.png)
KP Unpacked
KP Unpacked explores the biggest ideas in AEC, AI, and innovation—unpacking the trends, technology, discussions, and strategies shaping the built environment and beyond.
KP Unpacked
Knowledge Management Is Currency
In this episode of KP Unpacked, the #1 podcast in AEC, Jeff Echols sits down with Chris Parsons, founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, to explore why knowledge management (KM) is no longer just an IT function—it's a strategic currency for AEC firms.
Chris shares his 15-year journey building Synthesis, a knowledge platform purpose-built for AEC, and how today's KM 3.0 (powered by AI) is reshaping how firms capture, share, and scale what they know. From navigating firm growth to managing M&A, this conversation covers what it really takes to design a smarter business.
🧭 Episode Chapters:
02:00 – Why Chris left firm life to build a KM company
07:30 – KM 1.0 → KM 2.0 → KM 3.0 (AI changes everything)
12:00 – The high cost of knowledge stuck in people’s heads
15:00 – What it means to “design your business like a building”
21:30 – AI’s role in making KM searchable and actionable
24:00 – KM as the secret weapon in M&A and scaling innovation
26:45 – Why executive sponsorship makes or breaks KM strategy
31:15 – Process is the product: rethinking “build vs. buy”
41:00 – Designing AI agents that work alongside humans
54:00 – The mindset shift every knowledge leader needs now
📚 Resources Mentioned:
- Synthesis – AEC-specific KM platform by Knowledge Architecture
- KA Connect – Annual KM conference for AEC professionals
- Smarter by Design – Chris’s newsletter on knowledge strategy
- People, Planet, Design by Corey Squire – Sustainability book with a KM chapter
- Eisenhower Matrix – Prioritization tool discussed in the episode
👤 Guest:
Chris Parsons – Founder & CEO, Knowledge Architecture
🎙️ Host:
Jeff Eccles – Executive Director, Catalyst by KP Reddy Co.
Sounds like you? Join the waitlist at https://kpreddy.co/
Check out one of our Catalyst conversation starters, AEC Needs More High-Agency Thinkers
Hope to see you there!
Hey, welcome to KPUmpact. My name is Jeff Eccles. He's also the executive producer of KA Connect, which is Knowledge Architecture's annual conference for the AEC industry. He's also the author of Smarter by Design, which is their newsletter, and he's been a technology leader, a chief information officer and the information technology director of firms all around architecture in AEC. So, chris, welcome, it's great to see you. I'm glad you're here.
Speaker 2:I'm glad to be here. That's a great intro. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, I always enjoy. So you know one thing, another thing that we have in common is that we both missed AIA National this year. True, in Boston that is usually a time that we can run into each other, we can meet up, but we both missed it this year, so I guess we missed an opportunity to meet elsewhere.
Speaker 2:So we're catching up. This is our chance.
Speaker 1:It is, it is, it is. So I mentioned that you're the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, which there can be lots of plays on words and maybe you can explain some of them, but where did the idea of knowledge architecture come from? What's the kernel and what does it mean today?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. So, as you mentioned, I ran technology into architecture practices here in San Francisco and in both firms I set up technology with kind of three pillars. There's kind of like core IT, like servers and networks and all that kind of stuff that you would take out of an architecture firm, put in a law firm, be the same thing Design technology, obviously. And then the bucket I called knowledge management. So that could be intranets, that could be CRM, that could be digital asset management, that could be learning and development, mentorship, like how do we, you know, educate the workforce, how do we make the best use of our knowledge, like that was the part in both firms that like lit me up, that I really like spending time doing, and so when I kind of finished the end of my run at the second firm, I kind of wanted to do knowledge management full-time.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I kind of had two choices. I thought it was kind of go to a mega, go to Gensler, hok, som, et cetera and be the director of knowledge management or chief knowledge officer and I interviewed with many of those firms and others to do something like that. Or start a company and build tech and provide kind of knowledge management best practices to more small, mid-sized firms like the firms I grew up in. So the first firm I worked in was about 80 people, the second one was about 150, multiple locations. So like that's what I grew up knowing and chose the latter path.
