Brandon Norton, Senior Multi-Media Manager, Fuscoe Engineering

Talk Description
Modern learning organizations are not built on platforms alone. They are built through intention, trust, and design. In this talk, Brandon Norton, Senior Multi-Media Manager at Fuscoe Engineering, shares a creative, behind-the-scenes perspective on building ARC (Fuscoe’s integrated intranet and LMS) as a branded learning experience rather than a traditional training system.

Drawing from years of design leadership and hands-on implementation, Brandon brings these ideas to life by showcasing a range of modern learning experiences he and his team have created within ARC. Along the way, he explores the unseen barriers that often undermine learning initiatives: clarity of ownership, aligning expectations, cultural buy-in, and developing trust in the system itself.

He makes the case that branding is not merely decoration, but essential infrastructure which helps learners understand what matters, where to go, and why they should engage. When learning feels intentional, cohesive, and well-crafted, it earns credibility, and credibility is what drives adoption.

This session will challenge KM and L&D leaders to think like designers. How do you balance brand and information without losing clarity? How do you identify the right experts, respect their voices, and help them share knowledge in a way that feels authentic and scalable? And how do you design learning systems that improve workflow, strengthen culture, and become part of how people work, not something they step away to complete?

Speaker Bio
Brandon Norton is a Senior Multi‑Media Manager at Fuscoe Engineering, where he leads creative direction for brand, storytelling, and internal learning experiences. With a design background and nearly two decades at the firm, he plays a central role in shaping ARC, Fuscoe’s internal knowledge platform (Synthesis), and its evolving LMS. Brandon approaches learning as a designed experience, with a strong focus on culture, trust, and clarity. His work centers on aligning brand and information, elevating internal expertise, and building learning systems that feel intentional, credible, and genuinely valued by the people who use them.

Timeline

00:00 Introduction and the Full Circle Podcast Teaser
02:39 The Instinct: Rebranding Fuscoe
05:57 A One-Man Band: Brandon’s Role
08:18 Every LMS Already Has a Brand
13:33 Brand as Infrastructure, Not Decoration
17:56 Assembling the Band: Building a Content Team
25:51 The Unseen Work: Ownership, Buy-In, and Trust
28:44 Why It Matters More, and Designing for AI
31:40 The Inside-Out Approach: Preserving Knowledge
37:50 Bringing It Full Circle

Q+A
40:46 Q: What was your pitch to get podcast buy-in?
41:49 Q: Did you always plan for an external audience?
42:26 Q: Are Megan’s questions internal or external?
43:31 Q: Do you start with a topic or a person?
44:56 Q: How much does a podcast studio setup cost?
47:34 Q: How often do you record the podcast?
49:02 Q: How do you capture knowledge from retirees?
50:52 Q: Who turns interview content into LMS lessons?
53:23 Q: How do you bring a designer into LMS work?
55:39 Q: Who decided the podcast was the right platform?
56:54 Q: Is 20-minute editing about a distilled version?

Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Introduction and Full Circle Podcast Teaser

It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it, Chris and the KA team, for having me. With that said, let's get started.

Narrator: Welcome to the Full Circle Podcast.
Megan: Hi, welcome to the Full Circle Podcast. I'm Megan Williams, part of our marketing team here at Fuscoe, and today I'm sitting down with Marty Smith. Marty, thank you for being here today.
Marty: Thanks, Megan.
Megan: Do you think you could give me a little bit of your background?
Marty: Sure — originally from Missouri, the Marine Corps moved me to Southern California.

All right, that's just a snippet of something I've made. That's Marty — you're going to hear more from him, and about him, later. That conversation didn't just happen in the studio. It happened inside something we built. This is Arc, our intranet, and the Learning Circle, our LMS — all built on Synthesis with Knowledge Architecture. And here's our lesson within the Learning Circle.

We've been working with KA since 2016, so it's been a ten-year journey. And yes, this is my first time actually getting to come to KA Connect, so it's really a pleasure to be here, and really exciting for me to get to talk about this newest thing we're building. So let's kick it off.

