💡This newsletter provide key insights for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovation in AEC who are short on time, offering the context of each conversation without the need to listen to the full episode. It’s designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in if the ideas resonate.

Before we get to the main course of this edition, here’s a fun appetizer: I was recently interviewed on the USModernist Radio podcast. If you'd like to hear some of my interests, history, and more you can check it out on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

What if the real competitive advantage in your firm isn’t a new tool, hire, or market sector, but the fact that you’ve intentionally designed how your firm learns, experiments, and aligns before you were forced to?

Summary

In TRXL episode 215, I talked with Wes Reynolds and Hugh Soward from OPN Architects about what it looks like when a firm treats innovation as something you build into the operating system, not something you bolt on when a client forces your hand.

What stood out to me is how OPN uses an all-firm annual retreat as cultural infrastructure, and how their digital practice work stays grounded in a simple question: does this help teams do better work, and does it create real value for clients?Their experiments spanned everything from reality capture and LiDAR to VR/AR and even curiosity around concrete 3D printing, but the point was never the tool. The point was adoption, trust, and momentum.

Catch the full episode

Key Takeaways

Here are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

• Treat retreat like infrastructure: If you want alignment across studios, you cannot leave culture to chance.
• Normalize experimentation (and failure) publicly: Innovation moves faster when people are not under the magnifying glass when trying.

Randy Deutsch joins the podcast to talk about what real adaptation looks like inside architectural practice. Not trend-chasing. Not tool collecting. But a fundamental shift in how architects think, learn, and operate in an AI-accelerated world.

Randy draws on decades of experience as an educator, practitioner, and author to explore why resilience, convergence, and continuous learning are now core competencies, not optional extras. The conversation spans design technology, professional identity, authorship, and the uncomfortable truth that the firms who survive the next decade will be the ones who change before they’re forced to.

This is a clear-eyed look at where architecture is headed and what it takes to stay relevant when the ground keeps moving.

Original episode page: https://trxl.co/216

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Connect with the Guest

• Randy Deutsch
  • LinkedIn
  • Website
  • Professor Profile – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Randy's former students mentioned:
  • Aaron Laniosz https://archinect.com/aalaniosz
  • Ben Feicht https://www.benfeicht.com

Recommended Reading

• The Agentic Architect: AI and the Resurgence of Practice (Routledge, 2026)
  • Randy's 7th book is coming out in the Spring of 2026
• Adapt as an Architect: Building Resilience and Agility in Practice by Randy Deutsch
  • Amazon Link
  • Focuses on resilience and adaptive strategies architects need in a changing world.
• Think Like an Architect: How to develop critical, creative and collaborative problem-solving skills by Randy Deutsch
  • Amazon Link
  • A foundational book on architectural thinking and design mindset.
• Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice by Randy Deutsch
  • Amazon Link
  • Explores how design technology superusers are reshaping modern practice.
• Convergence: The Redesign of Design by Randy Deutsch
  • Amazon Link
• ARE Hacks: Learn How to Pass the Architect Registration Exam by Evan Troxel
  • Amazon Link
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
  • Amazon Link
  • From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us.

About Randy Deutsch:

For over thirty years, Randy Deutsch FAIA has been an architect and educator, and more recently, an author, international keynote speaker, and AI researcher. As a licensed architect, Randy designed over 100 large, complex sustainable projects for which he received the AIA Young Architect Award Chicago.

In the last decade Randy has authored 6 books, most recently Convergence: The Redesign of Design; Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice (a “Best Future of Technology Book of All Time” recipient); Think Like An Architect: How to develop critical, creative and collaborative problem-solving skills; and Adapt As an Architect: A Midcareer Companion. In 2026 Randy will publish his 7th book, The Agentic Architect: AI and the Resurgence of Practice.

In addition to teaching at University of Illinois at Chicago starting in 2001 and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign starting in 2012, until 2019 Randy served as Associate Director for Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture. He previously served on AIA Chicago Board as Director and Vice President; on Architect Magazine’s 2018 R+D jury; led an annual Executive Education program at Harvard GSD; and served on the 2023 AIA National Design Awards jury.

In 2020, his team received an NSF Grant and DPI Seed Grant for planning a first-of-its-kind institute for the application of AI in design, construction and operations of buildings and infrastructure. He is the co-founder of the Built Environment Futures Council (BEFC). In 2020 Randy was elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.

As a book author, international keynoter, workshop leader, administrator, mentor and educator Randy aims to help current & future design professionals understand impacts of emerging technology on future practice, to plan for and navigate a fast-moving, uncertain future with confidence. More about Randy https://www.randydeutsch.com

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Connect with Evan

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Episode Transcript

216: ‘The Future of AEC Belongs to Those Who Evolve’, with Randy Deutsch

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Randy Deutsch back to the show. Randy is an architect, FAIA, educator, AI researcher, and author whose work has influenced how many of us think about BIM, data-driven design, Superusers, and the evolution of architectural practice.

He has a rare ability to connect the dots between technology, culture, and the long arc of a career in this profession. And we cover a tremendous amount of ground in our conversation today. In this episode, we talk about the seven year career cycles Randy uses to intentionally reinvent himself and how those cycles have repeatedly pushed him into new territories, including his now well-known focus on ai, which began when he asked his own students what his next side pursuit should be.

We get into the importance of cultivating insight, the role of deep work and the deliberate space required to do high quality thinking in an age of constant distractions. We explore the shifts from architect as creative problem solvers to what Randy calls checkbox checkers and the long pattern of tools, cad, bim, computational design, and now AI being sold as time savers, while often having the opposite effect inside firms,

We discuss what it would take to flip that dynamic and move the rote, repetitive, and risk driven tasks to machines so that humans can focus on judgment, creativity, and real value creation. Randy shares what he's seeing firsthand as a teacher: students eager for AI automation and advanced tools, but who still need the real world grounding of craft practice and professional judgment.

We talk about mentorship, the power of storytelling, and the tension between the work students imagine they'll be doing, and the reality of how firms actually operate today. We also explore AI as a means of augmenting who you are as a professional, not just what you produce, and how that opens the door to new roles, the new Superusers and hybrid career paths.

We also get into leadership and culture. The longstanding gap between visionary designers and healthy management. The need for better role models and the opportunity for this next generation of architects to build more supportive, sustainable, and human-centered practices. As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so please be sure to check that out.

If you're a paid supporting member of TRXL+, you can find that directly in your podcast app, and if you're a free member, you can find those over at the website. Which is trxl.co. Lastly, you can really help the podcast by sharing these episodes with your colleagues, and please leave a comment over on my LinkedIn posts or over on the YouTube channel where you can engage with me and the other listeners.

So now without further ado, I bring you my most recent conversation with Randy Deutsch. So, Randy, it's been four and a half years

since the last time you were on this podcast, which is crazy to me.

It feel, it does not feel like it's been four and a half years, but Wow. Does it feel like that to you?

Randy: Yeah. It, it, it does, um, in part because the first two times I was on the, uh, your podcast, episode was, I don't know if it was number 3, 4, 5, something like that. It's really in the early days.

Evan Troxel: Number four? Yep.

Randy: yeah, and then within a year, less than a year, I believe, you know, it was on again.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Randy: um, uh, back to back.

Um, you know it was on the tail of, uh, my book Superusers.

Evan Troxel: Right,

Randy: it was at the

beginning of the pandemic, which I know

this is a pandemic project for you

Evan Troxel: right.

Randy: on to fame and

fortune, which is fantastic.

Um, and so lots happened in that amount of time, but uh, it's fantastic to be.

Evan Troxel: Thank you so much for coming on the show again, and, and I was listening to you on another podcast and I was

intrigued to find out that you kind of treat

your professional,

trajectory in seven year increments. And

I don't know how much you hold directly to that time, but it sounds like ballpark,

you've switched gears every seven years, and I wanna talk to you about

the latest one that we're, I mean, we're, we're getting to the end of the latest seven year stint.

Is that correct?

Randy: That's absolutely correct. Yeah. Just taking a step back for a second. don't know my mindset at the beginning of my career 49 years ago, but I treat, I told myself I was gonna treat my career not like a David Letterman stunt so much as a, an experiment. I was gonna, you know, this is before social media back in the day when I first started out. But still, even then, there were people complaining that they were not making a lot of money in our field. So I was gonna see, you know, is it possible to make a lot of money in our field? Is it possible, um, to constantly grow? Is it possible to be in our field for 49, 50 years without being bored even one day? Um, so yeah, I tried a lot, you know, a lot of different experiments throughout my career. And one of them is what I've, uh, called a seven year career. Basically, I have the career of, of an architect that carries through. uh, the end of high school all the way. Obviously not a licensed architect at that time, but, um, had made a decision in 1977 that I was going to be an architect. once you make that decision, you take a deep breath and say, now I have capacity to come up with a side gig. you know, having a podcast might be a side gig, um, for me every seven years, almost to the day. Um, I have, uh, switched the side gig out and there's a lot of benefits for doing that.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. I,

Randy: I

Evan Troxel: I feel like I've tried to do those in parallel and I think it's interesting that you do them in series.

Uh, and so because it allows you to fully

commit and like go deep instead of doing everything at some, you know, lesser level

and therefore never having the ability to take the time, I mean.

Selfish isn't the right word. Right. But it's like you are doing this for you and you get to do it deeply, and I think that's super interesting, which has led to some pretty incredible outcomes. Can you kind of go through

some of those seven years stints and, and talk about what the outcomes have been of them previously and, and then maybe how the,

did it lead into the next one or not?

Was it something that you just wanted some contrast all of a sudden?

Randy: Sure. Um, I have found there that, um, I never had a plan for the side gig

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: as

once I was committed. To whatever it was going to be. Um, even if it didn't relate with the previous one, I was gonna throw myself in a hundred percent. I'm somebody who's not motivated by money. I'm motivated by

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: as anyone who's

ever. Not been mo motivated by money would understand. You can make a lot of money being not motivated by money, sort of taking the attention away from it, it, it will appear.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: so I didn't worry

about that so much. But

Yeah.

I started off at the beginning as a cartoonist. I paid my way through school, uh, working for local papers.

I'm not gonna go through all seven of them at this point. But yeah, the, um, I was the cartoonist for the Daily Alini where I now teach when I was a, a student, um, back in the 1970s. And after that I did a seven year stint as a playwright. I think the aren't the fact that I have plays that have been performed in won awards and now are sitting in my closet.

I think one of the outcomes is, is I am a person who has. Done a deep dive of seven years as a cartoonist and in part as an editorial cartoonist who had to collaborate with, um, editorialists, who had very strong point of views many times that were not the point of views that I held.

Evan Troxel: Cartooning on a deadline, also, right?

Like

Randy: I, and on a, and on a

Evan Troxel: right?

right,

Randy: Absolutely. Um,

and trying to come up with a salient idea. So one of the takeaways there is I learned that insights were much more important than just coming up with knowledge or information. Um, probably the biggest takeaway for me from all of these, uh, side gigs is that there are certain insights that I use every day.

I use insights from playwriting, cartooning from book writing and so on. So that, those are for me, the big takeaways. Um. this idea that one builds on the other. Um, I have a lot of people who say to me, well, of course you're a professor, so of course you're going to do public speaking. You're going to write

books. for me, uh, as somebody who's been teaching at the

university level for 25 years, I don't know a lot of professors who write books and publish books, it seems like a cliche that they would publish or perish, for example. And I don't know a lot that actually cross over from academia to public speaking. Um, so it is a little unusual in some ways, um, to, to do that. yeah, so it's kind of oppression time. I don't know if it's a coincidence or not that I'm talking to you now, Evan. Um, but I'm about to wrap up the 49th year. So I've had, you know, I'm about to complete seven side year, uh, seven year side gigs. then there's the 50th year, which. Um, should be really interesting because either I jump into another seven years. Um, and without getting too, uh, bizarre in terms of references here, but there's something actually in the Old Testament that talks about the jubilee year, Jubilee years where farmers historically would let the land life follow for the 50th year because all that planting that's been going on,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: is a great way to like

steal the nutrients from

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: right?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Randy: using that as a

metaphor and I kind of

feel that way, um, that, um, coincidentally I'm at the end of my teaching contract, um, this coming spring, and so I don't actually know what I will be doing in that 50th year. I don't know if you want to talk about the AI one, the one that I'm currently going through.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: um, that was a little bit of an interesting story since I picked up on the fact that one side gig doesn't lead to the other. That, um, six and a half years ago, I opened it up to my, uh, 150 sophomores. I just literally asked them to yell out what I should be doing as my side

gig for the next seven years. And yes, there

were yoga instructor or food truck operator, you know, some of the suggestions from people who didn't necessarily know me really well. Um, but someone yelled out, AI researcher,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: said, I'm just gonna do

that. And

you can argue I'd written some books on technology, and it would seem, again, as a natural segue into

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: But it

it wasn't, it was like

starting from scratch.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I, I am really intrigued in, in that, in the current one. And just kind of going back on this idea of going back to the idea of insights and, and how that, to me is also a common thread in these cycles is you sharing in a very public way these insights, right? So it starts with cartooning, but also in speaking that's something you do through speaking, it's also through writing.

It's something you do through writing these books. And I'm curious where, like, how, how does that work for you? So I'm reading the book Rick Rubin's book right now, the Creative Act. Have you have, you know, you're aware of this and I mean, you, you're talking about this 50th year. I just turned 51 2 days ago.

So, uh, this was my 50th year and I would say I'm in a similar place. And I find it super interesting that you even brought that up because it's like. One of the things he talks about in that book is like, if there's no room for something, like, like if you're full, if you're fully engaged in a thing all the time, there is not room for anything else to kind of work its way in.

And so again, going even back to the earlier part of the conversation where I say I'm trying to do multiple things all the same time in parallel, there's no room. Like, there's literally no space for, of course you can, little tiny digressions here and there,

but, but no

big digressions that like you offered up to your students, what should I do?

Like that is a inspirational moment. You could of course take it or leave it with what they throw out at you, but why not, um,

open yourself

to that opportunity

to, for intrigue and for inspiration. I think that that's super interesting. So back, back to my idea of, of, back to my con the concept of insight.

How does that work for you when it comes to what you're doing? Like where is that coming from? How are you drawing on that? Is it subconscious?

Are you actively pursuing insights? Are you using ai? You know, so I'm just curious, like how, how does that actually work for you as Randy Deutsch?

Randy: Sure. Thank you for that question, Evan. Um, so just to be completely transparent, in 1987, I, uh. A costarter co-founded a, uh, startup and it's called Deutsche Insights. And while there is a lot of market research involved, there's also naming companies and coming up with new products and so on. And so that, that doesn't occur anywhere on this the, uh, seven year career,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: uh, successive sigmoid, uh, curve chart. that's just something that I do on the side, but I, I think what's important about it is as architects, and I see this in my students as well, we're all trained indirectly, yes. In, uh, design thinking, but also in pattern recognition. It's this idea of recognizing patterns. And I started to notice after writing my first couple, you can call 'em textbooks, um, before I wrote the book Convergence that came out in 2017, noticed just when I took a deep breath, I go on long walks every day, and when I took a deep breath, I would realize. That in every podcast, in every article in white paper, in every presentation, at every conference, somebody would mention things are converging, but nobody would define what that is. Nor even go so far as to say, converging in what way. So it's looking for gaps just like anyone with the startup would do.

Look for a gap, something that's missing in the world, and maybe you can be helpful in some way. That's an insight. Yeah. I just connected the dots when I collected more than one thou, you know, this proverbial pile of scraps of paper, which now becomes proverbial, uh, files within a folder in your laptop.

And when that hits a thousand, that's a salient idea. This is something that has got enough traction, has got enough depth to actually be worthy of a book. And that's actually how conversions came about. That's how Superusers came about. Um, you can't worry about the fact that you're making stuff up, right?

So if I was in physics, if I was a psychologist with a PhD, I probably wouldn't feel as comfortable, um, connecting the dots the way I do in architecture

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: historically you

don't really need a PhD to

be a researcher. and ai, interestingly enough, it's very hard to imagine what an AI expert is when you can't literally get it to do the same thing twice.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Randy: so while,

yes, there are people that we recognize as AI experts, it provide a little bit of freedom, I think, with the seventh, um, side gig or seventh uh, side career to just say, you know what? I'm gonna give this a deep dive and try to get this to happen. So I think it is about pattern recognition. I think it's about. Recognizing that anecdotes and platitudes, like we see a lot of times in TED Talks, um,

are things we pick up on all the time, but there's more value out there. And the value we can really provide is trying to find a way to connect the dots and create something new that has never been said before. just to give you a real quick example, um, because I think it's helpful sometimes to have an example. One would be, I hear a lot of times that ai, will enable us as design professionals to create time and what are we gonna do at this time? So I listen to podcasts and again, white papers, presentations, well, they'll say there's one or two things we can do at this time. You know, we can create more projects and more work to make more money. Um, you could do more while work for less money. And that's about it. That's about as far as it goes. And so this idea that. as I say in my book, uh, think like an architect. are amiable skeptics, we're always skeptical. I'm skeptical when I hear there's only two things you can do with your time. So working with a few others and collaboratively. Um, and then just on my own thinking through this, uh, with a blank pad of paper. Yeah. Come up with five or six different things that you can do with that time that are just as valuable. Um, you know, a cynic may look at those saying, no, those aren't real.

You know, uh, self-care is not really something or work life integration, work life balance isn't really something you can do with your time. It is, that's a value to Gen Zs and those, uh, coming up right now. Right. So, and you know that from a RE Hacks, your incredible book, you, you allude to it without using the phrase, when you talk about. Um, this idea of take of studying for the exam, the a RE exam in a RE hacks, um, not just signaling to an employer that you're serious about the field, but you're signaling to your significant other, you're signaling to your family that you really care about, uh, them in their wellbeing. You're will willing to do a deep dive into this and become a licensed architect. I think that's really an important message. So I think there are these, you know, getting back to this, I think there are these other things that go on to the point that we can be skeptical more frequently without being cynical, I think is a great space to be in, to come up with insights.

Evan Troxel: Th this example that you just cited, what are architects actually gonna do with that extra time? And are they are, or do they not even see it that way? Do they not see it as having extra time?

Randy: Sure. So of course there are going to be some that say it's a myth, it's a fantasy to think that AI. will not that AI will create time. So I'm trying to avoid a double negative there. So in other words, um, there are those who just feel like they've heard the story over the years that CAD will create extra

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: it didn't.

And

BIM will create, and computational tools will, now it's just the next tool. No, I think there's plenty of evidence that ai, uh, even if computation continues to automate the low hanging fruit,

AI will do a great deal for us. shame on us. We don't recognize that there's additional time? Some of us,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: uh,

have anxiety about

this additional time.

Either it's gonna look like we're sitting on our hands in an

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Randy: look. Um, or we're anxious because we're not, we don't have side gigs and we don't know how to fill in that time. Um, or we haven't thought about it. But this is something that, you know, I've lo I've thought about long and hard.

I'm currently, uh, you know, completing the writing of my seventh book where I

talk about the six or seven different ways that we save time. I'm not gonna go through all them here, not, not because it's in the book, but because it, it does start getting into details. But I think the example of work-life integration is a perfectly good one where most people just think you're gonna, with this additional time, we're gonna do more work,

or, you know, we're gonna charge less for the work that we did.

And so, and we'll be able to compete more. There are a number

of things that we can do beyond that

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: that include work-life integration and

includes things like, um, doing more with less. The

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: we do not

feel like we

can focus on sustainability and, uh, saving our planet because we're too busy putting fires out in the office.

It actually frees some people to do, you know, to do that. Probably the most surprising one is this idea that AI will enable us to address quality. so that's something you can do with your time. You can

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: um, look at the work

that you have on the boards, so to speak, and, um, put more time and attention into really thinking through from a material standpoint, structural standpoint, and so on.

Um, maintenance standpoint. How can I make decisions here that address longevity for the project and quality?

if that's what is important to the values of your organization, to you and to those you're designing for, that is a worthwhile thing to focus on.

Evan Troxel: That one seems super, I don't wanna say obvious, but, but as a worthwhile, because I, I've, I've used the word meaningful, like, so you spend your time on more meaningful things, but, but quality is what we're talking about. And what's interesting about that one in particular to me is that because the tools, the literally the same tools are available to everybody, the quality level is actually just gonna be at a kind of a static level.

Everybody gets the same quality. So what are you gonna do? To stand out from that. And, and what I think is so interesting also, Randy, is that we're totally drowning in mundane crap all the time. And I, I wonder if we even remember what it's like to do the quality stuff, because it's like, yeah, you could spend that offset amount of time diving deeper, spending more time slowing down, which is what you're talking about.

It quality equals time. Right? And so in order to be able to do that, you have to literally shift gears and, and we have now been trained, all of the feeds are coming at us all the time. The phones are going off, notifications and distract. The, the distraction engine is, is at a hundred percent, if not higher all the time.

And so it's, you know, it's, it's like. Maker's schedule versus manager's schedule, right? Makers need solid blocks of time to do things. And when that time strikes, when the inspiration strikes, it's not on a clock. Like it's not at the same hour every day. It's when it happens, and you have to take advantage of it when it happens, whereas

manager's schedules are in 15 minute increments, right?

So it's like checkbox, checkbox, checkbox, checkbox. But I think more people over the years, even in this super creative field of architecture,

have shifted into the column of checkbox, checkbox, checkbox, checkbox.

And now we're

slowly boiling the frog to just, everybody's a checkbox checker, right? And, and so now it's an intentional,

maybe difficult shift back to,

you know, let the machines do the checkbox stuff so that we can show where the value truly is in this profession.

That's gonna be a really difficult shift for some people to make if they can make it at all because.

We're so used to checking the boxes.

Randy: Absolutely. So I'm gonna address that in a second. A couple things I wanna address before I forget. One is, um, hitting over 200 episodes is pretty amazing for

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: who came

up with a podcast

that's just gonna be around because of the pandemic. So kudos to you. That's

Evan Troxel: Thank you.

Randy: Um,

and then second of all,

hitting the age 50 or 51.

So by far my fif, my fifties were. Uh, a renaissance for me. They, I mean, I

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: knows what to

expect, but,

um, I turned my whole life around and I discovered that, um, there were so many things I can create during that time. So I'm jealous about the fact that you're entering your fifties now officially. No, really. it's

Evan Troxel: I better make you proud, Randy.

Randy: yeah, you will, you will, and you always have. So no worries there

Evan Troxel: I.

Randy: Um,

but this

idea of quality is something I see all the time. Um, it's almost a shame for me. It.

The fact that after teaching for 25 years, I'm going to be forced out due to my contract to not after the spring because something has happened where

for the last

half decade or so, every time I teach a senior studio, if we enter the A CSA competition, my students win. Or if they don't win, that they win the top prize in the school. And sometimes both. And what I'm getting at is, is

that going back to this idea of quality, I'll have seniors that I've had as

sophomores or as juniors, then when I see them in their final year of their undergrad pre-professional program, in the fall semester in particular, but it could also be the spring semester. Yeah, they will start working, if not in SketchUp. Sometimes they'll start working in Sim City. Whatever they feel comfortable with modeling or um, rendering in, um, that's what they'll use. And there is something in me where I, again, it might be pattern recognition, where I am just able to see the genius in each and every one of them and able to connect the dots where maybe if I just show full faith that they can do it, they, they will do it and it happens again and again.

Those that have won the competitions are not the ones, that are the top two or three, you know, students in, in the studio frequently. Um, they're the ones where the light bulb goes off because they didn't have the wherewithal to understand that quality is something that either they could be part of or that was even needed.

You and I have the perspective to know that. Yeah, you, you know, this is a, a, a typical bias of anyone that's been around for a couple decades that things are worse now in so many ways than they were several decades before.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: say in architecture, they

actually are. But the reality is, is that architects are only responsible for two to 3% of the built environment.

So what are we really talking about here? Uh, it could be the non-architect, you know, um, uh, design projects. Um, yeah, it is a huge opportunity. And I guess what I'm trying to say here, a couple things. One is that, um, yes, we see it, um, uh, in our students as they go out into the field that now they graduate with this understanding that they're completely capable of designing something at the highest level, which is, you know, something coming into the studio they could never have said or believed

Evan Troxel: Right.

Mm-hmm.

Randy: thing is a really interesting thing happened, uh. before the pandemic, but it definitely blossomed. Um, I know you had Corey Squire on the show and his book is really outta this world. Uh, hopefully in your show notes you'll link to it

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: Um, it, to

me it's probably,

you know, Eric SLE wrote the best book a decade ago, um, down Detour Road,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: Corey

Squire wrote the best book in the

last 10 years. It's just unbelievable. I hand hand out free copies to my students all the time, and I keep rereading it over and over again. But where I'm going with this is, is that, um, the framework for design excellence is the kind of thing, you know, it's put out by the a i a,

you can

roll your eyes at it, but. We have left this paradigm where we think aesthetics is really why we're in the field working for wealthy clients, uh, and so

on, and it creates a whole new level of design criteria that we're aiming for. And that design criteria, yes, it can include aesthetics, but it doesn't talk about that directly. You cannot give a design

award to a home any longer, no matter how exceptional. water could not win an a i a award because it's a home. And unless it became something open to the public like it is now, it is in, it's considered inaccessible.

And the whole idea is that we make buildings, uh, um, addressing social and racial justice where it's part of the community, it invites the community and so on. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that with the framework of

design excellence, we have a whole new way of looking at quality. It's not saying to us that we have this design criteria now

Evan Troxel: Right.

Randy: we're not creating pleasing projects.

We're creating aesthetically pre pleasing projects that are also accessible and part of the community and do a thousand other things that are

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: to people.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: I think

quality

does become this really important, uh, thing for us to focus on.

Evan Troxel: Let's talk about your, your latest seven year stint that you're wrapping up and, and, and what kind of,

I don't know how you wanna frame it. The, the discussion. I would love to just kind of see what, what's top of mind for you as far as like takeaways from this. There's obviously like the reaction of our industry and our profession

to this, that we're just steeped in all the time, and that's probably a moving target as well.

Um,

I'm, I'm just curious your kind of, let's just start big and then maybe we'll zoom in on a couple things with, with your AI focus for the last seven years.

Randy: Sure. So thanks for the question. Um, to start off, um, because while I did not believe six and a half years ago, there was such a thing as an AI expert, I wanted to at least immerse myself as much as I could in it. And so things that I did, I got a phone call one day to join an incredible team. I'm in the architecture school, of course, we're down at the far end.

Um, on the south end of campus. We have 60,000 students at University of Illinois. Champaign Urbana at the

North End is the engineering

campus, and it was the civil engineering and computer science group that wanted me to be part of their team.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: I said,

without getting too spiritual, um, or mystical here, um, as soon as I said to myself, yeah, I'm gonna ate myself to ai, I got a call saying, we are going to. Uh, create this initiative. We're gonna go after a Discovery Partners and a National Science Foundation grant, and we're going to create an institute for AI in Chicago and so on. Will you be part of our team? And so we started with a, you know, less than million dollar grant, um, for the planning phase and went after a $20 million grant. Um, our current administration is making it a little bit

difficult, um, to get National Science Foundation grants or NIH grants, which we've tried both, um, for the second part. Um, but being part of that

team made all the difference in the world. And I did get to keynote one of our conferences where we had over 200 firms, cons contractors, architecture firms, engineering, consulting, and so on. Um, we had a series of, um, conferences that we rolled out, um, where we shared notes and we looked at how AI is being used in the field. So right there, it created a Mil u Um, from which I was no longer just reading articles online about ai. At the same time, I created a course called Design and Construction Futures focused entirely on ai, invited really smart people, much smarter than me who are using it in the field, and if they're not using it, to come and talk to students, explained why they're not, what's keeping them from doing that. And, and that lasted a couple years. The internal politics in my school, I am not a tenured professor, um, meant that, um, my class was competing or stealing students away from. Tenured professors classes. So that was short-lived. It lasted only four years. But because of that, the students were exposed to really remarkable research, and I was as well.

So I learned a great deal even just teaching that class. Um, the Built Environment Futures Council, I know you've had, uh, Matthew Crystal on your incredible podcast, and, uh, he and I co-founded the, uh, BEFC several years ago. Um, again, inviting really smart people, a very diverse group of people. I wanna mention that my design construction FUS class, equally diverse, multifaceted, multi-disciplinary group, um, not not what you would expect at all.

And I think the B-E-A-F-C likewise, uh, that diversity really, uh, helped. Group and we all benefited from the different points of view, view and background. Um, so what I'm going with this is, and this is um, not to belabor the history here, but immersing myself in real things with real people has made all the difference in the world.

Even in my current book, as I did in Superusers, I've interviewed 19 people from around the globe and to understand how they're using, uh, ai, but more importantly on the subject of agency, human agency, um, how important it is to be genic while using it before the rise of genic ai. Um, so there, I think what happened is, um, immersing myself in this topic, I just let it go.

I met, I've been meditating every day for 45 years, and I think that's a really important thing because a lot. Of what you said earlier, um, alluding to this idea of letting go and creating from some free space. I think there's this thing during the pandemic called quiet quitting. I am a loud quitter. Um, I belong to five, five mentoring groups,

Evan Troxel: Uh huh.

Randy: in recent

years, and I'm down to one.

And it's only because, you know, we, we signed a contract saying we will be part of this organization, this group one mentoring group, um, until you, you basically,

Evan Troxel: Exhausted.

Randy: you're exhausted,

right?

Um, but short of that, yeah, I've, I've overcommitted it different

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: but

yeah, there's, so just tells

me, you know, that. There's nothing more important to do than to sort of cleanse the pellets. So, while filling myself up with all of this, I heard myself last spring say to myself, um, saying actually to another couple, they, they flew in from San Francisco, we're having dinner, and they said, so what book are you working on next?

What book are you

writing next? And I remember saying to them, I'm not gonna write another book. I'm done with all of that. Um, I went home that night and wrote a book proposal. Who knew? And I submitted it. It, uh, to a publisher in the

uk, one that I had burned by working with another UK book publisher. I went back to the previous one, so

right there, they could have ignored me from having blown them off earlier.

Um, I did really well by them and they did well by me and I didn't work with them again.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: on me.

So when I'm going with this is,

is immediately they, they asked for a little more detail and then after that the next thing they sent me was a book contract. And why I'm mentioning this is, um. None of that would've happened, nor the talks or keynotes that I've given and the insights I've shared, if I didn't sort of empty everything every single day. I think that's an incredibly important thing, whether it's quiet or loud quitting, whether it's meditating, I think we all need, or going on long walks. I walk 10 miles a day. Um, I think it's incredibly important to constantly empty ourselves and then trust the fact that there's going to be something there on the other side. Um, so couple that with

pattern recognition. Couple that with, um, this idea that, um, we're skeptics or aimable skeptics, and whenever we hear these things, here's a real quick one. So, you know, of these 19 people I interviewed for my book, yes, there are several that are leading technology or digital technology or design technology initiatives within their very large, very familiar organizations where they're not allowed to use ai, right?

It's shut down because of, ip, uh, intellectual property or copyright or other threats, uh, perceived threats. And that's a shame because while some of those threats are very real at the same time, uh, we need to compete with each other. We need to step things up. We need to work with each other shame on these organizations because, um, in the code of ai, code of ethics, one of the, uh, things that we all sign off on is making sure that our employees are kept up to date. Um, not just with the standard of care, but with the latest technology so they remain employable. Um, that's one of our responsibilities as firm leaders is making sure the people that work for you are not held back. Not that because, not because you want them to leave your organization and, you know, work for your competitor and then compete with you, but because that's part of our responsibility is making sure they go to conferences and they're exposed to these things. the firms that are not using AI are not going to give the opportunity, uh, to their employees. They're just gonna have to on their own, find ways to keep up with ai. And that's not as easy to do from a financial standpoint for a lot of architects. So I have found this to be the most exhilarating six and a half years of my life.

It's just been an amazing. Process. I would say the thing I've benefited most from, or the product that's really come out of this is not a book so much as the q and a period after these keynotes or talks that I give. just, I mean, you can tell when people are signing up for a talk because they want learning units, especially the

Evan Troxel: right.

Randy: very

rarefied hsw. Um, there's no q and a afterwards, but I always allow 20 to 30 minutes including hanging around afterwards. And one that I gave recently in Colorado and one I gave recently in Salt Lake City, Utah. Um, yeah, we talked for an hour afterwards about AI in the q and a and it's not listening to myself talk, I don't know the answers to a lot of the questions.

You just trust that you're thinking together in real time and

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: will appear

and I feel like. is the real benefit from all this. I would never have been part of that, even as an audience member, um, had I not taken this on. Um, so shame on me for not being a yoga instructor or

food truck proprietor, but I do think, uh, this, you know, being alive at this time on this planet and being exposed to the things I've been exposed to, um, including talking to you right now for the third time on your podcast, um, it's a real gift.

And if I do nothing else after this, I think it's been an incredible life. So thank you.

Evan Troxel: Well, that was an amazing, I I'm ready for a digression though. Are you ready for a digression?

Randy: Please.

Evan Troxel: Because, because the what, what you're, it's bringing up things and, and it was actually today that I've started to change my mind about the future of this profession a little bit. And, um, it was through reading one of the very short chapters in Rick Rubin's book, which I mentioned earlier.

So, uh, page 117, beginner's Mindset is the name of the chapter. And it, it made me think about the profession of architecture, especially with a conversation, you know, context, a little bit of context. The conversation I had yesterday, kind of where I have already started to shift my thinking in one way. But then today it kind of radically shifted again around. There's always this question at all the conferences and, you know, in LinkedIn posts and what's gonna happen with architecture, with ai, right. What's gonna happen? And what my thinking used to be was, uh, I was always fearful for the older generations in the firms of, you know, because, because architecture is delivered digitally, right?

And the older generations don't have the skill sets because that wasn't their training because it's, you know, look at the modern user interfaces, at least for desktop applications. They're, they're like, it's like looking at the dashboard of a, of a jumbo jet, right? It's like, just controls everywhere. It's not intuitive, you know?

And, and it's only been in the last, you know, 15 years maybe people actually started thinking about user interface, user experience kind of conversations. And so, I get it, and I, I used to be concerned for those people that, that they were gonna age out of the profession early. Now I'm super concerned with the younger generations just never getting the experience and, and being brought into firms solely for the purpose of operating technology and being forced to do very mundane stuff for a very long time.

But that is also how you become an architect, right? You, you gain experience through the doing. And I went to a polytechnic University. It was learning through doing, and I was an early technology adopter. And so that just became part of how I operated, but it was the rarity. And now obviously that's completely flipped, but my concern then became about the younger generations not, I mean, how many students or, or young graduates or early professionals get to go on site visits where the rubber meets the road, right?

Where the line you drew actually meant something. And we're gonna go talk about it and we're gonna look at it and we're gonna look at precedent and we're gonna look at examples. And that is so rare, right? Um. But now I'm, because of technology, I'm actually concerned that the, that the younger professionals are completely at risk because the software does almost all of the things that they could do hired as a recent graduate.

Right? It's like all of that stuff is not all of it, but I'm gen, I'm generalizing to an extent, but a lot of that is unnecessary. Like, and, and the learning curve is now embodied in the software, right? Like it just, it knows a lot of stuff. And so I'm c I'm, I'm interested where, what you think about that.

And I want, I wanna throw in my, my new additional twist, which is this beginner's mindset chapter that I read this morning, which is I think that this profession has been suffering for a long time, of not allowing a beginner's mindset, not allowing the ability for. New graduates to experiment and explore and say, what if we did it differently?

There's been, they've been completely shut down for a long time in that regard. And now that the software is picking up a lot of the weight of the day to day, there might be room for that again. And I think it's very interesting as of today, and I may, you know, maybe other people are way ahead of me on this,

but I think this profession is ripe for reinvention

because I think the old version of this profession

kind of doesn't deserve to exist anymore.

And I know that that would be really hard to swallow for a lot of firms that have been around for a very long time. But

the world is changing way faster.

Then architecture is, and I think architecture is going to hit a wall very soon. I'm, I'm curious what you think about all of that that I just threw at you.

I know there's a lot, and I'm not framing it very well because this is all very new to me to even be thinking about, but I'm throwing it out here now just to, I think you're the right person to talk about all this.

Randy: Thank you. So again, without plugging my think like an architect book in 2020, when the book came out, I have several chapters on the, that focus on beginner's mind. I think that it's an incredible mindset to have no matter what we're doing. And

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: talked about it

today to some extent.

Also in the show notes, hopefully you'll have a link. He's not a competitor, but Rick Rubin has an amazing podcast called, uh, te Teton.

Evan Troxel: Tetragrammaton. Yes.

Randy: Right. And what I love about it is he approaches. If he does prepare in advance for his podcast, he, um, he comes in with a beginner's mind and just pure curiosity.

So I will listen to one of his guests on another podcast with somebody who's very intellectual and over prepared. And then I'll listen to him for four hours, over two volumes or two episodes talking to the same person.

And his are a hundred percent of the time always better discussions because he's living in real time.

He's emptied himself, he's open to the moment, he has beginner's mind and curiosity. So I think to the

extent that whether

it's from his book that you're alluding to or just from his example, I think it's something that we can all do, uh, uh, do really well for ourselves to emulate it. Going back to your question, I have concerns about the field of architecture, in part because to a fault. have dedicated the last 20 years of my life to architects staying in the field.

Evan Troxel: I Absolutely.

Randy: talking about,

right. Talking about

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: books, talking

about startups, or talking to people

in startups. know, I

Evan Troxel: adapt as an architect,

right? Your book.

Yep.

Randy: right. Uh,

adapt as an architect, which you're

part of. Um, and, but even in, uh, 2018, um, in this month, November, 2018, seven years ago, uh, I spoke at Harvard, GSD, uh, I was invited to speak there and I spoke about staying in the profession, and that's very controversial to those who feel like they wanna leverage their education or transferable skills into another area.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: be free to do

that, but I think

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: a

real deficit.

So, real quick factoid.

Up until our new rollout of our curriculum, four years ago,

97% of our

students. That I surveyed is the former head of the grad

department. Year after year, I would survey them, 97% of our students said they wanna become licensed. And with the new rollout of the curriculum, which could be described as being more general, more about transferable skills, less about professional skills, it's gaming the system, a little system. And for that reason, 50% want to be or see themselves as licensed architects. that is the industry average in education is that most schools

aim for 50%.

So where I'm

going with this is, is I'm a little concerned that when I survey my students, now I teach the, so the whole sophomore class, I don't think the. School, I'm in the college that the school is in, or even the university knows. As I've been teaching this for 15 years, I have the entire sophomore class and at the midterm point I say to them, nobody knows we're in this room. We're in a huge lecture hall, 150 students, and I say, we can do whatever we want in this class. What do you wanna do? so I give them 30 or 40 ideas of, of what we can talk about the rest of the semester, or we can talk about building performance. And they always opt for the more exciting stuff. They wanna talk about AI and so on.

Where I'm going with it, with this is up until this year, group of students would say they want to hear about how to become licensed. And a certain group would say they wanna learn about how they can leverage their transferable skills and do different things. year for the very first time, those two groups were the exact same students. In other words. They're just sort of keeping, you know, like you would expect Gen Z to do, keep all their doors open,

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Randy: um, right, and all their options

open

forever and never close the

door on any of them. So, um, yeah, I bring people in from NCARB to talk about licensure. I would talk with them about transferable skills and set them up with all the wonderful resources that are out there. It concerns me that, um, they're not entering the field dedicated to what they are trained to do or why they went to, to went into it to begin with. another interesting factoid. It's anecdotal, so don't hold me to it in the sense that while it's accurate, it may not represent everybody else's experience. of my male seniors. Are leaving

architecture for construction management

Evan Troxel: Whoa.

Randy: and it's not.

Yeah, and I've taught construction management classes not to these students. They don't know that. Um, I teach construction, I teach building performance. It's not because of that. When I survey them and take them one at a time aside, it's because they do not see themselves having a future in architecture and shame on architects and our professional organizations for not painting a picture of what that might look like.

Evan Troxel: 100%.

100%. I, I have thought, because I, I think about this kind of as a parent child relationship too.

If you don't model

what

they could become in like

the best way possible,

what what are you doing? You're totally squandering your position to be to,

and, and, and that is super selfish

to me. It's like

if, if you don't model.

If you if you can't show a model of what the potential is that somebody could become with excitement and vision, and I'm talking about this at a very conceptual level, right

then, then what do they have to look forward to, and why would they choose to do that 100%.

Randy: Exactly. So whether it's Tatiana Bilbao, whether it is Richard Rogers or even Wes Jones, the architect, I from time to time will create these little 10 or 15 minute long. Biographies and present them to my students. As you know, here's Will Sup as a student hitchhiking through Europe. Here he is as a 40-year-old who's primarily an artist more than anything else who designed the, the Sharp Center for Design in Toronto, one of the most extraordinary buildings ever created that you could only do if you were an artist.

But he found a way to get it so it doesn't fall down and it lives up to all his values. But the point I'm trying to make is, yeah, give them serving suggestions for who they could become.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: we used to have

posters up on the wall. Yes, they

were probably rock posters more than anything else of rock heroes, but, or sometimes celebrities.

But it's this idea, you need to be able to have a picture of what

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: You can always abandon it if it's not a good

match for you. Um, but you need to start somewhere. So I agree. And I don't feel like our professional organizations are painting that kind of picture. Things are very fragmented right now, and

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: ai,

the main concern of

the students I had in designing construction futures class is this idea that first computation and then AI would take care of the low hanging

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: I'd have a

student just really sincerely say yes. But that is literally what I was planning on doing

my first three years in a firm. just learning from somebody in the organization, now something else is gonna do that. So I think the beginner's mind is really the answer in some ways as well as human agency playing up agency, building it first, recognizing it in yourself, and then developing it further because. Yes, things will change. We are no longer drafting bathroom details or whatever it is in these horror stories that people had

at the beginning, um, of their careers before they stepped up. You don't any longer need to go through this long pro, you know, uh, projection where you are paying your dues

at the beginning. I think it is possible to enter an organization for the wrong reasons, because you are a digital native and no one else in the firm knows how to start a computer or whatever. Um, but once you're there, one of the things I teach my students, it's, it's such a meta thing to teach, but now you're in the, the firm.

