for me, for my industry, and I would like to just hire the people who know what they're doing instead of trying to build things myself.

I'm trying to make that my mantra—hire the people who know what they're doing and stop trying to build things myself so I can elevate. So I thought, “This is it. This is what I've been looking for.” And I was so eager because it solved such a huge problem of mine, of maintaining this awful Google Drive and feeling like nobody knew where to get information, that we signed up. When you are the decision maker, you can make a decision immediately. I had the problem, I had the budget, so… sold. 

I was so eager to get the team on it that we decided to focus on getting our just HR policies and procedures up before launch. Then I just spent Christmas break—I was just home with my parents, watching TV. We'd put the kids to bed, watch TV, and I would sit on the couch and copy/paste everything from that Google Drive into our LMS. It just felt like, one, it was very therapeutic, but I could just feel that burden lifting.

Chris: You were getting out of debt. Everything you move off, you're paying down a credit card.

Nicole: Yeah, it was therapeutic. It helped me move things forward and it got us off to a really great start this year with centralizing that information, and then gave us a foundation to build on from there.

Chris: I think you signed in December and Sarah Davies on our client success team who's running your project—we got back from the holiday break, she goes, oh my gosh, Nicole built her intranet over the holidays and it's done. So that was funny.

Susan: It's so interesting having both of you on because it's such a different level of resource in your organizations. Nicole, you're kind of doing all of this now. You're at 38 people and Ellen, you have a full L&D team and a KM team. I just think it's fascinating. 

Ellen, for you, you've built all this stuff and you continue to be involved, right? You are at this table having this conversation and you have not let go of this priority for the firm. I'm curious, being at this point where you have leaders, you could choose to step away a little bit if you decided that was the strategic choice for the firm, but you don't. What keeps you in the seat with L&D, pushing forward? I guess I'll also call out that you've spoken at KA Connect on this topic multiple times. I've recently talked to someone who wants to work with Synthesis and one of their reasons was “I want to be like Ellen Bensky.”

Chris: Right, but then your view is we need to go to the next level. So internally, you guys are like, but we're not. We need to be.

Ellen: No, and it's so fascinating because I'm listening to Nicole speak and I feel like I'm in part in the same place as Nicole because I'm looking at what we built and I'm looking at the pace of change and I'm looking at the need to take what we built, but the needs of people are totally different now. And so we've talked about this, about our project of redoing our Wiki pages and I need to stay in it because to me, it's all part of driving the company forward. Because I can't drive the company forward to where it wants to go if I don't take everybody with me on this knowledge and learning journey.

What I'm seeing and what I want to be creating, so much of it comes back to KM and L&D. The whole concept of a new clarity and simplicity and having really concise Wiki pages that explain why is something that I'm bringing across the organization and how we work and everything we do, how we work with our clients. Everybody in the world wants these things differently. It's not just internal, it's also how we're dealing with people externally. From my perspective, the responsibility of my role is to look at all of those things and ensure we're moving forward as an organization. Knowledge management and learning are part of the foundation of it for me, for sure.

Nicole, you said something that really resonated with me in terms of project management or how do people know what they're supposed to know on how to do things? One of the areas that I'm excited to be able to leverage the LMS in is those exact workflows. We've written a lot of Wiki pages describing workflows, but I'm thinking if we can get them in learning paths and we can have people talking about them, that I think it'll make a huge difference. 

I know when I go into a room and I explain a workflow to people, and they've got the Wiki as a reference, having both of those together is really powerful. If we can leverage the LMS in financial project management, and I can walk them through: this is when you're doing this data review, this is why, and when you hit this moment, this is what you're looking for. I think that having the video and the explanation from the subject matter expert is going to be an incredible combination to demonstrate that why to people, which no matter how clearly we write the Wiki pages and we're writing this paragraph of why do we do this this way at Turner Fleischer, there's something when you hear it from somebody themselves, to be able to go through it in parallel. 

For me, Susan, I couldn't be the leader that I want to be if I wasn't constantly bringing all of this together and having it all be important and all make sense to the overall strategy of where we want to go as we continue down this journey.