Speaker 2:And um synthesis is our product. It started as an intranet platform. You can get into that as much as you want. It was initially built on SharePoint and so we were kind of like we're wrapping SharePoint and making it more AEC specific through integrations with things like Dell tech and open asset and unit net and now AEC 360. We also just SharePoint's a very generic tool. It doesn't know about projects or employees. It doesn't know about a lot of the things that we care about in the AEC and at the time it also really needed a facelift. So we kind of skinned it, made it nicer to look at, we improved search analytics, all the things.
Speaker 2:Over time we have moved off of SharePoint. We're now our own app from the ground up and we have moved into AI. So we've got an AI search component to the internet which we can get into and then we are now just into private beta for our learning management system. So the kind of the vision of what we tried to do over the last 15 years. It's all been in that same field of knowledge management.
Speaker 2:But now, from a technology perspective, we're really trying to support folks from capturing knowledge to sharing knowledge, to distributing knowledge through you know learning and then kind of like using AI to kind of cut across all of it in the flow of work. So at a high level, like that's what we're doing. And then you mentioned our conference. We do best practices. So so much of success in knowledge management is about people process, technology and culture. So we try and hit the people process, culture stuff through events, through community, to try and help people understand how to get really good at doing knowledge, at doing knowledge management, kind of like being full stack you know, knowledge managers, if you will.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you mentioned 15 years. So when you, when you think back to deciding to take the road less traveled, if we can call it that, what year are we talking about at this point?
Speaker 2:2009. So, right in the middle of the housing crisis, what a great time let's you know.
Speaker 2:I think I actually think it is a good time to start a business because two reasons. One Ben Horowitz talks about this peacetime, wartime CEO kind of thing, and like when you kind of go in a hard time, you have to learn, like you have to have the value proposition really sharp. You kind of like build a culture of not spending a bunch of extra money just because money's around. Um, so you have to be really disciplined in finding a value proposition right.
Speaker 1:And that force forced us to do that yeah, and you know, thinking back to that time too, there were also lots of people talking about, well, you know, this, this tool, that tool, the other, this app, etc. You know we this tool, that tool, the other, this app, et cetera. You know, we're all born out of times like this, right, the. So, yeah, I think it is a good time. It was a good time for a lot, obviously for knowledge architecture, you know, and you skip back ahead 15 years and the things that you're talking about now, the knowledge management, et cetera. As you were describing the timeline and the trajectory of knowledge architecture. Talking about SharePoint, it really struck me that this week, as we're recording this, this is a big mastermind week for me, so I facilitate all of our mastermind meetings, and this week was construction tech leaders and two innovation leaders, mastermind groups. Sharepoint is discussed.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And one of the big topics always is knowledge management, whether it's transfer, whether it's platforms they're building it in-house, et cetera. It's definitely a reality as we look out across the landscape, not just of AEC, certainly, but definitely in our architecture firms, our engineering firms, our construction firms. How are we going to transfer this knowledge, this wisdom, to the next generation, or this generation that's coming into leadership? So I wonder, you know, 15 years ago, were you a little bit ahead of the game or no?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean that's an interesting way to put it. Let me try and answer it in this way. Knowledge management is a field. I mean that's an interesting way to put it, let me. Let me try and answer it in this way. Knowledge management is a field. I mean, we've been managing knowledge as a species, starting with cave paintings and you know, out on job sites.
Speaker 2:You know people. It took us a while to get to drawings, even right Like, like just drawing on yeah, so like, but but I think like knowledge management as a field really took off in the mid nineties, so like but, but I think like knowledge management as a field really took off in the mid nineties Um, I think it coincided with the internet exploding and kind of people wanting to digitize a lot of technology.
Speaker 2:Um, there are a couple big big conferences and thought leaders that got started in the mid nineties and so that was kind of KM 1.0, which was taking things that were in binders, standards, policies, all that static content, content and just digitizing it and making it easier to distribute, easier to search. When I started the business, we were in kind of that, what I call KM 2.0 wave. So that was kind of KM 1.0 was the digitization. Km 2.0 was when in the world like Twitter was starting, facebook was starting, like all these social apps were starting, and the idea was can we bring that social technology inside the business for knowledge sharing Instead of, you know, just it being top down? Can we make it more democratic, more point to point? Can I have more of a community approach? Can I ask questions and get answers, share lessons learned? Like we were early, I think, on that, like we were right there, like as soon as, like those apps started launching, we were kind of hacking SharePoint to like layer in some social. This is when I was still in house, kind of like, oh cool, like I can post something and someone in LA can comment back, like it was. Like I felt really like new, and so that's right.