I, I explained to them Daniel Burnham, I'm in Chicago right now. Daniel Burnham was, you know, get the job, get the job, get the job. So you've gotten the job, you've got your foot in the door. That's the most important thing. And now that you're there, yes, for a couple weeks, possibly months, you're gonna be doing some things that may not be your favorite things to do. But you're gonna see from the corner of your eye, another team as you're leaving at five or 5:30 PM because that's all you need to do. If you're carrying banker boxes to the warehouse or whatever it is you're asked to do, you are noticing this team's got a fire to put out. They've got a project due the next day.

Could you volunteer for them? Now you've got another manager seeing what you're capable of and so on, and they will vouch for you in the next, yeah, they see you've got a good attitude and so on. Don't work for free. Hopefully you'll get paid for the overtime for doing that. So I'm not suggesting that people work overtime or, you know, I, I do think they should have work-life integration or work-life balance, but at the same time, there are lots of opportunities to step up. I don't see this whole idea of victimization of people entering the field and it being this dire, you know, it, it will not match what you and I experienced in larger or mid-size organizations in our career. For sure, it will not be the same, but at the same time, I also don't think that's the end of the world.

I do think the architecture profession needs to change. Perhaps

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Randy: a whole nother conversation because that's,

uh, you've had it several times I think on the show, so kudos to you. um, um, I don't know who needs to hear that, but I don't think they're listening. Um, but, but I think

importantly, at the same time,

I think there's a lot of opportunity for our graduates should they choose to continue on in architecture.

Evan Troxel: And, and to be clear, I totally agree as of today,

and it's, I've, I've, I've never gone, I, I didn't just flip over 180 degrees, but,

but because the current incumbent nature of our profession is so opposed to the kind of change that we're seeing, like for, for example, Autodesk is huge in our industry. It is a drop in the ocean of what's actually going on with technology worldwide, right?

Globally. And, and so we look at it as kind of, this behemoth is not even close to a behemoth of anything. And so.

Randy: that a step. I would take it a step further, and that is the work that Autodesk does in the a EC industry is a drop in the bucket

Evan Troxel: Yes. Of,

Randy: Autodesk

Evan Troxel: of even Autodesk. Correct.

Randy: Okay.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and so I, I, I see tremendous opportunity for the students of today to completely disrupt this profession in a very, a reinvention kind of a way, because most of the time and effort. Of, of anybody who's going into this profession is spent cracking the culture code of this profession, right?

It's school, it's, it's like the indoctrination of all night. You know, maybe these aren't even recent examples anymore of like the tropes of architecture students, but all-nighters work your ass off. If there's more time, there's more work to do, um, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's licensure, and then there's the profession itself, which is, you've gotta do it the way that I've always done it, the way that we do it, the way that I've done it before, you've gotta pay your dues.

All of those things. I think that stuff is basically ready to completely go away and, and the current profession is not ready for that, but who cares anymore? Like the, to me, like the, all of the opportunity is in those brilliant minds that the genius that you see in your students to start something in Sim City instead of.

Revit or Rhino or whatever

to come up with new ideas with a complete beginner's mindset because the software is going to fill in many of the gaps. Not all of 'em, of course. I mean, to me, like an ideal partnership would be,

you know, a,

a student or a student group

with incredible ideas and somebody who's willing to take the risk and a complete integrated partnership happens where it's like,

you guys

do the amazing work.

I'll make sure that we can actually

make it work for real when the rubber meets the road, when this thing needs to get built. And we are gonna do things that this profession

rarely, if ever sees. I think that there's huge opportunity there,

Randy: I completely agree, and I don't think it is limited to design technology specialists,

Evan Troxel: right.

Randy: I am seeing,

really sharp, smart former students doing really amazing things. If you allow me just for a minute, uh, not to digress, but to provide to examples, um, one is a former student, Ben Fe, F-E-I-C-H-T.

He's in the, uh, Pacific Northwest and he is an exhibit designer now. He's been an architect for a long time. Yeah. He just goes home and starts messing around with AI and he asks. Can AI do every, this is a year and a half old question for him, but he asked, can AI design a whole museum from scratch?

Because a lot of people were saying it can't design buildings or does working drawings really poorly and yeah. Um, he was able to go through the whole process. But one of the takeaways from that experiment, which I think is really fascinating, is just a simple tool, using chat JBT and it's called, um, GPT Redline or

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: GBTI believe it's

called. And all it is is

he uses this tool to look at his wall sections and make suggestions for upping the R value, um, without raising the cost. And it does all the time. And that's just like so amazing. It even goes a little bit beyond this assignment that he created for himself. So that part, this idea of the beginner's mind, the curiosity, messing with the tools at home are all the things we love about, um, you know, this upcoming generation.

Another one just actually last week came to our school. He graduated eight years ago. Aaron, uh, Ash is how his last name's pronounced. Um, he actually designed whole convergence book for me in 2017 when he was a student, uh, including the cover, um, as well as the cover for my current book. Um, the Genic architect, um, he, um, he's just experimenting all the time.

I mean, just doing, just really. Amazing things, um, where, you know, he wants to come up with an electric motorcycle that's really easy, inexpensive, and really easy to build or switch out the parts. He won a competition for doing that, so he does a lot. He's trained as an architect and he's designing architecture, but at the same time he's trying dozens of different things.

He's actually, uh, a full-time curriculum designer for these really innovative high schools all over the globe, um, which is very cool. Um, so yeah, he's leveraging what he does. He's, he's very happy in his career. He's empowered. And also he, as he points out all these things he does other than maybe the motorcycle side, are very lucrative.

So he's really happy that, uh, that part of his career is nothing to be ashamed of, so kudos to him. So, yeah, I, I think, um, we're gonna see a lot more of this. I would prefer that some of this time and attention from some of our graduates is put back into the field or into the profession. Um, but there's, you know, I, I'm also a parent and it's very hard to see.

It's a little bit like pushing rope a little bit. Um, it's very hard to get it to happen. You can tell them what your wishes are, but they need to just follow the dictates of their own

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: and right. So, um, you can paint that picture. There's no guarantee they're going to follow it, but I'm always pleasant, pleasantly surprised to see the results when they're done.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

It, it gets back to the idea of like, of course there's that relationship where like the kids are, are never gonna do what, what you say. So if somebody else says it, sure. Even if it was the same thing. Um, but, but to have those models as. That possibility and that the potential of what could be. Um, that to me is that, that is, like, that is huge.

And I, you know, with, with all of the push into equity and inclusion and having people in positions that people could see themselves becoming, um, is, is amazing. And there's still a dearth of excellent examples. I, I feel like, and, and, and in many ti many cases, the examples

are not great culturally, right?

They might be great in a category, design, visionary,

um, whatever that may be. But culturally, as far as like what it actually takes to get the work done

is there,

that falls on the negative side in the negative column many times. And so you gotta pick your, your idols, you know, very judiciously. But, but there's not that many in our field of.

To, to really shoot for. And I think that, that it, it's, it's interesting that you pull examples in that aren't what you would consider like the usual suspects as as examples and actually kind of paint the picture. I think that's super interesting.

Randy: Part of that is design technology. Right? So, you know, not to pull AI back into this, but some of us have had experiences with AI where the only way you can explain it is it's magic.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: mean, maybe, maybe

you pat yourself in the back for

giving it the most remarkable, perfect prompt you possibly could have given.

Evan Troxel: What are the chances?

Randy: yeah, what are the chances

exactly, but the results sometimes that you get back gives you hope that it's just. Yeah, it, it's very self-empowering

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: that at your fingertips.

Same with computation. I mean, the way I see my students in studio work now where I give them an impossible assignment to change the material, put, you know, we're doing steel competition right now, so to put more steel in their project, and one of them just has the wherewithal with Dynamo or Grasshopper to get it to do what I asked them to do, the impossible. And it's just done

like they're using charcoal or a pencil. I

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: no more to it

than that.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: it's,

it,

it's just an extension of themselves. So,

um, this was always the dream. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is. Um, I do think just having that experience other than drinking coffee and getting a good night's sleep,

I don't know what el I mean,

you mountain climb, right?

So

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: you, have these exhilarating experiences out there, so you know what it can be, but, um, that gets you to that next level. But I do think these design tools, um, give from time to time this experience for people that otherwise won't be able to experience this higher level possibility for them. Um, and I'm sure there's a better way

of describing it than that.

Um, it's a, you know, it's in some ways it's very California. Idea, um, where they are able to operate on the level they never have before. And my job as a professor is just to get them to, to stop, take a deep breath and look at what they've done.

Because it's just like at the beginning of the semester, you're the same person, but there's no way in the world you would've ever thought that you

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: what you create.

So I think these

two examples, um, with Ben and Aaron that I had just mentioned and many, many others, I think those are the ones that are the most relatable to our students in the most inspiring. I feel like the media shame on them play up too many of the. You know, the more, um, central casting views of what an architect who competes with the other partners to get the better project and then gets the, you know, the reporter or the journalists on a one-on-one so they can tell their version of the story,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: And yes, they

created it all by themselves,

Evan Troxel: Right,

Randy: a team of hundreds Right.

Evan Troxel: right,

Randy: Yeah.

I

don't, I don't think that's very

helpful and

Evan Troxel: right.

Randy: it's

very empowering,

and I don't think that's the,

the story that is gonna mean a great deal to, um, our students. I do teach in a program, university of Illinois. In a, when I teach the whole sophomore class, it's called Anatomy of Buildings. And I happen to have collected, whether it's Gene Gang or um, many other brilliant architects, you know, uh, Caesar Pelley, um, have uh, taken this course in our program years ago as a student. And so that's like a way to get students also to see, you know, it's not a

guarantee. You take

Evan Troxel: They were in that chair.

They were in that same chair. That that chair Right,

there,

Randy: Exactly. Exactly. But I

Evan Troxel: same as you.

Randy: Look to your left and look to

your right.

There

might be a cesar, probably might be a gene gang

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

It might be you.

Randy: not even be the right message. I try to have one-on-ones with students during office hours or after class to try to figure out what it is. That would inspire them,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: would've inspired

me. know, to

think that it's not, it, it humanizes things and makes it more relatable, but for them it's, it's, it is just different things. They, they're bombarded with imagery, stories, narratives all day long.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: very hard to

compete. Even when I'm talking to

'em, you think I have a hundred percent of their attention. I teach in a way that's much like Phil Donahue

did talk shows. I'm

constantly walking, weaving in and out of the aisles,

walking around the whole room. two or three students out of 150. With their full

attention, and they're the ones who make teaching absolutely worthwhile because

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: say

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: are doing right

now in recognition, you smile back.

That's immediate

feedback. It keeps people going a lecture for an 80 minute lecture or discussion class. It keeps you going. But yeah, the 147 others are multitasking. Even though I explain there's no such thing, you

Evan Troxel: Right.

Randy: it.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: Um, Yeah.

they're

doing three or four or

five different

things at the same time.

It's not just. or whatever. It's, they're doing many, many different things. And other than the phone dropping from time to time echoing through the lecture hall, you know, it's, it's all happening. And I know how to get their attention. I, I semi facetiously start a sentence with, this will be on the final,

this will be on the

midterm. All 150 heads look up

Evan Troxel: Perk,

Randy: same time. But

short of that, nothing does.

Evan Troxel: right.

Randy: yeah. And so we are

all sharing this world, not just in lecture halls. Um, you know, it's a little bit like our airlines say to us. They know we could have flown with another airline.

So they, they express their gratitude. We feel that way on our podcast. Um, or when they're reading a book, uh, that we've written or, or recommended. Um, it is true. I think to that extent. Um, the fact that shame on us if we're just providing our own example, you know, my telling my story, which may or may not be, you know, uh, not relate to it. I, I do wanna

mention one thing.

I open my conversation with you responding

to the question having do with the success of Sigmoid Curves in my seven year side gig. I don't talk about that with my students directly, but yet Aaron Ash, who just came to our school, opened with his own framework for his

Evan Troxel: Mm mm.

Randy: He's only been eight

years out, but he has a

framework that he's using.

So it's amazing to me

to see that, that, you can think of your career conceptually instead of just sort of randomly going from one job to another. I got laid off here. I found a job there, and so on. It, you know, it doesn't have to be this random story,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: very colorful. I read a lot of memoirs and these

random, supposedly random things that happen to people like Patty Smith and others.

You know, in Just Kids you could read this random story and yes, it's interesting, but to, as an architect, to conceptualize it, the way you can have a concept for a building, I think is a fascinating way to go through a career. Harder

to do when you're in your 51st year on this planet

perhaps. But for those just listening right now who are starting off, it's this incredible thing. I liken it a little bit to every now and then you'll see a photograph of somebody's collection of journals or diaries or sketchbooks, an artist, you know, uh, I remember Herman, her, uh, Hertzberger had

244 sketchbooks that he kept in this photograph of the bookshelves with them. think, boy, I'd love to be able to do that well in almost in my 65th year. And that is very hard to start if you haven't started it. Whereas if you're 19 or 24 years old, it's much easier. So yeah, when you're starting off, this idea that you can actually create your career as a concept is much more important of a message than to say, switch out your side gig every seven years.

Evan Troxel: and and it seems to me like now, like when I was a, that wasn't an option. Like you went to work, you graduate, you work for a company and you just work there forever, right?

That was,

there was, my grandfather was a company man, right. Um, my dad, not so much, but, but it's not that far back where that's exactly how

it worked for a lot of people.

And now it's like,

man, the world is your oyster. There is so much opportunity out there to, to do it exactly what you're talking about.

Randy: Okay, I, I agree. It's harder to do that now and it was easier back in the day. But that said, I know while not being judgmental of my colleagues, I did secretly. You know, privately frowned upon those who were in the company for 20 or more years

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: I wondered

if they lacked curiosity as somebody who's literally in my career hired thousands of individuals, whether in my own firm or as a leader in other people's firms. Um, yeah, I teach all that, how to get a job, how to really get a job, and the signaling that goes on. And I teach students when we go, uh, you know, university, bless their hearts at the university level, teach students how to make resumes at the college level, which is fine. And applied Arts where I teach, they teach you as a designer how to design your resume and the school of architecture, they even have workshops. And then I basically say to my students, throw it all out. This is literally how it works. Without being full of myself. Yeah. The research I've hooked diodes up to prospective employers. I know that a larger margin, the white space is as important if more important than any particular line on your resume. I know that the bottom line, your resume, is really important. I mean it's, I mean, talk about digression, digressing, but bottom line, your resume should mention that you're a rock climber. Why? Because when I'm interviewing you, I'm gonna ask you about rock climbing as you tell me about it because it's about the hobbies. as you tell me about, or bungee jumping or water scheme as you tell me about it, you're much more likely to be yourself. And my job is to hire. The version of yourself that I'm talking to right now as the one that will show up day one. I am the world's best interviewer. I have gotten like incredible jobs in my career I did not deserve to get, and I got called to the woodshed on day one or day two of those jobs where it's like, I thought you said you designed hotels that talk that you never wanna hear several times in my life. It's not that I've lied, it's that. Um, I know how to interview and get a job. What I'm getting at is an employer wants you to be very natural in the interview. And so having a large white space means you're comfortable not just bombarding people with information. A good design is gonna be selective, A good resume will be selective and so on. So all I'm trying to say here is, um, have a lot of hope for our students. I think there's a lot of things we learn along the way, but of a lot of our lessons that we learn, we throw out and we don't apply to our careers, and we have this opportunity to do that. And kudos to my graduates and students, um, over the recent years that have applied these concepts to their careers. I think it works.

Evan Troxel: There, there's a parallel that I've been thinking of, maybe, maybe final subject here. I, I am very curious to hear your thoughts on this, but a lot of people approach tools. I mean, now is no exception with AI to just use it as a tool to do a thing that you've already done.

And maybe, maybe it's faster, maybe it's giving you an angle you didn't see before or whatever.

But then there's a, there's a completely different way to use these tools, which is to complete you or help you become

the person that you want to become,

the v

the vision you have of yourself

in this profession. I mean, we just limit it to architecture.

I don't know that tools ne or, or if that kind of thinking has been applied to this before.

I think there's individuals who thought that way, but I think now

there's just so much more potential

to do that.

With the augmentation of these kinds of tools,

I'm curious what you think about that.

Randy: Yeah. So using tools, uh, to augment ourselves, to amplify ourselves,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: ourselves with

our goal is the best

use of tools.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: my

take has always been, and it's

a little bit of a cliche now, but. Every tool is just a tool in your toolkit and sometimes a wrench or a hammer is what you need to get the job done.

Sometimes it is Revit or, or grasshopper. Um, there is my take, it's a little extreme, but basically there is no tool that's better than another tool.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: pretty much anything you can do

with any tool,

um, if, if it's what the tool is designed for, but yes, on this whole other level, I completely agree and I think there's probably no better example for in my life than the cover of my very first book, BIM and Integrated Design. I basically sold my soul to get a project that was in my firm at the time

on the cover. Um, um. You know, which was a museum up in Winnipeg, um, designed by Antoine Preoc. And our firm was just basically a glorified wood shop kind of model maker, except we were using Revit to make a 3D model. And then, needless to say, I got a lot more responsibility from there. But yeah, I

walked through the architecture school. We have several buildings, but the graduate building that I walk through, there are always professors telling their students either sitting cross-legged on the floor, like a guru or just lecturing to their students, no tool is gonna save you or Don't use Revit in my studio because it's just gonna create a shoebox. Um, that's actually not true. It is harder to get Revit to make your building look like a cathedral or, you know, um, you, you've gotta play with it. You've gotta lift the hood sometimes and, um, personalize it. But yeah, we can find much. More profound versions of ourselves. Um, and this was alluding to a moment ago with AI where once in a while you'll prompt something and you'll get something

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Randy: and

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: yeah,

this prompt that I created

got this result. And I am empowered now.

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Randy: Share

that you, you are collaborating with AI on it. You didn't just make this up, but yes. Um, nothing ever before that, um, allowed us to do that. And same with computational tools as well. And so I think, um, this is a, this is a huge thing. Much more quickly or sooner. In our careers, if we can see there, there's this more enlightened, empowered version of ourselves. Um, by augmenting ourselves the weak points that we're go naturally have, you know, following school. It

takes us a

long time. I heard you say this in a recent, uh, podcast. Um, I think it was with,

uh, the folks from, with, uh. Rob and Alex from Thornton Thomasetti that it takes 10 to 15 years before you're up to speed on something. Yeah. I even say then adapt as an architect, you're, you're at the beginning of your career and to reach the five, 10, or 15 year mark. And I think it's really important that we find a way not to get to the 15 year mark in one year, but to get little hints, little breadcrumbs along the way that keep us going, keep persevering.

We're gonna have bad days. The world is offering us bad days outside of the work we're doing in the careers we have. And so we need to have these little bright moments reminding us. Of how special this career is that we've chosen. And not to switch construction management unless that's really, really what you're, have your heart set on. And um, and I think the tools enable us to do that in a way now that, yes, you and I would never have this discussion 20 years ago about, you know, whether it was Revit or certainly AutoCAD doing that for us, MicroStation tech law is not going to necessarily back in the day do that for us. Um, so. that to happen and just recognize, I think that's the part with having the wherewithal or living in the moment is waking up or having a mentor or a professor point out to you what you created and to recognize that.

I am seeing this, by the way, a lot more, we see it on award shows. I'm using this as an analogy with celebrities. I see it at rock shows. I've been attending a lot of, you know, I saw David Byrne in concert here in Chicago the other night. And he lingered on the stage. I could hear his therapist, I'm making this up.

I could hear his therapist saying to him, David, you need to just count to a hundred on the stage until the clapping dies down and the standing ovation dies down because you never really let that sink in. You had

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Randy: up there.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: this

vulnerable little kid up there,

and he is taking it all in.

You can see him, and I'm seeing it much more frequently. So I believe it or not, really recently with an academy, a Special Academy Award. I think it was the Governor's Award for Tom Cruise, where he just allowed himself to stand up there and let it sink in. Sink. I think all of us need that when we have the little wins along the way.

And I think in our careers, for better or worse, they're gonna come from software. They're gonna come from our tools. We need to recognize that. Have people, mentors, and professors

Evan Troxel: Great question. Great, great.

I like how the chat, GPT, it just, it's out reaffirming. yeah,

Randy: it is. But that, yeah, I mean, that's just right. That

pleasing we know is just to keep us, you

Evan Troxel: Right.

Randy: uh, keep

us on. Right.

No, but it's

just, it's, to me, it's more than an attaboy or atta girl, because I know you're just joking around here, but you cannot be motivated by somebody else in our field. I don't think the gift cards, the attaboys and the Atta girls are, or even the balls of m and msms that firms have, I don't think that does it.

It's gotta come internally. But what's missing is somebody pointing out to you

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Randy: Did

well. Yes, it's true. Uh,

chapter VT in particular,

um, is a pleaser.

Um, as long as we can recognize that, I think we can get past it

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Randy: shame

on us if we are not

recognizing the good work we're doing along the way.

I try to have one-on-ones with each of my students just to make sure if there is a spark, if the light bulb went off during the semester and they never thought it was going to, that at least to my eye did. And I think that becomes a really important thing because it may get them to that next stage. And I think that is what we have to offer if senior people within our field,

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Randy: more than doing

a mind dump and just sharing

information and knowledge.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, no, I, I appreciate that that call kind of a call to action there in, in, in some way that, that is, is much needed. I think you're, you're right, and, and. I don't know. You're, you're an an optimist. You're a cheerleader. Randy, this, this has been a fantastic conversation. I ca I'm very much looking forward to your, your book, your forthcoming book, and, uh, and I don't, I don't know if there's anything else that, that I really wanted to talk about today.

But again, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation four and a half years apart. We, we need to do it in, in closer increments than that for sure.

Randy: Evan, as always, fantastic to talk with you. I appreciate it. Take care and All the best to you.

💡This newsletter provide key insights for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovation in AEC who are short on time, offering the context of each conversation without the need to listen to the full episode. It’s designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in if the ideas resonate.

What would break in your firm tomorrow if the one person everyone depends on didn’t show up… and would you even know it until it was too late?

Summary

In TRXL episode 213 I talked with Todd Henderson and by Christopher Parsons about what it actually looks like to partner with AI when the real challenge is not the tool but the fragility of institutional knowledge inside expert organizations.

Todd walked through a case at Boulder Associates where a medical planning accelerator emerged from a painfully common reality: critical expertise lived in people’s heads, scarce experts became bottlenecks, and teams were expected to get up to speed faster than the organization could teach them.

The sequence Todd followed is what made it click for me. He didn’t start by interrogating the rockstar expert. In Todd’s words, he “went to gemba,” learning the real workflow from the people closest to the work, and treated that as both a fact finding mission and an act of respect. That mindset, combined with AI as a bandwidth and recall amplifier, created a repeatable way to solve knowledge problems without turning knowledge management into a documentation death march.

Architects already live in the exhausting reality of documentation—producing drawings, specs, and endless coordination sets under relentless deadlines. The last thing they want is another layer of documentation work, this time aimed inward at their own processes and knowledge. It feels like being asked to draw the drawing of how you draw.

So what do you do when faced with the same conundrum in your organization? This is the code that Todd has cracked.

Catch the full episode

Key Takeaways

Here are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

• AI as capacity, not replacement: Todd framed AI as superhuman bandwidth, attention, and recall that accelerates execution after human judgment sets direction.
• Start with the work, not the expert: Going to gemba was not symbolic, it was a deliberate sequencing choice to understand reality and build trust.

Wes Reynolds and Hugh Soward join the podcast to talk about how OPN Architects is intentionally shaping its future through digital practice, experimentation, and culture-building. They discuss the evolution of OPN’s digital practice group, how they evaluate and adopt emerging technology, and why their long-running annual retreat has become essential infrastructure for aligning design, tech, and people across the firm.

For anyone navigating innovation, change management, or digital strategy inside an AEC organization, OPN’s approach offers a clear example of what proactive firm development really looks like.

Original episode page: https://trxl.co/215

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• OPN Architects – Official Website
  • opnarchitects.com
  • The practice behind the firm-wide retreats, innovation culture, and project work discussed in the episode.
• OPN Architects on LinkedIn
  • Company Page
  • Follow firm updates, project news, and design technology initiatives.
• Wes Reynolds – Principal, OPN Architects
  • LinkedIn
• Hugh Soward – Innovation Manager, OPN Architects
  • LinkedIn
• OPN x Skema AI Charrette
  • Lessons from our charrette with OPN Architects – Skema AI
  • Shows how Wes and the OPN team experiment with AI-assisted blocking, stacking, and early design workflows.
• OPN Firm-Wide Retreat & Culture
  • OPN converges in Cedar Rapids for Retreat 2025
  • Shows how OPN uses annual gatherings as a lever for culture building, alignment, and experimentation.
• OPN’s Innovation Lab & Digital Practice Group
  • OPN’s innovation work and Digital Practice leadership (including Hugh’s role) are highlighted in their promotions and innovation posts:
    • Promotions reflect commitment to practice
    • 3D printing & augmented reality innovation page

About Wes Reynolds:

As a Principal of OPN Architects, Wes has been with the company for 25 years. He founded the Madison, Wisconsin studio in 2013 and has led it to impressive growth. He has a passion for design and a commitment to finding thoughtful solutions that best suit the client's needs. He codeveloped OPN's digital practice and innovation team to focus on design technologies within the firm.

About Hugh Soward:

Hugh Soward is the Innovation Manager in OPN’s Digital Practice Group, where he leads the research and integration of advanced and emerging design technologies across the firm. With expertise in digital fabrication, extended reality, visualization, and reality capture, he helps project teams and clients understand and refine design decisions through clear, data-driven workflows. His work bridges digital and physical processes by streamlining collaboration among designers, contractors, and fabricators, ensuring that the tools and methods adopted provide value. Through a people-focused, practical approach, Hugh and his team foster an innovative culture throughout OPN’s studios, making technology an accessible and meaningful part of the design process.

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Episode Transcript:

215: ‘Proactive By Design’, with Wes Reynolds and Hugh Soward

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Wesley Reynolds and Hugh Soward from OPN Architects. OPN is a 120 person architecture firm based in the Midwestern United States. And here on the podcast, I talk with many people from larger firms that have access to incredible resources, but I've also been wanting to talk to mid-sized firms that are resourceful. This is where OPN comes in. I recently had the chance to spend time with their team in Iowa meeting their people, talking about tech and architecture, and experiencing the culture that they've intentionally shaped over decades.

Today's conversation is a window into that culture, especially around how they approach technology, design, and the future of their practice.

Wes is a Principal and Hugh is OPN's Innovation Manager. They're part of a group that reflects something I wish we saw more of in AEC... a firm taking a proactive stance towards its own development, not waiting for the industry to figure things out, not outsourcing innovation, and not assuming that great design and great technology grow on parallel tracks.

At OPN, those things fuse by design. And in this episode we get into how their digital practice group came to be, How it evolved from questions about BIM into a strategic capability and how experimentation with things like VR and AR and lidar and performance tools and custom software actually plays out inside a Midwestern firm of their size.

There's a humility to the way that they try things, accept when something isn't ready, and double down on what adds value. But the thing that really stood out to me is how intentionally OPN invests in culture as a foundation for all of this. Their annual all hands retreat, something they've been doing for decades isn't just a junket It's infrastructure.

A multi-day gathering where the entire firm hits pause, tour recent work, including their own, learns from outside voices, digs into the future of practice and reconnects to the shared purpose that keeps people rowing in the same direction. It's where projects, people, and ideas gain momentum and is where OPNs tech and design ambitions get fused into the culture rather than bolted on from the outside.

This is a conversation about what it looks like when a firm treats innovation, both technological and cultural, not as a reaction to industry pressure, but as a practice in itself.

There's a lesson here. You can't just upgrade your tools. You have to upgrade your culture. And the firms that do this intentionally are the ones shaping their future rather than chasing it. As usual, there's an extensive amount of information in the show notes, so be sure to check that out. You can find it directly in the podcast app if you're a supporting TRXL+ member.

And if you're a free member, you can find 'em over on the website, which is TRXL.co. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Wes Reynolds and Hugh Soward.

Welcome guys. It's great to see you again.

Wes Reynolds: great to see you, Evan. Thanks for having us.

Hugh Soward: I.

Evan Troxel: would love to kind of get a little bit of backstory before we jump into the conversation today. And let's start with you, Wes. tell me a little bit about your story, your trajectory in the architectural profession.

Wes Reynolds: you know, I'm, I'm a Midwest

guy, born and raised in Iowa. I went to Iowa State University, graduated with. Uh, architecture degree from Iowa State in 2000. Uh, I found myself at the end of that, like, what is next? And in my mind, I had two paths of was I gonna be a professor or was I gonna be a practitioner? I really never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing today. I was really interested in the academics and education process and really kind of avant garde thinking. Um, but I needed a job like everybody does, right? And, um, found myself still being in Iowa for personal reasons. And this firm called OPN was kind of coming of age and some good professors of mine really thought it was a to look at.

And so I met, two individuals actually, that are my partners still today. Uh, that hired me, gave me an opportunity, and somehow now going on 26 years later, I'm still at this firm doing really wonderful things. And You know, it's been a amazing ride. Um, midway through my career, I had the opportunity to start our Madison, Wisconsin studio for us, uh, to lead that. Begin building that presence outside of Iowa for the first studio for the company outside of, of the Iowa market. And it's been wonderful and we have a great team here. So that's, that's where I am.

Evan Troxel: Can you give us just kind of an overview, like what's, what's the. Give us what your firm looks like and how, how you might classify yourself. Are you, are you a small firm, medium firm, big firm? You know? And, and, and just give us some context here.

Wes Reynolds: Yes. We're 115 going on. 120 people typically as a firm size with five studios. Uh, three in Iowa. We were founded in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Then we built the Des Moines studio, uh, in the capital of, of Iowa. And we have an Iowa City studio as well. And then, uh, Madison was our fourth office at Madison, Wisconsin.

And then we recently, in the last four years opened a Minneapolis, Minnesota office. So that's our, that's our kind of realm, uh, a hundred percent, you know, Midwest centric in these three states. Uh, but right now we find ourselves practicing probably 80% in the Midwest and becoming, uh, what we would probably call a regional heading to a national transitional firm, uh, more regional 'cause we are working coast to coast with our projects.

Uh, we're a generalist practitioner firm. We are interested in a lot of building types, uh, civic, higher ed, K 12, science and tech, healthcare, uh, corporate. I mean, we're just a good generalist firm that is interesting in projects that we can bring a lot of value to our clients. We are architecture and interior designer design only as services, so we

stay inside those design focused parts of the industry.

No engineering services. Those are partner based. So, and we, and really our ethos is based on great design, uh, performance and caring about people. So we, you know, want to give back to the planet and, and do wonderful

architecture that's meaningful.

Evan Troxel: Nice. was I, I'm gonna put a link speak episode where we

Hugh Soward: Cool.

Evan Troxel: the tours that Hugh took uh, so, you've been and

Hugh Soward: Yeah. Uh, fellow Mid-Westerner,

never saw myself becoming an architectural tour guide, but maybe that's a

fallback

that doesn't work out.

Evan Troxel: cruise

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

grew up in, uh, the Peoria, Illinois area, central Illinois, about midway between Chicago and St. Louis.

Um, ended up going to school up at uw, um, Milwaukee

and that's where I met Wes at the, uh, career day there.

And I was doing some research with a professor, so I interned in the Madison studio and um, got hired full-time to go to our Cedar Rapid Studio.

But was living in Iowa City at the time. 'cause everyone said that city is super fun when you're 25. So I, uh, lived there and then the next year we opened up the Iowa City Studio and that was a fun ride.

Um, being able to, uh, work in a very small office with the backing of a large firm.

Evan Troxel: Nice. And give us an idea of what you're doing now.

Hugh Soward: yeah, so now my title is, uh, innovation Manager. And that was a journey starting, I wanna say late 2019 when Wes and the partners saw the need for, um, OPN to focus on what's out there in the world of design, technology, and, uh, innovation and how we can push that forward for our firm.

Evan Troxel: Cool. So Wes, you started the digital practice group at OPN. Can you just talk about the timing of that and what led to the, what built up to actually kind of facilitate that happening?

Wes Reynolds: Yeah, it was myself and one of my partners that now has stepped out of OPN, Justin Bishop. He and I kind found ourselves many times late at night thinking about the future of practice and the future of OPN and where we want to go. Both were very technology interested and somewhat literate, and all these wonderful like things in front of us from visualization to the future of. You know, AI wasn't even a conversation then, right? It

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: where is BIM gonna go? Where's automation gonna go? Digital fabrication. We were both makers and we're like, how can we just look differently? Right? How can our firm elevate continually design work and how can we make this technology realm like serve us better?

And so he and I were thinking, and we both did a lot of stuff with Hugh, and it was just such a natural fit for the three of us to kind of start this first cohort to start thinking about this. And, and then other individuals with our firm, uh, Holden Rasmussen who joined the group, he is a part of it.

That's kinda that first core group that really kind of has been pushing and still part of it, uh, today, thinking about what we're gonna do in a firm. And, uh, you know, we, we found ourselves in a strategic plan with the partnership saying, us have a chance here. You know, this is something not a lot of firms are doing. us try this, let us experiment. Let's actually invest time in people, you know, pull them out of the day-to-day practice of architecture and just focus on what's this new cutting edge pieces, um, how can we bring 'em to then the staff and team to then deliver different type of work, you know? So that was, that was it.

And I can still picture the, the night where we were at the top of a hotel sitting there thinking really kind of crazy. It was about 3:00 AM and we were making a pitch that we knew we had to our partners the next day and put a slide deck together of all this crazy stuff that was happening. Not even just in architecture, but other pieces were out there and what

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: we do?

So, and I dunno, we must have done an okay job 'cause they, they bought it and uh, the partners has supported it ever since and they get it. And you know, it's been an underlying part now of our firm of, about earlier. We care about

the planet design. Um, underneath all of that then is supporting technology that supports all those kind of initiatives.

And so it's really part of our day to day, I would say. Now you right.

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you

Wes Reynolds: I.

Evan Troxel: things

Hugh Soward: Yeah. Um,

it was right at

the same time that we were doing a big renovation of,

uh, we actually might still be working on it.

Um, it's a long project of

the oldest. Yeah, the oldest, the oldest dorm at University of Iowa, uh, Hillcrest,

um, that's been added to several times, um, throughout the last century pretty much.

And, um, that's where just reality capture really came into play and that, that being super important. Um, the university was actually having issues with, uh, parents coming in with a tape measure. And the old CAD plans they had were

few square feet off from what was advertised that their, uh, student is gonna be in.

So they wanted to, at first just get the whole thing, uh, documented properly, and that's when we were contracting that out and we were wondering, can we take this in-house? We know it's a big lift upfront, but, um, now it's completely embedded into our process and helped us, um, communicate to the client that they can trust the data that we're giving them and the drawings and all that too.

Evan Troxel: Nice. Yeah. It, it, it seems like there's always one project that just kind of becomes the tipping point for, for this. So how, you know, technology is a tool and tools allow you to, uh, use leverage on

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I'm curious from, from both of your points of view, how you've seen the digital practice

and technology help OPN use that leverage in different ways.

So like adding value to what you're giving to clients that they can trust. That's a great example. do you have other ones that, that are at the top of your head that you could

that, that you see as, you know, may, maybe they're not even competitive. Maybe they are competitive advantages or strategic advantages, but just like, oh, we couldn't do that before, but now we can totally do that.

Wes Reynolds: Yeah, I wish you know that it's, I bet there's a hundred of 'em here. If we actually

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: and like documented this someday, I think sometimes what sticks on our head is all the things that didn't work. But, you know, I mean, Evan, we were, we were trying to

Evan Troxel: I'd love to hear those too,

Wes Reynolds: No. No. And, and those are

Evan Troxel: because

Wes Reynolds: mean, that list is

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Wes Reynolds: Right. But, um, but like, especially now, we can't keep up with how many failures we have before successes in a

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: Right? Like, I mean, that was what we told the partners day one. Like, Hey, we're gonna fail a lot, but that's the whole point of this. Let's like, like test things and bring it in and figure out if it's hardware or software that brings value to our firm, you know?

But we were early adopters of buying our own lidar scanners. Those are huge investments for a firm of our scale, right? We were early to drones and photogrammetry and um, you know, we were trying to ar vr, you know, VR was just becoming a thing with headsets. That's still, that's been, um. reality of success.

The AR has become extremely successful

recently, but the vr, it's still that device is holding people back, you know, I don't know what it is. And it's, it's, that's all I can say. The device, I think is what stops us and, and being busy. We'll talk about that probably later. Right? That's always an integration challenge.

And you brought that up when we were our retreat. You know, how do you make these things adoptable? But, um, go ahead. Like, that's, where I was. So I guess you other first initial thoughts, wins.

Hugh Soward: Yeah. Um, the stuff that sticks out to me from the early stuff was,

um, when we first started this, we were kind of, you know,

spraying like a fire hose, trying to get a lot of stuff in front of people,

um, and trying to understand what, what works for our firm and our culture and our projects. Um, we don't have a one vertical that supports most of the,

um, firms, so we, it's hard to just pick one and then just completely optimize that.

Um, but we had little projects like, um, using Grasshopper and, um, some interoperability methods and digital fabrication to make climate studio, uh, studies easier between Revit and Rhino inside. Um. Using it to communicate with the contractor better. The, if I have to distill it all down, it always seems to come down to communication and, um, helping our client or our consultant or fabricator contractor understand our design intent better so that we can have more accurate, um, results and, uh, predictions so that more of the cool stuff stays in the projects.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. I, I feel like, um. intent realized is, uh,

of architects struggle with, right?

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: the, the, it's difficult to convey in all the different ways that people consume the story information, the documents, whatever that is. and then obviously the coordination of all those things as well. But, it's interesting to watch the profession go from, design intent from a, a very loose thing to LOD 400 models, right? Where

Hugh Soward: Right.

Evan Troxel: can just go and go and go in into the detail because you want to really the control over the outcome, right? What it actually turns out to be. And while recognizing that architects aren't the builders, they're not the ones that, you know, they, there is a, there is a hard wall between, you know, unless you're design build. Um, or you're an art studio, right? That, that makes your own stuff you have that wall between you and the actual hands-on making

have like, contractors, the for right? it's

Hugh Soward: Yeah, well, uh, having no ego is, uh, helpful

with that. Um,

are, they're,

Evan Troxel: right? Like,

Hugh Soward: they are ready to humble you

you learn about the means and methods of how they're gonna build something

what makes it, what makes it tough, what makes it expensive. Um, that's, those are the kind of questions I'm trying to get answered so that we can work on it together because they wanna make

great projects too.

Um, not every contractor is out there just to make Yeah, exactly. Um, and part of that is us aligning ourselves with great contractors as well.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Hugh Soward: has been a really cool partner that has been a client, but also a fabricator for some of our work, and they do really awesome stuff too. So part of it's choosing the right partners, but also part of it's making it easier for a lot of the smaller contractors that we have in rural Iowa to be able to utilize some of this stuff too.

And that's some of the other things we're working on with visualization and things like that.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. you give us an idea of what your digital practice group is like? You mentioned Holden, obviously

but then just

I met office? question that with smaller in the

Hugh Soward: Yeah. Um, so from my role, I'm actually pretty decentralized. I live in Peoria,

um, and travel amongst all the studios, which is relatively centrally located out in Minneapolis. But,

um, I make my way to each studio at least

times a month

at minimum, but we're all talking digitally all the time anyway, so it's not as big of a deal.

But, um, we have Holden, who's our digital enterprise leader,

and, uh, formally BIM manager and him and, um, our new digital practice specialist, Justin, both work in, uh, Des Moines. And then Monique, who is our BIM specialist, she works out of the Cedar Rapids studio. Um, we also have a couple of IT folks, uh, Nick and Roger that um, are split between, uh, Des Moines and.

Uh, Northern Illinois, Madison area, and, uh, we all are happy to travel whenever we're needing to, but we stay contacted with everybody. The interesting thing is how we're interfacing with the rest of staff is that we have a ton of champions that are really interested in some technology or another, or process or something.

And so we try to keep them involved and find ways to get them, um, using stuff on their projects or, um, working towards different initiatives too. So we recently did, um, some joint research with Iowa State, um, and Shelby Doyle at their computation and construction lab, um, with their, uh, concrete 3D printers.

And that was a project completely born from, uh, two of our staff that, um, wanted to, uh, do some research into it. And we were considering like, does OPN want to look at buying a concrete 3D printer? And then we looked at the price tag and was like, no, we are not, we are not interested in that. Um, but we are interested in the technology and how

Wes Reynolds: We just can't afford to be interested to the full extent.

Hugh Soward: a better way to put it.

Wes Reynolds: There you

Hugh Soward: Um, but we are interested in what does that look like when it, when that technology is more common in the Midwest, and can we be ahead of that? And luckily we had, um, a relationship with, uh, Shelby at Iowa State, and she's already doing a lot of that research, so we found ways to, um, benefit her by giving her a real project that's gonna be permanent, but also benefit us by getting us access to her

knowledge base and her studio.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Wes Reynolds: I mean, Evan, the, go.

back to your core question of the team. I mean, we didn't plan for it to be decentralized, but it

Evan Troxel: I was gonna ask, I was gonna ask you like strategically, because like these are centralized, there's distributed, there's combination of both. There's

Wes Reynolds: Yep.

Evan Troxel: analog and digital, right? Like you've got all these things kind of playing together. And I was curious from like when you, when you first had the vision, did you see it a certain way and then it played out differently?