Designing Learning as an Experience, Not a System

I want to unpack what you just saw at the top of this video, because it's going to take a little bit of a mindset shift when we talk about this. Most people, when they think of an LMS or any kind of system, think of it in terms of courses, catalogs, quizzes, tracking. And yes, it is all of those things — but I want you to think about this: to your employees, none of that is actually the product. That's why I'm here today. I want you to think of it as an experience. Is it fast? Is it clear? Do your employees trust it? Full stop.

Nobody falls in love with a storm drain. That's my little jab at engineers — I do work at a civil engineering firm, so I have to throw it in there. What we build is typically invisible, underground. Nobody falls in love with that stuff. It's not sexy to look at, but it's important, because people fall in love with what's built on top of it. I just had to get that jab in for my engineers, in case they ever watch this. Who knows.

The Instinct: Rebranding Fuscoe and "Beauty Matters"

So how did a conversation like this end up feeling like something like this? A lot of it actually starts with a decision I made a number of years ago, and I want to tell that story briefly — it's a little bit of an instinct, which is why I titled this slide that way.

This is Pat Fuscoe, our namesake founder and former CEO, who retired in 2023. He and I had lunch together, and I brought up the idea of rebranding the company, because our logo was just tired. It had been about twenty years into his career at that point — this was before I even joined the firm, in 2007. It had a lot of moving parts, it was difficult to produce and embroider, and I'm always thinking about where a thing is going to live out in the world.

So he said, "Sure, I trust you. Do whatever you want." Music to my ears — I was so stoked to get this thing going. But that trust didn't come from nowhere. Pat, as you know, is a civil engineer, but he also values beauty and art — he's married to an artist — and from the earliest days of the company it mattered to him that our plans and everything we produced didn't look subpar next to an architect's work. We have some architects in the room who can appreciate how things look. He wanted our stuff to be on that level, and he had a mantra about it: beauty matters. He'd walk the halls saying it to anyone who'd listen. As an artist, I appreciated that — if I ever got a tattoo, it would probably be something like it, though I definitely wouldn't put it on my body. I did make a little fun graphic version of it for our team, partly to poke fun at Pat.

So I got to work. I quietly started the rebrand process, designed hundreds of logos over the next couple of months, sketched, and strategically left things out on my desk and whiteboard for people to glimpse and ask about. When they'd say, "Hey Brandon, what's that thing you're working on?" I'd say, "Ah, don't worry about it — just some little side project."

Eventually I got a meeting with our leadership team, once everything was ready. The very first thing I did was show them one slide — then take it away before they could really process what they'd seen. Only then did I explain the whole journey of how I got there. By the end, everyone just wanted to see that one slide again, to take it in, because it was already burned into their minds. They couldn't unsee it, and once they'd seen it, they knew they wanted it. I actually used that same trick on you today, showing you the podcast clip before explaining it.

A One Man Band: Brandon's Role and Design-First Approach

Before I go deeper, I want to talk about my role at Fuscoe, and in our journey with Synthesis and the LMS. Here's my background — that's a nice headshot of me, which is unusual, since I'm usually the one taking the headshots. Thanks to Coe for taking such great photos of this event.

I've been at Fuscoe for nineteen-plus years, and designing professionally for over twenty-five. My title is senior multimedia manager, which is loaded — ask me about it later, I do a lot. I love designing, I'm passionate about branding, I love to teach and coach, and I also love playing guitar. I'm quite literally a one-man band in a lot of the places I go and the things I work on. As a guitar player, I understand the importance of having a group of background musicians supporting you to help make the music — and somewhere along the way, that was how I started thinking about our version of Synthesis, which we call Arc, and our LMS.

I was quite literally that one-man band — every part of it, aside from the occasional guest artist, was me. I bet a decent chunk of you in this room can relate to that. You're influencing a lot of people without necessarily controlling them or having them report to you — it's really the only way this kind of work ever gets done.