I'm so grateful for two things. I'm so grateful for AI search because not only is it a great tool and we can get knowledge, but it showed us where we needed to get better. The LMS is doing the same thing from a learning perspective. We knew technical training—we don't have enough Revit training, we don't have enough really technical training. We've got a big digital department. We're like, oh yeah, go talk to Artyom. But this is giving us the impetus and that push to actually get something done. Because before we had the ability to leverage an LMS, again, to your point, Nicole, it might have lived on Newton, but how were we going to get people access to it and know that they looked at it and could then see if it made an impact? It's really important to keep sight of everything. That's what I am privileged to be able to do. But I'm also privileged to have people that are experts in L&D and in KM putting all of this together for us.

Nicole: I want to build on something you were talking about Ellen, on the SOPs. PSMJ just recently had some bold statement that the SOP is dead. And I actually disagree. I think AI search is bringing back the SOP and I'm starting to see the value. I'm just starting to see how it all fits together, where you need these detailed processes. They're essential, and I do not expect anyone to ever read them. AI search makes whatever you need from them accessible at any time, and you can just focus on what you need. That also has been influencing how I'm thinking about doing trainings, because I think in the past I would've done a training like, okay, here, I'm just basically reading you the SOP because this is my moment to get you to understand the SOP. And now I can give a training that's a little bit higher level, a little bit more about the why. Why is this important? Here's an overview of how it all works. Now that you've got that in your brain, you have the SOPs, you have the toolkit, and you can now dig deeper in that if you want because you're so pumped up about this. Or you can use AI search to get to the specifics when you're ready for it. I see it as this whole bigger picture of the detailed SOPs, the AI search, and then higher quality, higher level trainings that focus on the why instead of the how.

Chris: And that person, if they're not applying that SOP today, what's the point in teaching the detail anyway? It's just a waste of energy. I couldn't agree more with you that the SOP is alive and well for another reason that you didn't bring up. As we start having more agentic employees in our work, if we ever want agents to be able to help us do work, you've got to teach the agent the SOP. Even more important than an employee. In order for agents to work—they have the context—they have to know what good looks like. You have to teach them the way you want to work, and so you get this double benefit of really explaining how your firm works and standardizing it helps employees have more clarity, but it also helps the AI agents have more clarity.

Ellen: And to that, Chris, if you've got AI on top of it all and you've got the subject matter experts talking about the why in the LMS and people, and then you've got the Wikis that are getting into the details of it, you've got everything that you need for people to get the knowledge that they need. 

Nicole, for you as a growing organization, as you continue to add people and you continue to have more complex processes, what better way to onboard them to what's unique about GreenPrint than be like, hey, take these three learning paths over here and then take a look at these documents over here and boom, you've got somebody who's got both and can hit the ground running way faster.

That's where it never ends. Even at the size we are, every time we onboard somebody, you can just imagine, we have a lot of processes and there's a lot of whys. Why do we do things in this unique way? I have the reverse problem because we've been around for so long that I have people that—these people exist and we know them, right? I'm good. I'm going to just keep doing the thing that I was doing and I'm going to keep doing it the way that I'm doing. And then six months later, 10 things have changed and they're way behind, right? They don't have time, but if they could go into an LMS and they could say, oh, let me understand why they did this? I can bring people who have been here a long time with us as we continue this rapid pace of change.

Chris: Ellen, to your point, for that person, having videos that are succinct and on point and are done with adult learning principles—if it's five to seven minutes of a video versus in a staff meeting and we're going to ramble on. I don't mean to say that everyone rambles in staff meetings, but you know how it is. There's a way to be much more efficient and to the point in this scenario that connects with them. I think the other piece of it, I'm imagining this new world that you're both kind of describing. If I'm a new employee at GreenPrint, I get some stuff from Nicole, I get some stuff from Aya, I get some stuff from April. And you guys are multi-office, so I'm also getting to connect with these personalities really early and start figuring out who they are. And when you're telling them the why, you're also communicating with non-verbal—you're also able to communicate “this is serious and we're passionate about it.” And this is beyond just text…

Ellen: That's a really good point. Even though we just have one office, we don't have people that know each other because of hybrid and because of other things. Or they're worried, they don't want to go up and talk to Russell because his name is on the door. But if Russell was describing something through a video and then they had a Wiki and they could put all of that together, they would automatically feel more of a connection to be like, hi, because they've gotten to know who he is as a person by listening to him share something.

Susan: We've mentioned a few times, and for anyone who's not super familiar with at least the Synthesis LMS, it's on-demand learning: videos, lessons that you can interact with on demand—asynchronous. You're not in the room with Russell. You're watching a video of Russell, which extends Russell's reach and allows him to be Russell with a hundred people a year without totally depleting him, and giving everyone the same high-quality experience. But that does not allow you to ask Russell a question in the moment, which is also really valuable. 