Wes Reynolds: I don't think we ever cared about where people were. And I think if there was a group, I mean, talk about pre COVID going into all this. We were a firm that was like already doing all these things. It made that transition that everybody else was trying to figure out. We already were doing it as a

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: Like we had everything ready to be remote, but was not a point land. I think it was tied around people. That's, that's the key, right? You have to get the

Evan Troxel: Use people where they are.

Wes Reynolds: do, we're

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: to have wonderful people that want to collaborate one together. And it's such a wonderful egoless team too, with the same kind of vision to just keep elevating the firm and elevating architecture through technology.

Right? And whether their expertise is in software or the hardware or bim, it's just such a collaborative group. And if you said, did we know it'd be six people in a few years? No. But will I be surprised if we're 12 people in four more years? No. Right. I mean, it's the, what we're struggling in our annual, like strategic planning of that team is you look at the number of initiatives currently, massive, right?

I mean, you can never put enough time to it. So then you really have to pick and choose all those categories, from digital fabrication to ai, and everything in between, what you invest your time in, that's gonna bring the best value to internal group of all the architects and designers working hard to make their work better and maybe more. Efficient for themselves so they can again, spend time on the right things and then what's the most value to our clients. And

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Wes Reynolds: it's hard. There's always more to do than we have time for is our, is our challenge. And you gotta pick the right battles.

Evan Troxel: Where did those initiatives come from? I, I mean this is open to either one of you. Is it something that you have open communication with the staff and it's just kind of, a lot of ideas come from grassroots, or they saw their friend using something and they want to, they could apply to what they're doing? Or is it more coming from the innovation hub of digital practice? So I, I'm curious is, is it all of the above?

Wes Reynolds: Mind if I start here and then you can

Hugh Soward: Yeah, go ahead.

Wes Reynolds: I think it's both of those, Evan. I mean, we do have the grassroots and that's how probably we were working the first couple years is a little bit of that fire hose shotgun effect that he was saying. We had so many things we were interested in. We have definitely honed the team trying to say, all right, we have to stay on this project. Deploy this project, manage this project, show the teams why there's value to it to adopt it. then now we have kind of a running list. We just literally worked on it this week of, you know, 50, let's call 'em core exercises we want to get into, and, and some of these you have to do before the other so you get the right process, you know, but I think you saw at our retreat when you saw those like, um, PCHA, Chas, people did, some of those are completely individuals just trying something on their projects, which is even more exciting to us, right? that? they see the value of exploring through technology to bring value to their projects. And we have nothing to do that minus excited and glad to see other people are trying

it and go, wow, I can do that on my work as well. So, and that's been our firm's success. We love grassroots. We try not to dictate too much.

We let like a lot of freedom, right?

Evan Troxel: to that?

Hugh Soward: Yeah. Um, it, it's a funny balance that you have to try to find with, with the grassroots versus the top down kind of approach to it. Um, 'cause there's like the longer term,

um, bigger projects that we're trying to do, like,

um,

wrangling all of our disparate data and all of that kind of stuff. And

how, what if OPN knew what OPN knows,

you know, that's part of being distributed.

That is a challenge and that is, uh, something that we're

doing a little bit more from a top down perspective. 'cause it's a much longer, bigger project that's gonna take a lot of effort from a lot of different, uh, areas of expertise. And then some of the. Really interesting, random, bespoke things that we get that are grassroots, that some of them being are just, Hey, we provided a really specific solution to this for this client.

I don't know that we're ever gonna do this again. But that was cool.

Like, uh, documenting laser scanning and, uh, building a custom scaffolding for a hundred year old taxidermied birds that are covered in arsenic. Like, I don't know what I'm, we're gonna do something like that again. But, um, other things like, yeah.

Um, but then, uh, other things like, uh, building a connection between, you know, our FCA software and our client's, um, uh, facility management software and things like that. Like that's something that came from a project, but has potential to be a much larger connection across all, all of our projects.

Evan Troxel: that, that makes me just think of kind of potentially creating products, right? That could be extension of your business model, uh, your what, what you do as a service to clients, right? Architecture as a service. And, and maybe it's not like architectural design, but maybe it's like what you just talked about, Hugh.

It's like connecting

Hugh Soward: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: to that and we've figured that out and now we could package that. Do you guys talk about that in your partner meetings? Do you talk about kind of the evolution of the business model of, of where OPN is headed, especially with technology enabled practice?

Wes Reynolds: Yeah. we def we definitely have, and even part of our original probably quote unquote pitch to think about this, of, is that an opportunity that we might find something like that along the way. Yes. Is it required? No. Have we found it yet? No. We've, we've had some pretty interesting explorations. Uh, we've been part of some great pilot programs with some software groups that have seen that we have interested in this and they know we have enough scale of a firm that they wanna see what we can do with their. New tools or their new products. And that's been exciting to, you know, be a part of. And then trying to figure out of those products, how can they value us and how could we encourage those projects maybe to adapt that they bring more value to our firm and other architects like us. So

that's been, that's been really great.

And, um, we, OPN had the privilege to be part of the Design Futures Council, and so through that networking with some other individuals in that organization that kind of have like-minded pieces, it's been great to share kind of like where, where others are going with technology as well. So it's been good.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Wes Reynolds: Yeah. But we haven't found

Evan Troxel: Hey.

Wes Reynolds: know, million dollar software connection to sell yet.

Hugh Soward: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I, find that

these kinds of things start though with. Somebody needing to scratch their own itch inside the firm to solve a specific problem. then you kind of step back and say, oh, like you said, like maybe this

to more projects. What can we do to build on that? And you don't necessarily have the intention of using it to expand your

Wes Reynolds: Yeah.

Absolutely. Totally agree.

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: so,

Wes Reynolds: I think we've had those same conversations, Hugh, right? Of where are those tipping points when we need a individual like that in the firm or

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Wes Reynolds: our customization right now is, I'd call it low hue,

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: I think It, feels like it's picking up the kind of custom and connections that are going to be coming at us constantly.

Hugh Soward: It, it, that is a hard line to find at a firm our size is when can you afford to

fully hire a

full-time software developer or a team of them

to, to do something like that?

Evan Troxel: Okay, so a big theme at the a EC tech conference that I was just at was really around vibe coding, right? And this

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: of, there's a little bit of a stigma coming from, especially people who code a lot, it's like architects looking at image generation, right? It's like, ah, yeah, but that'll never work, kind of thing, right?

Uh, there's just kind of that natural response. But then there's people who are saying like, uh, Turner Construction, um, just deployed ChatGPT enterprise level to all of their employees. Like 15,000 employees, I think was the number.

Wes Reynolds: Wow.

Evan Troxel: I could be wrong on that number, but it's a lot of people and it's in every department.

And so they have people in the finance and accounting department writing apps that is something they could never have done before. Because I mean, even though they're that huge of an organization, they're not hiring a software developer to. custom apps right there,

Wes Reynolds: Yep.

Evan Troxel: but now there's the ability to do that.

And so I guess, I guess what this really dovetails is into my question about incentivizing your staff to play and to explore and to solve their problems with technology. do you, do you think about that? Do you do that? Do you say it out loud? I'm just curious how, how that works at OPN.

Wes Reynolds: Yeah, I would say we say it out loud, it's just everybody's constantly busy and you know that change to pause and pull up and I know how to get to. That destination in the project by doing exactly how I do it today and how I've done it 10 outta times, why would I pause and try to adapt that? It, it is, uh, I believe it's a little bit of a generational thing.

So it's great to have, you know, young energy come into the firm or new personalities come into the firm that say, well, can you do it like this? And, you know, that's it. But we try to create white space, you know, it's

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: busy and it's then it's also the challenge of being busy, of making time for these things.

And I

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Wes Reynolds: as a, as a digital practice group overall, that's always been our struggle is to get snowball effects on new concepts, new softwares,

new products that, you know, the guys have kind of organized, tested, see the value. 'cause they are, um, pretty much the whole group is, uh, architects, or trained architects, I should say. So they understand and they were practitioners. They know what we're trying to do to put drawings together. They're just on the technology spectrum of it now of what they're doing. Um, so they see the value as just, again, pausing to learn and do it and execute it. That's, that's what I see. But

Hugh Soward: I'd say some of our more successful.

Um, versions of that are when '

we stay embedded in some,

uh, aspect on the team to like truly support them. It's not,

uh, swooping in, here's this tool,

use it on this project goodbye. Like, um, when you're really in there and you're, you know, sometimes I become a part of the design team

at least to a certain phase to try this new method out.

And

it's not just being tech support, but it's also being design support in that way too, which helps our design muscles, um, with uh, not just not being in that world anymore. But, um, and I think it also helps them because they know that we're there to help truly figure that out with them when we're doing that.

Evan Troxel: I think coming at that, like from an architect's perspective is super, super useful, right? Like as a

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I would go into a client and we would talk about what they need, what they like, what they don't like, what are the problems, what are potential solutions that they've already thought of? And, and you get to partner with people on the design team, Hugh, and do

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: It's like a design problem, right? Software is still a design problem when you approach it that way. I mean, creating a digital practice is also a design problem. Thinking about the strategy of business models for OPN is a design problem. It's a, it's a, is the design problem also, right?

So

Wes Reynolds: No.

Evan Troxel: you kind of think about it in these are, it's the same. of set of constraints with design thinking applied to that? Um, it, don't think everybody does that. Um, I wish more people would, would do that, especially in these smaller firms where, like, it, there's a, there's a cost to having dedicated people to do this, but it's also a huge advantage to have dedicated people to do this

Wes Reynolds: Sure.

Evan Troxel: they're not

okay, Like, know all your struggles solve And, and so you're gonna both learn from each other in that, in that exchange. And I would think the product's gonna be better for that, whether it's a script that gets used once or it does actually have a life beyond that.

Hugh Soward: Yeah, it's a, it's a balance of treating your colleagues, like both your clients and also your partners

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Hugh Soward: in that, that, you know, we're in this together neither, we all want this to be successful, but I'm also here to.

Serve the project and

as a core design team, we're doing that.

Wes Reynolds: In Evan, you asked earlier like, you know, where do these ideas come from? I think some are from the digital practice team to implement new ideas, but you know, Hugh and Holden have had a history going to every one of the studios. I think for the last couple of years, Hugh, where you sit down with everyone, invite everyone in and say, what are your challenges?

What are those things that we could help you fix or improve or flow? And then we, you know, get common themes out of that like post-it note exercise and it creates, you know, 50 projects for us and some the ones that have the most value or we can see the value as like what we start working on as quick as we can.

And some are quick wins and they do those too. So it's, um, I think that's what's great and it makes our firm work well. I mean, it's a

Evan Troxel: It seems like that would help you. Yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. I, and I think it would help you prioritize because we're all drinking

Wes Reynolds: Yep.

Evan Troxel: tools. It's been three days. There's a new tool kind of a thing, right? And you mentioned that earlier. There's just, there's this, a huge amount of stuff, helps you prioritize what actually matters because it's problems that people are having, and you're not chasing things where you're trying to find a problem that fits the tool.

You're doing it the other way around, which is, okay, here's the problems. Now how do we go about attacking this with technology?

Hugh Soward: and that's a really easy pitfall to fall into the finding the problem for the tool.

Evan Troxel: yeah, yeah. Well, I, I'm, I want to talk about the staff retreat, but before we do that, I, I want to cover one more thing, which is, is you've got a digital practice, and you said, Wes, you alluded to, okay, well maybe in four years. It's twice the size. Okay. So you've got six people. You've got 150 people, total six people on the, on the staff of digital practices.

Wes Reynolds: total. Hmm.

Evan Troxel: Okay. So I mean, just talk about that, like, as the practice gets more and more rooted in technology, like you can't even do, you can't deliver anything without it anymore. Right? There is no other way that we're doing this.

Wes Reynolds: Yep.

Evan Troxel: Can you just talk about like that growth and not, not from like a, there's no, like, there's no ego in this.

I feel like, like if anything,

six people serving 120 people, if the, if I understand the way that it works, that sounds like, okay, that's a really small number. That's gotta be a really difficult job for those six people. It's just gotta be go, go, go. Because there's so many people. Okay, so let's talk firm strategy in like the digital department, which has quotes around it right now.

I used to say, you know, digital it's, we call it digital practice, just so everybody knows what we're talking about, but it's just gonna be called practice someday, right? This is. It is just

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: of practice. So it, it's the current version of practice actually. It's just, we still have to call it this thing.

So I talk about that from a leadership point of view at OPN and, and where, I don't know, just what are you guys thinking? Where are you seeing things going?

Wes Reynolds: yeah, I mean, so to your, like, it'll just be practice. Some days I try to say like, you know, a technology firm that practices architecture,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: Some days to kind of flip this on our head for our,

Evan Troxel: Right?

Wes Reynolds: of my partners just to go, do you understand like everything most people do today in our company is tied to a laptop or some piece of technology that makes it work. Right? now we're all pure designers at heart and we want to create beautiful spaces. That's what we wanna do. We actually, not many of us are technology focused. It's just Yep, those are the tools to get it done.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: we'll keep working on that. But, you know, I don't know where it's gonna go. I've had, we've never had a pushback on, Hey, should we get one more person?

We, we've been a firm that's been successful when we're lucky enough to have somebody like our newest team member. Say, Hey, I'm kind of interested in joining OPN and I

am interested in these technology things and this is what, and by chance, the newest person was, had a really kind of a 50 50 dynamic of pure technology and then, uh, sustainability performance, which was like really something that's another part of our firm that's really growing quickly is our perform performance for focus.

And Hugh and Holden and others are finding themselves like, all Right.

now we're building tools for the performance side. Well, now if you have a person that's really digitally literate and performance literate, that's even a great combo. So

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: I think when those people have, we've seen the opportunity, it's like a perfect timing and like, yes, um, do I have, and you know, between Hugh and Holden and I, a game plan of here's the next five people we're gonna hire. Not necessarily, but I think when we do these strategic planning efforts and we see we have, let's say 50 initiatives and we can only get to four this year, it keeps saying, how do we balance keeping all that going and benefiting the firm and not getting behind? And that's. Yeah, was a moment I would've said three or four years, three years ago, let's say, I thought we were in really great shape.

We were starting to be ahead of this technology curve and wow, it just felt like overnight post COVID somewhere in there, and then the AI kicked. I mean, you just feel behind every day. And that's, that's not a good feeling when you're a group that really wants to be successful. And

we're really driven individuals, really competitive, classic architects, right?

We don't like to lose. And you know, this, look, you look at this amazing list of efforts, people, the crew wants to work on every one of those lineups is super exciting. And it could be wonderful for, say for, our healthcare team, building some custom tools or something. You know, you look at these lists, it's, it's all fantastic opportunity. It's just got, he needs to sleep. Right? You know? Uh, that's how it works. And, and,

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Wes Reynolds: practice architectures our primary job, right? So I, I think it'll continue to grow Evan as, as a firm. the mindset our partnership is set on. So what it

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Wes Reynolds: keep playing that out.

Evan Troxel: Okay. So Hugh, let's pretend that you and Wes haven't talked about this already. I, I maybe you have, maybe you

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: have, but let's pretend that you haven't. what potential do you see right now that OPN could leverage and just like make some way that you do something completely out of the

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: like a really for

of can't on bite

Hugh Soward: I think that would be hiring that software engineer.

Um, right now to

help us supercharge the efforts that we're already doing. We have a level like yeah, the vibe, coding conversation that we've leveraged that quite a bit. Um, we all have a cursory knowledge of, uh, a handful of languages and APIs and whatnot, but,

um, having someone who really knows all of the ins and outs

can really help us build the,

the custom tools.

Or maybe there's that,

golden goose that, um, you know, your secondary revenue stream or whatever that is. But, um, I think that's the supercharger to letting us scale this thing a lot more.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Well, it, it takes me back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago at Turner where it's like somebody in accounting is writing an app that like changed the game for accounting. And so you maybe have people already in your firm who just have an idea and it's like, well, let's just prototype this.

Like that to me is what's

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: about the newest development is like. With a language that somebody already speaks and they're already using ChatGPT on the side or Claude or whatever it is, through that exact same thing. You can build something that will do something for you. And I think that the potential and, and, and it's untapped because you already have all those staff members.

You have 120 people and it's like, oh, if we just gave this

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: that I, I like to think It's, super to be practicing maybe not just architecture, but a lot of people are, there's a huge

Hugh Soward: Yeah. The uh, I mean specifically the vibe coding and that being empowering to people. We've seen a.

A big chunk of that were people that I thought that would never be interested in making their own macro even, or, but they're sitting here trying to make, um,

almost like a full, on,

a full on web app

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Hugh Soward: some part of the process faster.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Hugh Soward: or automating something.

And

I guess where I said that I would like to have a software engineer in it is that, you know, when you take it to the next level where it becomes a sellable tool and you have to vet all of that stuff that you're vibe coding to, there's, there's one thing when you're building tools for yourself and then when you're building external things, I have to have the proper security and all that.

That's, that's a whole nother level

Wes Reynolds: Yeah. I was a little, I mean, that makes total sense. You said that one first. I was surprised you maybe didn't talk about digital fabrication a little bit too, because as far as

Hugh Soward: I knew you would.

Wes Reynolds: Yeah. Okay. All right. You knew I would, I mean. The, the digital practice team, Evan, is also kind of like really made up of a lot of makers, which is super awesome as like artists, sculptors, furniture makers, and true classic designers, right? And so we talk about that a lot and, and we love our contracting friends and partners and sub consults, but we know we're on the edge of architects. Be able to become master architects again, of our craft. And when we can work with partners that have those great robots and all we're doing is really feeding, uh, our design through a code or something like that, we can have that craft back.

And that,

that, that, um, experience that we had with Iowa State and that CCL lab, I mean, that project just won an AI Minnesota award and the objects that we created are sitting in front of the building and are definitely a part of the architecture. And again, no one would know. We 3D printed through concrete, all those objects that kinda look like a series of follies, you know, and. That's, that's what's so exciting to me is, you know, that balancing act of getting to play contractor

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: with our craft of architecture again, and not just that small scale, that's where we have to experiment and prototype, but it's coming, right? I mean, the edge of the next decade of what's gonna actually look like, what construction will look like is gonna be really amazing for us,

Evan Troxel: It cuts both ways, right? Like you've got this ability to have access to making physical things through and so that, that that direction is coming at you, that democratization of access to that kind of stuff. And it's happening to architecture too, right? And, and there's, from a partnership strategic level, like you have to be thinking about like, okay, we are getting access into this.

What are other people getting access into? What, is our domain? Right?

Wes Reynolds: Yep.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's, it's interesting to watch that. I mean, thing things are uh, in, in all directions. And, and that's something to keep your eye on as, as a leadership team, but also as a, through that r and d process, because you're, expanding, but you're also getting pieces taken away at the same time, potentially.

Wes Reynolds: Yeah. Our

Evan Troxel: Alright. So,

Wes Reynolds: on all that.

Evan Troxel: All right. Well, let's talk about this retreat that you did. Can you give, give a, a kind of an overview of what you do and why you do it?

Wes Reynolds: Yeah, so Our firm's been in business for about 48 years, and I think for about of them we have had an annual retreat, and that was even when it was just one office, one studio, they would shut the office down and just recharge get together and talk. what it's become with five studios and five very different locations. We call it one OPN. Um, everybody's in that same pool of, I don't care where you sit, you might be in Madison and you are working in a project in Iowa, and you might be in Cedar Rapids and you're working on a project in Madison, right? That's not, it's just 120 unbelievably talented people, is how we think about it, right? But that geography separates us. So for two days out of a year, we shut all the studios down. We find a wonderful major city in the Midwest. It's tied to travel that we go to, and we have a great loop from Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City. and we take time. The first day is about thinking about the business, where we're going, how's everybody doing a wonderful social event like you saw that evening.

And then day two is about, uh, seeing architecture, typically architecture that's not ours, architecture that's gonna inspire us to come back to our clients and just bring great value and. the last five years through our design excellence, uh, program, we've invited wonderful national and international architects to come in and just talk to us.

Part of it is a crit of our work, like reviewing and giving us pretty direct feedback of how we can improve. You know, that good to great exercise of Yep, that's a good project. Here's how it could be even better. And each one has been so different. Um, so those have been fantastic. And then like this year we wanted it, um, it was inward looking, so we were in kind of our, our town where we all started.

So we were in Cedar Rapids, uh, went and saw some of our own work, which is nice to sometimes

take a pause and look at our own projects and then invite two great

speakers, you know, you and Dwayne, and a great combination. And the mindset was this year that we are trying to culturally shift everybody to think about, you know, the digital side of what we do

and how that can. doesn't have to change how we do great architecture and great design, but what can we do culturally? So, as always, it's easier Somebody else says that for you than yourself. Right.

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: they'll listen to, they'll listen to you, Evan. And they did, right? It was, it was great.

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: everybody who

Hugh Soward: actually Wes is the one that showed me his work for the first time. Um, 'cause Wes hasn't talked about it, but he is a metal worker and so is Dwayne

because, but, uh, Dwayne Oyler is a teacher at SciArc, along with his wife Jenny Wu, and they do some of the most incredible, um,

it design build.

I don't know what the actual technical business model would be, but,

um,

Wes Reynolds: no.

Hugh Soward: it's the most literal version of design build I've, I've seen,

um, where they make, some of the most intricate and, um, beautiful, uh, projects by hand. Um, and it was really interesting to see how their, um, how their practice is scaling.

It's incredibly forward thinking. Uh, the scale of their projects is getting enormous.

He was telling us about like a,

a model he had to put on a flat bit of a semi, um, just for a model, not even just the installation. Um, it, their work's always been very inspiring to both of us. And since we were thinking, you know, where are we going with this firm?

There was the, the two sides of it, which was technology. Um, how are we integrating that? That's where we, uh, thought to call you. And then what's some of the most avant-garde stuff out there that we can be inspired by? And we thought they were one too.

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Wes Reynolds: and you didn't say, but the, the firm's Oyler Wu Collaborative. Um,

Hugh Soward: yeah.

Wes Reynolds: their, their work is such built in craft, which our firm cares a lot about, and it's just a whole different level of craft that and Jenny are doing. And so like, it, we thought it was so great, and yet, you know, when you hear Dwayne talk about it, I mean they're, they're working digitally too, right?

So how do we take this large sculptural type object building and then, you know, work in the technology side of it? So I, I loved, we, it was everything we hoped it would be when we had you guys both join and I dunno, the, this was something where we tried a little differently where, um, you obviously both presented and talked with us, um, and then, and then that sit down of, you know, Hugh going through some questions and talking about it, you know, questions that we're asking ourselves internally, our teams are asking of 'em, getting both of your opinions. as practitioners thought leaders was, was really influential to the firm and exactly what we were hoping it would do. it created a buzz, um, talking about these things. Um, both you are, you know, you have wonderful brands and I loved it when many people were, I talked after the, like you had Evan TRXL join you guys.

That's amazing. You know, I, I listen to his podcast all the time. Like it Well, I mean, we're very thankful you guys did that and it was, it was everything we hoped it could be. And then, I'm glad you guys both stayed late and had drinks and played ping pong with us. And like we, you know, we're long time friends.

I'm sure. So.

Evan Troxel: I had some great long conversations too, uh, which I, you know, hanging out afterwards affords like talking with Justin, your on, on your team, Hugh, right. For a long time. Um, and getting to meet Holden and getting to meet people whose names I had heard earlier in the day. And then

all in the same place together afterwards and not everybody's at a table have the freedom just to kind of go stand in a line and strike up a conversation with somebody who, who you're standing next to, I think is, is fantastic.

It was great to meet kind of a wider range of. you know, besides the partners of the firm and Hugh as you know, the, the digital practice team. So I thought what was really striking to me was just kind of this proactive approach that you take with the

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: to get on the same page and talk

of course, there's lots of projects going on.

Not everybody has, uh, transparency into those projects, right? Because they've got their own projects and they're in a different department. Maybe they're in hr, maybe they're in finance, maybe they're in contracts, maybe they're in graphics and marketing, and they don't get to even, they don't, they just don't see what's on the boards. Not that there are boards, right? What's on the monitors? Um, especially as a distributed, you know, amongst five

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: and a lot of different team members. So. a great opportunity to bring everybody together and get them on the same page as far as like that looking inward of the firm. But then are we going and why are we going there? And then kind of setting a new datum for the next year.

and you said like this is an inward year. I'm curious what you mean by that. 'cause I kind of think of this as like cycles of, of a breath almost, where it's like, okay, this year's an inward year, next year's an outward year. I don't know if that's what you mean, but could see something like that really helping you kind of structure and organize this kind of staff retreat around to have a different posture when you get together the next time.

Right. I just think that there's a lot of interesting things that you

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: with something like this and, and so I'm just curious from like that broad perspective. Um, obviously I bet you get a lot of great feedback and I bet there's a lot of people who say, I don't have time for this because I'm so busy too, but you make, you make it happen, so it's important.

So just like that, from that priority standpoint of, of getting the staff together and putting 'em on the same page, can you just talk kind of towards that and, give other firms out there who are listening an idea of how this has benefited you?

Wes Reynolds: Yeah, there's not one partner that's ever paused and said, should we stop doing retreats? They're

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Wes Reynolds: just so successful for us. It's a great, great time for our culture. Yes, every single human that's at that event is super busy, but they knew for two days they're gonna set their pencils down and revived. Listen to speakers that are gonna challenge us to be better on whatever it is that that theme or topic might be. then see those people that maybe you aren't collab, you are collaborating with, but you're not physically in the same place. There's so many new people to our firm constantly that are coming into it, that you get to meet those people, they really quickly get a part of our culture when you get to have an event like that. Yeah. I would encourage every firm to not look at the fiscal side of that event and look at what it could do for you. Um, and when I said inward, we've taken the last two years just to pause. 'cause we've always, and we enjoy it. Looking at other people's work in some other major city that we're not in. We had some, we, the humbleness of us, we have some really fantastic work. And when you're not on those projects, or even sometimes when you're on it, you don't even get to go enjoy it. Right. So it's proud for those people that led those projects to present them, showcase them, and those that haven't seen it. But, you know, we had a Fire station Cedar app is at one of our first national, a i a, of us never stepped foot in there in that building and everybody wanted to see it.

We knew it, we knew it by photos. We had talked about it. Everybody was proud of the recognition. But you know, it was that time to go see that kind of work that ourselves just influencing others in this country, you know, of projects.

So that's, that's what I meant by inward on that,

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Wes Reynolds: So,

Evan Troxel: It was a wonderful event, Hugh, your team was integral, or maybe you uh, in kind of making this event from

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: fires and,

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: maybe

Hugh Soward: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and, from it?

Hugh Soward: Well, retreat. I'm always involved in it in some way in the last,

four years, I would say.

but not to the point where I'm picking speakers or suggesting who we reach out to. That was a unique opportunity.

Um, and I got a Miro board with, um, a lot of other really cool names on there too. Now for, for the future that gives, it gives, um, myself an opportunity to expose, uh,

my colleagues to

some really interesting stuff that they might not have thought of before.

Um, and that's when I got approached this year about, um, you know, a lot of people were very inspired by, um, the talks at, um, a i a national this year around technology and stuff too. Um, and that's when they reached out to me like, Hey, who's a really good. Voice for this. And, uh, not to, uh, toot your horn too much on your own podcast, but you were my first choice on that.

'cause when we were starting this, watching your videos was actually really inspiring. Um, when we were getting into the digital practice thing, um, it really helped me find a way to, um, learn how to communicate this to my coworkers and what's communicate the value of that. Um, but, uh, what we normally do during retreat is it's an opportunity for us to communicate to everybody at once you got a captive audience, it's hard to find a stranger at these.

Um, and so we've done them where we have a tech demo, where we have a whole bunch of booths with all of our technology, a whole lot of money in one room. And, uh, we're showing them, we're doing, uh, we called it ar Jenga with the HoloLens and, um. Uh, playing building blocks and having a time trial with that.

Um, there's a drone flying around another part of the room and people are scanning. People are in, uh, vr, doing other stuff. Um, looking at 3D print a table of 3D printed models. Just, um, opportunities to, uh, embed this in the culture of OPN and all the different kind of technology that we're working on.

Sometimes it's building a custom sculpture, um, completely digitally that, um, is, uh, using things like the HoloLens to steam bend, plywood and conduit to make a show them, Hey, here's how we can communicate with contractors in the future.

Evan Troxel: That's cool. Nice.

Hugh Soward: It's always, it is always something unique and it's always stressful for two weeks leading up.

Evan Troxel: I bet events are difficult for sure. And, and you held this, you, you hold this event offsite, right? So

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: many people are traveling from offices to go there. It's maybe in a city that an office is located in, maybe not, but can you talk about the venue for this year, the

Hugh Soward: The Pickle Palace.

Evan Troxel: Pickle Palace?

Wes Reynolds: Yeah.

I mean, it's a

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Wes Reynolds: it was a great venue and our um, HR director, uh, Jen, she's a huge part of this. Our hr, our marketing director, Carly, is a huge part of this. And they were definitely two that wind up our game and they said, Hey, we wanna do something different. And we're always up for it, you know, like, what's, what's the venue?

And typically when you got our size, you, you end up being in a convention center at a hotel. 'cause we got a. is 80 people that are, you know, not, or a hundred people that are out town, you know, so it's all those kind of like challenges. But Jen found this place and

what a great combo of like, the Pickle Palace is pickleball and ping pong and all kinds of social venues.

And obviously we need to have a good

size, uh, place to have, you know, uh, food and, and uh, the actual meeting event. And it was, it was a blast. It was a great place. And, uh, I found myself playing pickleball right before, uh, we had the night event and I wish I would've came better clothed 'cause I could've done that all night.

Right. I came, I came in dress

shoes and I was

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Wes Reynolds: over the court. But yeah,

Evan Troxel: I believe you invited me to play pickleball too. If I would've. Yeah, if I wanted to.

Hugh Soward: Yeah. I.

Evan Troxel: was. It was a cool venue for sure.

Wes Reynolds: you know, it's, it's about having fun together. That's how you

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Wes Reynolds: people. Right. You know, and it, it's no better, it's, doesn't get any better than that. So, yeah, it was, it was a great venue and. Uh, minus the microphones. I could have lived without those working a little better, but that's okay.

You always gotta have some glitch, and that's what makes you humble. Right. So can't be

Hugh Soward: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's a group that I'm a part of and they have a, a, a channel in their chat called RFI, and it's not RFIs like architecture, RFIs, it's uh, people can actually put ideas in there. And RFI stands for room for improvement. And

Hugh Soward: hmm.

Evan Troxel: if there is room for improvement, and that could come

it could literally be, you know, there weren't enough trash cans at the event. Like something very small to like the mic. We need to own the microphone set up next time so that it, we make sure it works, for example. And, and I thought, okay, that's a pretty cool, pretty cool idea. The r the RFI channel for, you know, the, the annual event.

Could ideas could and should come from. experience and insight, so

Hugh Soward: Right.

Wes Reynolds: we're always up for, we try not to have a. Roadmap, that that's when it becomes kind of corporate-y and not us. And

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Wes Reynolds: those Pecha Kucha's, we started those last year of letting others like just talk about their work and small and big. And I don't know, those Pcha Chas this year were just somewhere hilarious and didn't see that coming and, and the work is all so fantastic.

So proud of the

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, I really wanted to have you guys on the podcast to highlight what you're doing and that kind of proactive nature that I saw that you firm has and that you're instilling through the whole staff, through events like this. And also just the way you're communicating, kind of where you're going and, and taking time out. do that intentional work, I think is kind of the rarity that I see. I see, you know, a few people from the firm go to this conference and a few people go to that conference and rarely does what happened to that

brought back and presented to the whole, I mean, that's, that's not everybody's interested, but also hard to do.

Right? And so for you guys to actually take the time out to do that, I wanted to highlight that on the show. Thank you so much for having me there. I got a lot out of it and I went to contribute, but I mean, I, I'll just say I got a lot out of it as well. And I, I particularly liked the, all the human stuff that happened there.

I mean,

Hugh Soward: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: speeches, uh, the tears that were shed, the, cereal boxes with. Retiring partners on them. And I mean, it was just, you guys have a fun culture and I wanted to also point that out to listeners, right? And I'll say it like I did on the other podcast, if, if you're looking for work at a Midwestern firm, you guys should be looking at OPN. and I feel like you guys have have a good thing going there.

and everything that you're

Wes Reynolds: Evan, it's, uh, you, you're definitely a friend, OPN and it's an absolute privilege for us to be on this. And thank you for having us. And, he said it, you, you know, you were our number one on the list and we didn't even know if you'd even like pick up the phone and call us back. And, uh, we're so glad you did.

'cause everybody loved hearing your thoughts on it. So thank you for being a part of the retreat and thanks for continuing this relationship.

💡This newsletter provide key insights for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovation in AEC who are short on time, offering the context of each conversation without the need to listen to the full episode. It’s designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in if the ideas resonate.

How long can AEC firms keep calling technology “support” when the people who understand it are increasingly the ones shaping the direction of the entire business?

Summary

At AECtech 2025 in New York City, I had the rare opportunity to moderate a live panel featuring four leaders who all came up through design technology and now occupy significant leadership roles at Populous, HKS, CBT, and SOM. What unfolded on stage was far more candid, energizing, and revealing than any scripted Q&A session could have delivered.

This newsletter distills the ideas, tensions, and aspirations that surfaced during that conversation: the shift from design technology to strategic leadership, the role of communication in scaling transformation, and why technologists are increasingly positioned to shape the business of architecture and engineering.

My goal for the live discussion was to show design technology practitioners a clear path forward. My goal for this breakdown is to give AEC leaders a snapshot of where our discipline is heading and why this moment matters.

Catch the full episode

Key Takeaways

Here are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

• The industry is redefining career paths: Technologists are stepping into business leadership roles once assumed to be exclusive to traditional practice tracks.
• Communication has become the differentiator: “My job is mostly communication.”
• Technologists must manage outward, not just upward: Being a leader means shaping culture, not just solving problems.

In this special partner episode, Todd Henderson and Christopher Parsons join the podcast to talk about what it really takes to build a learning culture inside an architecture firm—one that actually sticks, scales, and improves project delivery over time in this final installment of the KM 3.0 series.

Drawing from Todd’s background in Lean, Scrum, and healthcare design—as well as Chris’s leadership in knowledge management, intranets, and now AI-enabled search—the conversation goes straight to the operational reality: how people learn, how they share what they know, how they improve, and why many firms fall short. The episode explores the evolving role of AI-augmented KM, the importance of making institutional knowledge searchable, the value of intranets that don’t die on the vine, and how learning management systems give firms a real advantage in consistency and quality.

Todd also breaks down practical strategies for coaching teams, supporting project managers, and turning continuous improvement into a repeatable habit rather than a once-a-year aspiration.

About the KM 3.0 Series

This episode concludes a seven-part, in-depth series created in partnership with Knowledge Architecture, designed to give the AEC industry a comprehensive, modern framework for knowledge management. Across these seven conversations, leaders from operations, digital practice, learning & development, and technology share what’s actually working inside their firms—and how they’re using KM, AI, intranets, and training systems to move from isolated expertise to firm-wide capability.

The result is a robust, openly accessible resource for anyone in AEC looking to build or modernize a KM program. Whether you’re starting from scratch or leveling up an existing initiative, the KM 3.0 series delivers a rare combination of strategic clarity, practical examples, and hard-won lessons from people doing the work every day.

If you’re responsible for digital practice, firm operations, KM, or elevating your team’s skills, this finale ties the whole series together and points toward what’s possible. It’s an in depth look at how firms can work smarter today than they did yesterday using the right systems, culture, and leadership making that future achievable.

Original episode page: https://trxl.co/214

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Connect with the Guests

Todd Henderson – Principal, Boulder Associates

• Todd on LinkedIn
• Todd’s Boulder Associates Bio – Lean leader, ScrumMaster, and healthcare architect helping teams “do what we do better today than yesterday.”
• Boulder Associates Website – Healthcare-focused architecture and interior design practice where Todd leads from the San Francisco office.
• Boulder Associates on LinkedIn

Christopher Parsons — Founder & CEO, Knowledge Architecture

• Christopher Parsons on LinkedIn
• Knowledge Architecture Website
• Knowledge Architecture on LinkedIn
• KM 3.0 Overview
• Synthesis – KA’s intranet platform
• Synthesis AI Search
• KA Connect Conference – Community-driven event for knowledge management in AEC
• Smarter by Design Newsletter

Previous KM 3.0 Series Episodes

• TRXL 190: ‘AI + KM = Smarter AEC Firms’, with Christopher Parsons
• TRXL 194: ‘CEO as Knowledge Architect’, with Ellen Bensky and Christopher Parsons
• TRXL 198: ‘Unlocking Sustainability with AI-Powered Knowledge Management’, with Corey Squire and Christopher Parsons
• TRXL 202: ‘Knowledge Management is Everyone‘s Job’, with Katie Robinson and Christopher Parsons
• TRXL 208: ‘Aligning AI with Firm Values’, with Kate Grimes and Christopher Parsons
• TRXL 211: ‘Discovering the Value of AI Through Experimentation’, with James Martin and Jess Purcell

About Todd Henderson:

With 20+ years of experience as a healthcare architect, Todd has recently come to recognize that his deepest professional satisfaction comes not from project work but from facilitating organizational improvement. As a result, he has pivoted to a role of Director of Practice Improvement, taking on assignments that target critical business needs.

He sees his calling as being an agent of change to help achieve strategic business goals more effectively by, for example, leaning on systems thinking to uncover leverage points for action. He takes inspiration — and "borrows" ideas — from powerful schools of thought like lean, agile, and knowledge management. He gets unreasonably excited about using what he's learned to help the people around him experience greater ease in their work.

Outside of work, Todd loves to cook, especially Indian and Chinese cuisines and slow things like fermenting miso or making cheese. He tinkers with electronics, coding, and 3D printing, often in ways to facilitate his food projects. Running, rucking, hiking, and feeble attempts at fishing round-out his freetime.

About Christopher Parsons:

As Founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, Christopher is responsible for product development, marketing, and organizational health. He is also the executive producer of KA Connect, our annual knowledge management conference for the AEC Industry. Christopher has been a technology leader in the AEC industry since 2002, including serving as the Chief Information Officer for Steinberg Architects and the Information Technology Director for SMWM (now Perkins+Will).

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Connect with Evan

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Episode Transcript

214: ‘Partnering with AI to Solve Knowledge Problems’, with Todd Henderson and Christopher Parsons

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and before we dive in, I want to acknowledge Chris Parsons and thank him for his partnership throughout this series. This Marks the seventh and final installment of the KM 3.0 journey that we've been on, a project we created together as a lasting resource for the AEC community: something that captures where knowledge management has been, why it matters more than ever, and how leaders can respond. It's been incredibly rewarding to build this series and watch it resonate with so many of you working to move your organizations forward.

In this episode, Chris and I talk with Todd Henderson. Todd is a thinker, advisor, and practice leader who has spent his career helping organizations navigate complexity, build resilience, and rethink what it means to operate in a world that rarely behaves the way we expect. His work crosses strategy, leadership, technology, and human behavior, and he brings a clarity and honesty that's especially needed right now.

Our conversation spans a wide range of issues: how AI is [00:01:00] reshaping knowledge work and expert driven fields like architecture and engineering. Why VUCA - , volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity is now the constant backdrop for professional practice and what leaders must understand about the fragility of institutional knowledge.

We get into the rising cognitive load inside firms, the limits of traditional knowledge management tools and the shifting identity of the "expert" when machines can retrieve information instantly. Todd brings a deeply human lens to all of it. The role of language and narrative in leadership, the tension between identity and adaption, the psychology of AI adoption, and what it takes to build organizations that learn rather than simply react.

It's the perfect conversation to close out the KM 3.0 series because it elevates the discussion from tools and tactics to the broader mindset and operating system firms will need going forward. As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes.

You can find them directly in your podcast app if you are a paid [00:02:00] supporter of TRXL+, and if you're a free member, you can find them over at the website, which is TRXL.co. Please help the podcast by sharing episodes with your colleagues, and I hope you'll stay through the end of the episode to hear and my closing thoughts on the series, so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Todd Henderson and Christopher Parsons.

Todd Henderson, welcome to the podcast. Great to meet you.

Todd Henderson: likewise, Evan. Thanks for having me.

Evan Troxel: All right, I'm gonna pass this straight off to Mr. Christopher Parsons, who has a relationship with Todd. They've been working together for quite a long time, and I'm actually really excited to hear about Infinite Todd at some point during this, this episode.

So take it away, Chris.

Christopher Parsons: Oh yeah. Good. Uh, good foreshadowing. I've known Todd for close to a decade now at this point, and I have come to think of him as one of the most , generous and inventive knowledge leaders in our community. So he spoke at KA Connect twice, um, once, several years ago about lessons learned with one of his coworkers.

And this past [00:03:00] August he spoke at our conference and he gave a talk that has already become one of the most discussed sessions of the year. It was called Rethinking KM Teams, When Your Newest Teammate is AI.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: we'll get into that today. Um, we're gonna learn about, talk about what it means to build a learning and knowledge program when AI isn't just a tool, but it's a collaborator on your team. So Todd leads a bunch of things. You'll hear about his plates that he's spinning, but learning and development, knowledge management and AI at Boulder, he champions their Synthesis platform there. He's a Director of Practice Improvement. Um, and his intranet, they call Biscuitnet. We may or may not get into why it's called Biscuitnet.

Um, that's their, that's their intranet platform. Um, so Todd is a huge continuous improvement person, um, that will come up for sure. And he's one of those people that's always experimenting. he's curious, he's optimistic, he's quick to turn ideas into action. He once described himself as the person that [00:04:00] puts the fork in the light socket just to see what happens. um, I think that's a

Todd Henderson: the

Christopher Parsons: huge part that that's actually describes a lot of people that I hang out with. So it's a fun, it's a fun group to be with. So over the years, he's just been a great, contributor to our community. And I think this talk, you'll see that, um, he just brings playfulness and fun to knowledge management and business, and I've always appreciated that.