So when it came to Synthesis and the LMS, I approached it the same way I approached the branding problem: as a brand and design problem first, and an LMS problem second. That decision is something I'll keep coming back to, because you'll see I'm not a one-man band anymore — I now have a group of supporting musicians, and that part of the story changes too.

Every LMS Already Has a Brand

Something I didn't fully appreciate until I started building this: every LMS already has a brand, whether or not you meant it to. How does it feel? Is it clear? Considered? Does it feel like corporate homework? All of those are brands — not necessarily bad ones, just brands nobody chose on purpose, because it was never actually in anyone's hands to decide. So the real question was never "should we brand our LMS?" It was "what brand does it already have, and is it one we like?"

That's the theme for KA Connect 2026, and I thought it'd be worth unpacking word by word — it's kind of the way I used to study. Designing: an actual, intentional decision about how something is going to look and feel before you start. Modern: not trendy, not chasing a new phase, but built on something like Synthesis that's adaptable to change and constantly adding. Learning: really important — learning is not training. You can learn from training, but learning itself is something you choose to come back to. And then the kicker: organization — not a single department or person, the whole firm, the whole team. I put "uh-oh" next to that one, because I can no longer play by myself.

So design has to be a decision-maker, not just the finish at the end — not the coat of paint on the wall, not the lipstick on the pig, as they say. It should be at the foundation when you're starting, not something you jazz up after the fact.

A few months ago I did a webinar with the KA team about our Mapping Fundamentals and Subdivision Basics podcast series, and I talked about designing that through four lenses: design it like a product, build it like a brand, deliver it like a story, and structure it for scale. Some of this talk builds on that — thanks to those of you who were already listening, and apologies for the repetition.

Those four ideas were the easier part of the work. What wasn't easy was the ownership battles, and the months of quiet work that went into getting people to actually buy in and believe in it. Old systems and old ways can burn trust, and trust is really difficult to get back, especially when you're trying to implement something new. When learning feels intentional, it earns credibility, and credibility drives adoption. Credibility, really, is all about trust.

Brand as Infrastructure: Navigation, Consistency, and Trust

So if a brand experience is the actual product, let's get specific about what that looks like in practice, starting with something as simple as navigation. This is Arc's homepage — the navigation is essentially seven words. It took us months to nail down. Why months for seven simple words? Because every one of those words is a promise to our users. If someone clicks "technical resources," they expect that information to deliver. If it doesn't, people stop trusting the brand and don't come back.

The same logic runs through the Learning Circle, our LMS. We called it a circle, and that name isn't random — our platform is Arc, our learning platform is the Learning Circle, and our firm's philosophy is something called Full Circle Thinking. It's all the same shape on purpose, by design. A portal says "system" — something you pass through. A circle says something you belong to. It's also my answer to a question I was actually asked to speak on today: how do you design a learning system that becomes part of how people work, instead of something they step away to complete?

Our Learning Circle catalog is still in development and testing, but it comes down to how everything is organized — how courses become learning paths, and how those paths form tracks people can see themselves moving through. Depending on the course, there may be a quiz, or we can track engagement to get real feedback that's usable for developing more content.

I want to be careful here, before I scare anybody: not everything needs this level of production. One example I showed is just a Teams recording we did over lunch — often it's one person interviewing another, informally. But the same care and branding goes into it as goes into something at podcast level: everything's organized, everything's colored, everything follows our brand guidelines. The principle scales down, but not the thoughtfulness.

All right — infrastructure. Once something is usable, the next question is whether it feels intentional. That's the brand. I like to use an iceberg illustration when educating people on what a brand is — some think it's just a logo, some think it's vision and values, but it's really the whole thing, the whole iceberg. That's the actual infrastructure. So build it like a brand — it shouldn't equal decoration, it should be your entire infrastructure. Use the tools, colors, and everything available in your brand guide — ours is inspired by nature — and every piece of Arc follows that same visual language, whether it's a corporate announcement, a shout-out, a kudo, or a project win. A good brand is recognizable, just like your favorite song in the first few seconds.