Speaker 2:When we started, the company and the culture took a minute to catch up, cause there was a lot of like what do you mean anybody in the firm can share or answer? Questions Like what if they say the wrong thing? What if they, you know, get in trouble, like I don't, I don't, I want to be able to control what people are sharing. So there was a lot of like questions like that to get through, and we got through them. That sounds kind of quaint in 2025. But it was like a big big thing in 2009, 2010, 2011.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 2009, 2010, 2011. Yeah Well, I wonder, you know, as you say that, right, the, the culture hadn't caught up to that was was that specifically an AE or an AEC problem, so to speak, or was it broader than that? Because we know, I mean many of the things that we talk about, or you know, we talk about AEC being a laggard, um, a laggard industry, was, was that the case or was? Was it broader? Was it all industries that, um, that weren't quite there yet?
Speaker 2:You know it's funny. Um, I've heard this laggard thing for forever and when I spend time with people in other industries, they all say that their industry is a laggard.
Speaker 2:So somebody, somewhere thinks I guess maybe Silicon Valley never says that they're laggard. So somebody somewhere thinks I guess maybe Silicon Valley never says that they're laggard. So I guess there's, like you know, silicon Valley and like everybody else, yeah, no, I mean sure. I think that like that kind of idea of like management structures being a certain way and moving towards like a more community or democratic or collaborative way of leadership and communication. I think every industry I mean to be honest, there are still pockets of our industry and others that are still going through that transformation you know and no, I think that that's.
Speaker 2:I think it was a sea change. Usually, when there's a technology change, there's like a deeper cultural change that's coming along with it. It's the same thing. Km 3.0 is what I call the AI transition. Right, ai powered KM. There's all kinds of culture stuff that's going to have to get weeded out and figured out like as this technology. The technology is disruptive and it's a catalyst for those broader cultural, like even business model conversations that are being sparked now.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, yeah, 100%. Now, when I took over our startup incubator, I took over running facilitating our startup incubator. Almost two took over running facilitating our startup incubator almost two years ago now. I guess One of the things that surprised me and I don't know why it surprised me necessarily, but it did About 90, 95% of the founders that were running their startups through our incubator were from industry, and so they were a civil engineer and they had identified some problem, some frustration, maybe some problem, or they worked for a real estate developer and so on and so forth. When you were in the role of CIO or information technology director, what were the problems that you had identified at that point, or were they any? You know, maybe, maybe no, no, no.
Speaker 2:It was exactly that, born of my own kind of like mixture of frustration and opportunity, you know that I saw.
Speaker 2:Sure, like I'll give you. I could go on, but like maybe I'll name a couple I sat between in both firms. I sat between marketing and the principals and I watched the conversations and then saw the emails back and forth around like how many higher ed projects have we built in California in the last five years that are over a square foot? And then you get back six answers and they're all different. The same question.
Speaker 2:So a lot of it was like in people's heads. Um, there was a lot of us not writing down how we did so. Onboarding was tough. We didn't have like a way that we did x, y and z thing and it wasn't shared. It was all learned on the job, which I'm not going to take away from experiential learning, like it's a really important way that we learn right. But like just writing down how this firm operates, what our like, what our processes are.