But Todd, so with that, um, Todd, let's dig in and welcome to KM 3.0

Todd Henderson: Thank you so much. I read, I read something recently, Chris, about how, I don't know, in the context of what we do, it's like we're in a jar, And you can't read the label on your jar and

Christopher Parsons: on your own jar.

Todd Henderson: on your own jar. It can sort of read other people's jars. But so that, that introduction was very heartwarming for me 'cause it's like I know what I think is in the jar, but it's nice to hear what other people see.

Christopher Parsons: Yes,

Evan Troxel: Todd's personal brand is curious, but dangerous. That's what it sounds like to me.

Christopher Parsons: like. It's like that Christopher walk-in sketch, [00:05:00] the Saturday Night Live one with the, where he is with all the plants, you know, and he puts the goog eyes on all the plants. 'cause you don't turn your back on a fern, you know? Yeah. That way he can make eye

Evan Troxel: Good.

Christopher Parsons: with a fern and make

Evan Troxel: Nice staring contest. Go. Yeah,

Christopher Parsons: Hard transition to AI search. No, I'm kidding. Um,

Evan Troxel: good segue.

Christopher Parsons: segue.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Um, no, so, so one of the things, Todd, I usually bring in early into beta when we're building new stuff because Todd can see past what's broken and can see what's possible, which is very helpful when you want to collaborate and build something new. Um, and so Todd, you were one of the first three firms into AI search. When we introduced it to Synthesis, you were right on the edge of what it could do. Um, so we appreciate that. And I'm kind of curious for you what that was like, like what drew you to wanting to be part of that beta and that process and kind of like what you learned kind of early on and how you started. You were one of the first people in our community to [00:06:00] evaluate, is this working? Is it doing what I would hope? Would it do what? What even do I hope it should do? Like take us through that, what you remember of that. That was like the last October is when we started.

Todd Henderson: Oh gosh. Well, okay. Oh, oh. A thing about me is, you know, my favorite dish at any restaurant () is always whatever I haven't tried, right? Um, I live in novelty and curiosity and, and what's new and what's out there. And so I just, that's just how I meet the world is, uh, is by, oh, there's a button I haven't pushed.

What happens if I push it right? what's that alarm, you know, now? Um, so that, that kind of thing is right up my alley. Just the, an ambiguous situation or a new situation or unclear situation, I kind love, that's where I love to live. [00:07:00] Um, the dark side of that is I get bored. Really fast. really fast.

Like I went skydiving once and I was bored

Christopher Parsons: On the way down.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. I was like, okay,

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Todd Henderson: cool. I can turn left, I can turn right,

Christopher Parsons: You got probably less bored right at the end though, right? Like that

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: That would be interesting to know how that turns out. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: So I love, I think I might be part Guinea pig, you know, genetically or something like that. I, I love that kind of testing stuff out and then see if I can break it, see if it's broken, whatever. So, um, that is context. I mean, what, what was fascinating for me is, you know, I always say every, every tool works at both ends. being able to search Biscuitnet, our intranet in this other way, this much more, you don't have to know where stuff is. You just have to write a question. Was this big [00:08:00] just a. Oh wow. And then kind of right, follow behind it, like a, oh no, we really should have been investing in our

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: because now it's gonna pay off, it would have if we had, you know, been doing this all along. And so that's Chris, that's what comes back to

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: first. Was that like, I get it now. really

Evan Troxel: question about

Todd Henderson: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: this. The,

so, so AI combined with search, combined with intranet, right? Um, but I'm, I wanna know where, where were you in your kind of tool curiosity when Chris came to you in regards to AI in a, a more practice based or just even consumer level?

Todd Henderson: Man, it's been going so fast. I, it, it's

Evan Troxel: I know it's been a, a year and, and a, it's been a lifetime at the same time.

Todd Henderson: October was a decade ago. Um, I was. Using a, uh, you know, like large language models, [00:09:00] you know, chat, GPTI think at that point in time I might have been a, a perplexity fan, I forget. And, um, using it, uh, a fair amount sort of, sort of dabbling in it, kind of, you know, poking it.

Like what, what does this do? You know, I'd gotten past the, the, the stage of, you know, this in a funny style. Okay, that's okay, cool. You know, we, we've, we've written, wrote some new Shakespeare and we're done with that. And then was sort of sort of like, well, how does this become useful? And, and of course at the same time, those tools are sort of rapidly evolving and, and gaining in their, gaining their abilities.

But I think that's kind of where I was, was this is important, um, happening and I need to know what it is. And it's cool as heck. And also trying to find like, okay, where does it, where does it go? What's it for?

Christopher Parsons: That tracks. 'cause you know, uh, pretty early on we asked you to, I mean, [00:10:00] again, thank you. Like we asked you to do a webinar like six weeks after you started using the product to show people like what you were learning. And you showed a really cool example of kind of critical knowledge transfer from a couple subject matter experts. Um, one of them was Darcy Hernandez, another was Emily Nightingale, where you stitched together. Multiple different kind of AI workflows to do something. Super cool. So I wonder if you can kind of tell us about those early projects.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. And that, that was all, all of that was kind of, sort of coming up simultaneously, right. Along with the AI search and, and so forth. So what, um, I think what I think what, what sparked this for me was the, all of a sudden we have tools that transcribe recorded speech, and they do a pretty good job. Knowledge architecture built that into synthesis. So any of the videos that we post there have a transcript and you can like, huh, that's cool. And, and Teams does this, and it, it, [00:11:00] it that that technology became available. And, um, I don't know, some, somewhere the idea came to me like I could take that transcript and then use that to write intranet content. And actually I could have my friend ChatGPT write the intranet content and I can kind of, you know, be the, the director of that. And so, so outta that came this pipeline that I've sort of iterated, you know, time get expert talking, record it, transcribe it, those basically are effortless at this point. then go and run with it and, you know, use AI to. To mine it, right? Whether it's analyzing it for patterns, whether it's crafting a, you know, a, a summary or a, you know, you know, content end, use content from it, whatever. Um, this is this pattern that I just do kind of all the time now, and that that was [00:12:00] right around when it was born.

And so, you know, the, the two examples, Chris, that you mentioned are two different experts in our firm. One's my partner, uh, Darcy, from, uh, who leads our, our, um, of our offices, Southern California. And she actually, actually, I think this is where this really kind of, kind of landed for me as like the aha. She was lamenting like, ah, I have something to share. And it was about the politics of healthcare construction in California. Very niche thing, but, but kind of a deep. And she's like, I know I should share this on Biscuitnet. I just, I I'm never gonna find the time.

Evan Troxel: It's a heavy lift

Todd Henderson: time.

Evan Troxel: for sure. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: And I think in that moment I was like, I have an idea. How about you and I have a conversation and I'm gonna send you a draft. Right. All I need to do, Darcy, is

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: for a half an hour. [00:13:00] 'cause it's, the writing is the part that sucks if you're an expert in X as long as X is not equal to writing. If you're an expert in healthcare architecture, you're not great at writing.

Writing experts at writing are great at writing. You know who else is great at writing large language models.

Christopher Parsons: It might even be hard for an expert in writing to write about writing though

Todd Henderson: That's probably true.

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. Yeah. And, and that, um. That hypothesis that, hey, if I can get the writing out of the equation for the expert and really all I need from the expert is talk to me, which is a thing they tend to enjoy doing,

Evan Troxel: Yes. I was gonna pipe in with that.

Todd Henderson: We love to talk about what we know

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: we're good at it because we enjoy it. So it's just a source of pleasure, right? It's the writing is the painful part. So that's, so that's, that's a thing I've now, that [00:14:00] that little, that sort of, you know, pipeline is something I do just kind of standard operating procedure, you know, the, the, the knowledge that, that of us, you know, experts hold when it's at rest, it's unreachable. If you can get it out in the air and like literally in the air, in the form of wave vibrations. That a thing like a microphone can pick up,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah,

Todd Henderson: then you can do amazing things with it.

Christopher Parsons: well, they hate writing, but I think the other thing, Todd, that I've seen you do is they also don't know what they know. And so you've been pretty good

Todd Henderson: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: them kind of big, simple questions or following up or like, wait a minute, hold on there. What do you mean by that? And clarifying and digging for examples. And I think what I've seen you produce is a thing that they probably maybe not have been able to write on their own 'cause they wouldn't have access, you know, just a top of memory to some of those things. Like they would be much more [00:15:00] buried, right?

Todd Henderson: I think that's it. And, you know, talking about, you know, the, the run up to this meeting with Darcy where I wound up interviewing her, I even, you know, we sort of had a, you know, like, well, what, what are the points you want to cover? And, and I said, okay, well cool. I'm gonna just facilitate this

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: talk.

Christopher Parsons: And

Todd Henderson: you mean I don't have to worry about kind of getting us. this to the end, I'm like, Nope, I got this. And just let her just drop into her expertise and not really worry about it. And, and so, and, and then, yeah. And then I can, I know enough that I can poke and prod and dig and, um,

Christopher Parsons: then you can restructure so she can talk about it out of order and kind of meander off to a piece. And then you have the ability to kind of.

Todd Henderson: yeah,

Christopher Parsons: Synthesize that that's not too on the nose. And then, and then put it back in the right order. Right? Like and, and then I think the part that you said, and then share a draft.

So then it becomes back and forth and she's like, actually, I missed these three things. Shoot. You know?

Todd Henderson: [00:16:00] yeah. She doesn't need to tell any, you know, they don't need to tell a, a coherent story from start to finish and we're just gonna write it down for them. It's like, just pop the cap and let it fizz out. As long as we catch it, we got it

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: Those, those transcripts become this precious, this precious gold mine. Um, and it doesn't have to be pretty, just,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm,

Todd Henderson: it,

Christopher Parsons: hmm.

Todd Henderson: capture it.

Evan Troxel: Can I ask about the output from that and like, obviously you had this back and forth then with the draft and, and, and so then it goes into the intranet and it becomes a source of. This information that people can look up. I'm just curious how it connects to the end of that whole workflow. The people who actually need the information, do they read it?

What did they think about it? I mean, I'm just curious from like an actual, like rubber meets the road practice improvement. Right? That's what you're doing there. So, because you can, how many times have we all [00:17:00] done this? Like Chris has been in it, I've been in digital practice. The stuff that you're doing, it's like you put it out there and then you don't hear a thing about it ever again, right?

Never. That never happens.

Todd Henderson: I'll, I'll pivot to a different example. Um, that, that maybe illustrates a kind of a more. A richer sort of end, end use case. And that is the other one that Chris uh mentioned. Emily, one of our just rock stars, just generally project manager and she is really good with Bluebeam Bluebeam. If folks don't know, is this PDF?

It's kind of it kind of for architects replaced Adobe Acrobat as a thing that reads and edits PDFs and a lot of us spend a lot of time in Bluebeam. That's where we mark up drawings these days since we don't tend to print them out that much anymore. Anyway, a complex program. It's got a billion settings and thing.

Emily was like, she's [00:18:00] known to be this resource. And I actually, in this case, I approached her and I said, Hey Emily, what do you think about doing a quick masterclass on Bluebeam for project managers? Right. And in this case we invited some other folks. So she had an audience that she spoke to and they could ask questions and naturally, yeah, recorded it, transcribed it, and so fast forward right on Biscuitnet, there's now a page Bluebeam for project managers.

Actually, I think I kind of, I kind of rephrased it 'cause you don't have to be a project manager to, you know, it's like Bluebeam for like busy people. And you can watch the video, you can watch the video automatically transcribes the video. So synthesis search doesn't need anything else from me in order to, if someone says, ah, what is the difference between a Bluebeam Studio project and a Bluebeam studio session, which sound like the same thing, but [00:19:00] actually are different. Synthesis gives a lovely answer to that.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: on the page where the, there's the video. I still have a written summary that, you know, I use chat GPT to develop because a lot of people would rather skim,

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: to kind of go right to the thing that they want. So, so I mean, and that took 10 minutes to create.

I mean, it just, it's so fast, right? Um, we, uh, one of the plates that keeps spinning is our onboarding program and redesigned our onboarding program. Well, that page, that content is a part of onboarding. And so new hires, um, unless they're entry level, they get a kind of a very basic to Bluebeam from that blue that Bluebeam themselves produce. if you're, you know, have some experience, we have, you go do this and you can either watch the video or you can kind of

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: it and off you go. And so that's a way of, of trying to [00:20:00] operationalize that, that knowledge.

Christopher Parsons: And meet people in different, um, you know, I don't think, I don't tend to say learning styles, but like, you know, different preferences or if you're in a hurry, you don't wanna watch a video, you wanna get right to the shortcut key or whatever. It's, you want the

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: exactly.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. So you took this, um, so timeline wise, we're kind of in like Q4 of last year, October, November, December, kind of thing. And then we, we started talking the beginning of 25. And I'll just, I'll, I'll skip some of the, the, the, the kind of the, the back, the history there. But like, you ended up with this idea of creating a medical planning accelerator. Which I just want to

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: and I want our audience to hear more about what, what is a medical planning accelerator?

Why did Boulder Associates need one? Should we all have one? You know, what is this?

Todd Henderson: this was one of those, this was one of those moments where, um, just a need came up. I'm like, holy cow, this is what I've been training for. [00:21:00] Right. And I didn't even know it.

Evan Troxel: You didn't know it ahead of time.

Todd Henderson: Didn't even know it. So another partner of mine, let's call her Kate, because that's her name, uh, was lamenting that. Oh, and so Kate, Kate, like Darcy is a rock star expert.

Her expertise is medical planning, especially the early phase of medical programming and user group meetings, and really complex medical planning. Incredible expert. And she has built of medical planners around her, a growing team, around her word came to me that she was lamenting like, ah, it takes, it takes too long to get people kind of up to speed, So we have a few people whose job is actually medical planner, but we have a whole lot. I should mention our company, 80 90% of our work is healthcare work. And so we have a lot of folks that. You know, [00:22:00] do typical projects and, and may not even use our, our actual medical planning

Christopher Parsons: And like 200 or so employees something in that order of magnitude.

Todd Henderson: 50. Yeah,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. And then how many medical planners that of that? Those people.

Todd Henderson: Six,

Christopher Parsons: Okay.

Todd Henderson: something like that.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: a, they're a, a kind of a precious commodity. And this is, this is a relatively new thing. I mean, this is just, this all was sort of born like last year, so this is, you know, new and growing and evolving. Anyway, the problem, we need to get the, the sort of the most project teams working on healthcare projects up to up to speed faster.

We're hiring a lot of folks who are maybe experienced architects but are new to healthcare and there's a lot to learn there. Um, we also, there was the observation that when teams do engage with our medical planners, they don't do so great. Kate talked about, getting a phone call. Hey, I have a user group meeting tomorrow.

I'm hoping you can [00:23:00] run it. Well, that's not great. That is not a best practice. Um, so how do we, how do we, how do we just raise our game on some, some of the basic stuff, but also how to use these experts that we're growing and developing, and also how do we take those medical planners and actually keep kind of elevating their work as well? So that's sort of the, sort of the rundown. It, it struck me as the most perfect knowledge management. Like what a, what a juicy km challenge This is. This is a poster child for a wonderful knowledge management challenge. Right. So I, I did some research and you'll see the threads of what we just talked about coming through, where I just went and I interviewed all of medical planners and to do the, you know, I did a structured interview. I kind of interviewed them the same things, and I'm not a skilled [00:24:00] interviewer. So first of all, I had chat, GPD help me, like, hey, help me, help me plan

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: an interview.

Here are my goals. I wanna surface the, the lived experience, if you will, of our medical planners. I want to understand what their world is like, how they got to where they are, where are they feeling friction, blah, blah, blah. Right? And it helped me figure out, you know, like a half an hour, kind of a, you know, just an interview plan, a series of questions. So I started interviewing these folks. Then I feed the, I feed the first transcript back in and I say, Hey, I did one of these interviews. How did I, how did I do as an interviewer? First of all, give me some coaching. You know, in all of this, I want to be, I'm not trying to hand off my work. I actually want to get better at all of this stuff. And are the questions working? Do we need to tune anything? And so we're able to, you know, just rapidly iterate. I mean, I had, sometimes I had a half an hour between interviews and I could re revise the interview plan, you know, easily within that time, [00:25:00] get the interviews done, 'em all back in here are six or eight interviews, whatever it was. And now it's a task of mining that gold for the, the nuggets, right? What are the patterns? What are we seeing? What's, what's missing? What's, you know? And it was just this kind of just fantastic process. It was so easy. 'cause I'm not trying to, if I had to do this manually and sort of read through these transcripts or re-listen to them or read my notes. A

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Todd Henderson: doesn't have the the bandwidth to do that easily. Ai, a problem.

Evan Troxel: I, I think what's interesting about that process, I mean 'cause it, you've started out, and I think Chris mentioned it in the, the introduction, which was. When AI is your, your newest teammate, right? This was part of your talk at KA Connect. So, so you really, I mean, that's becoming very clear that that's how you're treating it.

And I think what's interesting, kind of hear through hearing you and through my experiences, and I would love to hear from [00:26:00] both of you, your experiences in this, but it's like, it's like somebody is there and they're always available and it's the person that knows about the thing, right? So it's like, it's like when you're interviewing Darcy or Kate or you know, it's like you just have access to them then, but they only have so many hours in the day and they're working on all these other things and you actually don't have access to them.

And so I think that's what's super interesting about this. And then multiply that across multiple offices and people having access to this information in a very, like, I get to ask the question kind of a way, not just I get to read the report that was. Generated from through writing or through an interview or a video or whatever, right.

But I think that that's, that's like a super interesting shift in the way that we're interacting with technology as it represents what people in your firm are authoring. And so I'm curious [00:27:00] from both of your, you know, speaking about AI as a teammate or a collaborator, does that kind of, is this the experiences that you're having?

Because I know there's a lot of people who just still use it, like, oh, answer my question.

Todd Henderson: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And, and you're, I think you're, you're, you're really speaking to this kind of back and forth between you and IT and bouncing ideas, getting feedback, all of those kinds of things.

Christopher Parsons: Well, I think, I think, um. Todd Todd's point earlier, it's like, oh yeah. And then, oh no. Like I, I think another way of kind of saying that is, you know, we use these tools internally, like we use our own technology I have written more content on our internal intranet. I've probably written five to six times as much content this year as I wrote in the previous year.

You know, like probably higher than that. Because what you realize is if you want that to be possible, if you want people to be able to have conversations with,

Evan Troxel: You gotta get it outta your head, right?

Christopher Parsons: right? But you have to treat, this is the thing if like, if, if the [00:28:00] AI is a teammate, you have to think about it's learning and development as

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: So how is it possibly gonna answer that question? And it's got all these knowledge gaps and part of what you're now trying to do is like you're trying to externalize. What you know, and not just what I know, but like what our team knows or like what nobody knows, like you could, there's a gap here. It's like nobody here can answer this question.

We need to go find the answer to plug the gap. 'cause you're trying to build, if you imagine it's like a foundation, like you're trying to build a solid knowledge foundation for your company and you don't want there to be cracks and holes and gaps. You want to build on rock, not sand, all the metaphors,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: And so when you get that metaphor in your head of like we're trying to build and then also maintain this solid knowledge foundation you're thinking about these future teammates that maybe ai, it just changes your whole approach. Like as I'm designing stuff new features, lot of what I'm doing is then [00:29:00] talk.

I do a lot of that through audio mode, which I know Todd, you do as well. And at the end of that I'll say like, let's kind of tell me our design decisions that we made while we were designing. Like what did we decide to do what not? Why did we make these decisions? What are some workarounds. And then I'll log that, 'cause I'm not gonna remember that three months from now or six months from now, or 12 months from now. So I can personally go back and get answers to those things. But that opens it up to my team too. So like, why aren't we supporting this feature? Well, it's because of this, this, and this, and we have to do it in the future. So it's a, it's a mindset shift, Evan, and an awareness that like if you take the time to write all this down, and I think this is what's different from the past of knowledge management is everybody, especially subject matter experts, get it. They're like, oh, I see. I can retrieve it, my team can retrieve it. You know, it's setting us up for AI success. So it just feels like that ROI on doing all that knowledge work has just gone through the roof.

Evan Troxel: That retrieval part is so important, right? Because it's how many times? Like, okay, it could be a Revit model, it could be a Rhino [00:30:00] model. It could be a Bluebeam document. But you have to go in and look for that information if you want to find it, or it's just forgotten about, right? Let's be honest, how many files are on the server?

And it's like nobody knows what's in them and no one's gonna go look

Christopher Parsons: right.

Evan Troxel: because, and, and somebody's moved on and we forgot about 'em. But what you're actually talking about is just kind of this. Actively live document at. At least it has the potential to be that. I think that's what's a shift.

Christopher Parsons: your people, right? If you think about it, you

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: the model of your knowledge up to date, know, digitally while you're building it in your carbon based analog brain or whatever it is,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: And Todd, I think like partly what's going on at Boulder, right, is like, you're kind of of key thing about knowledge management.

You can't manage all your knowledge. If you try and do it all at once, you're gonna just fall apart. Like it's, there's too much. So, but what you've done is you've prioritized a key area around medical planning that's like, let's establish a, at least a foundational level knowledge in the company around medical planning, right?

And then [00:31:00] we'll move on to the next thing and the next thing. And the next thing. Right.

Todd Henderson: It's the classic advice of. Pick, pick a problem that matters. Do do something that, that somebody cares about, that improves your business. Don't just do something neat for fun. You have to, you know, it has to be targeted. And so here we had a, you know, with the medical planning thing, we have a, a pre, a clear and present need for something, right?

Christopher Parsons: Which had all lived in people's heads. Right. There was nothing written before or was there any, anything written?

Todd Henderson: Very little.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah,

Todd Henderson: very, yeah, very little. You know, and, and, but, but that, I think a key thing is that that first step of, okay, I hear what you've asked me to do. I'm gonna go study the situation and get a clear idea of, kind of the landscape first critical. 'cause that

Christopher Parsons: I, Todd let me, I'm sorry to interject, but like, there's, there's something in, in the nuance of the way you did it that I think is important. What you didn't do first is sit down with Kate and try and exhaustively interview Kate. You went to the people that [00:32:00] worked, that were more junior or kind of like

Todd Henderson: Yes.

Christopher Parsons: right?

You did the, you called it going to gemba, which I think would be interesting. If

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Christopher Parsons: what that means and kinda like why you did it that way. I think the sequence was important.

Todd Henderson: it was important and very deliberate. In fact, I didn't interview Kate on purpose. I have Kate's, Kate's sort of the, the customer for this in a way. the work is going to impact these other medical planners, so I need to understand their world. So I've been shaped immensely by lean, right?

Lean is this sort of philosophy that comes out of the to Toyota manufacturing. System, it's come into healthcare architecture, especially starting in the Bay Area. So it was really, really important in my kind of middle of my career, and it just shaped my thinking about all kinds of things. When Chris introduced me saying he's Todd's all about continuous improvement, boy, howdy.

I mean, the way I make coffee in the [00:33:00] morning has been iterated 10,000 times. I'm

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: like, I get a little bit. But anyway, um, I got excited about coffee and I lost the train of thought. So gemba this, there's this notion, so there's a lot of Japanese terms that, uh, that, that show up in my mind and in my world.

And, and one is this notion of genbutsu. It means going to gemba. Gemba is like the place where the work happens at Toyota. It's expressed by an executive coming out onto the shop floor. They've heard there's a problem with one of the machines and executive is there and talking to the person who uses the machine and understanding.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: The reality of this. And they might, there's this example of, of one of them like reaching into this pan of oil and pulling up, you know, you know, filings of, of metal, like something's really going wrong with this machine. And it was, it's this expression of you really do need to go see what's going on. And in so doing part, partly it's, it's just that understand what's going on, but you [00:34:00] are showing respect.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: that is, that is just so important, right? You're showing respect to this person who you are perhaps going to, you know, change their world in some fashion. You're designing a process or a standard or who knows, right? I don't think you can ever go wrong by showing too much respect.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm

Todd Henderson: it's kinda like communication. Can there be too much communication? I don't

Christopher Parsons: hmm.

Todd Henderson: Um, so that notion of, hi, I am Todd. Tell me what your world is like. Tell me what's going on for you.

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Todd Henderson: Helps me understand what's going on, but also helps build It helps them be interested in something. The alternative, and I have tried, this is, hi, I'm Todd. You're doing your job wrong, but guess what? It's your lucky day 'cause I fixed it.

Christopher Parsons: I have a template for you to try.

Todd Henderson: Here you go.[00:35:00]

Evan Troxel: Have a, I have a standard.

Christopher Parsons: have a standard for you. You're welcome.

Todd Henderson: you go. I'll stand over here

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: run out and get me some flowers or candy, you know, No, that does not work.

Christopher Parsons: So you're both trying to understand their lived experience, but also their hopes, their dreams, their needs. And so when you end up shaping knowledge products for them, know, it's not you and Kate

Evan Troxel: It fits.

Christopher Parsons: up. What would help them, because Kate's so far down her journey, she doesn't know, and you don't know anything about medical planning, so you don't know. So design, it's customer led de knowledge, product design, kind of right.

Todd Henderson: led and, and Chris, it's, it's influenced by getting to be a beta tester for the things you guys roll out. The, the, the sort of discipline of, I don't go very far without making sure the people who are actually gonna use this have, have given some input. Right. Have helped shape it.

Christopher Parsons: What's wild about that Todd is like, we start really early with that process you're [00:36:00] talking about. And even so like, like let's say I, there's seven of people and I kind of spend a bunch of time with them and we figure exactly what they need. We go design it, we build it, we give it to them. You have to stay with them because the we, everybody hoped and dreamed isn't once you get into 3D and you start using something, it's not like you thought it might be, and you

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Christopher Parsons: stay with that group like two all the way through.

You know what I mean?

Todd Henderson: And, and it helps when you've built bridges and you've,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: see you as an ally, not an enemy or a, you know, someone who's gonna change their world, you know, make change at them, but, but is trying to make change with them for the things that they've told you they want. That's a much better, know, talk about building a foundation.

Christopher Parsons: so you, um, you, you went to Gemba, you spent time, then what did you do? Like,

or what did you learn? Yeah, yeah.

Todd Henderson: well, you know, take these transcripts back and kind of just work back and forth with, you know, in this case with chat GPT of like, what, what's here, what are the patterns? What are we seeing? you know, a couple things popped up. [00:37:00] ah, some of our medical planners aren't clear what the medical planning role means.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: Well, that's a

Evan Troxel: to Architecture. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: Well, and it's one of those moments, it's one of those moments where

Evan Troxel: means a lot of things.

Todd Henderson: A problem well stated is half solved. It's like, okay, I can,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: guess what, you know, an hour later we have a pretty good medical planner role description figured out now, right? I mean, that was a side, a side

Christopher Parsons: Just to pause on that. The the though, is that synthesized from these people who are not Kate? Or is that here's what people think it is, then you like, Kate, this is what people think they're supposed to

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: How close are they?

Todd Henderson: so just to, just to sort of do a little side quest on the medical planner role description, those interviews with the planners helped surface that we need one, we have the lack of clarity. Also, our project teams, remember, our project teams aren't using medical planners well. They don't know where they start and

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: We all need this clarity. So for [00:38:00] that, I actually did interview Kate and one other senior medical planner. I also turns out we have a job description, so we have roles, but we also have jobs. So we do have people who are hired as a medical planner. So I was like, well, give me that job

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: That's probably a good feed stock for this. And I took all of that, all of the interviews and the job descriptions, and then it was like, me write a medical planner job de, you know, role description

Christopher Parsons: So the difference is like a role is like, I might be playing this role on a project, but I'm, my job description is project job captain or project architect, or whatever. It's

Todd Henderson: Exactly.

Christopher Parsons: okay.

Evan Troxel: I love this whole idea of, of this thing, um, that, that you didn't just stop it. Well, we fed the system, the foundational information, and now we can just live off of that. Because I think a lot of, I mean, that's, that's what happens, right? It's like, okay, check the box. Yep. Uploaded the HR docs, uploaded the employee manual, uploaded the job [00:39:00] descriptions, the roles, the responsibilities, the, you know, definitions, the glossary, the acronyms, all the things.

Okay. But I think what's super interesting is that you actually asked a question then it's like, well, I mean, it's, it's your job, right? Todd, how do we improve on this? Right? How do we make it more clear? How do we get clear? Because you could in interview two different medical planners. And they could have two different descriptions about what the role of a medical planner is.

I mean, there would be a lot of overlap, of course, but there's still gonna be outliers. There's still gonna be different ways to talk about things. There's different ways to abstract information and, and communicate that to people. And then you get the, to use these kinds of tools to really help bring clarity to everybody in the office.

And then it just becomes this thing that I, I don't know what the cadence is, but you, you kind, you kind of need to do this. And I think over and over, and I didn't finish the sentence, but, but, but in architectural practice, how many things are there in the practice that it's like, well, [00:40:00] that's done. And now we never have to think about it again.

We're just gonna keep doing it the way we've always done it. That's like the dirty word on this podcast, right? Is we're gonna do it the way we've always done it, because that doesn't sh like you're, you are literally in a role of finding better ways to do the things we already do.

Todd Henderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and you know what, the, the other thing is I, I, I believe in the 80 20 rule, almost as a, as a, as a lifestyle. So

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Todd Henderson: role description, it only has to be 80%. Good. It's fine. 'cause

Evan Troxel: Not perfect. Yeah. Right.

Todd Henderson: do, check, adjust,

Christopher Parsons: But I think,

Todd Henderson: check,

Christopher Parsons: if I remember right, there was a big thing though. There was like a question, it's like, are medical planners responsible for selecting medical equipment? Yes or no? And nobody knew. Like that's a

Evan Troxel: Sometimes

Christopher Parsons: role. Sometimes it depends,

Todd Henderson: Depends.

Christopher Parsons: Oh

Evan Troxel: That's an answer. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: medical planners were clear. We don't do that. We're not medical equipment planners,

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Todd Henderson: of its own thing. Very

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: project teams really want to hand this off to [00:41:00] somebody. So they were strategically unclear themselves and, and yeah. So, you know, that surfaced in these various interviews as a, as a concern, as a lack of clarity as a thing to get, like, we should figure this out.

And, and then, and, and, and, and kind of, you know, it came up a few minutes ago. You, you, it's nice Chris, you talked about this. You could sort of throw everything in the hopper and then you can kind of get it back out

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: So knowing that there's this issue around, hey, we need to like draw this boundary.

Like our medical planners are not your equipment planner, but how do we do that tactfully? And I was able with the, you know, when, when using AI to write this role description. Sh that that piece showed up clearly. And then using it to write, you know, a revised page

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: Biscuitnet, same thing. And it was able to, it was able to phrase it more, more tactfully than I was, than I was able to. 'cause it's good with language. You know, there's another thing, [00:42:00] there's another thing I want to, uh, about this, that the, the, the whole kind of, from these interviews, that was one of those like blew my mind moments where every now and then, I mean, most of what, you know, most of these conversations with Gen G pt, it's, it's just like, yeah, banal, banal al.

And then you're like, oh, hold on. And at one moment it used this phrase, the Kate effect, it said, oh, just blindly. It's like, oh, well, you know, you need to worry about the Kate effect. And I was like, what? No one, no one I interviewed that phrase, we don't, that's not a

Evan Troxel: How funny.

Todd Henderson: that we

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: What do you mean by the Kate effect?

And it came back with this really poignant thing of everyone who is, you know, all these medical planners, they talk about the incredible impact that Kate makes when she, you know, you know, joins a meeting when she comes and intervenes and does something, she gets a lot done fast. They look up to her, they want to be [00:43:00] her, and there clearly isn't sort of a second in charge.

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: then there's everyone else.

Christopher Parsons: Mm.

Todd Henderson: that is a source of systemic fragility

Evan Troxel: Totally. Yep.

Todd Henderson: And I Right.

oh my God,

Christopher Parsons: Got it. Yep.

Todd Henderson: is, that's gold right

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: I'm, it's doubtful. I was going to come to that on my own.

Evan Troxel: That is insightful for sure.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. The kind of risk profile of that.

Todd Henderson: man. And then it's like, now I can work on that.

Christopher Parsons: Closing that gap. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: work on closing that

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. And the things we're, we're still working on is strategically like, okay, I need to transfer some critical knowledge. I think the book is sitting right there,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: from Kate to these other folks and broaden it out. And, and, and the other, the other thing about this also is I can show this, you know, I wrote

Christopher Parsons: Yeah,

Todd Henderson: from those original six interviews of like, [00:44:00] here's, here's the picture that I'm seeing of medical planning and gave it to Kate.

And she's like, she can be like, I see it. I get it.

Christopher Parsons: but it's citing the, the pe those people's quote, you quoted those people. Right. So it's also like, here are the re

Todd Henderson: Absolutely.

Christopher Parsons: isn't their words, how they feel. Right. They don't know what their job is or, yeah.

Todd Henderson: trying to, you know. Whatever. Do you know this isn't Todd's opinion, this is Todd. As a sort of amateur anthropologist studying a situation and reporting, maybe journalist maybe is better,

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: and reporting it back. And that has, that has also been very powerful.

'cause what, I'm really trying to do and, and I think it's, it's bigger than knowledge management. I'm trying to understand the structure of problems. 'cause it's a problem presents some kind of behavior that is happening and you wish it wasn't or behavior that isn't [00:45:00] happening and you wish it was.

And the classic, the classic management move is go tell those people to stop doing the thing or start doing the thing.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Nobody wants to hear either one of those.

Todd Henderson: It never works. It has never worked in the history of

Christopher Parsons: managing the, the, uh, the symptom, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: never worked because the symptom is, the re result is the, is the bottom of this long

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Todd Henderson: That, that, that, that, that, you know, includes the beliefs that your organization holds and your structures, you know, who, what jobs are there, what information flows are

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: Um, and if you don't try to understand the structure of the problem, you're not gonna, you're not gonna change the

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: Right. And just yelling at the person that is or isn't doing the thing.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I mean, you're literally describing cause and effect, right? But, but everybody's just looking at effect and most of the time, right? And, [00:46:00] and you have to go to the source, like this is the, the gemba, the gemba.

Todd Henderson: there's a, um, 1911 physicist named Rutherford, British guy. Was studying the structure of the atom, the, the belief at the time, and this, this is in England, so that the atoms, they knew there were particles in them. I think, I think they, maybe they knew they were electrons. I don't know if that term was in use or not, but they knew there was something, it wasn't just a marble, That, that, that model had been replaced with one, like a plumb pudding, So some kind of a, kind of a, a matrix with these little things dotted in, uh, uh, you know, like a, like a cookie. He was testing this and so I promise this lands in, in a relevant way. Soon, he shot a beam of alpha particles at a very thin layer of foil, of, of gold, gold foil, gold leaf. And if the prevailing [00:47:00] model of the atom was true, you'd see is the, the, the scatter. You know, it hit, you know. It, it would go through the, the, the pudding parts and it would hit the, the particle parts and it would scatter off, like you'd see a, a, a particular kind of, probably sort of a, kind of a homogenous scattering thing.

So he had a, he had a, like a, a detector, a particle detector around this setup. So they could see, like when they shot the beam, like where it, where it

Evan Troxel: Yeah, like a game of pool, like, like when you,

Todd Henderson: a hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: yeah. Okay.

Todd Henderson: hundred percent. What he saw instead was most of the radiation, most of the off particles went straight through. That was the aha.

Atoms are mostly empty space. They're not a solid thing. Occasionally some of them would veer off a little bit, very occasionally, some would like ping back at a sharp angle, so they hit something in the middle. Right. And so this was this, this was the, you know, can't see. And Adam [00:48:00] directly, but you can fire radiation at it. And by the way, it ricochets off. You can deduce what the structure is

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: What I'm doing is the same thing. You can't see the mental models that people hold. You can't see beliefs. You can ask them they'll tell you what they want you to know that they think they believe

Evan Troxel: That's a well qualified statement.

Todd Henderson: uhhuh. Right? Um, so, so these interviews that I do, those, those are my alpha particles, right? And I'm,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: pinging them off in the way they ricochet. The answers they give me understand the shape of the problem that I'm studying, the structure of the problem. And sometimes that structure is like the structure of the firm. That

Evan Troxel: Right,

Todd Henderson: the problem. And, uh, I. Just, just the ability to handle all of the language tasks around that using AI is what's [00:49:00] making this possible. And it was making this a really fertile time. For what I'm, what I'm up to.

Christopher Parsons: So now you've defined it well, like, talk about solving it like the last time we talked about this in August, so it, you know, five years ago. In, in, in AI terms.

Evan Troxel: right.

Todd Henderson: terms.

Christopher Parsons: terms, you know, you were, we talked about descriptions, you know, you built some templates, you were messing around with an AI role play surgeon.

You were messing around with some different stuff. Like what, what are you finding is working to help close some of the gap? Like, what experience have you tried, experiments, have you tried, and then what do you think is working to close that knowledge gap between Kate and everyone else?

Todd Henderson: Bunch of things. Um, not all of them have stuck, which is somewhat predictable. Um, easy win is that role de role description, right? That's just, you know. One and done. Right. Um, that's the sort of lowest level intervention that still needs to kinda be rolled out and, and implemented. But, um, the, one of the things, you know, Chris, you mentioned the, a role [00:50:00] play.

And so one of the things I, I learned from our medical planners is like, it's kind of hard. I mean, running these user group meetings, a user group meeting is of, and I think it's particular to healthcare architecture. I'm not sure other markets necessarily have this, maybe they have an analog, but it's, it's pretty intense in healthcare where you have meeting of, you know, physicians and nurses and department heads, really intense people.

Sometimes, sometimes big ego people and invariably, unbelievably busy people you might be meeting at seven in the morning 'cause that's all you, that's all they got, right? So these meetings are really critical and they're, they're not easy and they, they can be a bit of a, they can be a bit stressful. It's hard to do your first one, right? What if there was some way to help a person practice in a safe place where you can fail, you can get thrown to the ground and it doesn't hurt 'cause you landed on a pad. And so my, [00:51:00] you know, early ideation was was, man, is there a way I could, I could build a home brewed, uh, uh, uh, uh, AI simulator for this?

And that's possible a little beyond my, I think I'd spend enough time on it myself that, that someone would be like, where has Todd been for the last three weeks? So, but right around then, LinkedIn came out with something. Um, it was right before KA Connect, it was like the week before KA Connect.

So they'd had these role plays. You can go on there and you can role play giving feedback to a high performing employee or a low performing employee and, and you use a voice mode and just talk back and forth. came out? Um, just right there in, in, you know, late July, early August was the ability to make your own, you could define your own, the persona, the task, what's it graded on.

And so I built a very quickly, just a kind of a, a virtual surgeon and you're gonna, we do a lot of surgery centers, [00:52:00] ambulatory surgery centers is one of our very common project types. And so I sort of built a kind of a, by the nature of it, it has to be very, very kind of small and targeted. It can't really be a real meeting 'cause just, it's not designed for that.

Right.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: But this thing of like, Hey, I need to introduce myself, describe the point of this meeting and ask you about your workflow. Kind of, kind of a, just a couple, couple things. And it's been interesting. It's, um, stressful. Like, I sort of told it like, a surgeon, you're real busy. You're not sure why you're here. know, you're not sure why these healthcare experts need, need you to design this thing, right? So you might express some skepticism. And boy does she, um, and it's

Christopher Parsons: You're trying to create a, if you're trying to put these people, give them reps under duress, you know,

Evan Troxel: Totally.

Christopher Parsons: out, like Yeah. To have seen it before so they [00:53:00] don't see it for the first time live. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: Um, it's cool. It's cool. It's interesting. It hasn't frankly gone anywhere 'cause it's just, I think it's just not quite

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: It's so, it's too constrained. 'cause you just, you can only describe, you have like 500 words to describe it. I

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: it's just, you know, it's just not full fledged for what I'm trying

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: did spawn another idea. I was showing it to Kate and she's like, you know, it'd be cool. Uh, actually if you could do something that was like, when we go to project interviews, that was like a a, a trial run of doing a project interview.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: Well, that I was able to build in, in just chat GPTI loaded up all of the kinds of questions, you know, every marketing department keeps a

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Todd Henderson: word file or a spreadsheet of quest of interview questions. And so I made this, this, uh, project interview, you know, role play thing. [00:54:00] That's actually quite, it's quite cool. It has different, it has like three different levels. It can be like easy mode where it'll give you feedback, you know, or there's like tough mode where it's like skeptical and it wants,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm,

Todd Henderson: not gonna just take your first answer.

It's gonna be like, I don't know, any, gimme some evidence that, that's true. I mean, it's much more interesting. I'm still sort of shopping that around. I think, I think this is a little bit, this may feel a little bit like, hi marketing department. I'm Todd. I've solved something that you

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: in here and they're, they're a little bit like, thanks

Christopher Parsons: I'm curious about that. So Kate thought it would be really cool, Is what I'm inferring here, but I don't know, like Jim and Denise and Tony didn't think it would be really cool. Like they weren't necessarily thinking this is the way that would help them to learn.

Todd Henderson: I think so. I don't know. It it, Chris, you, you said it before, like, sometimes people ask for something and then you give it to them.

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: eh, it's not, it's not quite right. So, [00:55:00] um, I haven't put a ton of effort into it. I've, you know, just a priorities. It hasn't been

Christopher Parsons: But the goal is still clear, right? You still, like, we need to get people reps at being able to do user meetings or project interviews. Is that, do you still feel like you've diagnosed things correctly based on the preliminary work you did and now you're just figuring out the best way to solve the problem?