One of things that I've been thinking about and we've been navigating is: when do we do synchronous moments and when do we do asynchronous moments and when do we really intentionally build some moments for hybrid learning where you do something asynchronous, you watch the video with Russell, but then you sit down and you talk with your PM about project finance or you have 30 minutes with Russell and all the other new hires on a Friday to ask questions in a synchronous moment. We don't want to lose that. We want to build relationships and connections. I don't think having videos breaks relationships and connections at all, but I also know that there's this other part of it, too.

I'm curious what you both think about that and if this is something that you're starting to form an idea on today. It's also okay if that's not the case, it might be something that we'll be figuring out over the next couple years. And no doubt, that will be true as well.

Ellen: We're literally redesigning that as we speak. Redoing our whole learning community on Newton, our Synthesis platform, to have it be across typologies of learning and not just focused on programs that learning and development may be offering. Right now it's heavily TF Academy focused. We're literally having an on-demand learning section in the community. We're having program-based learning in the community. We're having mentorship as a path, we're having learning events as a different section to actually do all of that and have people understand we have all of these different ways of learning. 

If you want to learn in an asynchronous manner, you go into the on-demand section and these are the tools that you have. That's where, for example, the LMS will live. But if you really want a synchronous experience, look at TF Academy and see all of the scheduled and planned opportunities that you can do in person or hybrid. It's caused us to really accelerate getting this way of thinking and getting this out to the studio sooner because we didn't have all of these different types of learning before.

It's really pushing us to create our framework. Whereas we were typically too busy. We didn't have a framework. We were just doing—let's do this and let's do this. Now we're thinking in a framework methodology of, okay, if we're bringing this new program on or making it, what type of learning do we want to make it? It's allowing us to be intentional to make sure we've got balance across all of those.

Nicole: Yeah, this is very top of mind for me right now because we actually just this week did a live training on performance management. We have a new performance management process, and because of the sensitivity of performance management, we thought it would be better to have an in-person one, get all the managers together and have it be a little bit of a moment. You can do a little bit more of that “now we're going to take time for reflection. Now we're going to do a Slido and get your answers to these questions and see what everyone thinks.” That interactiveness really adds a lot of value. And then we're going to follow up with a recorded version for reference. And then all the SOPs and toolkits will be on the Commons for follow up. So I'm trying to learn from that because it was really successful and it made me think, when do we do this? Because I can also see myself being like, these videos are so great, I'm just going to do videos from now on.

There's something about when it's really something new, something that's really new and changing the way we do business. We have to get people together to talk about it and learn about it together. Then we can have recordings in the future. Whereas, I don't need to get everyone together to talk about how to do Deltek Vantagepoint stuff. No need for me to live present on Deltek. We can have office hours and we can have videos about how to do things. We’re really thinking about when the value of getting people to spend an hour and a half of their time with us can really have a multiplier effect. That's when we should do it. But it's a balance because it is taking people's time and getting a bunch of people together in one moment.

Chris: That's such an interesting lens, Nicole. The idea that if it's a big change in something new, that you would do it that way. But then you know you're going to have a new employee join you four months from now who wasn't part of that and two more six months from now. So they can do a purpose-built on-demand thing. But I'm wondering if you end up still doing a flipped classroom type thing where you say, here's the content around how we're doing performance, but then I still want to meet with you one-on-one afterwards to talk through questions or do some role-playing or scenarios or whatever that might be. So you don't have to deliver the basics over and over again, but you can have the higher-level conversation about what it means.

Nicole: That's a great point. And that's something I'm wondering too, is how to get those pause for reflection, write things down, talk with your partner, or the more interactive elements of it into the video-based learning. That’s something I'll be exploring as we move forward with this.

Chris: Well, one thing I should say just about the platform is for those that aren't in it, including you—you can have different lesson types. So you can have a video, but then the next lesson could be to book a meeting with Nicole for 30 minutes to talk through this, and then you mark that as complete, then you go to the next thing. Or go read these SOPs, mark that as complete, then go to the next thing. Video is going to be one of the core technologies, but you could involve people in that flow. Somebody could have an assignment that they have to complete and then come back. So there's ways to have a more hybrid, multimodal learning experience.