Speaker 2:If we bring a new person in who has healthcare experience but has never worked on a retail project and we want to onboard them and ramp them up into retail, what do they need to know about retail to be effective in their first week? There's just so much of that. That's just what in knowledge management we call tacit knowledge, meaning it's in people's heads, versus explicit knowledge which can be written down. You can't write it all down but, man, you can write down a lot and you can build frameworks to help people just learn stuff. And if somebody's away on a job site, that means that nobody can make decisions because all the information's in that person's head or God forbid, they leave the firm or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:So, yes, it was that frustration that, like we are a knowledge-based business and we are not, we're not stewarding it. It's like if it's like if you took, had money and didn't have it in the bank and you just had to, like laying all around the office and in people's jacket pockets and in their backpacks, like that's the same way that I looked at the way our knowledge was being stewarded. It's just like it's everywhere and there's no kind of centralized strategy. So, yeah, knowledge is money in many ways and it's our currency, and that's what drove me nuts. But it also got me excited because I thought there was so much opportunity to do better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really interesting image and right now there's somebody in the audience that's listening and they're using their favorite AI tool to create that image.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:We're going to see it, you know, in the comments somewhere. Hey, here's the AI generated image based on that illustration that Chris just provided of knowledge being money. I love that, so, as we think about. So, that was the seed. Yeah it was, and I was reading what's changed.
Speaker 2:And so I went to I should say one more thing, um, yeah, two more things. I went to an event. So back when it was called, they had an event I think they only ever ran at once called firm of the future in 2005 and they had like ed friedrichs, former ceo of gensler.
Speaker 2:they had people from the mit media lab, they had the kieran timberlake I can't remember which kieran or Timberlake one of them was there and I just watched these presentations and I was like spellbound. I'm like these firms design firms generally are designing their businesses like they would design buildings or infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is like they design the business and they're using knowledge as a competitive advantage, whether it's research, whether it's the thing as I was talking about about using lessons learned and best practices or creating good learning and development. Like there is a better way, and that kind of tapped me into knowledge management, and then I started reading about the literature in the field and realizing, oh no, no, the army is actually quite good at this, NASA is quite good at this. Like this is something that exists in large organizations outside of AEC. And so then that became my mission. It's like, okay, I want to learn how to do this. But then, when we started KA, it's like we need to kind of start educating the industry, which is why we did a conference. It's why we do all these things is because we are a knowledge based industry, but we just don't do it as intentionally or explicitly as we could. And that's been powering my energy, my jets, you know, for a while now, and it's still exciting.
Speaker 1:Well, you know it's interesting. You say that because that's been one of the things I've dwelt on for years. You know, even since before I started teaching pro practice in architecture schools, is this idea that you know similar to what you were just saying that they design their businesses like they design a building. And so I went to Ball State. I also have taught at Ball State and one of the things about campus is the architecture building sits here and then if you go to this one particular door, you walk out. That door and it's less than a hundred yards away is the closest door into the business building.
Speaker 1:Right and so you've got architecture right, you're not going to learn anything about business, but the business building is just right over there, right? And you know, one of the things I tell students sometimes is like listen when we're talking about the business of architecture. If you need to understand how to do invoicing accounts receivable, accounts, payable, something like that don't even think about it, right? Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Walk over into that building over there, go into one of the student lounges and say who has a system for invoicing? Six people are going to raise their hand. Pick the one you like the most and use their system, right? Why?
Speaker 2:recreate it. You're kind of making a build versus buy argument, but not about technology, but about process in some ways, right, sure, yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, and you know, we, we do the thing we learned in architecture school. We learned design thinking. When you learn critical thinking, things like that, and that's what we know how to apply, and we start applying it in areas that we don't necessarily need to apply it. Right, and I think that's one of the realities in the business of architecture, that you just described it and you're working to change that, I guess, in a way. Right, yeah, at least with the knowledge management piece of it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, I think one of my favorite kind of like tools in the world is that Eisenhower matrix right, when you've got things that are non-urgent and urgent on one axis and things that are not important and important on another axis.
Speaker 1:And what do we do as?
Speaker 2:humans. We need the urgent and important first and then we do the urgent and not important second right and the whole. Like the secret to knowledge management is that stuff is all in the important but not urgent quadrant. It's the stuff that, like, if we do this, this will show up and make us a better company three months from now or four months from now, and it's that investment with a kind of a long view sometimes not that long, you know like it could be a little bit out, but it's like being able to slow down and work on the business versus work in the business, like all those kinds of things and so.