Todd Henderson: Figuring out the best way to solve the problem, maybe even just. for the technology to

Christopher Parsons: Hmm mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: easier. 'cause it's just we're the cusp of, of this being it feels like. But in the meantime, you know, other things like, um, I had this idea, you know, there are TED talks.

What if there were med talks? We have all these, we have all these tools that the planners have created in true, true, true form. We haven't really told anybody about 'em. And guess who knows how they work the best, Kate? So [00:56:00] we've uh, we've assigned each of these tools to one of the planners. Their job is to learn how to use it at a Kate level

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: level.

They can interview Kate, they can talk to Kate. Kate's gonna coach this process, whatever. The only rule is Kate may not do any of these presentations. It has to come

Christopher Parsons: Mm.

Todd Henderson: of the other planners. Ha ha. And then it's, we're gonna do like TED talks one of these tools. So teach ba how to use this tool, what it's for, why to use it, where it falls off, and when you should contact one of the medical planners to go deeper, right?

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: It does a couple things. It elevates that

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: transfers some, some of Kate's knowledge. It ties that planner to that tool. Kate is, is Kate's able to, to elevate and be at Kate's level? And these folks are starting to be that second level of, of expertise, but on a narrower piece. So

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: bite

Christopher Parsons: And Kate's no [00:57:00] longer a bottleneck on supporting that tool. So she's been able to let that, let that

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: so interesting 'cause when people say we want to backfill Kate, a lot of times, like, we need to find a, we need to make a clone. And that's usually very, very hard to do with someone that's been working for decades to build that expertise.

But what you are going at is decomposing important parts of her knowledge in this case that are tied up in embodied and tools and distributing that. Right.

Todd Henderson: It is, it, is it the, the best or the only

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Todd Henderson: kind of solve the Kate effect? I, I don't know, but it's the one that like meets it, it like, it just checks a lot of boxes right

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: and is kind of fun, frankly. I mean, med talks, who doesn't love that? Well, the little do, do drippy sound. I mean, you know the whole thing.

Evan Troxel: I like how you're introducing people into this puzzle of scale, right? Because I think a lot of times when you talk about scaling knowledge or whatever it is, skills, you're usually, I think approaching it from like a technology standpoint. Well, the tool [00:58:00] handles the thing, whatever it is, and I think it's really interesting that you're saying, okay.

Now this person is going to be the, become an expert because that you, you're investing in that person, first of all, which I would think they would really appreciate. They're giving, you're giving them the time to do this, right? Because everybody's got deadlines and all these things, so you actually have to be really proactive about that investment and say, no, like, we need you to learn this.

There's value in that, and then we're gonna take that and you're gonna become the spokesperson to deliver that information to an even broader group. Maybe it's a small group at first, and then you get some feedback, but you build in to the culture of the firm. Then how you approach scaling knowledge, which is more than just a technology solution, right?

Christopher Parsons: You also record that, so you're also digit, you're externalizing it and digitizing it at the same time, which

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: and like, so you're doing both things at the same time, right?

Todd Henderson: just, exactly, it, it, and it, and it's, it's [00:59:00] eating away at the structural problem. The structure of this problem is that we

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: base and then

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: And what we need is, you know, my, my hand gestures aren't gonna. Do well on a podcast, an audio podcast. We have a, but we need, we

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: scheme, not a, not a tall, skinny tower that's unstable with just Kate in it.

And, and it's a way of solving the structure and it, and again, a tool works at both ends. So this will shape the culture of the firm

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: bit. The, the, the, the, the, the place I wanna, I wanna put this carefully. It's not about taking anything away from Kate or how people see Kate, it's broadening the base,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: Well, I mean, if you think about the amazing person that Kate is, Kate is a rock star. Kate is an asset. It's all, there is a liability side to that equation when it's the single. Person. [01:00:00] Right. It so, absolutely. I mean, it's, you have to diversify that, that knowledge throughout the firm. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: And Kate's delighted. You know, Kate's delighted by this.

Christopher Parsons: yeah.

Todd Henderson: doesn't want to, you know, that, that, that circumstance, right? She's probably terrified of buses, you know, as a

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: vacations,

Evan Troxel: Lotteries, maybe not lotteries, but,

Christopher Parsons: Kate go on vacation without like, and actually turn her phone off and worry that she's not

Evan Troxel: right.

Christopher Parsons: what I mean? Um,

Evan Troxel: a great point. I love that. I love that.

Christopher Parsons: the things that's so interesting about this is like. You know, when I first got started in knowledge management, you know, people say knowledge is power, and people like wanna hoard knowledge.

I'm like, I don't feel like in 2025 I hear much about knowledge

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: anymore. I feel like

Evan Troxel: Right.

Christopher Parsons: fucking busy and their knowledge is changing so fast that they're like, I just want to help. I just want help. You know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: don't wanna be the, the, the bottleneck or the choke point and hold this organization hostage.

That's not my intention at all. You know?

Todd Henderson: And, and, and [01:01:00] top of that. My calendar is back to back

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: I have, I can barely just do what I'm doing

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: can't solve the problem that I'm in the middle of. And that's, that's, that's really what's becoming my role is I'm someone who works, you know, on, on the structure of the business, on the firm

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Todd Henderson: instead of for it.

And so I can take these things on and I can just be like, sit with me for a half an hour and, you know, and then I can run with this once I capture your expertise.

Christopher Parsons: on the important but non-urgent things for Boulder, well, a lot of people are working on urgent fires. You're just trying to prevent fires from happening in the

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: yeah, yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Before we get to Infinite Todd, which I know everybody's waiting for, I'm gonna keep pushing it out a little bit further. Um, you had, these are my words. You correct where I got this wrong. You had enough success with Kate and the medical, um, Accel planning accelerator that the firm came to you and said like, Hey dude, [01:02:00] project management, like medical planning's impacting this percentage of the business. Project management's a big challenge for us.

It's, it's impacting the whole business. Um, so talk to me about taking the things that you've been doing in medical planning and taking that over to project management and what that looks like.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. The, the, as a segue, I'll mention that, a frustration with the medical planning thing is that the AI has made me really fast and everyone else is still going at their pace and are overburdened and over, you know, overscheduled and

Christopher Parsons: It's like limitless, like you're like, uh, you know, Bradley Cooper, I don't know if you guys have seen that movie, but he gets the drug that like, lets him operate at like warp speed, but everyone else is still moving at normal speed. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Todd Henderson: I wouldn't, I wouldn't that, that would be a bit boastful, but, but, but,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: so I, I love getting stuff done. Uh, but I'm constrained by just the, the, the pace that, that everyone else goes. But that means that I actually have bandwidth to kind of keep pushing multiple things. And so just like Chris, you [01:03:00] said this other opportunity of you know, we've gotten, we've gotten to a certain size and, and we're not going to get to the next size if we don't just sort of figure, figure out the things that frankly other firms have figured out, like project management, like seriously standardizing what it means to be a project manager. Um, what do they do? What authority do they have, et cetera. I'm actually getting ahead of myself. So, you know, the first thing I did was guess what?

Christopher Parsons: Gemba.

Todd Henderson: Bunch of interviews. percent. These, I kept confidential. I

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: folks 'cause I kind of wanted to, you know, wanted to sort of dig, 'cause this is the medical planning thing, which is, you know. Important, but it's sort of a narrower problem. This is a deep cultural This is, this is at the heart of, of architecture, of interior design, of it's at the heart of revenue. It's at the heart of [01:04:00] doing of the things that we like to happen as a result of doing a project. Whether it's sustainability, whether it's happy clients, whether it's making money and make, make money and stay in business runs through project management. And, you know, we're 40 years old. We have some entrenched thoughts on this. And so I knew this was like careful. Go do, right? Dig deep, but be careful. And so did these interviews anonymously. Um. Pick folks randomly who'd been through our PSMJ. We do A-P-S-M-J bootcamp. Like a lot of firms do. Only, only what we do is something special. It's like fight club, never talk about it again. The interviews are great. Um, just surfaced again, I'm trying to find out what is the structure of the problem. I had my own, as someone who raised up in this firm, I had my own sense, but I tried to put that aside just hear it. And [01:05:00] it was all those things. Our PMs don't know what a PM does, even though they'd all gone through the same training, but we'd never talked about it again. Right. Unclear authority that they would even say like, Uh, the, the lead designer, they just do what they want. And I'm like, but the work plan, and they're like, whatever. Right. So not feeling like they actually can manage the project. Oh. that, that kind of, the biggie is so, so welcome to Boulder Associates.

Oh, you're gonna be a project manager. Cool. We're gonna send you to this, this bootcamp, know, of every year. And then guess what you get every other month, a meeting with the CFO to talk about how your projects are doing financially. Good luck. Bye. And that's it. That is, that's it. So those meetings, you won't be surprised to hear were not well loved [01:06:00] on the whole, I'm understanding the situation. so do these interviews kind of surface all this and it's just like, yep. You have PMs that are scrappy and inventive, good on them. They survive through grit and determination in spite of the fact that there is no supporting

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: them. At all except they once in a while get to answer for financial outcomes that they really aren't prepared to even impact that much. Shocking that this is a concern that's

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: Right. And so I think that the report that I sort of wrote, you know, with chat GPT and forth, I dunno, three or four pages. And I really looked, you know, from a system systems thinking lens at this, like at the level of belief what is, what is holding us, you know, where we are at the level of sort of structure and [01:07:00] authority and rules and everything else. And when I gave it to, you know, the folks I report to who are project managers, right, they are living this as well there a, a, a light turned on in a unique way where I think they were able, I was able to paint a picture of the problem. lived by people who are in it and, and again, quoting them 'cause it's all fed by transcripts.

So every time I just check my instructions to chat, GPT is like every point you make, illustrate it with something somebody said, tell me who it was and what timestamp they said it. 'cause I'm gonna go check. If you don't do that, sometimes it makes things up. Um,

Evan Troxel: Turns out, yeah.

Todd Henderson: this was this amazing, um, moment of like being able to share, like, here's, here is what this problem is.

We're all focused on the outcomes, The, the behaviors. But really we have to be working at this other level to get this straightened out. And that was [01:08:00] really motivating. So I've, this is what I'm, I mean this is kind of half of what I'm doing right now you know, project management. So a really good role description, right?

There's just a lot of parallels with the medical planning thing. Yeah. that's gone through a bunch of iterations and, um, it's looking really good. then we had another bootcamp. And so, you know, one of, one of the things that was so clear, that was so clear in these interviews, um, no, I'm gonna, I'm sorry.

I'm gonna retract that. I'm gonna say it this way. One of the things that AI surfaced from the interviews was the void was something no one said.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: One of the questions was, Hey, when you think of Strong pm who do you think of? And what makes them a strong pm? And AI was able to go, you know what, nobody was Actually, nobody actually ever answered that question.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: PMs generally don't know who PMs are. are operating in a complete

Christopher Parsons: There's no community of practice [01:09:00] to, to use a, to use the knowledge management term, right?

Todd Henderson: no community. all, even just awareness that each other exists. Like one of our PMs and specifically, she's like, I literally cannot, she actually said this out loud. I can't name another pm.

Christopher Parsons: Wow. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's so interesting. So who are you learning from? How are you getting better? Like you're just on your own, just, you know, all running experiments. Yeah,

Todd Henderson: you're just guessing,

Christopher Parsons: yeah.

Todd Henderson: you know, and I'm better than that. These folks are better than that. You

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: they have colleagues that they can talk to, but,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: the craft of being a project manager is a distinct thing from, from architectural design

Christopher Parsons: But when one person learns something, Boulder doesn't learn it. So there's, there's not organizational learning happening there that's individual only.

Todd Henderson: that's right.

That's right. And also we have, we have a, a, a feedback loop of, to be a successful pm it's because you are scrappy and you figure things out and you kind of come up with your own way of doing stuff. 'cause we don't [01:10:00] have a way for you to do stuff. And that feeds it, and that, that becomes kind of the, the culture of project management is of these rugged individualists, right? So, but that cul, that, that loneliness, there's a profound loneliness, uh, amongst our PMs, at least in terms of connection to other PMs. And so, right. The, the two big things that I'm working on are role definition, which is more than just writing down the role, but it's also like, we need to operationalize this role.

I need the, project executives to own that they're going to support this and that the PM has some authority

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: to manage the project. Also, just at a basic level. And it's funny, it's funny, the, it's funny the, the debates you end up having, but like we need to be able to point at a person and say, you are the PM on this project not [01:11:00] universally agreed to.

Some, some folks have the, they're like, well, PM's kind of a vibe. Like these are some things that need to get done and we're gonna kind of like when you're, when you're an eight person firm, that's fine

Christopher Parsons: Vibe PMing. I love it.

Todd Henderson: PMing, right? When you're, when you're small or your projects are small, that's fine, but we're not,

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: Um, so the community and the role, those are, those are the two, the two main prongs of this. But they do a lot, I mean, the role itself is cultural, cultural evolution work because it's, we don't have any roles that are as kind of like. accountability and then there's authority that comes with this.

If we're calling u pm, you, it's all I should 3D prints of badges. It just occurred to me, right, we're giving you some power here

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: talk like that,

Christopher Parsons: Mm.

Todd Henderson: think that we [01:12:00] need to,

Christopher Parsons: What, what's so interesting, Todd, is that, um, so much of the noise around and the talk around a, I shouldn't say noise 'cause it's not all noise, but so much of it has been like efficiency. Like there end state is you don't have to do the stuff you don't want to do anymore. Like, there's been a

Evan Troxel: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: that end in kind of like products that take away work that nobody wants to do. And the profound way I think you're describing AI is as an organizational designer. Because that's what I look at what you're doing as is you're helping redesign Boulder and it's a research assistant. It's helping you document, it's helping you explore solutions. It's helping you redesign the firm to do really human work.

And a lot of the solutions you're coming up with are humans. Like we just need to be more connected, more clear and more aligned like, and it's helping you

Todd Henderson: a hundred

Christopher Parsons: get there faster than, and I just feel like that's so interesting to me. Um, like what kind of teammate are we trying to hire? [01:13:00] And maybe we're gonna get to infinite Todd, but like, if you think about what you want AI to do and who you want it to help you become like this is helping it, you become a more connected and human and clear and distributed and all these things, right?

Todd Henderson: Yeah. I think there's a, I deal a lot in mental models, right? um, I think there's, I I, I, I see on, on LinkedIn and just everywhere, you know, this sort of model that, like, if you give something to ai, just crap. It's just slop, it, it's, it's necessarily. A lessening of, of what you can do, you're, you're, you're de-skilling yourself.

And I'm like, well, if you use it that way, I think that could be true. If I said, here's my problem, solve it for me, and then I just run off with that, then I guess so. But, you know, at the end of the day, I'm, I'm an architect and I'm not working on anymore, but I'm, I am solving the architecture of these [01:14:00] problems of the firm,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: And the AI is, well, it may, and maybe this is finally the bridge to Infinite, Todd. The AI is just the, the thing that me superhuman bandwidth, superhuman attention, superhuman recall, and can write stuff pretty good in seconds, and then I can edit it in

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: and, you know, make things happen, at a, at a, at a pace that I just couldn't even imagine before.

Christopher Parsons: Okay. So Infinite Todd Brain Trust Council of Experts Go.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it goes back to the medical planning thing. I, I was, you know, out running one morning and, and sort of thinking about this challenge and I was getting really quite cranky because I'm like, I have got all these things, all these plates I keep spinning, onboarding

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: and the Biscuitnet and, and half a dozen others. And this is such a [01:15:00] cool, wonderful km opportunity. Ah, but I don't, I have no team this just talk about structural problems. It's me, myself, and I right now doing all these things and then, you know, then it, then it hit me like, well guy who is trying to tell people to use AI a lot, why don't you eat your own dog food?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: And, and I kind of had the 1 1 1, 1 thing I like to do, 'cause sometimes it's amusing, is take something very literally and see where it goes. And so it's like, yeah, what if AI is my team? No. Really? What if AI was literally my team? What would happen? Right? And, and, uh, one of the things I I thought of was this, this, this council of experts.

Like I, what I, part of what I need this work is advice, is just input

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: and kind of that, that, that back and forth to chew on ideas and bounce things around. And so, yeah, I had this, this notion out on a run came back [01:16:00] and I just, I I, in a, in a chat GPT project, I said, you are a council of, of various experts.

You, you know, containing these persona. Persona. I was like, I want a knowledge management expert and I want a learning and development expert and a psychologist and an organizational development and blah, blah, blah. I think I, you know, I think I put in like eight. And then, know, the first query I gave this group was, Hey, you're here to help me.

Who else should we invite to join this council? And AI was like, well, you need, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like 20 some odd It picked names for them and gave them each a little kind of role description. And it's, um, and so the way I use this, and it's kind of this funny thing, right?

Because it is, it's just chat GPT, it isn't actually something different personas. I, I had [01:17:00] wanted them to kind of debate or disagree, but it can't, it can't disagree with itself. But what it does do is it puts on different hats. And so it lets me inspect an idea a bunch of different perspectives. And again, most of it's like, ho hum. And then every now and then you're like. there's the goodie,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: the good stuff. um, I use this all, so I have a, I have a personal chat GPT account that I pay for, and then I have my work one, and I have one of, I have a, a sort of a similar of experts in each one.

Slightly different, right? Um, and I bring it, this isn't the place to bring, like what's the of, you know, Canada? It's like, I'm trying to think about how to help project managers feel more community, you know, just bring it kind of a big wide open thing. And it, it's, it's wonderful and I just, just go back and [01:18:00] forth and sometimes it just digs up a nugget of something that's like, I could have thought of that. I don't know if I would've just 'cause limitations.

Christopher Parsons: it'll come out from a lens, like a learning and development lens. Here's what I would do, but if I were a organizational psychologist, I would say like, this is the problem. Or a community building expert, or something like that.

Todd Henderson: The way it tends to work is kind of like, um, you know, there's that, that rule in improv of like Yes.

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: like whatever the person before you does, you, you, you never just go, no, you know, you kind of roll with it. It's a, it feels a little bit like that. Each one's sort of like, I agree with what she said and I'll add, you know, kind

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: you know, psychology.

And there's one of the personas is, uh, the overworked architect and, you know, generally jumps in with like, don't forget, you've got five minutes to prove to me that this isn't a waste of my time or I'm out. You know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, the answer can't always be more right?

Christopher Parsons: Yes. You need this, you need the skeptic that's helping to [01:19:00] push back on the enthusiasm of the, uh, other council people.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. And it, it's, it's just been a rich, a rich resource to just kick stuff around. That's very blue sky thinking. You know, generative, I mean, truly generative, uh, uh, uh, thinking I use it, I use it the time.

Christopher Parsons: kind of

Evan Troxel: It's interest.

Christopher Parsons: of the simulator. You were kind of trying to build, like you can

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: reps with these different per, I know it's a little bit different, but like there's this kind of, how can I run this, the simulation first before I go put it in front of real people to sharpen my thinking.

Todd Henderson: Totally. And it, you know, and it's sort of a way of, of maybe a, maybe what it does is it enacts a certain thoroughness of thinking

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: I want to, well, it two things, a certain thoroughness of thinking. So think about it as a KM person. Think about it as a busy architect. Think about it as a psychologist.

Oh,

Christopher Parsons: right.

Todd Henderson: I'm actually right.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: a psychologist. I don't even know entry level psychology, but I bet you chat GPT

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.[01:20:00]

Todd Henderson: Right? So, so it's kind of the thoroughness, but also just access to basic, you know, not psychology, but like. You know, 1 0 1 level fine. That's better than what I've got on board right now.

Evan Troxel: Is isn't the traditional guidance to, to write it like a fifth grade level, for example. Right. Like it, and so I assume it's probably kind of in that realm with a lot of things because that's what it's basically trained on.

Todd Henderson: That, I mean, what else can it give, but what it's trained on. But it, but you know what, I, I, I, you know, it has read everything on the internet. I've read

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: one, 1000000th of what's on the internet. So it has a lot that it can show me.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

like what you pointed out about that idea of, of the Nugget, because I think there's so many things out there where it's like that big giant thing, that podcast, that movie, that series, that talk that I went to, that seminar, whatever. It's like, oh, [01:21:00] generally, most of it wasn't for me, but oh man, there was this one thing and that one.

And so I'm just curious from your point of view, like you've brought that up a couple times now, and, and that to me is a big takeaway from the type of interactions that I'm hearing you talk about, that that really is, is resonating. I think it's valuable.

Todd Henderson: it's, it's funny, I, to me, how, how a lot of people in, you know, sort of, sort of take AI or interact with it and they're like, well don't wanna use AI 'cause they make mistakes. I'm like, have

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: worked with a human being?

Evan Troxel: Have you ever made any mistakes,

Todd Henderson: straight outta college and tried to get them to do something?

Evan Troxel: right?

Todd Henderson: know. Have you ever tried to get an architect to write something? Um, yeah, it makes mistakes sometimes. Those hallucinations are fantastic. That's what's called design in

Evan Troxel: Hmm, hmm.

Todd Henderson: Right. Um, so you understand the nature of the tool that you're [01:22:00] using and you approach it with the appropriate. Respect or,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Caution, whatever. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: it for what

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: know, and, and you go, yeah, 80% of what it gives me is gonna be, meh. Fine.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I.

Todd Henderson: I'm here for the 20%.

Christopher Parsons: I bet you're being, you're patient, you know, that's part of this too, right? Is you're just like, you're after the Yeah, it's,

Todd Henderson: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a

Christopher Parsons: yeah.

Todd Henderson: I mean, it's a, in one sense it's just math, it's just software. In other sense. It, it, it is a very different creature. And it, yeah, you go back and forth and you tunnel into the parts that seem interesting and you kind of, you know, let go of the stuff. It's like, eh, yeah, I got that. And I, I don't know. It gives me access to a thoroughness of thought, a quality of thought. Depth of thought that that is for me, has been a game changer. And I'm still the editor, I'm still the, the, the director of it. I [01:23:00] kick the stuff out that isn't good, when I see something that's good, I'm like, holy cow, that's amazing. Off I go. And uh, that's just pure win.

Christopher Parsons: It's, um, you know, we named our newsletter, uh, smarter By Design, kind of celebrating this idea that. Architects should design their businesses with the same intentionality. They design buildings and bridges and infrastructure architects and engineers, AC firms. And I think that your story that you've been sharing is very much a design story. And then AI is a design partner for you and helping of level up Boulder Associates as a learning organization and figure out like, and I, and I kind of want to maybe just spend a couple minutes as we close on, know, you and I have talked about this, Todd, that we think that, you know, the future of learning and development and how firm and a EC Learn is gonna radically change in the next five years. And you've kind of laid a lot of groundwork in [01:24:00] this discussion around kind of the AI piece of it. You're also in our beta for the learning management system that we're building.

Todd Henderson: I

Christopher Parsons: And um, and I know that, and before, long before you've got into that, you know, we've had conversations for years, you've been exploring, really doing learning and development in a really. Meaningful adult learning principle driven, like way, and like, and I'm curious just like how these worlds are connecting in your brain between what you're doing on the AI side and, and all that stuff we just talked about. And now you're thinking about how do we upskill and educate Boulder as a learning organization going forward?

And it, it's like, where are you on that

Todd Henderson: Man.

Christopher Parsons: in 300 words or less? I'm

Evan Troxel: Yeah, just a small, small ask right there.

Todd Henderson: yeah, yeah. Um, what comes to mind is the everything bagel from the,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: movie, uh, everything everywhere, all at once, right? Because, um, not only [01:25:00] is, these capabilities, I wanna jump back to something from a while ago. You talked about ROI, Chris, half an hour ago. The, the, the return on our investment is going up knowledge, you know, knowledge management activities, and the investment is going down,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: of these are happening fast.

Christopher Parsons: hmm.

Todd Henderson: And so yeah, that ro the, the division of the two is changing, radically.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: Um, I don't really know where this goes.

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: I didn't know what I needed an LMS for before I got the chance to poke around in one and kind of un like have it shape, have it started inhabiting my, my thinking. Right? And so there's, there's that, there's the evolution of the technology. There is also an, I [01:26:00] think I'm probably drifting away from your question, but we are in the most VUCA time I can imagine, right?

Volatile, un certain, complex, ambiguous. we are fundamentally, you know, mostly healthcare architects. So I, I have this mental model that we are on a planet that is not doing great, it's getting ready to kick us off. We are in Field architecture that is really upside down. Our business model makes very little rational sense nowadays is not looking good. We do a lot of healthcare. Healthcare in America in particular does not make a lot of sense. Not looking good. It's shaky and there's ai.

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: So my overall view taking like [01:27:00] everything is just wobbly radically wobbly. And I think, I think architecture has been overdue for a disruption for a while. And I think the disruptor is here.

I think we know who it is. It's

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: what that actually means. Uh, that's the thing about disruption, right? Um. Whatever the question is here. Agility is the answer, not clinging to what we have done before, not clinging to who we think we are. Not clinging to business models, not clinging to beliefs and ideas. Get ready to dance 'cause,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: right, because it is time. And so really the way I meet this moment I don't know what AI is gonna do. I have concerns, I have, you know, I see possibilities, what I know for certain [01:28:00] is I want to understand it deeply. I wanna be, I

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: I wanna be in the front

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Todd Henderson: figuring out what it can do rather than find out what it did.

Christopher Parsons: think the, I love what you just said. I think the way I would translate that to someone who's spending a lot of time with people in that beta I've been using the phrase continuous onboarding a lot.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: this notion that onboarding, if you just hear it said with no qualifiers, it's like, cool the first week that somebody's at the company.

Or maybe in a really good example, the first 90 days. the truth of it is, it's like you're always onboarding into something new. You're onboarding in a new software, now you're a job captain. Now you're working on ca. You've never done that before. Now you're working in retail. 'cause you worked in healthcare now you've never, you're doing an ambulatory thing 'cause you've never done one.

You've only done Nikki's like, and then the technology changes. So like that get ready to dance thing that you said to me is another way of saying this continuous onboarding. It's like learning and [01:29:00] is gonna become as important as learning some ways because the thing that we just thought was the best thing to do two years ago is no longer even close to true.

And we have to be willing to let go of it. it's like a beginner's mindset outta zen. You know? It's like you, because things are in a VUCA environment. It's like the best we know right now. And we don't know how right now, how long right now it's gonna, it's kind of stressful. But it's the only way through.

It is to, I think that is the truth of our times now.

Todd Henderson: you can deny it and look away. Good luck to

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: um, it puts me in mind, oh, this movie reference is probably too dated, but like the Matrix where there's that big old USB connector in the back of a, of everyone's head and you can be like, Hey, I need to know how to fly a helicopter. 'cause I just got in a helicopter.

And it's like, okay, cool. in the limit. I think that's, you know, that like, I need to know X now

Christopher Parsons: it's [01:30:00] so funny you just brought that up. I was just having this conversation with my wife last week about that scene in that movie, and the question we had is like. Why don't you just upload everything in the beginning just so that you have it all. Like, what is it? Because the brain has limited No, I mean maybe we, we got to as like, it's the anatomy, right?

The brain has limited capacity to hold information, so therefore, but then if you want to upload the helicopter thing in, your brain is full. Do you have to then delete the Spanish module? Like, anyway?

Evan Troxel: the trash,

Todd Henderson: through this menu of, yeah, well, I don't need to remember what a cookie is

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Or can, can it auto archive, auto delete? Like I get the helicopter thing, but I said it to delete two weeks from now. 'cause I know I'm not gonna, anyway.

Todd Henderson: Oh no. I deleted my family. Whoops. You know? Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: yeah. Uh, that's great Todd. I mean, I think, I think you've really gotten at something very true there. Um, and I think the role, so the kind of what your role in practice improvement is, is if people are getting ready to dance, you're a little bit of the [01:31:00] The orchestrator, the guy cranking the record player, you know? Um. You've actually, no, I know what you are.

Todd Henderson: I like

Christopher Parsons: You started with a thing about the jar and you, you are telling Boulder what's, what the jar is or at a kind of a,

Evan Troxel: what the label is.

Christopher Parsons: project management what's in the jar. You're telling medical planning what's in the jar.

You're telling bloo Beam what's in the jar that you know the people and it, it's, you've got this kind of way of being both in the business, but then also kind of looking at it from outside at the same time.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Todd Henderson: yeah, yeah. What they don't know is all of the jars, they're just hot sauce. It's all hot sauce. I.

Evan Troxel: I what I, what I'm hearing is that Todd is super, super proactive about identifying issues that nobody is really asking for help on there. Architecture school. Like to go back to this idea where Todd was like, okay, what's the source of the problem? I think a lot of [01:32:00] times the source of the problem is in the training, right?

It's just like, this is who you become as an architect. You are a lone ranger. You have to solve all your problems. You get to work on a project by yourself. You get to present the project by yourself. You get to build the model, you get to do the drawings, you get to do all the things.

Todd Henderson: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And, and rarely do you actually get to ask for help.

Like you're forced upon you the dcr, right? Like you don't,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: some, some architects were like, yeah, please, please help me through this. Help me see what I'm not seeing. What are my blind spots? Of course. But I think a lot of times like, well, there's deadlines and we got stuff to do, and I'm gonna do it the way I was trained or the way that I was mentored, or whatever, and I'm just gonna figure this out.

And then there's Todd, and Todd is coming in and saying, well, I see a bottleneck. I see an issue, a I see a future problem here. Maybe it's not a problem right now. I see a, okay, I need, I see a, a scale problem. I see a this kind of problem. I see that kind of problem. And what I love about this is like the proactive nature of working on the [01:33:00] practice versus working in the practice.

Because in the practice you've got blinders on. Like you've got a project, you've got a deadline, you've got a hierarchy, you've got a. The politics, you've got the culture, you've got all those things. And if you really can step outside of that and start, I, we need more people like this in more firms, right?

Because that's what's gonna elevate not just that practice, but the profession. And I think that like, hopefully through conversations like this, that that's a big takeaway and that people will step into those roles because that, I mean, that's my goal.

Christopher Parsons: kind of

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right, right.

Christopher Parsons: Todd, do

Evan Troxel: Absolutely.

Christopher Parsons: that, 'cause I think, uh, I, I'm trying my best to Yes. And what Evan just said. my feeling is that some of these things you're going out and proactively discovering, but you're also getting inbound from people as they're finding out more and more what you're capable of.

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Christopher Parsons: now you've gotta prioritize which of those things to take, but you're also not necessarily, what I'm also taking from this [01:34:00] conversation is you're not necessarily accept accepting the premise of how they've defined the problem and what their proposed solution is. You say like, if I'm gonna do this, we're gonna go, we're gonna tear it back to the studs and we're gonna go to gemba and we're gonna find out what people think and build back to like validating this thing.

Is the way that you've described it is that,

Todd Henderson: yeah, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's basically right. Part of what I do. In fact, part of what I've always done is, I've been at this firm for 23 years, and I didn't have this term until not that long ago, is I moved the Overton window

Christopher Parsons: uh, great, great. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: The, the, the, the range of allowable thought. And I have, I have sensed that at least for my firm, it, the wavelength of change is about three years. So it, I have to start talking about something and in about three years, know, we're ready to sort of like move

Christopher Parsons: It's like a Doppler effect. You talk about it and it takes three years for it to kind of

Todd Henderson: yeah, it just, it's just like at first it's like, [01:35:00] oh, here goes Todd. Right. Talking about equity in 2017, the heck's that. Right. and that's not, that's not a boast. That's just, it's the nature of the, the, the

Christopher Parsons: The diffusion of innovation curve, right. Kind of thing.

Todd Henderson: yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: of innovation and just new ideas just need, people just need to kind of encounter them a few times.

And then, and

Evan Troxel: If they gotta incubate. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: So when I was proposing the role that I now have. You know, I gave this list, like, they're like, well, what would you do? I'm like, well,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and kind of just from, not from deep research or anything, but just from having been in the firm and of the firm, like, well, these are some things that I think need work. And so some of those are now actually coming back as somebody else's idea.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Todd Henderson: So, so there's a, you know, um, there's a, there's a, yeah. The doppler effect. The, the kind of ripples

Christopher Parsons: what you're not saying though, I think is what you're inferring is that they've come back as someone else's idea, but now it's [01:36:00] better for you to, this is the better time to try and fix project management. 'cause it's not your idea to fix project

Evan Troxel: Well, and you're a partner to them

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: can help make it happen.

Todd Henderson: yeah, exactly. And also, and also it's like, it's got leadership's attention. I mean, it, you know, this one, project management is such a great example. I cannot think of a thing more centrally, like, we're gonna move the needle on things we care about. This is it. It's

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: Revit skills. We got those.

It's not, you know what? Whatever. I don't know. Um, this is super for us at this moment right now. This is a man, opportunity. So it's the right thing to work

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: right?

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Todd Henderson: after that, something else will be the right thing to work on.

Christopher Parsons: The next most important thing. Yeah, exactly.

Evan Troxel: been.

Christopher Parsons: That's great.

Todd Henderson: Yeah,

Christopher Parsons: but I mean, I think that's a good lesson for people that aren't in knowledge management or are new to it. It's like just what you described is like one of the best pieces of advice. It's like find a problem that really matters to your company and then help them make progress on [01:37:00] it.

And just doing random acts of knowledge management. 'cause they're fun science experience. Like you should do some exper, maybe you need like 5% or 10% experiment time to just see what happens. But like core work should be the kind of things that you've been describing with us today.

Todd Henderson: You know, my, like, where I kind of started with, with some of this, like the interview with Darcy, that was in a sense a beta test and that, you know, that was a pretty small thing, very, very constrained notion, but it sort of proved the, the, the potential right. Of, of a way of acting and like, hey, I can very quickly generate value from something.

And even though that wasn't enormous, I think those types of things, even if it's not the most important thing, but just like

Christopher Parsons: Hmm

Todd Henderson: the opportunity

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: itself. it, get it, do

Evan Troxel: Yeah, totally.

Todd Henderson: it starts to build and build your own

Christopher Parsons: True. Solve a real problem. Yeah.

Todd Henderson: solve a real

Christopher Parsons: So it doesn't have to be the Yeah. Yeah. [01:38:00] That's fair. That's fair.

Todd Henderson: project management came to me as like, okay, Todd, you, you have this role now, fixed project management, would not have gone

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Todd Henderson: actually good

Christopher Parsons: You built up.

Todd Henderson: a ramp.

Christopher Parsons: No, I think that's a fair, I revised my previous statement and I substitute it with your new one.

Evan Troxel: Good idea.

Christopher Parsons: Evan. Do you have any parting thoughts or comments?

Evan Troxel: I think I, I gave them, I, I feel like this is a model for firms to really pay attention to because, um, it's a rare, I would say, on, on some level that, that this, that stepping out of practice, working in the practice to working on the practice, something that I've talked about a lot over the last five years, and I, it's super, super, super important.

So appreciate you coming on and sharing what you're, what you're doing at Boulder.

Todd Henderson: Well, thanks for having me. This has been just a joy and a

Christopher Parsons: I've enjoyed it. Thank you, Todd, for being so generous and transparent. And I've been, if you can sense that I'm not wanting the conversation to end, that's two for two reasons.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.[01:39:00]

Christopher Parsons: I, I can't think of a kind of topic I'd rather discuss so I could keep going. Also, Evan and I have been working on this series, um, for the last seven months.

This will be our last episode of, in this kind of run of this series in, I'm sure Evan and I will partner and do fun stuff together in the future. But like, this is the end of the 2025. Welcome to KM 3.0 series. So I just wanted to say big thanks to Evan for making this possible. Like I've really enjoyed collaborating with you, all the people in the series.

I've learned a ton. I know I've gotten a ton of great feedback from our community, random people at Autodesk, Autodesk University saying like, I've been listening to the thing. I love it

Evan Troxel: Super cool.

Christopher Parsons: So thank you Evan.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Christopher Parsons: really great thing here at Troxel and we really, uh, admire and respect the work you're doing.

Evan Troxel: Well, thank you for helping make this kind of thing happen. I believe more of these kind of partnerships do need to happen, and I can't wait to see what KM 4.0 looks like

Christopher Parsons: Oh, you

Evan Troxel: you're working on that, right?

Christopher Parsons: down.

Todd Henderson: Yeah. Hold

Christopher Parsons: Slow. Hold on buddy. Let's go with [01:40:00] 3.3 0.1. Sounds good. Right about now.

Evan Troxel: You're the software guy. I'll, I'll defer to you on that, so

Christopher Parsons: right. Thank you

Evan Troxel: thank you both. All right.

Todd Henderson: Thanks guys.

💡This newsletter provide key insights for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovation in AEC who are short on time, offering the context of each conversation without the need to listen to the full episode. It’s designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in if the ideas resonate.

What happens to a design practice when curiosity stops being a hobby squeezed in after deadlines, but instead becomes the engine that drives the entire firm forward?

Summary

In episode 212, I sat down with Ashley Hastings, Studio Design Technology Leader at Woods Bagot. During our conversation, I paraphrased something Ashley was describing—the idea that firms should incentivize continuous learning to help innovation happen: "curiosity as a KPI." The phrase stuck with me, and when I went to name the episode, it reemerged. But it needed context. When I recorded the intro, I explained that the phrase carries an intentional contradiction: KPIs are traditionally about measurement and control, which are the very forces that can smother the exploratory spirit we’re trying to cultivate. Ashley and I explored a more nuanced idea: not measuring curiosity, but making space for it, protecting it, rewarding it, and tying it to meaningful outcomes.

We dug into how Woods Bagot is navigating the post-GPT era through “freedom within boundaries,” how rhetoric and language have quietly become core technical skills, and how AI is forcing firms to re-examine culture, governance, and the psychological safety needed for transformation.

What emerged is a clear-eyed look at what modern design technology leadership demands, and how a firm can turn curiosity from an accidental byproduct into a strategic advantage.

Catch the full episode

Key Takeaways

Here are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

• Curiosity shouldn’t be micromanaged. It should be made visible and valued. KPIs won’t measure wonder, but systems can reward exploration and protect time for learning and innovation.
• Revit as a database reframes BIM as an information strategy. Seeing Revit “as a database first” shifts BIM from geometry to consequence and collaboration. Of course this isn’t limited to Revit any longer. Many foundational apps work this way.

Jonathan Nelson, Nirva Fereshetian, Heath May, and Shane Burger join the podcast to talk about one of the biggest questions facing our industry: How do design technologists grow into firmwide leaders?

What was originally planned as a one-way presentation quickly became a true two-way conversation. Instead of a traditional panel format, we created a space where the audience guided the discussion with thoughtful and challenging questions. The energy in the room elevated the entire session and resulted in one of the most engaging and candid moments of the conference.

Joining me on stage are four leaders who all began in design technology roles and now hold significant positions inside their firms:

• Jonathan Nelson, Global Head of Digital, Populous
• Heath May, Partner and CEO Elect, HKS
• Nirva Fereshetian, Principal and CIO, CBT Architects
• Shane Burger, Chief Design Technology Officer, SOM

Together, we explore real pathways into leadership, pivotal career decisions, and how to build credibility inside complex organizations. We discuss what technology adoption conversations look like, how to develop the next generation of talent, how to approach the build versus buy dilemma, and what it takes to secure buy-in for major technology investments. We also talk openly about the cultural friction that continues to challenge firmwide transformation.

By capturing and sharing this session on TRXL, we help extend the value and reach of AECtech far beyond the room. These ideas and insights can now be part of a global conversation among AEC professionals and leaders.

If you want to understand how design technologists make the jump into senior leadership, what skills matter most, and how the future of practice is being shaped right now, this episode delivers clarity, candor, and inspiration from leaders who have lived it.

Original episode page: https://trxl.co/213

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Recommended Resources

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
• John Cleese's Legendary 1991 Speech About Creativity (YouTube)

Connect with the Guests

Jonathan Nelson

• LinkedIn
• Populous – Global Head of Digital
  • Company Website
  • POPULOUS on LinkedIn

Nirva Fereshetian

• LinkedIn
• CBT Architects – Chief Information Officer
  • Company Website
  • CBT on LinkedIn

Heath May

• LinkedIn
• HKS – Principal, Director of LINE (Laboratory for INtensive Exploration), CEO Elect
  • Company Website
  • HKS on LinkedIn
  • HKS LINE

Shane Burger

• LinkedIn
• SOM – Chief Design Technology Officer
  • Company Website
  • SOM on LinkedIn

Event + Hosts

• AECtech Conference
  • AECtech
  • 2025 Symposium Details
• Thornton Tomasetti – CORE Studio
  • CORE Studio
  • Thornton Tomasetti

Recommended TRXL Episodes

• 068: ‘A Wealth of Abandoned Ideas’, with Shane Burger
• 156: ‘Why Are We Doing This in the First Place?’, with Shane Burger
• 163: ‘Confusing Evolution With Innovation’, with Nirva Fereshetian
• 205: ‘Rethinking Your A/E Practice’, with Robert Otani and Alexandra Pollock

About Jonathan Nelson:

Jonathan Nelson joined Populous in 2022 as Global Head of Digital, leading internal digital transformation and external productization and partnerships. He supports the global Holdings Board by shaping the firm’s technological vision and strategy across digital services and products.

Previously, he was Global Head of MX Studio at Lendlease Digital, overseeing development of physical and digital products and project delivery. There, he also led the Contextual Universal Building Systems (CUBS), a digital building automation initiative.

Trained as an architect, Jonathan’s career spans architecture, construction, manufacturing, software development, and academia. Before Lendlease, he was partner and director of StudioWorkshop, an award-winning architectural and digital fabrication practice, where he advanced file-to-factory workflows, custom software tools, and design projects across Oceania.

As a researcher and academic, Jonathan has published widely on prefabrication, generative design, and digital fabrication, including peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and a book. His applied research and projects have been exhibited internationally.