Ellen: I was going to bring that up, Chris, because we've been thinking a lot about this, that learning isn't just one modality if you really want people to learn something. It's not just hearing it once. That's what I'm really excited about is creating these multifaceted learning paths that are interactive and that do have a few different ways of getting the same information. And then what I'm excited about—let's try that with this and see how it goes and get feedback, right? Let's try it with just this. But because the LMS gives us the ability to leverage all different types of ways to learn, we're going to be able to really find out, and maybe it's people and culture things work better as this combination and technical training works better as just this. But with the flexibility to create different types of paths, we're going to be able to really hone in on what works best and where, and for whom.

Susan: One of the things we've been experiencing is that even within the folks working in LMS right now, week to week, folks are changing their approach because it's all new and we're figuring it out. A lesson I'm taking away from that is that it's just going to keep changing. We should not be too attached to any of our ideas about how it's going to land or how we're going to do things, what goes on demand and what goes asynchronous. We have to be pretty fluid to evolve with our learners and to hear our learners. 

But I'm realizing that there's a flip side to that, which is that our learners have to be okay with the learning methods changing. We've heard a lot since the pandemic in particular, that people are exhausted with change. I'm curious if this is an area where we have to manage the learner's experience and give them a lot of prep or warning or not change the learning methods too fast because that is stressful. Or is this an area where it's okay to change pretty rapidly because every change is in response to their feedback and we're taking a step forward for them each time?

Ellen: Yeah, we think about that all the time, and I think that there's no way to get away from the pace of change. We just have to share our perspective on the pace of change and help people through it. Even in the redesign of our Wiki pages, we've changed things already. You have to be that way living in the world that we're living in. If we can create really agile, change-based organizations, and this can be part of it, then that's super exciting.

The one thing that I will say that we're experiencing is when there's so many different options, we have to be able to say, okay, we're going to go in this direction for now. Even with our Wiki pages, well, it could be a guide, or this could look like this, or this could be like that. Let's pick a lane and let's do a few things in it, and then let's see what happens and get some feedback. I even see that with our own team, with the LMS—oh, we could do this or we could do this. As an organization, being able to navigate change and know when to go, when to stop, it's going to be one of the top differentiators in successful companies moving forward.

Nicole: Yeah. One of the ways I'm trying to support our team through that change is by reducing the number of tools they have to use to do the things. They've got tool overload and so yes, we're going to roll out a new way of learning, but it's going to be all in the Commons, which is our Synthesis intranet. It's a tool they already know. It's a platform they're familiar with. The more we can centralize things, the fact that they can find things in the Commons now, instead of having to go into Deltek, I think by giving them less friction for how to get the information and then showing that the change is in the context of the tools they know and love as opposed to, oh look, we have a new LMS that's a different tool and a different system and a different entry point. That's what I can do to help support them with that is just give them fewer tools and fewer entry points to get everything that they need and do their daily processes.

Chris: The reason we started the newsletter called Smarter by Design, and now the podcast, goes back to this idea that AEC firms should spend as much time designing their businesses as they just spend designing buildings or bridges or roads or whatever they're working on. What I love about this conversation is it's been very much a design conversation. How can we create a better experience? It's user-centered design at the heart of building a really good learning organization. It's informed by adult learning principles, but it's done with empathy. It's not just the most efficient way to get content out. Really how do we design ourselves as a learning organization? 

It reminds me, there's a book called The Living Company by Ari de Geus, and in that book he studied the companies in the world that had lasted the longest. He's got some 300- or 400- or 500-year-old companies in that book. The famous line in it was the only long-term sustainable competitive advantage is learning faster than your competition, right? Learning, you could substitute the word adapting, it's all in there around evolution. What you're both talking about is this thoughtful, not science project kind of chaos, but we have to keep changing, we have to keep moving quickly. But you want to do it in an intentional, calm, strategic, thoughtful, user-centric way. That's what I'm hearing from both of you.

Nicole: I also feel like I'm constantly redesigning my role at that speed. A year and a half ago, I did not know the word knowledge management until I saw your article. I did not know the word adult learning principles. Now just in the last few weeks, I have this whole new vision about learning at our organization. Do I need to become an instructional designer now? This is what I love about my job. What I love about being a COO is to continually reinvent, but how I choose to reinvent my role has implications for the business because it's all in service of that business. So that's part of the fun. I personally do well with that change, but my job is then to minimize, to create positive change for the team so that they can do their job better. You use the term the half-life of knowledge is shrinking and I feel that so deeply, just how quickly things change so much faster than before and how can I keep up with it and keep my team up with it in a way that's not overwhelming and is maybe energizing as much as possible.