Speaker 2:But you find firms. I mean there are one of the really like gratifying slash, pleasurable parts of the journey I've had running the company is how many smart firms there are in our industry that do exactly what we're talking about. And what was really fun about KConnect in the early I mean it's still true, but like in the early days it was like I was on a treasure hunt, trying to find these smart firms who were doing a piece or a part of knowledge management really well, they weren't even necessarily calling it knowledge management, they were just trying to make their business better and by connecting people together. They got to say like, oh, I can take something from this firm over here and that firm over there. Like we were able to start to picture, together as a community, what this could look like. I released a periodic table of knowledge management elements in 2016, which I've updated. But that came from like spending time in the field with AEC firms who were just smart, who cared, who stewarded their business, who could work on the non-urgent and important stuff Like that's the ethos, you know, of the firms that do well with knowledge management.
Speaker 1:Now you mentioned KM 1.0 and 2.0, and you mentioned that 3.0 is is AI, so of course, ai is the the hot topic almost all the time these days. How is KM 3.0 changing what you're doing and what you're seeing in the firms?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that has been true is that firms. So from a product perspective, the first way we've, the first way we've manifested this is through ai search in our platform, so we aggregate all the data from the other platforms. Then there's also stuff that's natively added to synthesis search through videos, like natural language search, you can kind of picture, if you're listening along, what this, what this probably looks like. Um, however, like ai search is only as good as the underlying knowledge slash data that it has access to. So a lot of firms that have been very diligent about stewarding whatever it is policies, procedures, best practices, learning content, project data points, employee skills and licenses, like all that kind of information.
Speaker 2:That's the questions people want to ask, like, if you've been doing knowledge management all along, you've been in, you started off in a pretty good position with AI, but it's also exposing a lot of holes right In people's data and so it's providing really actionable and I would say, probably the most amount of motivation towards, like subject matter experts or like senior people understanding it's like oh, I get it. If we capture our knowledge and we steward our firm-wide data better, this unlocks these outcomes where I can just come in and ask these questions, or my emerging professionals can ask these questions, and so it's really reduced that gap between I put something in here and I can get it back out, whereas in earlier iterations of knowledge management it was. It was a little, you know.
Speaker 1:You remember keyword search from seven months ago you know what that was like, Maybe six, I don't know. Back the old days, back the old days of keyword search.
Speaker 2:So I think it has kind of like lit a fire and like had people understand on a deep level why managing your knowledge is so important and the outcomes that it can generate. I think that's one big thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you mentioned earlier and I may have cut you off at that point or near that point, but you mentioned business model, and that's one of the things that we focus on a lot at KP. Readyco is okay, innovation for the sake of efficiencies great. You know, different emerging technologies, et cetera. But what about business model innovation? So, when you think about knowledge management the way you just described it, I thought was also really beautiful right, you've got the subject matter experts put in it, you can get out of it and this can change the way that we do things what are you seeing? Maybe it's your customers, maybe it's not, maybe it's just somewhere in the industry, but what are you seeing in terms of business model innovation, where knowledge management is driving some sort of change?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's the classic stuff that I'm actually, interestingly enough, pretty familiar with but unable to say anything interesting on around fixed fee versus time and materials and getting paid for value versus value-based pricing and all that kind of stuff. I don't have anything new to say there that people haven't already said. What I think is interesting about KM if I'm a CEO and I'm kind of like, well, why would I care about knowledge management? And one would be from an innovation perspective, having the capacity to deliver on innovative new services. It could be a market sector, a building type, a new technology. We figured out a new way of building buildings, whatever it is. Usually those things are started by a person who's the tip of the spear. They go do these first five projects in this new market sector of this new type, or it's a new net zero project, or a mass timber, whatever it is. And then how do you make it so that you don't have to have that one person on every one of those projects you want to do? It's a bottleneck, right. You're limited. Your growth, your ability to accelerate, is limited by how well you transfer knowledge and can scale out that expertise across your company. So I think that's a huge lever in terms of like capacity and, at the same time, you're also managing risk. So if you are doing this innovative new thing, you're usually doing that in a public area, like somebody recruits that person away. You know like, so you're you're trying to manage risk also with that. You know the kind of innovation. So it's kind of like, how do you? There's so many.