About Nirva Fereshetian:

Nirva Fereshetian is a Principal & Chief Information Officer at CBT Architects, a Boston based award-winning design firm providing services nationally and internationally in Architecture, Interior Design & Urban Design. She is responsible for aligning business technology strategy to meet primary business objectives. She is experienced in managing projects & people with an interdisciplinary background in architecture/construction/technology and a capacity to bridge that knowledge to enable informed business decisions and increased productivity. A passionate advocate of the AEC startup ecosystem as CBT Architects continues to collaborate with many founders for the overall goal of shaping the future of the industry. In 2024, she was recognized as one of Boston 25 top women in tech.

About Heath May:

Heath May FAIA is a Partner and Executive Vice President at HKS. He has dedicated his career to elevating the firm’s reputation for computational design, research and innovation. Previously the Global Practice Director of HKS LINE (Laboratory for INtensive Exploration), he specializes in data-driven design optimization, simulation and digital fabrication and has led projects spanning diverse sectors, including hospitality, healthcare, urban infrastructure and sports. A former Adjunct Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington, a frequent contributor to leading publications that explore advancements in digital practice and a patent holder for digital stamping and sealing of architectural documents, Heath is widely recognized for his leadership in shaping the future of our industry and for inspiring the next generation of designers.

About Shane Burger:

As Chief Design Technology Officer, Shane leads SOM’s global Design Technology team and directs the workflows and software that empower every member of our team to better foster efficiency and innovation. In his previous role as a Principal at Woods Bagot, he led a global DesignOps team dedicated to researching, developing, and applying new models of design and delivery to projects, and fostered a global community of designers that was defining the innovation-led future of practice.

From 2003-2011 he was Head of Design Technology at Grimshaw Architects. At Grimshaw he specialized in design for Arts & Cultural facilities and the use of advanced computation techniques for advanced geometry, analysis, and fabrication. He also established Grimshaw’s first BIM projects.

Starting in the early 2000’s, Shane was an early advocate and active developer of design computation methodologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries. During this time, he served for 8 years as a director of the design computation and education non-profit Smartgeometry, firmly positioning that organization at the intersection of art, design, technology, and the modern human experience.

Provide feedback for this episode

Connect with Evan

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Twitter/X

Episode Transcript

213: The Rise of Tech-Driven Leadership in AEC

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I am coming to you live from New York City, where I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at AECtech hosted by Core Studio at Thornton Thomasetti. Well, not this intro, I'm now back in Oregon at TRXL HQ, but the episode you're about to hear was recorded off the soundboard at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island just a few days ago.

The session was originally planned as a standard panel discussion with me as the moderator asking questions, but I wanted to do something different. So instead of talking at the audience I proposed we talk with them. So we flipped the script, turning it into a real conversation driven by the people in the room who will shape the next generation of design technology leadership in our industry.

The outcome was far better than anything we could have scripted. The audience showed up with really thoughtful questions about career paths. Culture, leadership structures and the real obstacles inside firms. And the panel responded with clarity, humility, and a [00:01:00] level of candor that made the entire hour feel electric.

It was a rare opportunity for emerging technologists and seasoned leaders to have a real exchange. Our panelists, Jonathan Nelson from Populous, Heath May from HKS, Nirva Fereshetian from CBT, and Shane Burger from SOM, each come from deep design technology backgrounds and now hold major leadership roles inside their firms.

Their stories highlight something I think is essential for our industry to understand. Design technology isn't a side path. It's becoming one of the most direct routes to broader firm leadership, and this is where I see TRXL adding more value. Moments like these shouldn't only exist inside one room for one audience on one day.

By capturing this panel and sharing it with you, we get to extend AEC tech's impact beyond the localized event, beyond New York, beyond the walls of the venue. This conversation becomes part of a larger ongoing dialogue happening across the industry and around the world. In this episode, we get [00:02:00] into the evolution of tech first leadership, the realities of navigating large organizations, the challenges of building strong talent pipelines, and what it really takes to advocate for, fund, and scale transformation inside AEC firms.

We also explore the tension between ambition and practice, how firms are redefining service delivery, deciding when to build versus buy technology, and wrestling with a cultural inertia that so often stalls meaningful change. A key takeaway from this conversation for me was the growing opportunity for design technologists to step into major leadership roles.

And by capturing events like AECtech and bringing them to the global TRXL audience, we're widening that opportunity even further. The more we share these conversations, the more accessible these pathways become. There's even more in the show notes, so be sure to check that out.

I've included links to previous episodes with Core Studio leaders and with the members of the panel that have been on the show before so that you can get even more from them. Supporting members of TRXL+ will get all of that right in your [00:03:00] podcast app. And if you're a free member, just following along, you can find those over on the website, which is trxl.co.

As always, sharing this episode, commenting on my LinkedIn post or joining the conversation on YouTube helps the show grow and helps elevate these important discussions. I came out of this panel energized about the next generation of leaders having access to people in this industry who are so willing to share their experiences.

So without further ado, here is the leadership panel discussion live from Core Studio's 2025 AECtech event in New York City.

Jeroen Janssen: So for this session, um, we'll kick it off with a panel of our distinguished guests here. Um, I'll let them actually introduce them themselves, but um, they're gonna be moderated by Evan Troxel gonna come up and start the show.

Evan Troxel: All right. while we're getting situated, I just, first of all, amazing event thank you to David Mans.

Where's David? He is [00:04:00] outside organizer in chief. Thanks Alex and Rob, and thank you, the audience, uh, you brought it today. Amazing questions. And, uh, my goal with this is to give it to you. What I hope you see up here. Is a potential path, which now I think we're getting a glimpse of what we're gonna see a lot more of.

This is to me kind of connecting the dots between design, technology, and leadership. At a firm, at the highest levels. I was in school, this was not a thing. All right? we were taught three things. You can be a designer, you can be a project manager, or you can be a technician.

And we really focused on design. How many people had that experience? and then like 1% actually got to be designers, And so what we're seeing now is that there are many paths and. Specifically with this group of people here, we actually get to see where some of these paths can lead.

And so I'm hoping you, you see that. So I'm gonna seed that thought with you now I want you to ask questions so that you get the most outta this [00:05:00] opportunity to speak to these people. If you like what you hear, the kind of conversation that we're having today, this kind of conversation I have all the time on my podcast.

My name's Evan Troxel. I host a podcast called the TRXL Podcast. And so I hope you would tune into that because you can hear the kinds of, the couple people here have been on the podcast several times already and also, many people in the audience.

And so I hope that you'll tune in for that kind of thing. Like I said, this isn't gonna be a, a discussion just on the stage. It's really a discussion for you to have, and I, and I hope you'll have questions for these people. So I'm gonna ask each one to introduce themselves, and after the introductions, I'll kick it off with a question. I'm gonna have each one go through it, and, but then I want people to be ready to ask some questions. All right. So Jonathan.

Jonathan Nelson: I'm Jonathan Nelson. I'm the Global Head of Digital at POPULOUS.

Nirva Fereshetian: I'm Nirva Fereshetian. I'm the Chief Information Officer at CBT Architects, uh, Boston-based, design firm

Heath May: Heath May. I am the CEO elect at HKS [00:06:00] based in Los Angeles.

Shane Burger: Shane Burger. I'm the Chief Design Technology Officer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Evan Troxel: Thank you. All right, what I would like you all to answer and, my goal is for you to, you know, a couple of bullet points, but, if you can kind of talk through a couple of pivotal moments you have experienced throughout your career from where you started to where you are now, but you think that people could relate to.

So Jonathan, why don't you kick us off

Jonathan Nelson: I guess I, I have a pretty non-traditional background, right? I did go to architecture school, but I've spent very little of my time working for architects. I've been in software development, property development, applied r and d manufacturing, those kinds of things.

so getting all of those kinds of different experiences and seeing those different lenses has been very pivotal for me. as far as the, the leadership thing goes, at my previous position, I immediately left from being an on the tools person to being a leader person. And that was a, [00:07:00] a really, transformative moment to have, to learn a completely new skill, and a different way of talking to people and using different language.

and yeah, learning to be a good leader and also managing up and managing down is, is something that's really changed everything for me.

Nirva Fereshetian: I also have an architecture degree. but at the end of that, last year, I was very interested in technology. New things were happening, and, I wanted to do a master's degree and had very few universities that had computational programs at the time. So, um, very few people were really doing the integration of, architecture and, computation.

So I willingly went to a, a master's degree at UCLA for combining both and the first experience was really, an internship at SOM in LA that kind of defined All of my career. So the company was doing things that no one else, unlike now, it was not democratized.

They had really very expensive, Sun [00:08:00] Workstations. They were developing, a, software program internally with IBM. So things that were, are happening now and it's very commonplace. but then when I. Finished everything and got out. I thought, well, everybody was like that, but it was shocking that no one was like that.

and it was kind of a challenge to, get integrated in a firm and I was, I guess, lucky enough that a firm was looking for some, technologist Now that, that. Being part of that, integrating into a technology career in a creative firm is one part of the, equation. But I think it's only in the last decade or so, that has been recognized as either a C-level job or really being part of the business, not really.

Oh, let those people figure out the technology. Is it broken? They can fix it. So I think the remarkable advances now and the career opportunities, are really being part of the business, having a voice, and [00:09:00] integrating with the decision making process. I, I feel that. being knowledgeable in technology is part of the equation, but in order to be developing into, a career of, combining those is really about the business and things that I never learned neither in architecture school, nor in, in even the master's degree that I pursued for technology.

So the opportunities are real and. As you could see today from all of the. different sessions, the different titles that people have, the different departments, these are just explosions in the last couple of years, so I encourage everyone to think out of the box. In some instances, I think many people have made up their titles.

They were never existed before, right? And in many companies. They mean different things. It's very much related to the context of what kind of company you are and what are you doing, but it's extremely encouraging to a new generation [00:10:00] that, there's a million different ways of developing your career and you are in charge of it.

So go for it.

Heath May: pivotal moments. Well, 13 years ago, um, I found myself working at a large architecture firm, something I never thought I would do when I was in grad school. I think I wrote a manifesto about why that would never happen.

But I learned that you could get away with a lot in a large organization before someone knew what you were doing. And that became kind of an interesting place for me to be. So at the time. Started to notice that there were some people with some latent skill sets with computational design, parametric design, you know, this idea of connecting performance to, to driving geometries.

But, uh, wasn't really sure what to do with that. But I found myself in New York, uh, where I kind of, uh, begged our CEO at the time to spend a couple thousand dollars and send me up here to this innovation conference. And I came back with this idea to create a studio where we could, uh, explore some of the new workflows and methodologies.

Um, and to my surprise and chagrin, [00:11:00] um, our CEO said yes and, uh, said, you know, go ahead, do it. You, you can take someone and, you know, start to try it out. But, uh, come back next week with the business plan. This was before chat GPT. So for me it was like, okay, Google what is a business plan? Right? And, uh, tried to get that.

Off the, uh, you know, kind of off the dime and start to do something with it. But, um, that became, uh, a studio called LINE, Laboratory for Intensive Exploration. Um, and we took that and we took that opportunity to really investigate the project as the lab, you know, what could we do with each new potential client user opportunity to really drive methodologies and process forward.

and we really started To critique, and investigate different softwares, create our own where ones didn't exist. And, um, from there, you know, began to slowly start to find opportunities. One project at a time,

Shane Burger: I guess key moments for me, a few that come to mind in particular, before gonna architecture school, I was much more interested in being a [00:12:00] musician.

And I think what I really enjoyed about that was the kind of creative interaction with other musicians and what it meant to kind of improvise, but also have like a fundamental framework underneath chord structures, melodies, those types of things. And it was a collaborative affair.

That was the thing that I really enjoyed about it. And then I went to architecture school where creativity was a solo thing. Um, very much on your own in that sort of case. So that was always a little bit of a frustration for me. It took me years to really come back to that. But I also say I, I started first playing around with, tools like, alias on sun workstations, those sort of things back at university at that time, mostly run by the automotive program at the school. I was learning those kinds of tools. And then a few years later I was at, uh, Grimshaw Architects and saw a presentation by Robert Ish, and he presented on the Waterloo International Terminal by Grimshaw as a computational model and an early version of generative components.

This is about 2004. Immediately I was excited. Went to a conference, learned how to use the tool, and started meeting an amazing group of [00:13:00] people, quite a few who are in the room right now. Uh, that for me was the real starting point and developed an amazing community. And it, what it did for me though, as a designer and as a thinker, is it changed my approach.

It changed how I thought about the design process, how I thought about geometry, how I thought about integrating. Analysis, fabrication materials, how I thought about how I could build in my methods of collaboration with other people into that exact same kind of system. Number of years later, went to Woods Bagot, where I then scaled that up in a larger way, across a broader.

Company, about a thousand person company. And at the same time, I started running the smart geometry conferences for about eight or nine years. Where again, it was about building out that community and connecting people in collaborative creativity. so those end up being a number of, kind of key moments for me is this kind of balance back and forth between individual and collaborative creativity and the ability to kind of embed that thinking process and structure into the tools that you use as an extension of your thinking [00:14:00] process.

Evan Troxel: Amazing. Uh, one thing I wanna go back to Jonathan, because you, you spoke the least, Jonathan. I didn't know we had a time limit. you actually mentioned a thing that has come up in many conversations, which is like that shift from being a do.

To being a leader and that kind of soft skill, like a whole new skill set. And so I, I promised I would give this to you guys, but I wanted to bring this up just to kind of set the stage for if you are looking to work your way in a firm to this kind of position, that's a very real thing. And, and that's what actually I think makes a difference between success.

And unsuccess in, in that kind of a role. because if you, if you're so stuck on continuing to drive the car, the, the tools, the technologies, that's all you can do. You have to, if you're gonna be in that leadership role, take on the leadership burden. this isn't something I think many people even look forward to doing.

if I were to ask these [00:15:00] people, if, if leadership is easy. I guarantee you the answer is no. And so, learning those skills, Jonathan, just any, anything, just to expand on that point for you and how your mindset or your behaviors, or however you wanna frame it has, completely shifted. And then I want people to start raising their hands for questions so that the, the mics can get passed out.

Jonathan Nelson: there's a, a, a framework called Maker and Manager, right? And the, the base postulate of it is that makers. Uh, which are people on the tools spend their time in two hour chunks. And this is Paul Graham, isn't it? The I, I think so, yeah. And because you need time to get into the zone and you need time to, to work through problems and, and be, have a lot of interrupted time.

But a manager has to live their life in 15 minute chunks. So you really don't get the time to always consider and make, you know, great decisions all the time. and life moves a lot faster. And when you're also, a maker, again, because it's a, it's a solo thing, it's a lot [00:16:00] more difficult to expand and move outward inside of a business, right?

But a manager's job is really to, to manage outward as well, And there's lots of ways you can learn to be a leader. There's courses in, you know, CL two and those kinds of things are great, but becoming an effective leader is really just about reps, right? And, and learning how to change your life.

So for me, that happened, in my previous company, Lendlease, I spent some time and came up with a big theory of how something should work and we should build something. And this was a, a three person digital organization at the time inside of a 14,000 person company. And apparently, luckily it, it impressed some people.

And the next thing I knew, I was giving this same presentation 60 times throughout the, the business to IP people, to lawyers, to development managers, to chief digital officers, CEO, all of. Those. So you learn really quickly how to adapt to different stakeholder needs, right? Because it's, my job is, is mostly communication, [00:17:00] right?

And change management with people. I'm not on the tools. I trust my team to be able to build those things, but I have to effectively make sure that the, the board, which is a bunch of architects and, and finance people, right. Understand the nuances and details and, and the importance of what's happening here.

So yeah, it's, it's a complete 180. Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Any takers on questions? Let's get the, the mics going out.

Audience: I am wondering if you could address, if you ask any you person here, how many softwares they use or their preferred set of software. You could have like people who have 17 things installed and use it for different projects here and there. what is the, a good balance or how does it even work in your firms about, top down, Hey, this is the kind of software we want to use, versus grassroots, Hey, someone discovered this free trial and now we're all gonna start using it a little bit more.

Heath May: Yeah, I can jump in. And, uh, Natasha, our chief technology Officer is back here so you can correct me, as needed. Natasha. Um, it's a balance of both. There, maybe a reconciliation of both [00:18:00] because there's never really any balance. Um, but I think right now, you know. And then I had the, uh, the privilege of hearing all of the panels before this, and things are changing really fast, right?

The pace of change is increasing, and the proliferation of different softwares that are available that are just kinda screaming come kick the tires are out there. Um, so I'll share, you know, just a, a quick anecdotes. Uh, we just, we, we do like small kind of incubation tests. Throughout the organization, and we did this key to the future, competition where little teams of two, uh, where they found a problem and kind of naturally found a technological solution to that, that included sometimes using AI or not.

But where I'm sitting right now, in order to be agile enough to grapple with what we don't know is coming at us from the future, you know, we can, we can think, we see it, we can't see around the corner. So to have that agility, we really need to have a lot of little bets that we're making so that we can hit on one.

And so this grassroots movement, you know, to really [00:19:00] begin to test to understand is absolutely fundamental to that. Now, where that top down comes is that will get us nowhere if we don't communicate what we found. And we have to take that and be responsible enough to say, here's where I'm finding some value.

Maybe here's where I'm not. Uh, because we don't wanna have the redundancy of, you know, 1800 people in our case, testing the same workflows or the same software without communicating to each other. So, you know, this idea of leadership, you know, it's not a, it's not a rank and it's not a title, but it's a posture.

Uh, and distributing those decisions as far away from the top, so to speak as we can is really where we're coming from.

Nirva Fereshetian: I think, Everyone knows that it's overwhelming amount of things are, um, landing in everyone's toolbox. But I think the fundamental decision, there's always a top down in the bottom, bottom up.

But, um, people are testing things whether we want officially to have them test or not, and that's a reality. But the more important part is in [00:20:00] decision making for a tool, is what type of workflow that tool is in. So. If it's. On a one-to-one workflow, then it's very easy to do the bottom up and have, uh, for example, image generation, idea generation, those type of tools can come and go.

Uh, and yet they're very much personality and intent related. But when you're gonna implement downstream tools that affect an entire project team or entire ecosystem, you gotta have some top down. Um, so no, no one is able to replace Revit yet until that comes. That is a major top down situation, but other workflows are very conducive to either way, approach, and most importantly the bottom up because all the time a tool sells itself.

I don't, I always tell The founders we're working with. If we are forcing it on people, it's not working. people tell each other that it [00:21:00] works and it, it becomes like a wildfire. and those generally are either one-to-one workflows or workflows that affect small number of knowledge workers.

The decision making top down is very important when it affects interoperability between different projects, training between different projects. It can't be that everybody uses whatever tool they want. Each project can't have different types of files, but it can on a design, you know, image generation end for example.

Shane Burger: Three terms that come to mind for me at this one. First one is composability. This is probably something we've heard from a few others, is that the ability for any of your design and engineering teams to compose the collection of tools necessary to get the job done, it needs to be there. They need to be able to assemble what they need because different types of projects require different types of engagements, different client conversations, different things you need to be able.

Present them the whole journey of exploring. You need a certain level of composability to connect up to the tools that you need. [00:22:00] So then on one side of that, you have the second term, which is democratization. You wanna be able to have those systems available to as many people as possible to use the way that they need to, and for them to be able to bring up new tools to try new things and test new things.

But then the third term is governance. From a data perspective in an organization, we have to think about the intellectual property of our projects, the intellectual property and copyright of our clients, and we need to be able to understand that these composable systems have to interact with each other all the time.

So we need to be able to know how this data connects on a very regular basis, especially if you wanna take advantage of some of the agent based approaches that needs to be able to connect into the various kind of data repositories. It's a complicated mix and a complicated stew of things that you have to think about.

But I think to kind of echo a little bit what Heath was saying here is that you have to, in a way, give a direction. You have to be able to communicate to people, this is what's working. This is what aligns with the values of our company and where we are going and the journey we're going on. [00:23:00] And you know, empower them to find the solutions.

I think we can. In leadership positions, we can set those directions and put out those big questions, those asks of the company. But there's no way that us or even our technology teams have enough bandwidth to evaluate everything that's out there. But I think to engage the group and empower them to be part of that conversation, but also make sure that they're not just doing checklists of features, but they think more fundamentally about how does this change how I think and how do I do my work?

So it's that kind of combination of. Composability in the center with both democratization and governance, kind of pushing and pulling in equal amounts.

Audience: I think following on from that question, so when you're in a leadership position and you set a direction, you know, that then trickles down into the people that execute on it. My question is ultimately like how do you as, as a leader, evaluate whether it's working?

Like what are your frameworks for being like, yes, this, this is working well, or this is not working well. Um, [00:24:00] and maybe as an example, like having been. On design technology teams or with people who are, you know, if you make an architect, if you could, if they can produce a rendering in half the time, they're not gonna go home earlier, they're just gonna make twice as many renderings.

Uh, so it doesn't necessarily show up in the, like, you know, financials. I would, I would imagine maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But I guess that's, that's kinda the question, like for, I guess. Given that you're all, you know, at the top of very large organizations, what's your framework for evaluating whether your strategy's working or not?

Shane Burger: I'll just kind of briefly note, I usually try to evaluate things both on the data and the narrative. So from a data perspective, I do want to know, are they completing two or three times or five times as many renderings? Also, it is good to know are people spending fewer hours? So does it save people time?

So there's both. If there's a terms would be basically either a cashable or non-cash value versions of these things that you wanna be able to track. And it is something that was very much on my mind. A lot of the presentations before, I didn't get a [00:25:00] chance to ask people, how many of you are actually tracking the use of every single tool and the different kinds of ROIs that are associated with it?

'cause some of it is, is an increase in efficiency and some of this is an increase in value. The value is a harder one to. To figure out. Maybe you only realize that over a year or two by increase in clients or quality, whatever, but there is a data portion of it. I think any of you who are building tools, please build in some method to track the use of those tools because people in positions like mine are gonna be asking you for that information.

So just plan it in advance. But the other side is the narrative. What are the experiences people have? Do they enjoy it? Do they ask to use it? Are they excited when they get a chance to use it? If you can make a tangible impact on the experience of your staff sitting at the desk, that's the best thing in the world.

You know, there's one way to basically say your company's going to, save your clients money, and therefore that's a value. Another would be to say you increase the profitability of the shareholders in your company. That's another part of value. Another would be to say you're increasing the quality of life for the [00:26:00] staff that you have in your, studio.

That, for me, is the number one most important thing because those other two things fall in line after that. So I think, uh. Constantly speaking with and working with staff and understanding what the quality of their experiences are, and then mixing those two, some sort of understanding of data and some of the narratives.

And also just to point out, leadership in the company tend to, you know, I don't know if it's a left brain, right brain type of thing, but tend to make decisions based on one or both of those sort of scenarios. And if you have answers for both, that's, that's the best way to see it through.

Evan Troxel: I'll just real quick add in that this is something that Shane and I spoke specifically about the last time we had a podcast conversation, so you can hear even more about that because I think that job satisfaction part it not is like that.

I'm glad you said that. That goes first and the other things fall in the line after that. Uh,

Nirva Fereshetian: I mean all those data in the metrics, metrics that you. Are able to collect are very important, but employee experience and client experience overrides that even if the data [00:27:00] shows something different.

Have you ever heard that they went to a meeting and showed something to the client and they loved it? Guess what? We're using that tool.

Whatever it is that produced that, because the client liked it so. even though you can show the data behind it, it might not be as influential in the decision making.

employee experience is also the same way. So if they are happier to use it. Like I mentioned before, it's like they tell the next team, the team over, they show we don't even have to announce it, that we have the tool. You keep getting this request of, I want a license too. She has it, I want it, he has it, I want it.

So I think those are other types of metrics that sometimes override the numbers, which are the logical things.

Heath May: I like the focus on people first. Right. Um, and someone was talking about it earlier, maybe Pablo, on the idea that, you know, where do you see ai, for instance, you know, as one tool making a difference, and how do [00:28:00] you evaluate what value that's bringing?

And is it, uh, is it allowing us to be more creative or what is the ultimate goal here? And, you know, if, if you have a purpose, what I've found is. Asking the right questions. And so, you know, adoption is something that you really wanna look at. But you know, if, if it's really about design, you know, it's asking what's the big idea here and what are you trying to do and how did you accomplish this?

And if the technology is part of that answer, that's telling me something. Uh, but if I ask, how much time did you save? Um, or how much fee did you collect, that also sends a message. Um, and as a leader, we, we have to be very careful about the questions that we ask.

Jonathan Nelson: So, when we're looking at internal, uh, initiatives, we actually have a framework that we use to make sure that we get this right.

A a lot of firms don't track in a lot of detail how people are performing on certain things, right? So if you're in an ERP and you're marking down your time sheet, it doesn't get very granular most of the time because it would take you, you know, three weeks just to fill out that. So a lot of times we don't actually even have a [00:29:00] baseline to measure improvement off of.

Right. So that's where the employee satisfaction comes in or, um, the, the people asking for adoption and things like that. FOMO is very powerful in our company, right? So we make sure to disseminate what people are doing with tools and technologies, and then more people come and come and ask for that. But when we're doing internal initiatives, I have my teams make basically a two slide business case, right?

And we measure it on, on five specific things, and that's time and money. It's, Brand perception with our clients. It's, legal and risk, that can be reduction of that. it's employee satisfaction. And the last one was, competitive advantage. And you just have to address those things and what you think it is.

So it doesn't have to always be numbers, right? It can be qualitative as well as quantitative.

Evan Troxel: Do they present that information to you or do they, do those slides have to speak for themselves?

Jonathan Nelson: They do present it to me.

Um, but it's like a quick 15 or 20 minute thing. and that gets a little bit relaxed depending on how much [00:30:00] time or money they're asking for to do something, right? So we, we have a very specific portfolio that we work on, and it's, it is roughly 60% of our effort is fundamental to the business. 30% is innovation.

And then about 10% is experimentation. So I do allow them time to do moonshot type stuff or let's, you know, let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks, kind of things. And that helps me manage my employee's time, the money that, that I have to ask for and also make sure that we're integrating with the business.

Heath May: Can I ask, ask a quick follow up so that, uh, that ratio, have you dialed that up and down, or have you found a sweet spot with that?

Jonathan Nelson: It's, it's pretty loose. Um, so when, when I first came into POPULOUS, I don't have a predecessor. They just decided that they were behind in digital and technology and they wanted someone to lead it, uh, instead of a, a board of people that didn't really understand the technology all that well.

So, I actually hired business analysts to go around, um, different parts of the business and analyze pain points. That they had and try to figure out what the explicit [00:31:00] needs of people are and the latent needs as well. And then some of the business opportunities. And that set my initial roadmap and the, the 60, 30 10 is a pretty recognized framework, but I, I just do it loosely because I don't want people to be stuck.

Making PowerPoint slides for me all day. Right. That's, that's not any fun. I do PowerPoint all day. so it's, it's mostly about just getting it iterated quickly, but then when we're asking for half a million dollars to implement, you know, a new global system that is a formal business case that is, you know, 40 pages, that's distilled down into two or three for the board, but they can read the rest of it.

So it just depends on, on the effort and time required.

Audience: I'm very curious to know what was your last hire, in terms of role, obviously, and if it's the one before the last, um, it's also fine. But I would like to know, why did you hire them and what was the impact that you were, uh, expecting for. In your organizations?

Shane Burger: so the most recent hire from me was actually a junior [00:32:00] computational designer who joined in our, one of our West coast offices.

A recent graduate from school, had interned with us for many months, uh, had been just building really interesting little projects and helping out with things, and was really excited to come join us. The thing that really caught me about them. When we had the conversation about whether they were going to join was just the enthusiasm to explore and try things and this desire to go steps beyond what we were asking as well, the, the kind of hunger to do something interesting.

This was a point of where they were also showing me some of the work they did in school, which was super impressive. And then. we wanted to bring them in, uh, for a growth opportunity to try to make an impact and have some excitement with the work they would do. Learn from people who had been in our company for 10 to 20 years and really kind of bring some new energy and vitality into the work.

And it has absolutely paid off. They're not in this room, so I'm not saying this to get them, you know, build up their ego or anything. Uh, but it was, it was an an [00:33:00] amazing sort of moment because even in the last few weeks they've been sending me screenshots of stuff that they've been working on and. We have been asking to develop these set of tools through kind of some rhino plugins and rhino environments.

And they, we had originally thought we were gonna get this far and this person's already presenting ideas that were gonna be six to 12 months down the road and already accelerating and thinking, you know, forward thinking in that sort of workflow. I saw just somebody who was excited and interested and really wanted to think through the work, and I wanted to give them an opportunity to grow.

And I think that was it. It wasn't a matter of like finding, I had a. A, a square peg and I had to fit somebody who fit that particular role. It was like, I'm gonna bring some energy and excitement into the group and somebody who really wants to learn.

Jonathan Nelson: Uh, my last hire was a data analyst. I spend a lot of time trying to bring non-traditional skills into an architecture business. Um, and part of that was because we have a lot of data and we have, you know, most of the businesses made. Of architects [00:34:00] and they consume everything in a very visual way, right?

So they don't consume information in a tabular way like an accountant would or something like that. So we have to find an effective way of taking a lot of tabular data and turning it into something that's useful and engaging for our designers, but it's also for our clients. So as, as you know, we do mostly sports and entertainment work, um, and a lot of our clients are extremely sophisticated in this area.

So if you. Most of you have probably read the book or seen the movie Moneyball. so these organizations are spending tens of million dollars a year on data analytics. So we also wanted to reflect that. We have similar sophistication to that. Uh, just to add to that, um, my next three hires will be a machine learning engineer and two full stack developers, and they'll concentrate fully on ai.

Heath May: the last one that I was. Really involved in was a Chief Data and digital officer. And, uh, the way that we are building the team here, we have a Chief technology officer, chief information Officer, and then [00:35:00] there's been, you know, lots of talk today and even earlier on the conver conversation around governance and data.

And to be able to longitudinally connect data that spans from the practice of what we do to the business and operations of what we do. that's the platform that we're looking at. So in order to really be able to get value from the, the data analysts, um, that we have on staff, um, having someone that can really start to look very broadly longitudinally across the firm, uh, with that perspective, to work directly with the chief technology officer and the CIO, uh, was a gap that I saw.

And, uh, we're trying this out with, uh, with that as a technology leadership team.

Nirva Fereshetian: we last hire is a computational designer that was an intern for two summers, but not just for, developing scripts or computational, setups, but mostly two. Uh, we have, uh, workflow use cases, to improve that we've determined that are inefficient.

[00:36:00] and We work very closely with a lot of startups, that, have the overall objective that fit in improving some of those workflows or solving some of those problems. So he is actually working to develop, Workflows that are going to be used for, uh, because so far everyone, you know, one example is designing in Rhino, and then, throwing those files to the Revit people and.

Uh, pretty inefficient way. And then those people throw those files to the CA people from a very inefficient way and no one knows how. So we have three, four use cases that we have developed. so internally he's sourcing people asking, you know. Why do you do it this way? How is it that way? And then we have couple of, external partners, uh, startups that, we seem to think that they're fit solving at least part of that problem.

so that's, essentially the role.

Shane Burger: Mind if I just ask [00:37:00] a quick question. I'm curious from the audience here, how many of you are actually either hiring people in data analysts or senior data engineering type of positions, or yourselves might be going that direction from a career perspective?

Alright, a hand, a handful of those. we're going down this journey ourselves and I feel like all of the major practices are investing a lot more in this sort of data engineering, data analyst positions. I guess a question for you, Jonathan, on this. So the data analysts that you're hiring, and maybe this is the same for, for any of you, are you focusing on people that are domain specific, understanding architecture, engineering, construction, or more general skills based, or a mix between?

Jonathan Nelson: Uh, none of our data analysts have any AEC experience at all. Um, it doesn't matter to me.

They come from banks and stuff like that. We hire, uh, usually junior ones with two to three years experience. Um, then we can, we have the expertise. We can show that to them, right? They have the data expertise that we need.

Evan Troxel: Shane, you should start a podcast. Good question. I don't, I don't have time for that. [00:38:00] Sorry. I wish I, I will leave it to the experts.

Audience: I had a question on, because you, you are all leaders in technology. Uh, do you guys think about a succession plan for yourself?

Or like, how does the younger crowd come up? And, what's your thoughts and what are the factors you consider in those, uh, succession plans?

Shane Burger: I, I'm not gonna be cheeky and say like, an AI agent is gonna take over my job because that, that, I just don't think that would work. I honestly, I think it's, uh, synthesizing ideas and communications is probably the biggest thing that comes to play for me, is your ability to communicate out a vision or a set of strategy to people and to bring them together.

'cause, uh. Our organizations are large enough. You've got differing opinions, you've got a whole collection of people that have great ideas, but they may differ from each other. You've gotta collect everybody together under one sort of idea. So the ability to, communicate that sort of vision, synthesize those ideas and speak it back to the company is probably the biggest part of it.

so that's probably one of the biggest qualities I'd be looking for is the ability to synthesize [00:39:00] lots of different ideas, communicate and work with, large diverse stakeholders.

Heath May: I think in general, we should always be thinking about succession, right? It's not, uh, it's not like a point in time that we start to think about that, but it's an everyday thing, right? and I, I appreciate that. Thinking about the equality, is it a skill set or is it an attribute, you know, that we're looking at and what are we trying to accomplish with this?

And I think communication is absolutely fundamental to this. Uh, but I also think it's a, you know, it's a moment that we can think about that there's an inspiration. Right. And you know, I, I think back to, you know, many years of attending these, like, you know, today there were, there's so many talks. Today that we're inspirational and, and it should always be that way.

We have to have that curiosity that continues to happen regardless of where we are in our career or what we think that we might have, uh, accomplished at one level, taking on another. Um, but, you know, someone, Rob over here sitting, he was doing what I was doing only like 10 years ahead of me at every step through my journey.

So I could have a question and, uh, he would kind of, you know, grin and nod and say, yeah, here's how [00:40:00] we, here's how we went through that. But. Finding somebody that inspires you, that's done something that's created, something that took a risk, right? You know, there's an element of risk. I think that that hasn't really been brought explicit to all of this.

those are the things that makes me think, yeah, I wanna do that. Think about hearing John Cerone talk about Barclays many years ago and what they were doing with, you know, should the panels, you know, they're going to make the structure sag. Do we design to where it was or to where it's gonna be? And you know, you think like, that's what I wanna do.

I wanna be making those decisions, you know, that have huge impact. Take a risk, find somebody that can inspire you to do that.

Nirva Fereshetian: also, I, I think the field has been evolving. You know, it's not a one-to-one replacement anymore. whoever was in my role before, um, and me we're not doing the same thing.

And, and as you could see, the proliferation of the. Managing technology in large firms have become from one CIO or CTO to like a data officer and a innovation officer [00:41:00] and an AI officer. And so I think it, it's no longer, uh, who can replace who. as our nature of the businesses change and the way we do things change.

It's uh, it's a very different structure.

Audience: Hey, I have a question about your personal kind of leadership, uh, strategies actually, uh, about your measures and philosophies in this like weekly changing technology landscape, right? None of us can open up Slack or teams anymore without having three LinkedIn articles inside of our inbox, right? With people that are really excited that might be tangential to technology or not in technology at all.

And I, I think I'm interested in hearing how you decide what gets incubated internally for r and d, what you choose as an early adoption and what you might wait for to cook a little bit.

Jonathan Nelson: so we also have another loose framework that we use, which is called Make Buy Partner. Right? So we evaluate the pain points or the ideas, and then we say, is [00:42:00] there something on the market that's currently there? Uh, is it something that is suitable to our needs? Right? And, and then it's subject to review by legal and IT, and all of that stuff.

Um, and then there's some things that. We feel that our partners should be working on, right. And that, and that's software companies or, or cloud provider companies or something like that. So, I mean, there, there's things inside Revit that we don't think we should be developing. We think Autodesk should be developing.

So we just make clear and then we communicate that to them that, that this is a need for us. then there's things that may be very sensitive or have, significant competitive advantage to it. And then those are things that we tend to build internally. but most of our ideas actually come from within projects or within innovation that's already in the company.

So we have tons of innovation happening all the time. A a lot of what we do is to try to capture that and say, can we scale that up and make it for everybody? Or is there a better workflow to do that? And so we've built a dozen tools just based on. Little POCs that other people have made for one [00:43:00] project and they turn out that it's useful for almost every project that we do.

Nirva Fereshetian: I think it's very important for the technologist pr inside the firm to not. Make it look like all the decisions are made by technologists and, I always keep saying that during sessions or presentations make it look like it's their idea. because it has to be working in their realm.

And no matter what the technologist thinks, and no matter what a wow idea it is, if it's not functioning within that realm, then it's not, it's worthless. So, um, I feel that, integrating everyone, and I think that's where everything is headed, is. More of a distributed technology function, and then the technologies themselves are just giving directions.

As you could see, Turner showed that 15,000 people are building agents on their own. and so I, I think. The self-sufficiency and the new, [00:44:00] um, tools that are on deck for people to use and create things is going to be defining a very different role, that we play. And I think it's a positive one because the business needs to make the decisions, not necessarily just, uh, all of our frameworks or all of our explanations.

Shane Burger: I, two things that come from mind for me. If people are sending me, you know, slack messages with LinkedIn files or videos and hey, have you seen this piece of tech? They're excited. Right. Like respect that, that's good. That's, that's like what we should be trying to bring out in the people in there. The worst thing you want to be doing is be like, yeah, that one's no good.

You should actually look at this. Or just ignore them and not know, right? They're excited. That's the kind of person you wanna work with. Now, maybe the specific one that they chose is not the direction we want to go. Meet them there on that, like ask them about it. What is it about this that you liked?

Let's have a conversation, right? You should ideally have enough people on your team who can work and communicate that way where you can, [00:45:00] you know, receive those sort of conversations. That to your point, Nirva, it's like, it shouldn't feel like it's coming from me. It should feel like it's coming from the collective of the community that comes up with we're there guiding it particular directions, but you wanna harness that excitement.

The other thing that comes to mind for me is when I look at software companies. particular tools or whatever that come up. The tools that I get most interested in are the ones that have a clear roadmap, that seem to align with the kinds of things that we would like to do. It's not just the specific features.

Yes, that'll give you short term decisions and help you out, but we're trying to steer thousand person plus organizations. We're not buying licenses to use for a few weeks, that then get leapfrog by some other tool that came out that did the same thing that they then texted you about a week later. Right?

We're trying to make larger decisions for this, so I wanna look for companies that I like the direction they're going. Ideally they're not gonna get bought out by Autodesk or somebody else, but you know, the companies that are, that are doing something that have [00:46:00] some. Resiliency to it. Some ideas that the idea behind it is interesting and fascinating and aligns with the types of things that we might want to do.

So that, that's often where I'm getting into. Just what shows up on the webpage is one thing. I want to feel, what's underneath it, what's the subtext? What's the, what are the founders doing of that company? Like that's the stuff that gets me excited.

Nirva Fereshetian: I, I think we talked about, uh, communication and just as much as it's important communication to the board or other decision makers, I feel that the communication with people like that and how you explain and how you, uh, get feedback and, uh, explain why that is not something we want, maybe not use or why we should try is far more important than the leadership explanation because those people are your allies, you know?

To tell leadership that we want to use that. So I feel like our success has been that we have explained to them that this might or might not be the right choice. And then [00:47:00] once it's something we wanna push, they are our advocates to make that decision happen. Once they show in their projects that it's working, then I don't have to convince someone, uh, in the finance department that we are gonna pay for it.

So there's just no option, but pay for it.

Shane Burger: I have to say, like I have a certain amount of empathy for the experience as well. I was that person 15, 20 years ago. The IT team hated me, right? Like they, now I kind of par, I co-run it. So that's a little bit ironic in my brain, but it's like, yeah, having some empathy for their experiences and what they wanna do also.

Sometimes they're bringing it up because they've got to solve a problem on their project. It's right in front of them. They see an answer. And they want to get it done, why are you telling them no? Right? Like sometimes you gotta be careful 'cause that tool might train on the IP of the company. And then we've just released confidential material like that.

That is a line to not cross, but have some empathy for the experiences. 'cause I think a lot of you in the audience have been in that exact scenario.

Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah. I mean, how many times [00:48:00] people said critical thinking, we appreciate critical thinking, we appreciate curiosity. That's a display of that. And that's a way to encourage people.

Evan Troxel: I think we have time for one or two more questions.

Audience: strategies do you do your organizations use to retain computational designers, machine learning developers, data analysts, developers in general.

Developers in general. Uh, when competing against big tech companies that may offer bigger salaries. Um, better resources. What are you talking about? What makes a mistake?

Jonathan Nelson: So this is actually an interesting conversation. Um, and it's something that I do try to talk to the board a lot about, right?

So I mean, when you think about just having a design firm, it's very easy for the very senior executives to think of everybody in terms of architects, and they benchmark people in terms of architects. And I do make that case to them quite often. I said. We're not gonna lose our computational designers to a, a competitor, right?

We're gonna lose 'em to a tech firm. It's just that simple. [00:49:00] And here's the reasons why. Our digital twin people aren't gonna be gone to, you know, a, a rendering house. They're gonna go to a VFX agency or something like that. so we're still in the process of figuring that out. I like to think that we make the quality of employee experience, good enough that it makes it a little bit harder to leave.

and we let them work on things that they're very passionate about, which also makes it a little bit harder to leave. and it, it goes up into the company culture as well, right? So if you feel you're respected as an employee and the company culture is good, it's also again. Much, much harder to leave.

But as far as very specific pinpointed strategies, it's hard to have one for me. but I have had to a few times go directly to the CEO and ask people, get out of cycle raises and things like that, because they do from time to time get lured away.

Shane Burger: I will just say there's at least one person in this room right now who left my team for a major tech company.

So this is, uh, this is an act. There he is. He's right there in the corner. Alright. So I wasn't gonna call you out, but you can do it. Um, it, it's really hard. It is really [00:50:00] hard. I mean, there's a few things you can do and I was unsuccessful with some of these things, but, first of all, pay everybody a reasonable salary.