Chris asked me directly: how do you balance brand and information without losing clarity? The brand isn't just a layer on top of information — it's something that helps organize it. With the Learning Circle, just like the navigation, there was a lot of back-and-forth figuring out how to categorize our videos and lessons. If it's hard to find, that difficulty becomes part of your brand. The infrastructure's clear, the branding's clear through color, the hierarchy's clear, and there's consistency from lesson to lesson. That brand consistency creates trust, and that's really what it's all about — it doesn't become decoration, it becomes infrastructure. That visual trust becomes content trust, and trust is what we're after. So ask yourself: does what I'm doing help somebody get there faster? If not, you've got a problem.

Brand consistency requires somebody to constantly say no — if you're just making things look pretty, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Sometimes you have to say no to people above you, which is uncomfortable, but that's where I lean on Pat's mantra: if it doesn't have an element of beauty, it doesn't belong yet, because maybe we can make it look pretty. Strip it all down, and it's really about giving someone active management — the ability to say no and be the decision-maker, keeping things consistent week after week. That's what I call governance: somebody has ownership of the platform, and it's consistent and clear. That earns credibility and trust, which drives adoption. Consistency earns credibility, credibility drives adoption, and adoption and credibility lead to trust.

Assembling the Band: Building a Content Team

All right, I talked about guitar — I like music, so I'm going to talk about the band. Now that we've got something usable, none of it means much without the right people behind it, because being a one-man band wasn't sustainable anymore. This is where the band stops being a metaphor and starts being an actual answer.

How did we decide what the podcast even needed? That was driven by my friend and colleague Samantha — manager of technical operations and excellence, a former project manager who moved over to the dark side of non-billable corporate team members along with me. We get to go pester people all day and pull information out of them. The two of us identified a gap between our civil engineering experts and our survey and mapping experts — neither side was communicating certain things to the other — and that's where our Mapping Fundamentals series came from, building on an earlier brief audio podcast I'd made for a mentorship program.

So Samantha became my drummer — she helped keep the beat, I kept the harmonies, and we started making music together. Once we knew that gap existed, we needed a singer, and it took us two seconds to land on Marty, who you saw at the top of the video. Marty's a unique guy who always says yes, and a great lead singer — Brandon shared a highlight reel of outtakes and bloopers from working with him that had the room laughing. "I mean, how can you not just ask that guy to be in everything you do, right?" he said.

So we got to work. We built a small studio space — really just an office I hijacked that I don't let anyone else find out is available — with simple lighting and camera gear, and started writing content with Sam. But we realized we needed another band mate, so Megan joined as our bass player. She's the one actually conducting a lot of the interviews now, a role I could have kept for myself, but I strategically picked her because she's just over a year into her time at Fuscoe, genuinely curious, and a fresh voice asking questions of our seasoned experts is exactly what lets them let their guard down and be real.

The good thing about a band is the lead singer can change with each song. For Marty, it wasn't even a question — Sam and I just looked at each other and knew. Other times it starts with a voice looking for a platform, like a strategic new hire who's always said yes and will be in a three-part video for our next series, or Anthony, Marty's counterpart — the Sammy Hagar to Marty's David Lee Roth. Some songs start with the singer, some start with the song, and you need to know which one you're looking for first. But once you've found that person, respect their voice and their story. Don't sand it down into a polished marketing version — let it be their voice. We leave the cameras rolling, let people talk, and I disappear behind the camera as much as I can. I don't over-polish anything with AI — keeping things human is what makes it worth listening to.

Anthony: Another thing too that a lot of people have found out is that I'm also a major In-N-Out enthusiast. In-N-Out. In-N-Out. Double-Double. In-N-Out Burger.

Brandon: As you can tell, he loves In-N-Out Burger, and I left the camera rolling afterwards. We were just having some banter, and he must have said “In-N-Out Burger” a hundred times, so I thought, I've got to match that up and have some fun with him — so we did.

Chris asked me before this presentation whether the LMS is the hero of the story, or the podcast. I thought about it and realized it's neither — it's the people. Not the platform, not the format, but how you design the story around them.