Speaker 2:I spent a lot of time like five or six years ago with with some in the thought leadership community outside of AEC, like people that like professional thought leadership writers and marketers, and what was always not talked about is the back end of, like the delivery and the execution. So we've got this great new concept whatever I'm Accenture and we've come up with something that we're trying to do Great. Your first two or three people know how to do it. Like how do you make it so that all of Accenture can deliver that across all of your offices and those kinds of things? And I think it's the same thing for AEC. It's like how do we scale innovation Right and knowledge is right at the heart of it? You know whether that's learning and development, whether that's like formalized training, whether that's whatever it is AI access to support people in the flow of work to get answers. That is so much of what it is, so it's not all tacit knowledge we're able to like translate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you've worked with at this point, you know I would think 150 or more firms over 15 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I may be way off on that number, but no, we've worked with more than that, but you're in the right ballpark, yeah sure.
Speaker 1:Okay so, but no, we've worked for more than that. But you're in the, you're in the ballpark, yeah, sure, okay. So I mean that's that's a lot, that's a lot of firms, that's a lot of when. When I run our incubator, um, we're, we're evolving it now, but in the past we've always focused it on pre-revenue and and very heavily on customer discovery and and um, we would say, you know, hey, you need to, you need to have 150 customer discovery calls. So you're there right.
Speaker 1:You're, you're doing all of that customer discovery, uh, for uh, different reasons maybe, but, um, but what are? What are the big lessons learned? I mean, you've got quite a perspective and that's the point, of course, of customer discovery is to get that perspective using your products day in and day out. What are the big lessons learned from you know these years and all those firms, and how do you apply that? Moving forward, or maybe, what are you? What are you here to teach others? I guess could be another angle.
Speaker 2:So is your question what are my lessons learned as a founder? Are you asking, what are lessons learned for AEC firms getting better at knowledge management?
Speaker 1:yes, okay cool.
Speaker 2:I like both versions all right, why don't I start with the AEC lessons learned and then maybe we can talk about some founder stuff?
Speaker 1:perfect perfect.
Speaker 2:I I think the the smartest firms. I know this sounds so likeite, but it's so true. Connect knowledge management strategy to business strategy. Sure, yeah, it makes sense you can't manage all of your firm's knowledge. There's too much of it. It's like it changes too fast, especially these days. So the best firms are like they just go right back up to business strategy and they're like we're trying to improve quality Cool, we'll do these things. We're trying to become in design excellence We'll do those things. We're trying to move into new markets.
Speaker 2:All of those are different knowledge management strategies depending on what matters to the company and like the best businesses, do that and don't chase random acts of knowledge management or random acts of AI Like there's like a deep connection and that's why the best knowledge management programs have executive sponsors for them who sit on the board or the management team or the leadership team, so they know what matters and what doesn't and they can just like cut off going in the wrong direction, off in the past, like that is. That is like lesson number one and two and three, almost in terms of when you see firms starting to get lost, it's always like and what problem are we solving again? And if, even if we solve it like, would it matter? Right, I think that's huge. And then it leads to prioritization and then it leads to like more wood behind fewer arrows.
Speaker 2:You know, it's really a lot of that is and it's hard. It's hard if, like, imagine you're a company that works in 10 markets and you can't like spread all of your investments equally across those 10. You, I mean you could, but like you're, probably there's probably some that make more sense to push your chips into versus others, and a lot of that resource allocation stuff can get political and it's tricky. So I think the smartest businesses can cut through that. Um, that's what I've seen yeah, very little to do with technology.
Speaker 1:Honestly, Like a lot of these are like, yeah, cultural Well, yeah, I mean, and two of the things that you touched on there. I mean, again, you're talking about this, I'm thinking about conversations that we have in our mastermind groups all the time, because it's again, this is a topic with the innovation leaders groups especially. You know. There there's one particular example. I can't share who or what the firm is, but their director of innovation is tasked with building a knowledge management, or they've been working on building a knowledge management system in-house, on building a knowledge management system in-house, and at our last in-person meeting, which was in Atlanta in May of this year, they talked about that and the fact that their board of directors, on their board of directors is I think it's more than one, but at least one champion of you know exactly what you just said One champion of this knowledge management platform system, whatever they call it, and they're focused on knowledge transfer, focused on innovation, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And then there's another mastermind member who has a whole innovation. They've they've actually spun out their own innovation team, right, so they have their, their parent company, and they have the, the child company, so to speak, which is the innovation group, and they have built out a robust system because they again, it's exactly as you described. They're in multiple, multiple markets, yeah, so offices all over the place, and one of the things they've said is, hey, our group over here in Phoenix is doing this thing and they think it's innovative, and they think they're breaking new ground, and only to find out that the group in Nashville or wherever, has been doing that for nine months, and one hand didn't know what the other was doing, and so they're. You know, they're working on, you know that. That seems like it's such a basic example of knowledge management but.