That's like a clear thing to do. Alright. also just give them enough support and opportunity. They shouldn't just be the lone computational designer within the company. Give them a community of people to work with. Give them a career path. What do they do next? Are they going to go the direction of, building software tools all the time?

Then give them that opportunity. Uh, do they want to be, become a designer? Who just has computational skills as part of their toolkit, help them go that direction. Do they want to go leadership directions? Help them go that direction. So have paths for them to go to. Also do everything you can to keep them creatively and intellectually stimulated in learning.

Right. Don't just make them do the same damn grasshopper definition on the same kinds of projects all the time. Give them things that keep them excited and interesting to, to learn, connect them in with communities like this, support them attending conferences like this. There's a whole host of things that I think we could possibly do.

In [00:51:00] the end, you still will not always be successful. Like that's gonna be the case. But I think giving them learning opportunities and career paths are to, and a community are probably three very large things that you could do to help them. I'm the kind of person that I get excited about the buildings that our company does, right.

I feel vicariously like I benefit from that experience of seeing the work that our designers and engineers actually produce, and that's the product of the work. And sometimes you'll find computational designers that feel that same sort of thing and others will want to build software and others will want to go into consulting and do other things.

And so we're not gonna fix it for everybody, but I think there are. Absolutely key things that you could do. And I also say this again from an empathy perspective as somebody who left a major design firm because they were not supporting my career path, and it led to the path that I'm on right now. So I had this exact same experience myself.

Heath May: That's what we try to do also, Shane, you know, think about, uh, we wanna improve people's lives through design. And that's the key piece. And, and it's my job to [00:52:00] help everyone in the organization understand how their role, when they come into the office every day contributes to improving someone's life through design.

Um, and that can be different from, you know, doing this somewhere else, being a technologist somewhere else, writing software somewhere else. It's the design aspect and to feel some pride of authorship in that. And I think the other reality is that, uh, we are reevaluating compensation models. Uh, also role progressions, uh, with the understanding that as you start to think about behavioral human scientists, anthropologists, data scientists, machine learning experts, all of these things that are maybe tangential to what we do, but also becoming, uh, critical to where we're going, um, there will be a different compensation structure.

And, you know, with the theme of this panel, I think if you're considering that, you know, weigh that in. You have skills, you have capabilities that, uh, someone else doesn't. Um, and I think that deserves a conversation around compensation because of the value that you can bring. And I think that's just a reality that we start to have to grapple with.

Evan Troxel: Amazing. That's all the time we have for questions. I hope you [00:53:00] got what you wanted out of this. That was the goal. And so thank you to the four panelists for speaking so candidly,

and once again, thank you to you all for coming and showing up and bringing it today. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thanks.

💡This newsletter provide key insights for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovation in AEC who are short on time, offering the context of each conversation without the need to listen to the full episode. It’s designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in if the ideas resonate.

🎉🍾 Tomorrow is my birthday, which also marks the one year anniversary of this newsletter. While publishing 45 of these and writing over 41,000 words, I've discovered something unexpected: writing these deep-dive analyses has fundamentally changed how I listen to my own podcast. What started as a way to extend the conversation has become a tool for clarity. It’s forced me to identify the signal within the noise, to extract the frameworks hiding in casual dialogue, and to connect insights across episodes that I might have missed in real-time. The newsletter has become the complement I didn't know the podcast needed, transforming ephemeral conversations into permanent, actionable knowledge. I hope you are getting the intended value as well!

On to this week’s edition and my opening question for you:

What hidden value is sitting inside your firm right now buried in old videos, conversations, and workflows just waiting for AI to surface it?

Summary

In episode 211 I sat down with Jim Martin and Jess Purcell from Shepley Bulfinch, joined by our KM 3.0 guide, Chris Parsons, to get an inside look at what it really takes to make AI useful inside an architecture practice. Shepley is a 150-year-old firm with an experimental culture, and their approach to AI, video-first documentation, and knowledge-sharing offers a template for any AEC organization trying to modernize without losing its soul.

What emerged was a candid exploration of disciplined experimentation, the hard edges of AI’s unpredictability, the cultural scaffolding needed for knowledge to flow, and the reality of running knowledge management without a KM department, all while maintaining an environment that encourages curiosity rather than compliance.

Catch the full episode

Key Takeaways

Here are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

• Disciplined experimentation: Shepley defines value by continuously testing, retesting, and documenting their tools, not by believing the hype.
• “Trust but verify” is the new mantra: Teaching staff how to question AI outputs is now just as important as teaching them tools.

Ashley Hastings joins the podcast to talk about what it really means to make curiosity a key performance indicator (KPI).

📐A note from Evan: The phrase “curiosity as a KPI” contains its own contradiction, and hopefully the irony landed with you, dear listener. Obviously, KPIs are about measurement, control, and predictability—the very things that can kill curiosity when applied too rigidly. True curiosity thrives in open-ended exploration, not quarterly targets. The challenge isn't to meter curiosity like a production metric, but to design systems that protect space for it, reward it when it leads somewhere useful, and to not punish the curious if/when it doesn't. The goal is to make curiosity visible and valued. Not to turn wonder into a dashboard.

We discuss how curiosity can and should be operationalized as a measurable part of firm culture—not so much as something tracked, but rewarded and tied to real outcomes instead of being left to chance. Ashley shares her perspective on aligning incentives for innovation, treating training like a product, and creating feedback loops that actually capture and scale knowledge across teams.

We also talk about the post-GPT reality of context over keywords, and how design technology leadership is increasingly about change management and culture design.

If you’re a digital practice leader, BIM manager, or anyone trying to build a more innovative, adaptive practice, this conversation offers a clear path toward turning curiosity into a strategic advantage.

Original episode page: https://trxl.co/212

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Curiosity by Alastair Reid

Ashley Hastings: “I was recently reminded of a poem that I’d learned in high school, and that my English teacher had given me in a graduation card senior year. Call it a guide, as most poems can be. It’s stuck with me all these years.”

Connect with the Guest

• Ashley Hastings — LinkedIn
• Woods Bagot — Website
• Woods Bagot — LinkedIn
• Women in BIM — Speaker profile: Ashley Hastings
• Melbourne Build — Speaker page & AI panel

Books and Philosophies

• Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
  • Wikipedia Overview
  • Frames the data economy architects are designing within—useful context for AI-in-practice conversations.
• Matthew Crawford — Shop Class as Soulcraft
  • Amazon
  • A case for hands-on craft and judgment—echoes the “keep it human” theme in digital practice.
• Nicholas Carr — The Shallows
  • Amazon
  • How tech reshapes cognition—relevant to learning cultures and digital literacy.
• Adam Grant — Think Again
  • Amazon
  • Practical tools for curiosity-as-a-KPI: unlearning, rethinking, and constructive debate.
• Peter Senge — The Fifth Discipline
  • Amazon
  • Systems thinking for organizations—great for aligning design tech with firm strategy.
• David Epstein — Range
  • Amazon
  • Why generalists and cross-pollination matter in AEC innovation.

Events and Networks

• Women in BIM (WIB) — Global network for digital practice leadership
• Association for Women in Architecture + Design (AWA+D) — AI & practice salons
• Melbourne Build Expo — Architecture & AI panels, industry tech showcase

About Ashley Hastings:

Ashley is an empathy-driven design technology leader with a background in architecture and more than a decade of experience across the global AEC industry. Her work sits at the intersection of design, systems thinking, and emerging technology, where she guides digital innovation and operational strategy within complex project environments.

With experience spanning the United States and Australia, Ashley brings a global perspective to design challenges and a deeply human approach to technology adoption. She has led initiatives ranging from BIM integration to AI-enabled workflows, always with a focus on improving collaboration and building continuity across project teams.

Provide feedback for this episode

Connect with Evan

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Twitter/X

Episode Transcript:

212: ‘Curiosity as a KPI’, with Ashley Hastings

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the Troxel podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Ashley Hastings. Ashley is a studio design technology leader at Woods Bagot. Where she's helping redefine what it means to lead with curiosity inside a global architecture firm, with a background that bridges business, architecture, and data, Ashley brings a systemic lens to how ideas move from experimentation into practice.

She joined Woods Bagot at a pivotal moment. Just as GPT entered the mainstream, forcing every practice to reexamine how they capture, share, and act on knowledge.

In this episode, we explore what it means to make exploration measurable, repeatable, and valued at the organizational level rather than left to individual initiatives, what happens when curiosity is incentivized instead of squeezed between deadlines, and how firms can use it to drive learning, innovation and retention.

Along the way, Ashley unpacks how viewing Revit as a database changed how she thought about design information, why training needs to be treated like a product inside firms and how post GPT workflows reward context over keywords. We also reflect on what it takes to turn design technology from a collection of tools into a sustained capability, one that's measured not just by software adoption, but by how much smarter the organization becomes because of it.

Something that really stands out to me in this conversation is the notion of curiosity as a KPI, as the title suggests, in an industry built on solving complex problems, curiosity isn't a luxury. It is actually the engine that keeps practice evolving. We talk about how to operationalize it through mentorship programs, learning budgets and leadership KPIs that reward inquiry instead of punishing uncertainty.

As usual, there's more information worth your time in the show notes, so be sure to check that out. You can find them directly in your podcast app if you are a supporting member of TRXL+, and if you're a free member, you can find them over at the website, which is trxl.co.

So now without further ado, I bring you my wonderful conversation with Ashley Hastings.

Ashley, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. Great to see you again.

Ashley Hastings: Thanks so much, Evan. Yeah, it's great to see you too. Um, feels like, feels like,

we were just at Confluence.

Evan Troxel: It, it doesn't feel like that to me. It feels like it's been a decade.

Ashley Hastings: okay. Great.

Maybe you do more things than I do.

Evan Troxel: Oh, no, no. I'm just getting older. Thanks. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Time. Time feels shorter

Evan Troxel: Yes, time. The older you get, the time, the shorter it goes. I have a theory about that. But anyway, um, a lot's changed I think in the last two and a half, three years since, especially for you professionally, uh, geographically, uh, you know, things like that. And then, uh, also technology wise.

And so maybe you can kind, well, first of all, I would love to hear your story about your. Trajectory through the architectural profession.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Um, because I think that would kind of set the stage and, and give other people some, you know, obviously some context around what you've done. And now then we can move into what you're doing.

But, but let, let's just start with, the Ashley Hastings story.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah, it's all a blur. Um, first off, thank you. Um, thanks for having me. Thanks for the invite. Um, excited to, to see you again. Um, it has been, yeah, it's been about a little over two years. Um, um, my trajectory, uh, not ever been linear. Um, and I, I got to architecture, um, by way of all natural things.

Like I studied international business for undergrad. was in the Air Force for a few years, and then that career, um, was, uh, at the time very dramatically for me cut short, um, because of a medical disqualification at the time. And so, I had planned to be a pilot in the Air Force. That was

the, that was, that was the original trajectory.

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ashley Hastings: and, and when that all changed, I had a moment of going, well, what was that about? Why, why was, why did I go through all of that and why did I learn so much and get so far? And then it went away. And, uh, aviation, a love of aviation was, has always been a thing for me. Um, and, uh, I made a lot of, um, connections in, in my head when I was doing that soul searching after the fact.

And, uh, I used to travel a lot with my family growing. And I was fortunate enough to see a lot of the world very early, I remember going and just seeing cities, just new cities, and experiencing, uh, what it meant to be in other places and what it meant to wander around other places. And, um, this is gonna sound like a, a kind of a crazy parallel, but, uh, my love of and aircraft got me to architecture it started with a love of cities, and then you kind of zoom in and you focus on the buildings. Um, but for me it was always the, the kind of the city system or the infrastructure that, um, a place really special, um, for better or for worse, right? Um, and so when I was going through this time in my life where I was wondering what, where I was supposed to go next, I had a. A moment of saying, ah, I got it. I'm gonna be an architect. And is not, that is not the typical, I played with Legos and I

love drawing. When I was little, I did love those things. Um,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: no, no question. I still, there's a lot of Lego in this room actually. Um, but that was not the typical kind of pathway to architecture. And, and so I, I said, okay,

um, this is what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna find a graduate

Evan Troxel: I want, I want to ask you though, that you said you got it. So did this come where, where'd this come from? Did it come from the inner voice? Was it, did it come from somewhere else?

Ashley Hastings: Um, uh,

so road trips in California

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ashley Hastings: always the best thing I was, um, and 'cause because you sit in traffic

oh, so long, um, it was, it was one of those moments I was actually driving back with some friends. Um. From Malibu back to Los Angeles at the time, this was 2012 and um, yeah, it was one of those I was driving. It

was evening. You have a lot of time to think and

Evan Troxel: You're just on like autopilot, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. Right.

Ashley Hastings: Um, and yeah, it was just one of those kind of lightning bolt, um, moments, which I think

are they're rare. Um,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: rightfully so. I don't think people should be having those all the time. But, yeah, it was a, it was a really clear moment for me where I was like, okay, architecture onward,

what do I need to do?

Evan Troxel: The, this, this thing though is so interesting, right? Like this, I I, I'm sorry for kind of belaboring this, but, but it's like the subconscious has been working on this for a while and then it revealed it to you. Right? And, and I've definitely recognized like the power of that and like, I even have a reliance on it.

It's like you,

I think as architects especially, and, you know, maybe you didn't even have any training at this point, but I, I, we'll, we'll continue the story in a minute, but it's like, as an architect, I was trained to take in a bunch of inputs and just let it simmer, right? Like, you don't have to actively be, and I'm gonna use my air quotes, like designing, right?

Because designing happens when.

It doesn't usually happen on command. Like the ideas don't just flow out. Like you could actually, you can easily, well, not easily. You can get to that point where, because you have built the muscles to do that thing, then you sit down to do that thing and it actually happens.

But for most people, that's not how it works. That's not how creativity really works. But even in this thing, you got this message and it was like, well, like it didn't, it didn't have no context. Right? It's like something had been brewing for a while and then you were just kind of available because you were in this com contemplative state, you know, the dulce tones of the, the 1 0 1 or whatever you were on coming back from Malibu sitting in traffic and, and I, yes.

I'm from California. I say the 1 0 1.

Ashley Hastings: they're,

Evan Troxel: Yes,

Ashley Hastings: it's, it's a,

Evan Troxel: they all have.

Ashley Hastings: we all have with them.

Evan Troxel: Yes. Right.

Um, but, but you were available and, and in that state that, that kind of thing just delivers on. And I think I, I just wanted to. Puts an emphasis on it because I think that's important is like to listen for those things, but also to have a little bit of a

acknowledgement that, that we can have a reliance on them too.

And they're not just magic, right?

Ashley Hastings: Well, and it's, and it's okay to sit with your thoughts as well, because everything that you just said, Evan, is really, um, such an interesting parallel What, where we are right now, which I, I, I won't get there yet, but

just where we are right now with ai Right. And,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: and a lot of the kind of availability of instant

gratification and of that, but, we'll,

Evan Troxel: Distraction. Yeah. All those things. Right.

Ashley Hastings: get there. Um, also, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm, I'm surprised I just said all of that, uh, in terms kind of origin story. Um, so thank you for kind of, um, opening that bit. But from, from there, um, that, that moment of going Aha architect,

and by the way, I don't practice. Um, so

Evan Troxel: was gonna say, did you know what that even meant? Like I,

Ashley Hastings: No, I

Evan Troxel: okay.

Ashley Hastings: Um, but I did, I did have that sort of, um. Innate love of building and structure.

You know, you try to build a tree house when you're a child and, um, you know, not, not very high off the ground, but, um, yeah, just Lego and connects and like all of the things erector sets, like everything was there. Um, but nothing ever really pointed directly at Um, and I, and I'm glad of that actually. Um, 'cause this wandering path has been really interesting. but yeah, so at the time I was like, okay, what can I do? I started, I enrolled in some classes at UCLA, um, for, uh, their interior architecture

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ashley Hastings: Um, I was still very new in LA by the way. I'd just kind of gotten there early 2012 at the time.

And, um, yeah, I did, I did some courses at UCLA, which, uh, living on the east side, was. A journey every few days. Um, I started some classes at Art Center at night as well, which was really fun. and I, I started working with, I got a job as like a, a personal assistant for a general contractor in la and we were um, like, uh, nightclubs and bars in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. And it, I didn't, I didn't know anything and it was, um, fun and crazy and, overwhelming and you just kind of go and, and do all the things and, you know, And that was, that was pretty wild. And so, uh, I, I, I was in that space for a few years and, uh, changed contractors. So I got the construction side, um, kind of first I wanna say, um, while I was doing the, the, the classes and, and kind of, I was learning, I did some hand drafting classes, so I ticked that box. I did some AutoCAD glasses, which, uh, I still never understood the structure for AutoCAD. Like how do you, how do you name the layers? I don't understand. I'm sure there's a logic to it, but, um, yeah, I kind of went through maybe very fast track, um, path to, uh, eventually. develop a portfolio. And, uh, I remember going to, was it bl in Pasadena? And, just saying, I need to make a portfolio. What does, what does that include? And

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: before I'd done anything. I was just like, what do I need? Exactly?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: And, uh, so yeah, it was quite a kind of of, um, intense curiosity, uh, like, like actions and, and kind of ex exploration for a few years. And, um, and then ultimately I was looking at graduate schools. Um, I also got really involved with, um, the Association for Women in Architecture and Design. So a WA

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: shout out. Um, got involved in, in their mentorship program, um, and had a, a, an incredible mentor who's now an incredible friend and has been for a long time. Um. Stephanie Reich, we'll just do a little shout out there. Um, and, uh, she, she really helped guide me to, she's like, you know, live, live where you wanna go to grad school, go to grad school, where you wanna work. And, and so, um, the options for me at the time were, yeah. Um, UCLA 'cause I was then familiar with it.

And then S Arc and a couple of things went into that decision. Um, first of which was sort of geography. I've always, I was always an east sider in la. and, and s Arc really presented itself as, a challenge. And I, I wanted to go somewhere where I was gonna be uncomfortable 'cause I'm a, I'm, I'm, I'm not a formalist, um, which is a, a term I,

I learned after I got there.

And, um,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ashley Hastings: uh.

Evan Troxel: sure you learned it the hard way.

Ashley Hastings: Uhhuh. Um, but there were, there was just so many, there were so many incredible moments of getting to that point. And, and I did the, I did the summer program at, at cy Arc, making a meeting, which is now this incredible, like, offering of cool weirdness and really in depth like, uh, it wasn't just materials now or like, it was materials for us, and it was kind of, um, before a lot of digital interaction. and

Evan Troxel: Mm

Ashley Hastings: it's, it's just changed so much. Like, you know, our, our class, we were the one, the first ones with

3D printers, but we also missed realtime rendering.

But,

Evan Troxel: mm.

Ashley Hastings: so, um,

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Ashley Hastings: that was, um, a long-winded answer to your question of initial kind of starting off point. But, um, SA. Was a moment in time. Uh, I learned so much.

I was uncomfortable. Um, and what I really learned is that I was, I was still really interested in systems and, um, and systems thinking. And, when I was looking at like, internships and, and things that I could go and do, I, I realized I didn't really want to do the, didn't wanna do the traditional kind of architectural design as my, as my focus. I took a class in Revit one, one class, and I fell in love with it. Um, because I, I realized that

Revit is a database first, and it,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: it, and it is a 3D modeling program second, and

it need, it has rules, right? So if we go

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ashley Hastings: to the, start of all this rules and discipline and. Structure and, and, um, the things that I really towards, um, were, were, were down that path in,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: in, BIM world. And so, um, so I, I, I moved, I moved in that direction, and so was kind of tracking towards bim management, design technology. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was, that was kind of where I

was sort of naturally heading.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. So when you, when you graduated and you started looking for work, or maybe you had been interning, like were you naturally pulling toward big firm, medium firm, small firm? Where, where did you kind of fall in that spectrum?

Ashley Hastings: So, of all things, um, I, I, I don't think I, I, I wasn't thinking about like the size or the name or. Kind of those, those other drivers. Right. I was, um, I really wanted to connect with where I want, where I wanted to work. Um, and, and I, and I was an older graduate student, so I, I, I, I think a little bit of extra experience was like, Hmm, you know, find a place where you're gonna be happy. And I, I don't know that you always

think about that when you're of starting out in

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: new career. But I, I really wanted to be in a place that kind of resonated from like a, an ethos kind of standpoint. And, uh, I wound up at Arup all things, so engineering side. I interned at Arup because I had a project management background from doing the contractor side of things.

I had kind of evolved into a project management. Space. And I had the business degree, um, from undergrad, and I got my foot in the door with Arup in la and um, uh, Russell Fortmeyer, I don't know if you've come across him before, is the sustainability leader, um, at, uh, at Arup in the Americas right now. And, um, he was also one of my instructors at XY Arc. And so I I, he always talked about aup and there were, you know, so many interesting stories. And he was coming at it from a, obviously the sustainability lens and kind of material focus and things that were also, you know, I was interested in. But I was like, I don't know, you know, part of the system kind of thing. um, and so I asked him one day, I said, Hey, you know, does, does Arup do interns or anything like that? And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, he. He's like, my team is full, but you know, gimme your CV and we'll pass it along. And I actually, I, I got into Arup as an intern in project controls, so the financial side of projects and nothing to do with anything.

But when I graduated, I, they're like, you probably wanna use your degree. And I said, yeah,

that would be great.

Evan Troxel: Nice. They were looking out for you.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah. And, and so I, yeah, so I, I, I moved, I moved to Arup, um, and joined the BIM management team. Um, but I guess in going back to the, what was I looking for? It was, um, like total,

total design was the, the concept for, um, for the basis for all the work at Arup.

And, and I really liked that approach because it was considering, considering everything, right? And it's

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: practice and, and. Including architecture outside of the US in, in most cases, and, all of the different disciplines that exist under one roof. It's just, it's pretty rad. Um, and to have that kind of exposure as the

first part of my, let's say, new, new career, um, was really powerful and I got to learn so much.

And I just remember the, the initial, the initial definition, uh, on, on arrival was, ah, engineers

think differently than architects.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: and I thought that was a really, and, and what showed me that was, um, just the difference in, in two dimensional approach versus three dimensional approach, but how they both kind of do, do some of, I'm, I'm putting my hands together in a kind of infinity symbol.

Like there's a lot of movement in both directions, um,

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Ashley Hastings: and, So I think that was, that was some really incredible exposure for me and learning about how everyone needed to work together a, in a BIM environment. And I think BIM ultimately, building information, modeling sounds, sounds kind of boring as a, as an, as an acronym, but we all know it.

Today is something really incredible where, um, it requires that you collaborate, like BIM wants you to collaborate, Revit wants you to collaborate, and, and, uh, it also wants you to realize that design has consequence.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: make changes and, um, things that you decide to do affect other people. I, I get very philosophical about BIM in general, but I, I think it's a really unique, um, way of working and, and, and methodology that is much more than. A model and it's more of a, a way of interacting

with, with teammates.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

that, that design ethos, the total design, didn't that come out of one of Ove a's like early writings? From what I recall, it's like an an essay or something.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah. Um, God, I have one of the books around here. Um, yeah. His, his approach was, was so unique, I think, and maybe at the time, I don't know, they're, they're also like, um, they're also like new iterations of, of that thinking that just try to, you know, perpetuate that idea of collaboration and coordination and, I think the idea of, of total design is really. Interesting because it can be defined in so many different

ways, depending on the person or the team or the,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ashley Hastings: sector or what have

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I mean that, that to me, I mean, that's just kind of where my brain goes is like design the team.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: the, the business design, the approach design,

Ashley Hastings: yes.

Evan Troxel: because like the reactiveness of a lot of the way that architecture firms work, which is like new project throw, throw a ragtag team at it and go make it the best you can in the least amount of time possible.

And it's, uh, that's a very reactive approach. And I know that there's lots of firms who do really pay attention to the design of those things as well. But, but like to get back to the ethos of the company and kind of knowing who they are and what their approach is, is interesting that you kind of saw an attraction to that so early in your career.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah. And I guess going back to that, that that lightning bolt moment or those, those kind of reflective contemplative, times that, uh, we so rarely get or take for ourselves. yeah, I think, it's important to remember that everything has to be immediate and, and that's, that's, that's just gone really grand in terms of, um, uh, uh, of an idea or a thought.

But, not everything has to be immediate. And, and it's important to

be considerate and,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: thoughtful and, and decisions that we make for ourselves, but also for other people.

And it doesn't always get to happen that way. It's kind of a luxury when you

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Oh, I, it is a total luxury because most of the time all there is is pressure to do something as fast as possible, right.

Ashley Hastings: you know, like, why,

why do we do that?

Evan Troxel: A lot of times that's a perceived pressure. It's not an actual pressure, right? It's like, oh, of course they want this as fast as possible because faster equals cheaper, equals better. And

Ashley Hastings: Oh

Evan Troxel: yeah, but rarely does it actually rare. Rarely is it, I mean, it may be cheaper, but it is probably not better, right? So,

Ashley Hastings: And it's

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Ashley Hastings: triangle, right? The

triangle of

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: You can have two out of the three things. What

Evan Troxel: right.

Ashley Hastings: and speed.

Evan Troxel: right.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Pick two.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: so where did it go from Arup for you?

Ashley Hastings: Uh, so after a few years, I, I missed design in

the architectural sense, so I,

Evan Troxel: earliest design of a project or, because you, as an engineer, you are, I'm sure you're at the table sometimes, but that, that would be rare,

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

Evan Troxel: then there, but then there are times, usually you're receiving something and then it's like, okay, now, now you can start. And then it's like, well. Y

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you don't.

You're not there at the beginning.

Ashley Hastings: those were. interesting conversations. I loved working with architects when I was at a, because, um, I've always considered this role even now as a sort of, um, liaison or, or conduit or, diplomat in some cases. I think, I think those of us, um, in the, in the BIM management space or in the, in the design technology space, we do kind of act as this, connector of, of many different and people and ideas and, um, or at least I, I hope that's how we, how, that's how I see it.

Um, um, and I, I think that's pretty cool. Um, but the, there, there are those moments where you're like, oh, I'd really like to, I'd really like to go solve a, a different kind of problem. And that was where, yeah. Uh, I, I wasn't looking, I wasn't looking for anything. Um, but an opportunity presented itself and, um, the studio design technology leader for the LA office for Woods

Bagot was available. Um,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: it sounded like kind of the next step for me and, and the next move. Um, and, and as a

bonus it was in the Bradbury building. So,

Evan Troxel: Very cool.

Ashley Hastings: What a great, incredible space to

Evan Troxel: What a lobby to walk into every day.

Ashley Hastings: man. Yeah. Really, you know, that, that return to office approach, that was okay when the Bradbury, um, you know, post COVID and everything.

So, um, yeah, that was, uh, that was an unexpected.

Um, like I said, I wasn't, I wasn't looking. Um, it

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: appeared and, um, I jumped on it because. Like, it felt like the, what I gained from working with engineers, I was like, oh, well maybe, maybe I can, let me go back to, to my architecture friends and, and see if, see if I can change over here too, and have

cool conversations and yeah.

Evan Troxel: I'm curious when you, okay, so you're, you're, I want to step back a minute, which is when you're in a project team at Arab back then, right? Which I'm sure is different than today, and the kind of. Yeah, information, the kind of data that you're getting maybe from an architect today would be very different than what you were back then.

Were you clued into what firms were, what we, you know, say ahead of the curve when it came to kind of digital delivery, or at least this, this collaboration and the depth that BIM can offer

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you're doing it right.

Ashley Hastings: If you're doing it right. Yeah. Um, for sure. I think, uh, it was always interesting to. to know the architects and also because they typically, a lot of the architecture firms wouldn't have a BIM manager

you know, kind of someone dedicated to

Evan Troxel: That was, yeah. That wasn't a role back. Right? They, they maybe had a CAD manager. They definitely had an IT department, but, but

Ashley Hastings: it,

Evan Troxel: a lot of times a BIM manager was still a consultant back then, right? Because they didn't need 'em full time, or at least they didn't think they did.

Ashley Hastings: They didn't think they did. I would I argue that everyone needs, everyone needs at least

one, but it shouldn't be the only person fixing things.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: but that's, yeah, that's another part of this, um, part of this game. yeah, I think, um, my, my approach with anyone I work with is, I, I always wanna understand where the other person is coming from and also just try to facilitate a conversation around. The things that we don't know either, you know? So it's, it's great to talk through how we're gonna do the things and, and how we're going to approach a problem and, you know, here's the software we're gonna use and, you know, here are the plugins and all of that. But also, like in, in the case that we've done this thing, whatever the thing is, we've done it a hundred times.

We keep doing it the same way because that's the way it's always worked. Um, so we'll just keep going. I, I do always wanna ask the question of, but like, what else or what, what other considerations are there? What, what new things are out there? And, geez Louise, these days, if you've got, um, you know, if you talk to someone for a few hours, there's a change has happened, you know, something new has, has arisen and showed itself. Um. It's just so hard to keep up with all the new things that you also want

to commit to things that work.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: so I think it's important to, again, have those conversations of like, well, is there another way or, um, before we start, could we talk this out? Or, um, kind of where do we wanna go or what's the expectation?

Just

asking those questions, um, can

Evan Troxel: Open-endedly. yeah.

Ashley Hastings: yeah. And, and without fear. because asking questions, um, gives the impression that you don't know something and well, sorry, it doesn't give the impression. It means that you might not know, but you also wanna help clue in, everyone in the room. And so asking a question doesn't something bad, right?

It, um, I'm trying to avoid using the word. I'm like, I'm trying to avoid using the word stupid. Like, like, I just hate, I hate when I get that sorry to ask a stupid question. Like no questions are stupid. Um, and I, I really, I really hope that someday we'll

feel, we'll stop apologizing for asking questions, but,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: yeah, I think it's important to you know, yes, accept things as, as we can probably all do them 90% of the time, but also questions around. Um, but what if we tried this or, you know, what if we

ask for an extra day or, you

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: what, what can

we, what can we do a little

bit differently?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. So now you're at Woods Bagot, right. And I think you've been there ever since. Is that correct?

Ashley Hastings: yes. Yeah. I have done, um, so I joined Woods Bagot in October of 2022. So just, just passed my, my three year mark. Um, I joined in Los Angeles and uh, and then of course a month after I joined is when, um, the world changed and we had

GPT drop into our lives.

Evan Troxel: I was gonna say like this,

this was only a couple years after the world changed in a completely different way, but

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

With just nonstop life

changing events in humanity currently.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: Um, yeah, so,

so that was really fun timing, I think.

Evan Troxel: Did it feel, did it feel like a, a major change when that happened? Like a, like you're saying, a month later?

Ashley Hastings: yes. And, um, so kind of a blurry couple of months in that way. Not we, we didn't immediately dive into it. It was more, and I think, you know, a lot of. Organizations are still kind of in that individual into collective movement of how we're adopting ai. Um, but at the time it was kind of just a bunch of us going, oh, have you, have you tried this thing? It's, it's crazy. You know, you just ask it a question and it just goes on and like, it, it answers it really quickly and, um, seems to know a lot. Um, and I, it's hard to, it's hard to even actually back to, what

it, three five,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: that kind of initial, initial starting point. But, um, yeah, I just remember a lot of people going, oh, and like, have you tried the, have you tried Dolly and

have you

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I was gonna say like the image gen stuff was also kind of.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: around the same time where it was like,

okay, that's a another thing you have to contend with or, or learn what the potential of is and, and, and at least start playing with it.

Ashley Hastings: Start playing with it, man.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: is play? Um, a whole other, like,

that's a, my favorite conversation is like, how can we have some

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ashley Hastings: Um, yeah. There were, there were just so many things happening all at once. And we were also, um, uh, the LA Studio was, was, was also still coming out of, um, kind of a, a reforming period post COVID and, um, had a lot of work with, um, the San Francisco studio and so Studio California. and, uh, yeah, it was a really cool time of just growth and excitement and enthusiasm. Um, and we were working on LAX, um, the, um, midfield, satellite concourse, uh, south, um, which is just finished or close to, to finishing. Um,

now that I'm in another country, it's hard to keep

Evan Troxel: I don't miss that airport. Yeah, I don't miss that airport,

Ashley Hastings: Everyone loves LAX. Come on.

Evan Troxel: right?

Ashley Hastings: um, but yeah, it was, um, it was just a kind of blurry time. And I remember maybe like in January of 2023, right, in the new year, um, just kind of going, Hey, you know what, we should, we should

probably all just start having a chat about,

Evan Troxel: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: what's happening. Like what are you seeing out there?

What are you, what are you finding interesting and like, where do you wanna explore? Um, because I think, uh, and even still today, there, there are kind of, there's healthy levels of skepticism and fear. Um, but then there's, it's also this kind of ubiquitous technology now. And, in a lot of ways, uh, you know, individuals have been sort of changed by, the interactions that have occurred over the last few years and, and. And there's still a lot of people

who haven't even started yet.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, well, I'm, from that point of view, I'm curious what the. What was, if I was to take the temperature of Woods Bagot back then, what would you say the temperature of like, or at least the, the curiosity in these tools was? Because I've always thought of Woods Bagot as being a technology forward company, right?

Way back to Andrew Human, Brian Ringley, Shane Berger days of, you know, early, um, Autodesk University talks about interoperability and building grasshopper tools. And you guys had the whole like, what is it, the wombat tool set? Like there was this whole, there was this whole thing. Um, and, and, and that was early, you know, design technology.

Um, it was just, that was like on my radar. And then I can assume then that, that just marched on forward. And, and, and like you said, there's this whole spectrum of kind of curiosity and implementation and adoption of across the board in the profession of architecture. I've always seen Woods Bag as being kind of early to that game.

And so I'm curious where that. What the temperature was like when it came to ai.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah. So of the, if we go back to that ethos kind of approach to how we, where, where we find ourselves, um, one of the sort of tenets of what's bag is like, is focused on rigorous curiosity. And I, I love that. Um, and so, uh, there, is sort of in our, I maybe in, in each of us as individuals, but then sort of as a foundation as for, um, the firm is, is that kind of to to explore, um, and, and to, to try new things. We, I think we have. incredible ability to, um, perpetuate, um, more of the, more of the, the things that we wanna see in the world in terms of tech, like design, technology. Um, and then there's that kind of added piece of wanting to push outside, and

I hate to use the word innovate, but

Evan Troxel: Explore. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, you are. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: it's again, it's that, you know, we can keep doing what we've been doing and, and we, there are, there's no shortage of cute Australian animals that we can name our tools after, because that's, that's what we do. And it's,

um, shout out to Wombat And Kka. Um.

Evan Troxel: be clear, like Woods Bag, it is an Australian based firm, right? Like that?

Ashley Hastings: exactly.

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Founded in, in Adelaide,

um, 156 years ago. So

Evan Troxel: Been around a while.

Ashley Hastings: history. Yeah. Um, and so, um, I think, I think there's, there's always part of our approach from the design technology side

is, is, is is asking those questions of

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: can we go from here? And I remember, um, myself, so as the studio design technology leader, there's, there's one of me in every studio. Um, and what an incredible team of humans, um, because there's a vast experience, those who've been with the, the firm for 20 plus years. and then those like me who've only been in a few years, and, um, we all come to the table with some really. Uh, incredible insight into what's happened, what's happening, and you know, what could happen. I think, um, yeah, those are always good conversations, but curiosity piece is, um, I think still evolving. Um, one of the things that is really critical about this time the world right now in terms of like business holistically is, um, that risk, right? The risk is a, is a heavy driver. Um, the thing that is, you know, ultimately people to take more time. Um, I say people, but I mean organizations causing organizations to take more time to make decisions in this space because there are, um,

the potential ramifications that come out of,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: either not the misuse, but you know, the. Not fully figured out, um,

approaches to using new technology.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. An example of that, I mean, it's, it's shared by a guest just recently on the podcast. Uh, and that was that, you know, through the pandemic there was a lot of move to online collaboration tools and, you know, now it's been five years, four years, whatever it is. And, and it's like, well, now we don't pin up anymore.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: so then it, then it's just a question of, well of course, like things have changed, right? People, people are working remote a lot more and they're not in the space where that used to happen.

Um, of course it was incredibly valuable to those who were there in its time. And then, and then it's just a question.

It's like, did that ma, does this matter? What was, what were the pros? What were the cons? What are the pros of the cons of the new way that we're doing it? And of course there's preference and there's all these other things that come into it. But, um, it's interesting just to kind of say, oh, well, like, let's just step back and, and, and, and maybe brainstorm where this could lead us, and then have a conversation about that, because

there's always gonna be unintended consequences of

Ashley Hastings: Absolutely.

Evan Troxel: a tool, a technology, a new way of, you know, a workflow, a process, whatever you wanna call it.

And, and you can't always foresee all those. But it is interesting to actually pay attention to the things that have been changing and say, okay, what are our values? What matters? Why does it matter? Right. And then move forward with that conversation.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah, for sure. I think, so our CEO has taken the approach of, of freedom within boundaries and doing air quotes there, but, um, uh, freedom within boundaries. I think it's just maybe a good approach for life. Um, 'cause it's good to have some guardrails in place. Um, it's good to have some, some, um, some

rules by which we conduct ourselves.

Um, and

Evan Troxel: Those, those two things, freedom and boundaries are widely open to interpretation as well.

Ashley Hastings: Yes.

depending on the region that you live in,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: there's all kinds of, yeah. I just finished, um, an audio book, uh, this morning actually. Um, when I went for my coffee, um, that i'd, that I'd heard about on another, like listening to another podcast and someone mentioned it and I was like, ah, that sounds interesting. And it is, uh, the ancient

art of thinking for yourself, um, by Robin Reams. And it was a really interesting And so I listened to the audio book because, um. I like to have one of every medium kind of going at a time. So I'll have an audiobook, an ebook, and a regular book. And I, they're not quickly read or finished in any way, shape or form.

I just like to have the different options depending on what mode of transit Um, and, um, yeah, the conver uh, the, the book itself is around rhetoric. Um, the kind of, um, the, the art of our speaking and persuasion and language and, I think we're in a really pivotal time where language and the, like, the, the capability of,

and like fortitude behind communication

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: really important. it's, it's really, um, and I, I, I say that considering the work that we are. Per pursuing. And I, I mean, the work that we as humans are pursuing when it comes to working with ai, right? Large language models are fundamentally like built on, um, a concept of language. And, um, and how we work with GPTs is, is centered around we communicate, right?

It's not a keyword search, it's not a, a demand that gets you great results. It's, it's the, the, the art of prompting, the art of rhetoric, the art of conversation that really determines where we go with different tools. Um, and so yeah, there's a, there's a, a, a really interesting moment happening right now around how we use language to not just communicate, but to kind of guide,

where we wanna see results.

Evan Troxel: And, and it's an EV evolution, right? Because I think where everybody was used to the voice assistance and learning how to talk to those, to get them what they, to get them to do what you wanted. And you had to kind of speak the Google language or the Alexa language or the serial language or whatever, and

just looking around, see if any devices just lit up, but they're all listening.

But, but we had to do that. And now we're doing that again in with, with these kinds of tools. And at the same time, these tools are learning. Back. It's like, it, it is kind of a, a feedback loop that that's happening here. And the early adopters really have to bend to the machine and the further things evolve, the easier it gets for mortals, you know, normal people to just say what they want to say and the thing does the thing.

Right. And, and, but, and that things are moving very fast and at the same time, at the same time. Well, yeah, because like remember when everybody was talking about prompt engineering, right? And, and now it's, it's much less of a subject. Of course. It's still a, it is still a thing, but it's kind of evolved into context engineering and guidance.

A lot more guidance than just q and a kind of stuff.

Ashley Hastings: isn't it interesting like context engineering, right? Like I think context is such a, such a beautiful thing because it, everyone needs it.

It's not just our favorite GPTs,

right?

Evan Troxel: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: Um,

Evan Troxel: sure.

Ashley Hastings: right.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. You're speaking my language because I, I can't even tell you how many times where it, it's funny because the people will, like, I hate ai, this or that because it, it, it lies to me or it doesn't answer my question or whatever. And it's like, well, and, and then I hear that same person speaking and I'm like, there's not any context to even just normal conversation.

And it's like, so do this to that. And I'm like, well, what's this and what's that? Right? It's

Ashley Hastings: yeah,

Evan Troxel: provide, provide more, because I don't know what's inside your head of what you're referencing because it's not out here for me to look at or you haven't explained it.

Ashley Hastings: we, yeah. don't, we don't have the, uh, the, the, the

brain, the brain, uh, reading capability yet. Right. The mind reading. Uh, we don't have that fancy helmet that has some up

sometimes come up in the sci-fi stories. Right.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: it's, it's not, um, and I think that's really interesting because it's such a human thing to, maybe sometimes start with the assumption of, well, you know what I'm

talking about, right? Like,

Evan Troxel: You know, you know what was really good training for me was, was my wife, because I've always been a visual. Like I, I will like to just draw it out. I'm just gonna draw you a picture because that's how I want to see it. And, and she never wanted to see a picture, just, just tell me.

Ashley Hastings: Just

Evan Troxel: would say no. She would say, no, just tell me.

And, and that would force me to paint that picture with words.

Ashley Hastings: words.

Evan Troxel: And that actually was fantastic training. I guess I need to thank her publicly for that. But it was one of those, because I probably haven't, but it's one of those things where it's like, oh, that was, that was super useful because it forces you to go about it in that way.

And now with the world that is very language based for these kinds of interfaces.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: There is actually no difference now between typing it on a keyboard and just saying it to the thing. I mean,

Ashley Hastings: Totally.