One more wrinkle: sometimes you need the backing track. For technical content that doesn't need a human voice, we're experimenting with AI-generated narration from a transcript — something as simple as how to navigate project folders — with the same structure, color, and hierarchy. We're not fully committed, but it's something we're considering, especially as people come and go from the firm and we might not have that original voice available. We don't want people distracted wondering whether the voice they're hearing is even still with the company. But to be clear: when someone's lived the experience and is sharing their knowledge, get their voice. It's their history, unpolished, because that's the whole point — getting the human element. Scale the authenticity, not the production, and make sure it's repeatable.

We didn't want this to be lightning in a bottle, so we made it a repeatable process: the same pre-interview conversation, the same space and loose structure, the same editorial care and post-production, and the same review and launch structure. That's all by design, because design earns the right to be trusted.

The Unseen Work: Ownership, Buy-In, and Trust

So everything so far — the nav bar, the Learning Circle, the podcast — that's all output. But here's what it actually costs to get there: three things — ownership, leadership buy-in, and cultural trust.

First, ownership. What I haven't said yet is that the band I described is really an informal version of something more formal I built for the Learning Circle, called the Learning Circle Core Team. That team covers five areas: Kirsten, our HR generalist, handles onboarding and career growth; going clockwise, Nick, our CAD manager, handles applications and CAD training; Samantha handles operations and workflow; Jared, our IT senior systems administrator, handles tech support and network security; and I handle marketing and branding. This is the team of owners for our LMS content.

Before this team existed, information was scattered across platforms, or worse, sitting in Outlook — the crutch of the firm. Formalizing this gave ownership to five individuals, and ownership is a key part of the whole thing.

Second, buy-in. It's essential to get leadership buy-in. I used to believe in the "Field of Dreams" mantra — if you build it, they will come. It's a nice story, but it's wrong at the scale of a whole firm. Real adoption comes from the top; grassroots efforts can only take you so far. When our leadership started using Arc themselves and talking about it in team meetings — which took years — it stopped feeling like Brandon's project and started feeling like something that belonged to the firm. That shift, from Brandon's platform to our platform, was the whole ballgame — a real milestone for me.

Third, trust, which takes the longest. We use a diagram at Fuscoe about trust in terms of culture, and I've adapted it here: do we only know about the system, do we understand it, or do we respect and trust it? You win that slowly, through repeated, almost boring reliability — does search actually find things, does the link work every time? You have to do that for months. But you break it once, and you reset the clock.

Why Unseen Work Matters More, and Designing for AI

So the unseen work — why does it matter more? Experienced people are retiring, projects are becoming more complex and time-crunched, and AI is now changing how we deliver knowledge, whether we're ready or not. If ownership is unclear, a retiring principal's knowledge might leave with them, never fully captured, because no one was responsible for turning it into learning. If leadership isn't visibly bought in, the effort gets treated like an IT initiative and stalls. And if trust is thin, none of this matters, because your AI search is only as good as the credibility built underneath it — an AI system can surface a broken process just as confidently as a good one. It doesn't know the difference. Your people decide whether to believe it, and that's where it lies.

A bit more about AI, and how I think about this component. Back in my design days doing a lot of web work, there was a question of desktop or mobile first — it used to be easy, desktop by default, until the iPhone came along in 2007 and it became a mobile-first world. The same thing is happening today, but with people or AI. Do we design content for people, or for AI? The answer is both — designed so it can be understood and surfaced correctly, which then makes it accessible to people. Here's what I've learned: AI doesn't lower the bar on clarity, it raises it, provided you feed it good information. This is our AI search within Arc — I fed it a term from one of the podcast videos, and it surfaced real, live results from that podcast. When you have a real person behind the AI, trust goes up.

A lot of what I've talked about here is built on what I call the passion budget — passion projects, late nights, squeezing time between your real work to help people around you. But that passion budget has a ceiling. It crashes down on you, weighs on you, creates pressure, and turns from a fun hobby into a monkey on your back you can't get off. The way to solve that is by inviting others to join your band. Find your collaborators and build with them. Don't wait for permission to scale — refuse to stay solo, get your band behind you.