Ellen: Yeah, I had a really interesting experience today where somebody couldn't understand the process of how to develop a new guide on Newton and they dove in and they just threw a bunch of information up and it wasn't thought out and it wasn't organized. They were frustrated because they got feedback that, now, did you think about this? I was like, wait a minute, let's just think about it. If you are in a project, you start with schematic design. You have to design how this thing is going to look, what is your intention for this? Then you get into design development where you then codify that and you start creating, okay, that's what I thought, but now what does it look like and how does it work together? Then you move into construction documents and you're like, okay, now I'm going to add the heavy details and how is this thing going to actually be built? That's all we're doing when we're creating and codifying knowledge, right? You have to have your idea and your design, and then you have to put it together. And they were like, oh, wow. I get it now. It is all design. 

Our purpose for our company is “We make lives better by design,” and I use it in conversation 10 times a day. Look what we're doing. We're creating something new and we're doing it by design. We're thinking about it. We're intentionally thinking about how this thing is going to happen. And to your point, Nicole, that's why I love my role. You'll get to a point where it's like, no, you don't need to become an adult learning expert. You just need to hire one. When you get to that moment, that's going to be an excellent moment, right? That's how you have the ability to scale and continue to make these things truly important.

Chris: Until you do though, and maybe I'll just kind of close this out here. There's change, there's design, there's learning, there's adaptation happening at the firm level. But then as Nicole pointed out, it's happening down at the individual level, and as you said, Ellen, with this person kind of having some light bulbs turned on for them. We're also thinking about this at the community level. We're all in this knowledge architecture community in uncharted waters. Nobody has tried to build knowledge management, learning management, AI in the middle of this. There's no best practice. There's nowhere to go find out how to do this. We are inventing this together as a community and we're going to go faster and get smarter as we evolve. 

Part of what I hope comes out of that is I think Nicole could learn a lot about, well first of all she has Google, so can go learn some things there and watch some YouTube videos. There could be a consultant, but I also think that the community, we're going to try as a group and show what good looks like and not even just generally adult learning principles, but what good looks like in an AEC firm. Maybe have different scales for different learning content types, we'll do what we've always done in this community and try to connect people to the best ideas in the community so we can all move faster and better down the road.

Ellen: I can build on that—an LMS theme that I'm thinking about on Newton are the KA Connect talks. I just had a new marketing manager start. I've already given her three talks to listen to because I want her to understand how others in the industry are doing this. We've never had a person like her start before with her background and her caliber, and right off the bat, first day it's like, okay, listen to this one, then this one, then this one. And then we're going to talk about it. What resonates with you? What resonated with me? So leveraging the KA community to actually teach in my studio is something that I'm truly excited about. I think this community is awesome.

Chris: I love hearing that. I thought you were going to say something different. I thought you were going to say, because I have heard from your team that they're building a course on how to teach using adult learning principles. There's a lot of imposter syndrome that people are feeling—I'm not an instructor, I'm a project architect. What do I know about teaching somebody about how to do this thing? I think all of us are going to level up as organizations, as a community, but then as individuals, not even in the COO or the learning development role. All of your people can get better at teaching, which I think will make them better leaders within their teams. They will get better at going out and marketing and chasing work. I think just getting better at these things will level everybody up and we're excited to do this.

Ellen: I was just going to add one more thing to that. We do that with TF Academy. When we teach our instructors how to teach in the Academy and my learning specialist does it, I can absolutely see a difference in their client presentations and in the way that they're interacting with clients. So we see that on a daily basis. It all interacts with everything.

Chris: Parting thoughts, Susan Strom?

Susan: It reminded me—I'm thinking about, I think it was, Ellen, one of your KA Connect talks. I can't remember which one, that we need to become a teaching organization. That's really resonating for me right now as we think about this leveling up.

Chris: Great. Well, thank you two for being here and joining us. We appreciate all of your insights. Lots of good ground covered here, and more importantly, we’re looking forward to going on this new journey of learning how to design modern learning organizations with both of you and your teams. So thanks and thanks to everyone in the community for listening.

Ellen: Thank you.

Nicole: Wonderful. Thank you so much.