Evan Troxel: probably not even gonna have the typos if you just say it to the thing,

Ashley Hastings: Well,

Evan Troxel: right? So,

Ashley Hastings: and you know what's so interesting about that? Is, is also like the, the, that the text to image piece, right? If we just consider that if you, if you know what it is you're trying to say, but you can't. Offer a way of, of visualizing it to show it as an example. Um, and we're starting to see this with some of our, our clients, for example, or just like our, our collaborators, you know, people in the world that we're working with. Like if you can use the language in a way that gets you a, a visual representation of the thing that you're trying to talk about, amazing. And then you share that with your collaborative partner and you say, this, this is what I meant. Here are the,

the, the words

that I use in order to get to this visual

Evan Troxel: oh, yeah. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: this. And they, and they go, oh, okay. And then, you know, in the, kind of the mid journey esque, you know, describe, you know, um, it forward slash describe? Um, and you, you can start to, um, communicate in totally different, or not

different, but like, just new ways or like

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ashley Hastings: ways of. of Yeah.

Getting that context and being able to really run with it. wow, what

an, a time to be alive.

Evan Troxel: I think it's absolutely incredible when there's, I'm in the moment and I cannot think of the right way to say something or the best way to say something, and I just write it down anyway and just be like, ah, let's see what happens. And I hit, hit enter and it's like, holy crap. It actually worked. I didn't have to be perfect with my presentation of the idea.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: pretty crazy.

Ashley Hastings: It's just freeing. And I think, um, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier, just asking questions. Wow. How nice does it feel to ask a GPT I'm gonna say this, it's gonna sound crazy, but like, isn't it nice to be able to ask A-G-P-T-A question and then get an answer that is, you know, what you wanted or, or not, but also

just not have that, um,

perceived judgment or bias or, or

the, the,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: That can come from communicating

Evan Troxel: know of.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

yeah. It's probably

Evan Troxel: We're we're actually being scored in the background. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: on the back end It's just telling, It's, all of the other

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

It's building a profile. Yes.

Ashley Hastings: like, it's such a, it's such a freeing moment. And I'm not, this is not me saying, you know, um, only talk to

the, the GPTs over here.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: not at all what I'm saying.

I'm saying like,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Ashley Hastings: um, we can kind of practice Become more comfortable with how we communicate, um, if we

spend more time, know, kind of exercising those

Evan Troxel: a judgment free zone,

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

Evan Troxel: right?

Ashley Hastings: and I, and maybe, maybe that, you know, that long, the long-term effect of that, the evolution of that is

that we become better communicators.

I'm, I'm

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: in this space where I'm like, use the tools to use the tools to evolve in a you know, direction. Um, yeah, it's, it's such a, it's such a cool time to experiment and explore with all of these different tools and to yeah, to kind of face, maybe face the fear in some cases of, of, um, yeah, just not, not having the right answer, not knowing the right question, not knowing the words to put together, doing the thing that you wanna say, but then

ultimately coming out of it going, oh yeah, that's, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well, it, it,

it reminds me of like the early days of programming where it was like, I didn't, you didn't know how to do it. Right. And, and so you would try something and then you, it wouldn't work, and then you'd have to go back in and tweak something and then run it again and see if it works. That kind of tinkering.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it was. And and I, I find that to be like that where it's like these early days of tinkering and just seeing what happens, it seems very technology experimental to me in that way, but the tools are way more powerful now. Right. It's like

Ashley Hastings: so fast. It's just changing

Evan Troxel: Right, right. The speed is incredible.

Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: And I think, oh, wow. Yeah. What, um, so I, I mentioned, yeah, play earlier and just like having, having a bit of fun, um, again within boundaries when you're at work, but, um, what a, what a great opportunity that we have to kind of try new things and, and like. Before it was called Vibe coding. You know, I, it was really interesting to just go, I'm kind of curious about learning Python. I'm not a coder. I'm not a developer in any way, but I, I really love learning and, and so I wanted to try and kind of, uh, you know,

take a course and then supplement it with, you

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: hey, favorite GPT, um, how do I, you know, I'd like a puzzle, um, you know, um, quiz me on this, or like, how would I write this or that kind of approach.

And it's just, it's so fun. It's just so fun to up with an idea and say just what, what, where would this go? Um, what, what could this be? And I started, um, I, I've been taking a knitting class for like a beginner's knitting class for the last, uh, four weeks. Today's the fourth, fourth and final class. And, um. I just thought, I was like, okay, patterns stitching, that's, that's a very obvious data, um, capability here. So, uh, I was, I was having a chat with both Claude and, uh, chat GPT and was talking about, you know, I was like, well, there's, there's gotta be something in, in knitting and where there's a, here to look at, you know, different patterns and different stitches and stuff like that. And, um, I looked up, I just kind of did, um, like data

knitting or something like that, or, you know, just

Evan Troxel: You're like, I didn't know the words, but

Ashley Hastings: Exactly. Yeah. It was like,

Evan Troxel: you just tried it.

Ashley Hastings: I started with a, I did start with a Google search and um, I found this really cool piece of work by someone at MITA few years ago, um, where she'd taken, um, a. like a, a machine from the 1980s and configured it with Python and JavaScript, um, to, uh, to actually like initiate knitting. It was like a robot as well. And so like initiate knitting patterns based off of

a binary of, um, white and black and then the kind of

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: scale in between it. And then, yeah, it was really cool.

And then like she explored different, um, patterns, and then came up with an app that, so she was way ahead of me, but, um, but I was like, oh, that's a really cool concept. Um, and so kind of took that and ran with it with, um, Claude and, and chat GPT and came up with a quick script to like, just in, start with like a, a randomized, um, pattern and like so many rows and I was like, maybe I'll do a scarf. Um, because I was like, I don't know how to do color. Stuff yet, but, um, I'll just try, just try some of this. Um, but then I was thinking, oh, and then what kind of data sets would I like to use, uh, to interpret in different ways and yeah, just wow. Like it started with a simple idea. Um, I didn't know what that could turn into and then fed it into my GPT friends and, and got some interesting results.

And now I'm like, oh, but

what if you know X, Y, Z?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: these different, really fun

rabbit holes. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. I mean, it's, it's one of those things where it makes me think like what are the implications of the democratization of everything technology wise to anybody?

Ashley Hastings: Yep.

Evan Troxel: And, and where does that leave professionals? Right? That, that, that's, this is the big giant

Ashley Hastings: This

Evan Troxel: question mark. Right? It's, it's really interesting.

And at the same time, like you are a professional in a profession that requires stamps and insurance and contracts and all these things, and these tools are, I mean, you have the exact same access to the tools you're talking about as everybody else, right? and

Ashley Hastings: where

Evan Troxel: I think what's interesting though is,

well, yeah, how do you differentiate or how do you evolve?

How do you change? I, I, I think that's kind of the danger, right? I'm not saying anything new here, which is. We, we just absolutely cannot continue to do things the same way we've always done them because of those kinds of, I dunno, let's call 'em threats for the sake of the conversation, but opportunities, right?

Like there's all kinds of,

Ashley Hastings: Yes. Where's the SWOT analysis for this?

Evan Troxel: but how do you actually

get out of the lane that you're in to do that analysis? And then again, in a few months, and then again, because things have changed in a few months,

Ashley Hastings: Exactly.

Evan Troxel: do you, because you, you kind of need to have somebody, at least somebody, if not more than one person, right?

Just continually saying, well, here's some opportunities. What if we apply this and, and just really

incubating, or, I don't know, there's, there's a lot of words you could use to describe that process, but, but you're basically, you're being curious about what the future of whatever you do could potentially be and how it could be very different than what it is right now.

Ashley Hastings: yeah. Wow. I think it's,

it, it

becomes kind of overwhelming almost,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: when you think about it

Evan Troxel: Paralyzing. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Um, I, and I, I guess I'll, I'll make the differentiation between like.

and then organization again. Because,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: because I think we've, we all have a lot of, um, freedom within our own individual capability to, um, experiment, in the ways that we want to, right, our, in our kind of own personal sense.

So we have these personal relationships with these tools and then, and then we have how our organizations are, are starting to kind of figure out how we wanna work with things. And again, it's that, those risk factors that come into play where, um, it can slow down, you know, maybe an already slow process. Um, I was reading an article yesterday about, um, it was kind of marketing focused, but it was essentially saying that, the, the iteration, um, approach just ha just has to be. How everyone operates. And so it's, it's developing, it wasn't talking about agile, but if we consider the kind of agile methodology as, as the way that we all move forward, um, in our work, it's, it's about being really adaptable.

And I don't know, I don't know how, how that works with what we've always done, you know, in, I'm gonna say in a EC, but I feel like every, every discipline, every industry is experiencing this in, in some way because everything is moving so fast. the response, uh, is just, it's, it's too much, right?

It's too much to, be able to react to in type ways. Um.

I don't know. I don't know what the answer is for that.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Well, well, I'm curious, you're, you're a large organization and you have a lot of offices and studios and so I'm curious the attitude. And maybe, maybe hypothetically, it's not even Woods Bagot, right? It's just a larger architectural organization who obviously sees these tools on the horizon, ob, assuming many people are using 'em, but the attitude towards giving those kinds of tools to anybody in the firm to use.

W because the, the, to me, there's gonna be people who are obviously wanting to leverage these tools, and there are definitely organizations who are like, no, it's too risky. We don't know what's going on with, like, okay. So yes, there is that side of it. And then there's also the, okay, well I'm gonna go somewhere that is gonna let me to do that because that's the future of my career.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And so there's this, there's this,

this is an issue for sure, and I think it's way beyond architecture, right? This is

Ashley Hastings: Absolutely

Evan Troxel: any kind of organization. And so I'm, I'm just curious, like what is the attitude towards. Accessibility to tools like these in these large organizations. I don't have to deal with that.

I'm, I'm an organization of one and, and, but there's, there's end user license agreements, there's subscriptions there, there's all of, you know, there's bloat when it comes to how do you even manage logins and

Ashley Hastings: Yep.

Evan Troxel: and what the IP is and is it local? Is it in the, like, where is it, all that kind of stuff.

I mean, these are what organizations have to deal with, but they also have to deal with them quickly

Ashley Hastings: Yes.

Evan Troxel: that like, you can, you can either, you can make the decision and say no, and here's why, or yes, and here's why. Because we see a different future or we see it helping us in this way.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah, so I think, um. I think I can only answer this hypothetically,

because we're all in this kind of nebulous state,

unless you

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Ashley Hastings: an organization of one, um, where there are just so many variables and so many things to consider. And, and it's, and sort of the response, um, approach is changing, you know, uh, maybe not daily, but it's, but it's, everyone's learning very, very quickly and we're trying, know, we're trying and we're testing and we're considering, and I think, it's incumbent upon every, everyone to upskill and develop their

own in this space.

Evan Troxel: that happen on your own time or does that happen on company time or a little bit of both?

Ashley Hastings: it's a, that's a great question. Um, in. My, my personal feeling is that it's a bit of both, because I think there's a responsibility on individuals to want to, to want to upskill and to, know, I think continuous learning is, is sort of a, a requirement as a human being. If we had, if we had to sign a contract with life, you know, what would it, what would it entail?

And I think it would be that we have to keep educating ourselves. Um, but that's, yeah, it's a personal feeling. Um, and then I do think there's a responsibility on organizations to, you know, require some level of continuous education and continuous development ways that are meaningful to the business. Um, and I think that making that a priority, you know, in addition to compliance training, which everyone has to do, um. I think these are really important parts of culture, um, organizational culture and, and so, and then, and then also maybe the thing that often gets forgotten or overlooked is incentivizing that and, and rewarding people for, for doing the work and making it part of the path that we travel, right?

So making it part of the, um, the career goals and the, the KPIs

and, you know,

just

Evan Troxel: Okay. Curiosity as KPI, I like it.

I like it.

Ashley Hastings: I

Evan Troxel: There's a title for the episode.

Ashley Hastings: Um, I think I, yeah, because like, then, then everyone gets better, you know, everyone, um, keeps evolving and, and it's not about keeping up necessarily, but it's about trying new things and

like is short. Um.

Evan Troxel: I think what's super interesting about organizations is that you have this huge range of experience. Huge. And who gets to say where the ideas come from when you have an organization that big, or at least I, I don't think you should try to keep it in a particular place. Right? And, and so by encouraging that curiosity across the board, I mean, you could get an incredible idea from you some place you never expected it because that person was curious about

seeing, you know, where the rabbit hole went, for example.

Ashley Hastings: And, and also just, um, feeling safe to do so. You know, um, I think there was a lot of conversation during COVID and, and kind of since then about, you know, psychological safety at work real. Like I, I, it's wildly important. Um, and I think, I think all industries would do better to just pay attention to what people need to. Um, speak up and feel safe and feel heard, and, and I think, um, it's about the,

those asking questions, right?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: um, being able to, to, you know, fail and then fail better, right? Um, make mistakes tinker,

play and, and kind of make it okay to, to yeah. Explore. And I think,

um, that, that's, that's everywhere,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: But again, freedom within boundaries,

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: making sure that it's, it's beneficial and, and safe. Safe

for the business as well.

Evan Troxel: Well, I, I want to segue to your recent talk at the Melbourne

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

Evan Troxel: Build Expo,

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I mean, the, the title was The Future of Architecture in an AI Driven World. So you got the crystal ball out, it sounds like. Please, please tell us what it says.

Ashley Hastings: Um, so that this was a really fun conversation. Um, and the Melbourne Build Expo is really interesting because,

it was my first

time going, but um, they do

Evan Troxel: We, I wanna, I wanna pause for a second. We never actually talked about your transition across. Do we even call this a pond? Like what? It's the, an ocean?

Ashley Hastings: it's the, um,

the the, the, yeah. 'cause it's not the

pond. Like the Atlantic is

Evan Troxel: the pond. is,

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

The

Evan Troxel: the Atlantic is The pond.

Ashley Hastings: is

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: I guess.

Evan Troxel: Right. Okay.

If you say so, it's a That's a long flight.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: flight.

Ashley Hastings: and a half hours from la. Um,

Evan Troxel: Well, so just talk about your career transition real quick there to kind of lead up to this Melbourne Build Expo.

Ashley Hastings: Um, so I had been with. Woods for about four, four months. I think at the time when, like I said, there, there's, um, as the studio design technology leader, there's one of me in every studio. And so the me in Melbourne, um, was, was moving into a global role. And, um, and, and actually I, I'd seen the post on LinkedIn prior to knowing that. And so I was like, hang, hang on a second. And so I went to my colleague and I was like, Hey, man, you're not, you're not leaving, are you? And he goes, no, no, no, I'm just moving into a global role. I was like, oh, okay. Uh, I'm, I'm interested. And I just, I, I put my hand up. Um, and, uh, and, and so it wasn't out of nowhere.

Um, so for, for additional context, um, in 2019, my, uh, my husband, uh, then. Boyfriend that turned into fiance in 2019. Um, uh, we were visiting some friends here in Melbourne. Um, so my, my husband's best friend and, and her wife live here. And, uh, we were, we, we came to visit, uh, all of us at the time. All four of us were, were working at aup. And so we did a, uh, we did a week of, of work in the office, and then we did two weeks on holiday and, um, did the Great Ocean Road and went to Kangaroo Island and then had a fantastic time. Um, and before all of that, um, we got engaged. So, um, my, my husband proposed, um, here in Melbourne in St. Kilda. Uh, we went to go see some penguins and. So, so we had a connection kind of to the, to the city, you know, through that experience back in 2019. And, and actually at the time, this was, um, yeah, September, 2019, at the time we were thinking, oh, you know, Melbourne could be cool. That'd be a good, like, maybe next step, just see what happens. then the world shut down and, and so we just sort of like tabled that idea, um, for the, for the time and, you know, life moved on and, and we just didn't think about it.

Um, and, and then yeah, when, when the posting popped up and I, I spoke to my colleague over here and I, I was just like, well, I'm, I'm interested. Um. And so, yeah, interviewed for it. Um, and, and really, uh, enjoyed learning about the Melbourne studio. 'cause uh,

all the

studios are a little bit different. They all have their own

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Ashley Hastings: and, and

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: established.

Um, we're about 150 or so, 150 plus people. Um, so it was gonna be a, a different, um, experience altogether and a really fun challenge. And so, yeah. Got it. And, uh,

and moved, moved over, um, yeah, about a

Evan Troxel: No big deal. No big deal. Moving,

moving across the ocean.

Ashley Hastings: But that's kind of, that's kind of the best of being, being, you know, um, being part of a system that

is, is

global, right? You,

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ashley Hastings: you, you

Evan Troxel: it a little easier for sure.

Ashley Hastings: humans, you know, and in every different region and have conversations and, and yeah, just. That was my favorite thing about Arab. That's my favorite thing about Woods.

Um, I think we're, we're really lucky when we kind of stretch out and talk to people in other places and

yeah, see what's going on. So,

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Ashley Hastings: that, that's how I got here. Um, so yeah, so, um, Melbourne build, um, on the back of that, uh, really, really fun, um, conference, really interesting, um, space. And they, they do, I think they've got one kind of in every big city in Australia.

Um, I'm not sure if it ventures out, but, generally driven from the, the construction side. Um, and lots of really interesting, yeah, I, I love seeing new new tech in construction as well. And so not just the digital piece, but also looking at, um. There were some cool robots on the floor. Um, and uh, the conversation was, yeah, driven by that topic of the future of architecture in an AI driven world.

No small task to talk about that. Um,

Evan Troxel: are you, are you throwing this out and saying, okay, we're going to assume that the world is driven by ai, or are you saying that it's like, oh, this is something we need to talk about right now because that's what I'm seeing.

Ashley Hastings: so, so I think, I think the conversation and, and how it went, like, I think it was about get, like bringing everyone into the, into the space and saying, Hey everyone, this is a thing that we all need to care about because,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: um. AI and, and this kind of the way that we know generative AI and, and how we're adapting machine learning into our processes and all of these things, like, this isn't going away and it's not, um, it's not something that we can just ignore or it's not a trend or a fad.

I, I think, I think there's, you know, there are a lot of conversation around like the, the bubble and like the height and all of that. I mean, the, kind of like the internet or mobile phones or electricity. It's like, it's a, it's, it's such a big movement that like, we're not going to, I don't think it's going away. So it's, it's really about how do we, um, again, learn, develop our literacy, our fluency. Educate ourselves. How do we start to move in the direction of, this is where technology is guiding us. Um, how do we embrace it and how do we, um, how do we be the change that we wanna see within it? Um, 'cause I think that's, that's a thing that also can get overlooked is, is thinking that

technology is just thrown at us, or,

Evan Troxel: Well, well, just a second ago you said the way technology is guiding us and, and I think I, and, and so I just want to point that out because I think there is this sense, which is like. It's coming at me. I need to navigate this as we go forward. And I don't have the agency in, in this. And so it, it, it's interesting just to, because that, that just came out, right?

I mean, I don't think that,

Ashley Hastings: No, it's totally true because.

Evan Troxel: and at the same time

on some level, it, it kind of is because, I mean, billions and billions of dollars are going to make going into this to try to make sure it happens right

Ashley Hastings: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: in, in these ways. And, and

like that's, that's a bubble that you're talking about, potential bubble, right?

It's like, uh, at some point the dollars stop or scale way back or a reckoning has to happen to

Ashley Hastings: is

Evan Troxel: find other ways for that

to, to make sense.

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

Evan Troxel: Um, but, but I mean, it costs a lot. It costs a lot. And especially in these early days to build, to pioneer a lot of this stuff and get it in the hands of as many people as possible for.

You know, to build the biggest companies they possibly can as fast as possible.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah. And, and yeah. And how many people, right? Um, 'cause there there is that, and some of, of the conversation was around the inequities. in how accessible, quote unquote, um, the tech is or how, um, accessible it should be because, there's, there was a thing in the New York Times a few months ago about the kind of clear and obvious divide between data center locations in the Northern Hemisphere versus the southern hemisphere,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: you know, information I care about now, um, much more, um, that I'm in the southern hemisphere. um, and I, you can just sort of see the, um, the ethnographic, the demographic approach to, um, where, where things exist. Right? And it's, it's always, it's kind of a, a, an obvious trajectory of,

you know, the haves and the have nots as

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: be that way. Right? It should be, and this is where I'm, I'm that everyone. Kind of take a, that responsibility and accountability for, um, responding to the systems in ways that are not, um, let's say again, guided by the technology itself. It's about taking agency and, and really, um, it starts as, as simply as if A GPT gets something wrong and you tell it, right? it's about informing the models and, and trying to slowly eliminate, or you can't eliminate it really, but you try to decrease the amount of bias in, in a thing, right? Over time. Um, and so there's, there's the approach that we can take and maybe this comes down to that kind of the, the language piece, um, that. In the, the book I just finished was talking about how we approach the, the topic of climate change. Right. And I think it'll, it'll have a similar parallel to this space. And what the way we use language in talking about climate change is that it's like, it's the, the war on climate change or the, the, the, the thing that we have to fix about climate change. And it's like,

it's, it's treating it as an other

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: whereas, um, in, in using that kind of language, we relinquish the responsibility that

we have to being the ones that caused it in the first place.

Evan Troxel: this is everywhere, right? It, it's it, you, you turn the thing, the concept, the argument, the idea.

Ashley Hastings: Yep.

Evan Troxel: The technology into an enemy so that you can say, that's not me. Like that is, I think, just kind of an evolutionary, um, you know, like that, that's a survival mechanism almost when it comes to like what's happening in your lizard brain, right?

Ashley Hastings: Yep. Yep, yep.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: And, and we, and we do it, we do it with everything. It's, I mean, those, those of us in the, in the, the, the bim and design technology space, how many times have we

heard the, I don't know what you do,

but It's

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: you know, like, that that's

Evan Troxel: It's a black box. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: that's

Evan Troxel: another thing.

Ashley Hastings: that's a form of othering, you know, and it, it, it creates distance between, you know, A and B.

Right. And, and it means that, that we, we get further away from the thing that we to impact or change or collaborate with or, or what have you and I, and it's just, it's, it's little kind of conscious moments of, recognizing that and being able to, um, yeah. Take ownership of, of,

whatever the next steps need to be. And,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's like a lack of responsibility, right? It's a, it's by, by by saying, this is this other thing. It's got its own responsibilities and it's the villain or whatever it is. It's negative. It's, it's different. I don't have any responsibility in that. And that is super interesting, just as like a human psychology that happens.

And, and I think what's interesting is a lot of times may, and it doesn't, I don't think it applies to everything, but it's like by, by pointing at it over there, you're signaling that you don't have any of it in here.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you probably do. Like everybody's got their,

Ashley Hastings: Definitely, definitely. I think we're all connected, right? Um, we're all, we're all connected. It's this

incredible ecosystem. Um,

Evan Troxel: It's a, it's a very elaborate masking technology that we have. Right. It's like, it's over there. It's not me. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Talk about what came out of this conversation at the expo, because that, to me, like you said, you brought. Everyone together in the space to kind of have this conversation. And I love that you kind of framed it that way.

I, I'm hoping that it was more of a conversation than just a presentation of,

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

Evan Troxel: here's the thing, it's not, and here's the information. Go do with it as you will. But that to me, like that's kind of one of the biggest missed opportunities of conferences and, and going to seminars is that often it's, it's one direction and sometimes there's a q and a at the end, but really I think the format needs to get flipped and, and say five minute presentation, 50 minutes of discussion would be way more useful.

So what was the conversation that came out of, out of this?

Ashley Hastings: So what an incredible group of, um, panelists I had with me. Um, I, I raised my hand to moderate, um, and I'm, I'm, I'm glad I did so because, uh, I

always like to learn other people. and

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: um, especially because, uh, I'm, I'm not an expert in this space. Um, I, I, my own, my exploration in AI has been as a supplement to my quote, unquote day job. Um. And, and it's, it's really just been about a sort of personal passion to, um, keep it human, um, to, to make it accessible and to keep, to keep the, the conversation around how we can make change, not how will change us. Um, even though I know that that's part of that kind of hopefully symbi symbiotic, um, relationship.

But, um, so the of us, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, yes. Six, um, we got together and, you know, we, we did the thing where we, we met on the day, but we, we did have a conversation prior to, and everyone sent their interests in, in an email chain. Um, spoiler alert, this is how it works with. Um, it was really interesting.

So a lot of, a lot of, um, interwoven threads of, of interest and curiosities there, um, around, um, like systems thinking and equity and, uh, sustainability. It's a huge one. Um, we're all kind of on that hype versus reality train. and, you know, talking about culture and collaboration and how, how there's an evolution that we need to sort of acknowledge in this space.

And, um, and again, this could have

been industry agnostic. Um, it just happened to be that we were talking about, and we were a group of people, um, involved in architecture, engineering and construction. Um, and, and within architecture we also had a landscape architect, which, you know, also drives a lot of the kind of. Um, conversation and, and what does it

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: the actual environment in in which these, the tech needs to exist. Um, so we didn't present anything mercifully and, um, we, I, I wanted to guide the conversation with questions and just see how everyone sort of, um, could speak to their own experience, but then also, um, challenge each other, or at least I tried to challenge them. Um, but that in guiding the conversation was just kind of fluid and, and, kind of organic, like

seemingly what we're, what

we're doing here.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ashley Hastings: Um,

Evan Troxel: seemingly this has all been scripted. We're all, we're both reading off teleprompters right now. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Um, but yeah, I think, uh, we all. Could come to a sort of consensus of, you know, it's the, not about the tool, right? It's not about the what, what thing are you choosing to use? It's about how are you, how is it changing how you work are you collaborating or, you know, improving your, your workflows as a result. And so think that's where a lot of the, the hangups and failed pilots and things can, can fall apart is when the focus is just on the tool. Like, oh, we bought this thing. It's like, great. It doesn't, it's really not what we need. Um, and so I think it was, you know, it was a good conversation around like process over product and what, what are sort of. Cultural shifts need to consider when it comes to, you know, data. Right. what's interesting about this shift right now is that maybe design tech, as it, as it stands as an entity within a EC has always been a little bit um, but also at the foreground for innovation and kind of experimentation. But it's always kind of like doing its own thing. But, but I think where we're, where we're heading or where we have been heading is, is that everyone sort of needs to fall in love with data and, and understand that there's, there's ways to work with it regardless of what discipline you are or what, um, what role you have and that it can be impactful. When, uh, there's a, a talk by Andrew ing, um, is his surname, um, from, uh, deep learning and he gives a, uh, it was a Ted talk from a couple of years ago and he mentions how generative AI and machine learning and all of these things can, can be for everyone, right? It doesn't require huge expenditures or lots of data sets or big data sets or anything like that.

It, you can really start with you have. And I, I think acknowledge, he gave an example of like a, a, a, like a small town pizza business, right? So independent operator, um, needs to better understand what kind of pizza to sell, at what times during the day, and how much to make and all of that. And it's like you could really just look at sales and receipts and all of those things and, and create a, algorithm that works for. optimizing when and which pizzas you make, and then like, uh, a textile manufacturer and looking at, if we were introducing machine learning and sort of, um, recognition of stains or tears in, in things, and just training a system to recognize stains and tears, and then using that as a QA kind of approach to, um, the

final product that's being shipped out.

You know, um, recognizing where the data matters and you, you think about that and you're like, oh, actually, yeah, that's, that's kind of cool. what, and it, I, I bring this up because I think it's, it's, uh, an interesting shift to how we think about data and how it impacts our lives and. From not even considering the social media impact over the last 20 years, but, you know, just, the things that we see and the things that we interact with and, how we can acknowledge and, and kind of impress, um, change in our work based on the existing data that we have. I don't know, there's just a lot to,

Evan Troxel: There. There's a lot of gold in there. Right, but it's, you have to think about, well, I don't know. You have to apply your curiosity to what could we do with it?

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I'm curious if anybody shared anything in that forum that you were like, oh, I never thought of that. Or just something that sounded super interesting.

Ashley Hastings: I guess part of it is that everyone is asking the question. What does this all mean for my job? And of the takeaways were like, you know, a thing that we've, we've all kind of said is that it's not a, this, this isn't a replacement for humans. It's meant to be a supplement. And so approaching the, the tech in this way, or it in this way is more about leveraging the capability versus

like, succumbing to it or, or, or

Evan Troxel: well

Ashley Hastings: it kind of

do, do, the work for you. 'cause that's not

Evan Troxel: what's what's interesting about that scenario

is that if you are seriously stuck just saying, what's gonna happen to my job? Like, something's probably gonna happen to your job, right? Like let, let's just, let's be honest.

Ashley Hastings: to ask that

Evan Troxel: Well, well let, let's just say, first of all, it's probably gonna impact all the jobs.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And now are you just gonna wait for that to happen? Or are you gonna be curious and you're going to develop yourself into the next version of whatever yourself or your role or

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: your trajectory is, as with the agency and active participation that that would require? I mean, if, if you're literally waiting around to see if something's gonna happen, like it's gonna happen,

Ashley Hastings: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: gonna, it's going to pull the rug out from under you most likely, right?

And so I, I don't think it's fair and I don't think it's healthy to say, no, you're, we're all safe. Right? And I, I know you're, I'm not, I'm not putting those words in your mouth. I'm just, I, I know that some people do that. Um, and at the same time, like, I don't think it's all bad news either, but. But it's like, it's like the future is there for the people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.

Like that to me is kind of what I think about when I think about tools like that. So especially tools that have the ability to potentially change everything. Right. So, yeah, I'm, so is there anything that you're doing at Woods Bagot or in your career that you were just like, no way we can do this now? I think that that's kind of like, it feels a little sci-fi on some level, right?

Where it's like, you know, Hollywood and storytelling has kind of painted a picture that we have moved into on many levels in many different, with many kinds of technologies, right? And sometimes it takes a lot longer than anybody thinks, and then other other things go really quickly. But it seems to me like there's, there's, I, I mean, I, yeah, I see it all the time on this podcast.

When people talk about the kind of work that they're doing, it's like, no way. Like, like you can do real time. You know, CFD modeling on projects for sustainability real time. Like, it's incredible. Like, we used to have to send that out and it would take weeks for that to come back, and then we'd make a change and we'd do it again.

And, um, but it's, it's stuff like that where, I mean, that and that, that actually does have an AI tie in because it's, it's the, it's the training data that enabled that to happen. Right. Um, super interesting kind of stuff. And so I'm just curious with, with the stuff that you're employing in practice, is there stuff that you're particularly proud of or excited about?

Ashley Hastings: so we're, yeah, and we're early in our journey for sure. Um, and I, I,

think maybe we've been

saying that for like two years at this point, but I,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: I think It's

Evan Troxel: It's like you hear everybody say, oh, it's, it's early days. Early days. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Perpetual early days,

Ashley Hastings: it is probably gonna be

early days for

like a decade, you know, like,

Evan Troxel: right?

Ashley Hastings: um, because, this is gonna, it's, yeah. It's gonna just go. Um, but I think, I think what's been really interesting, there's, there's a couple of things. So, um, we've gotten started. In the, or not gotten started, but we've been, uh, for a while now, I guess the exploration in, in image generation and video and walkthroughs and, um, kind of augmenting the, the visual capabilities is, is awesome.

Right. And I, and I think it's only the wow moments are when it's new for someone else, right? And so that, the sharing factor is really a huge part of it is being able to collaborate. And, and, um, my, my colleague, um, Alex Wilson, she big shout out, has done an incredible job of kind of, um, creating a collaborative space and a, uh, capacity for sharing in this, in this way where, um, everyone involved and who is continuing to get involved in the visual, um, narration side of things. Is it, it, it's it's community, right? So I think the, the wow factor from that perspective has been the, the community that's being

built on this change and this evolution

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Ashley Hastings: working. So that's been really cool. Um, I, I'm less on the, the image side. Um, I'm, I'm kind of in the everything else space because where, that's just where I've landed. but again, as that kind of extracurricular and, um, I think what's been really fun is, is for me it's been speaking to the different disciplines. So not architecture, not interior designers, not, not, um, kind of urban designers, but like legal and risk and finance and p and c like our, um, people and culture. So hr, um, speaking to all of the, the, like the, all of the disciplines that make the business work and, and being able to tap into, um, you know. Ways of showing change in that space and just being like, look at this possibility. and having those conversations and really kind of starting to, to get those moments of, oh,

from, from others, right?

Like, oh,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: oh wow. in either seeing like a, a code being written really fast or, um, you know, analysis kind of, uh, reporting and, and

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: out of, um, asking the questions. I think that's been really great so far. And it's so, it's such a early,

time.

Evan Troxel: Do you find that, do you find that those kind of, those things that you see, that you talk to people about, spark ideas in what things that you might wanna apply them to that's, that's different, but Oh wow, that's cool. What if I do that to this? Um, I think that that's

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: a really interesting part of when you have a,

a business with different business units in it that are all kind of working.

Sometimes they're pulling in the same direction, sometimes they're pulling in different directions.

Ashley Hastings: yeah.

Evan Troxel: but, but they're, like I said earlier, like by, by kind of spreading the tools out amongst everybody, you never know where the good ideas are gonna come from,

Ashley Hastings: like

Evan Troxel: and that's neat.

Ashley Hastings: it is neat. Like you can see how excited I get about it. 'cause it's like when everyone gets a little spark of something, or, or there's a realization that, oh,

hey, we, we actually can connect in this way, or our

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: together over here. It's just like those moments of yeah, just

ex like excite excitement.

Um,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I'm, I'm curious how that kind of trickles down to small firms that don't have all these different departments and people in different areas being curious about different things. When you're a company of one, right, who gets to do all of it and then there's only so much time in the day. There's definitely a disadvantage there, and so you kind of have to pick and choose who you might follow online as somebody who's doing that kind of on your behalf, that is totally open to share it.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: think that's where. Social media, YouTube, whatever, podcasts come into play a lot more, but you also then have to have the time to consume that information.

Ashley Hastings: Yes.

Evan Troxel: so many times where I'm just listening something and it's like, oh, okay, that it doesn't have anything to do with their application. But the idea applies to something I'm doing and then

that was r and d on my behalf, you know, and all I had to do was kind of take it and turn it a little bit and, and now I can apply it to what I'm doing.

I think that's maybe a way to kind of approach that. But big firms, I mean, you have resources, you've got people in departments and doing things, and it's a different beast

Ashley Hastings: we we're still under-resourced, you know, like, I think that's the

Evan Troxel: always.

Ashley Hastings: never, there's never enough and that's, um, for better or for worse, um, of change, but then can also be like crushing, right? Um, because we are, we are limited, we are finite, um, in our ability, um, just as humans. and I think, I think accepting that there are limitations that it's okay to have maybe, you know, the, the middle kind of expectation for output

versus, you know, the, the top

Evan Troxel: Full throttle all the time.

Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: Like

what an exhausting way to exist.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: I think it, I think it's about tempering and, you know, trying to avoid fomo because that, that's hard. Um, but, but having, having the, having maybe that grounding mechanism, even if you are one or like small firm, just having that way of going, okay, this is what we can do now. This is what I can do and, um, this is what I'd like to do in six months. Or, and just remembering that, you know, this is a journey.

We're all on it. Um, there's, there's money at the end of it for, for, for businesses of course. So there, you know, there's, you can't avoid the, the commercial kind of necessity of, of all of this. But, um, I think there's. Greater value in keeping the human approach at the center of it. Keeping that curiosity going and keeping the the velocity behind human exploration and, and human first technology is, is kind of the way forward. Again, idealist, I don't know that we're all

going in that way or

Evan Troxel: Well, okay, so, so I have kind of a provocative maybe last question, last topic. 'cause I think that would've been a great place to end, but I just can't leave it. I just can't leave it right there. So do you see a potential future where, and this ties into this idea of, you know, people saying, what's gonna happen to our jobs being kind of like a huge concern, but do you actually see a future and, and we can just limit this to architecture where you actually don't need as many people to do the things because like you said, you're, you're always under-resourced.

But I think I'm actually seeing, and I'm sure you are too, on some level, it's like, whoa, uh, I can get, I can get through a lot more processing in a shorter amount of time. We get to decide what we're gonna do at that time. But I think it also starts to become a conversation around like. Maybe we're not gonna hire that extra person, maybe that person.

We're not gonna, maybe we're not gonna get rid of anybody, but maybe we're not gonna hire the extra person to do that kind of thing. I mean, I headlined today, like Amazon laid off 14,002, something like 30,000 people.

Ashley Hastings: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Huge number. Right?

Ashley Hastings: massive.

Evan Troxel: And so like, you don't just automatically get to have the job.

Ashley Hastings: You.

Evan Troxel: That's, that's part of the conversation.

But I think the other part is like, well what are you actually seeing? Because do we have a point where we're just comfortably resourced and we don't have to hire more people, but we don't necessarily need to do it with less people. Do you see a future where there is just less people involved in this process?

Like what, what do you think? I'm just, we're just reading the tea leaves here.

Ashley Hastings: it's, it is, this is an interesting provocation 'cause um, not gonna have fewer

people, I think, you know, from a

Evan Troxel: Well, maybe, I mean, if you look at all the,

Ashley Hastings: yeah,

Evan Troxel: there's, there's a certain countries for sure are gonna have issues with population. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: I,

Evan Troxel: but but yeah.

Ashley Hastings: behind all of this bigger,

Evan Troxel: there are,

Ashley Hastings: in all, in all of it. But like, maybe it's, maybe it's a mentality, you know, like what's enough,

um, in terms of.

Evan Troxel: that's not a capitalist mentality, that's for sure.

Ashley Hastings: How dare I Oh

Evan Troxel: Define enough. Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: um, yeah, I guess I, there's, there

is like the fu the future of work, right? What does that,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: actually look like and, and what does it look like for students coming out of university and what does it look like for juniors?

And I mean, wow. What a time to

Evan Troxel: Yeah. What does it look like as a, as an animation graduate right now? What does it mean? Right. That's scary. I mean, you just.

Ashley Hastings: so maybe, okay. The, the thing, the thing that we all as, uh, a unique selling point is our personality, right?

And it's our,

it's our, it's ourselves. Um,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Hastings: we have ourselves as. Um, the most valuable of our, our portfolio, right? our personalities, our, I don't like, I think soft skills is not the way to describe it anymore. Um, but it's our, our empathy, our, but curiosity, our enthusiasm, our or passion, um, which is really quite difficult to, um, visualize or put into words.

And it really requires that human contact to, um, to make that legitimate to someone else. But that maybe has to be where we start to look, um, which is a hard thing to imagine when

AI is conducting interviews now.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's reading. It's reading the, the job applications. It's reading the cvs. It's automatically deciding who, who's meeting the requirements. Yeah. I mean, it is like, wow, what a weird spot.

Ashley Hastings: like, is does the

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Ashley Hastings: Um, I feel like we might, we might finish this in just

a, uh, a question

There's, there gonna be

Evan Troxel: that's fine.

Ashley Hastings: pretty

Evan Troxel: Ongoing conversation,

Ashley Hastings: Um,

Evan Troxel: right?

Ashley Hastings: an ongoing conversation, but it also, I, I think, again, we can't just let stuff happen to us.

And so there's, such, we're only limited by our own imaginations in this space. so,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Ashley Hastings: I, read an article the other day, uh, a thing, a thing, a medium or essay, a medium about this guy was a, a data analyst and was looking, you know, looking for a new job, was just struggling, having a hard time and was like, hang on a second.

Like, why am I not showing my data analyst self my approach? So he took the approach of just. Documenting his entire career as a dashboard. Right. And it's like, oh, like it seems obvious when you consider that, but it's not, that's not what people do. You have a

CV and You might have a portfolio of work that's very static.

Evan Troxel: You do what everybody does. Yeah,

Ashley Hastings: exactly. And so, so why, yeah. How do you differentiate yourself? again, you're only, we're only limited by our, our own imaginations. And so yeah. I, I think, I don't know what the answer is, but I think we have to ask ourselves those questions of like, well, what,

how am I, how am I different? And

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: yeah. That,

Evan Troxel: Well, I appreciate you,

Ashley Hastings: hours, I think.

Evan Troxel: I appreciate you attempting to go down the theoretical. I mean, you said earlier that you, you know, a lot of your stuff was theoretical and I feel like this is one of those things where it's like we, the conversations need to happen and they need to happen in public, and, and it doesn't mean there aren't gonna be wrong answers either, like that.

And that should be totally encouraged because that's how you figure out what the right answers are over time, or at least the most current right answer as as it may be known as. So,

Ashley Hastings: I guess. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: can only do the best that we can with

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ashley Hastings: that we have at the time, so that's a horrible political statement there. Um, yeah, we just gotta,

we just gotta do our best

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for, for having, and thank you so much for having this conversation. I appreciate it. It's been really fun and it's great to catch up with you and see what's happened in the last two years and a lot. It is a lot across the board

Ashley Hastings: Yeah. Thanks

Evan Troxel: Yeah. For me as well. Yeah,

absolutely.

Ashley Hastings: Thanks for asking the

questions, Evan. It was a really good

Evan Troxel: All right. I'll put links to Ashley in the show notes and other things that have come up during the conversation, so be sure to check those out and, uh, talk again soon.

Ashley Hastings: Awesome. Thank you.

​

💡This newsletter provide key insights for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovation in AEC who are short on time, offering the context of each conversation without the need to listen to the full episode. It’s designed to keep you updated, spark your interest, and encourage you to tune in if the ideas resonate.

Is your design technology a true force multiplier or just a fancy tool?

Weekend Reading Recommendations

• This newsletter, of course
• From Expertise Scarcity to Abundance: Why Workflow Orchestration is the Future of Knowledge Work by Theodore Galanos
• AI For Architects Is Nothing New. And It's A Return to First Practices (Finally) by Phil Read
• Overcoming the Crisis In Graphic Disciplines by Ralph Grabowski

Summary

In episode 210 of the TRXL Podcast, I spoke with Matt Goldsberry about taking computational design beyond clever scripts to turn it into durable business value: standards-as-products, ISO-19650-aligned data practices, dashboards that matter to the business, and the change-management work required to actually land new tools in busy teams. We also hit where AI is real vs. hype and why pairing design automation with portfolio data is a force multiplier.

Catch the full episode

Key Takeaways

Here are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

• Computational → Commercial: Move from one-offs to repeatable products (standards, templates, governed data), measured against business KPIs, not just technical elegance.