The Inside-Out Approach: Preserving Knowledge, Not Performing

Something I didn't fully realize about this approach until recently: most firms, when they think about something like a podcast or polished marketing content, build it from the outside in. I'm thinking of it more as inside out — we want to capture knowledge for our people first, and maybe there's a chance that knowledge escapes the walls of our firm later. It's a different posture, but I think it's durable and worth exploring.

When you're producing something like this, remember you're not necessarily performing for an audience — you're preserving information for your people, and the outward audience just happens to notice. Employees hearing their own leadership talk about things nobody's shared before, and having that spread through the company faster than any announcement or email could — that's the pattern we're trying to establish. So it's important to let the old well run dry — the old ways of spoon-feeding information and announcements — because people will find another way to get a drink of water. Move essential information onto the new platform.

That inside-out approach shows up in how we release content, too. We publish podcast episodes on Arc as posts people can interact with and scroll through, broken into video chapters, which ties into how it's organized on the Learning Circle. That builds familiarity with the brand and infrastructure, and people start having conversations about it organically within the post — it creates a fun, deliberate water-cooler moment, a little bit of FOMO. By the time that same content lands on the Learning Circle repackaged as structured lessons, it already feels familiar, because it has that same infrastructure. That's the same instinct as leaving sketches out on my desk: plan it, let curiosity breed, let the questions develop, and let the fuller story land on something people already half recognize. And because it's fully indexed with AI search, it's easy to surface — and because our people are behind it, employees know it can be trusted.

What's important is that one recording — one simple conversation with our surveyor — didn't stay just one thing. We kept him billable to his other projects with one hour of investment, which helps with leadership buy-in — when I ask for someone for a podcast, they know that's hours away from billable time, and we value utilization at Fuscoe. (Maybe I'll talk to my Canadian friends later and see if we can establish some change back home.) That one-hour episode was really twenty minutes in the studio — I build in a buffer when I say an hour. It became structured lessons for our LMS, a podcast episode, social media shorts for YouTube and Instagram, and, with help from transcripts and AI, a series of LinkedIn articles that the individual — in this case, Marty — could post on his own account, positioning him as an expert in his field. We're also hoping the podcast has legs outside our walls, on platforms like YouTube, Apple, and Spotify. All of that from twenty minutes to an hour in the studio — we're milking that time for everything it's worth, and none of it would be possible without the strategy I just walked through.

So: ownership, buy-in, and trust. When ownership is already settled, we can make fast creative calls without routing them through the chain of command for sign-off. When leadership has already bought in, the work has real visibility instead of quietly disappearing into a catalog nobody browses. When trust is already built, people actually press play instead of clicking past or assuming it's one more mandatory thing to sit through.

So if you're thinking about your next big piece of content, before you spend a dollar on production, ask three questions: Who actually owns this? Will your leaders agree to use it visibly for others — and I love the "glass wall" illustration shown earlier today, letting people see the work in progress. And do your people currently trust the system you're about to put inside of it? If the answer to any of those is no, or not really, or "I don't know," that's not a reason to stop — it's telling you where the real work needs to start before the creative work even begins.

Bringing It Full Circle

So, bringing it full circle — see what I did there — zooming all the way back out to our Learning Circle: every click is a promise, so build it that way. Designing learning like a product means treating every click that way: saying no to inconsistency, saying yes to beauty matters wherever you can leverage it, and finding the right voice by looking past titles to the people you already trust — not just principals and project leads, sometimes your senior people, sometimes your newest, whoever has a voice worth sharing.

Credibility is what turns your platform into something people actually trust and want to come back to, and that drives adoption, which in turn fosters more trust. This is our phrase, Full Circle Thinking — it's our marketing, our brand, how we approach engineering, and how we approach everything from accounting to IT to marketing to technical work. This is our Full Circle Thinking wheel, the process behind the brand in action: we research, we design based on the research, we construct based on the design and research, and then we check how things are performing — everything goes out into the real world, from projects to design tasks. And it's probably not lost on you that the clip you watched at the start is part of something called the Full Circle Podcast series — it's not just a metaphor, it's part of our brand, and now the Learning Circle is part of that brand too.

I started this talk saying I was a one-man band, and I was tired of it — but I'm not anymore. I have the full support of a drummer, a bass player, and a singer, with someone ready to step up to the mic every time, sometimes a new voice. If you're out there doing most of this by yourself, know that you don't have to keep doing it alone. And the next time someone asks who's really building your LMS, it doesn't have to be a committee or a department — it's just whoever's willing to keep doing the part that never makes it into the fancy screenshots. If you're lucky, you're going to build a good band around you.

Thank you.

Q+A

Chris: You mentioned you had to get buy-in to even just start the podcast. What was your pitch?

Brandon: A lot of the time, I do first and ask second — it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and that's something I live by. I talked a lot about trust in the presentation, and being at Fuscoe for nineteen-plus years has helped me build a lot of trust with leadership and the people who make decisions. I also have the fortunate ability to interact with nearly everybody who onboards at Fuscoe, from associate engineers to leadership, so I've built those relationships from day one. It was just a conversation that built up over time.

Chris: So you built some forgiveness into the relationship.

Brandon: Yeah.

Chris: Did you know from the start there was going to be an "out," the way you talked about the inside-out approach, or did that piece come later?

Brandon: I kind of designed it for the out — I'm always thinking about the polished product and how things will look to a big audience, and I design backward a lot, because that gives me a bigger vision for what I need in between. But shortly after I started designing everything outward, I recognized that it was actually more important internally, for the time being.

Chris: Megan's doing the interviews now — when she's writing questions, are they more internally focused, hoping something external comes out of it, or does she blend both?

Brandon: A little of both. It starts out informational, because we need to bridge the knowledge gap between departments — what is surveying, why does it matter, what's the difference between a parcel map and a track map, why do our engineers need to know that. It's a conversation they need to have, and now there's a piece of media that opens the channel. So mostly it's internal, but we weave in the awareness that we might send these externally too — for recruiting, for people curious about technical knowledge and career growth.

Chris: You mentioned sometimes you start with a topic and work toward a singer, and sometimes you start with a person and work toward the topic. How does that identification process work, and who's doing it?

Brandon: Mostly that's me and Samantha as the two main drivers, out of that core team of five. She works tightly with operations, and we're trying to develop a set of workflows that reflect the Fuscoe way of working rather than "the Fuscoe San Diego way" or "the Fuscoe LA way" — standardizing our collective voice. Picture a cross-section of the earth: Sam and I are in the middle, the core team is the next layer, and a group of people we know will say yes is the layer after that.

Attendee: This is more of a comment than a question. I think people are probably wondering how you pulled off a green-room studio, and how much it costs — we also have a green room at our company, and it doesn't cost nearly as much as you'd think. It shows the dedication to the cause, and it's not just a benefit internally — it's also a great recruiting tool. We put out YouTube videos, and by someone's second week they're already sitting down for an interview because of it. So don't get scared off — it's pretty affordable.

Brandon: I'll elaborate and agree with you — that space was pretty inexpensive. The biggest cost was really convincing people I needed to occupy one of the offices, thankfully one without windows, in our building from a move three years ago. I'd had a hand in planning that space, which helped, since I'd already built trust with leadership and decision-makers. As for gear: a DSLR camera, a cheap lighting package from Amazon, one more expensive LED light, a couple of microphones, and some acoustic panels you can buy online. I stole a couple of chairs from around the office, watched some YouTube tutorials, talked to buddies in production and podcasting for tips, and just put my hands in it and made mistakes — every episode gets better than the last.

Attendee: How often do you do the podcast — is it on a regular rhythm, or whenever you need to?

Brandon: Honestly, whenever we need to — but that's because Sam and I are meeting regularly, even if informally, grabbing coffee and hearing concerns rather than letting them sit. With this particular series, we actually recorded all of Marty's parts in one hour, so we were more efficient than doing three separate twenty-minute conversations.

Chris: Are each of those a series with the people you've interviewed?

Brandon: So far, yes — this one is Mapping Fundamentals: Subdivision Basics. The next one, with Kevin, another strategic voice we brought on, will focus on public-sector work like stormwater from another office.

Chris: It sounds like part of the driver is Sam noticing disconnects between teams or offices and wanting to fix that, but it also sounded like you were concerned about people retiring. How do you tackle that?

Brandon: Sam is kind of the office therapist for our technical staff — they go to her and vent, which is how we find a lot of what we need to talk about. On retiring voices: we lost our namesake CEO, Pat, three years ago to retirement, and we didn't have the podcast or the Learning Circle yet, so we're backfilling those channels now. A lot of what I do is go back and watch old videos of him — lunch-and-learns he gave — and turn those into lessons in the Learning Circle. That's passable knowledge, things that still pertain to our practices and our brand — our Fuscoe way and feel. Some things don't transfer or have life beyond someone's retirement, and those are the ones we're trying to capture.

Attendee: Who's tasked with taking what comes out of an interview and turning it into lessons? Is your team shaping what the lessons are, or going back to the person you interviewed to confirm the takeaways?

Brandon: The first pass is me — I edit the video in Premiere, so I'm very familiar with the topic by then. But it's also back-and-forth with the team, specifically whoever was in the video. I send them the transcript — Synthesis gives you a PDF and a VTT download — and I put it into Word, pre-divide it into segments where a lesson naturally seems to end and begin, and ask for their edits and suggestions. You can't change the video, but you can change where the breaks fall and what each lesson covers. I get some help with the lesson description too — the key takeaways and a "what's next" — using AI, fed with the transcripts, to help condense the time it takes to subdivide lessons and be concise about what we're expecting people to take away.

Attendee: Excellent branding, not just for the LMS but for your firm as well. It sounds like you were leading the organization of the LMS in addition to being the lead multimedia designer. If a designer isn't leading the construction of the LMS, what's the best way to fold that creative person into the process?

Brandon: That's a good question. It starts with who's passionate about it — I talked about the passion budget becoming a weight that crushes down on you, so reach out for help before you feel that pressure. Have conversations, find someone else with a similar passion for knowledge and how things look and get communicated in your firm. And if there's a creative person at your firm who isn't leading the charge on the LMS or Synthesis, they should be — I really believe that creative person needs to be part of this. Bring them into the band; don't carry the weight of being a solo artist. Get your drummer, find your bass player, start making music together as soon as possible.

Chris: I'd add — design isn't only visual design. Sometimes the learning strategy and approach happen without a visual designer, but then someone with a visual eye comes in and says, "I see where you're going, but we can make this clearer, more organized, make it pop, build trust." It needs to be designed — design is a big word.

Brandon: Those were some of the underlying battles I mentioned — besides how things look and are organized, it was getting the buy-in and trust, establishing the infrastructure before building the pretty thing on top of it.

Attendee: Quick question — who initially identified the podcast as the right platform to collect and absorb knowledge in your firm?

Brandon: That was me. Podcasts, even though they've been around a while, felt like a hot platform — people are always asking what podcasts you're listening to. We'd done something on Arc earlier where people submitted their favorite songs for a Fuscoe Spotify playlist, and someone asked if they could submit a podcast instead, since they don't really listen to music. That went in my pocket for later. We'd also done a short audio piece for a mentorship program, on empathy in the workplace, in a podcast format, and I wanted to expand that into video — so why not here?

Chris: Was part of it also about being concise — editing an hour-long conversation down to twenty minutes as a more distilled version of what someone was trying to share?

Brandon: It is. With something like Teams, when you're editing and cutting and it's noticeable, people start asking what got cut. I like to leave in the mistakes, the flubs, the dead space — it shows people processing and really thinking about the question, trying to deliver the best answer. That's credibility and trust.

Chris: Brandon, thank you so much.

Brandon: Absolutely — thank you.