Speaker 2:But you get to like. So like knowledge management doesn't work when it's like a silo department that's working on their own, like it's orchestrated stakeholders because you've got to go across business units, operational departments, market sectors, like you're really orchestrating and having success through others as a knowledge manager.
Speaker 2:And a lot of that is connecting the dots and like because you're sitting in and all those rooms, you know what's happening in the firm and you're playing air traffic control and that's a lot of like what makes you know these firms successful for sure. I think they also think like jobs to be done would be a good framework. But thinking in terms of use cases and being like really specific about what use cases matter most, like. So, for example, like we have seven firms in our beta, like we just got into beta for the learning management system and one of the firms comes to mind who's like well, they've got 12, 13 years of recordings of like this really great learning and development program they've been doing, but it's too much. Like it's so much that it's like where do we start? And they're like well, let's go back to our business strategy.
Speaker 2:We've added we added 70 employees. Like there's a 250 person firm. We had 70 people last year who are emerging professionals. We want them to get them. They do a lot of healthcare. We want to get them up to speed and fluent in healthcare. That's it. That's the focus. Like we're going to stay after that. Like, how do we upskill emerging professionals on healthcare until we have that in really good shape and then we'll move on to the next thing. Not try and like serve all people across the business all at the same time. That takes discipline, right and trust and like willingness to strategy is mostly what you say no to right and so that's a lot of what's the strategy part is. And willing to stick to your guns and work on the most important thing Like that's what I get inspired when I see firms do that, yeah, yeah, and we see that you know, and it seems like we're, that seems like it would be more a bigger and bigger issue with the amount of mergers and acquisitions that have been happening.
Speaker 1:And I I have to think, and that you know that's not my area of expertise, but I have to think that M&A is going to to drive a lot more quote unquote growth as we continue to move forward. But if you're going through a merger, an acquisition, whichever it is, you've got to transfer knowledge into the new team, or back and forth, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had at KConnect last year. We had two folks from page um in houston um talk about the merger with eyp. That they did and you know both highly technical, smart, great firms. Like what does it mean? Not just to merge all this, like the letterhead and the erp is like fine, but like we both do this kind of work, like which way is way is better, like we want to kind of like have efficiency. We don't want to like just say we're acquiring you, now do everything our way, like if you have a better way we want to learn from it.
Speaker 2:So they kind of talk through some of the knowledge management challenge, like opportunities of like buying a really smart company and saying like how do we get make our stuff better and make them better? Like it's really, it's really interesting. Like when it's done thoughtfully it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what are some of the traps and uh and blind spots that you know? If it's, maybe it's, maybe it's a M and a type situation, or maybe it's just a, an organic growth situation, or maybe it's just hey we're, you know we're trying to catch up with the nineties. Um, what are some of the, the things that people are missing?
Speaker 2:They need to be aware of. So most of the time when we get hired, because building a knowledge management platform and intranet LMS, it's a firm wide deployment, so it's not something that you go pick up, you know at the, at the checkout. You know like a little little kiosk right at the checkout, like a little kiosk right at the checkout line and it's not an impulse buy. So usually when firms come to us, something rather seismic has happened. Right, there is ownership transition or leadership transition within the company. There's been an M&A. I'd say the most common is they've hit a growth, they hit growing pains. So there are these natural sizes within AEC like I don't know, 30, 60, 100, 250, you know where they are like, where it's like we need to invest a lot more to get the operational efficiency to be able to be comfortable and make money at this size. And if we don't, we're going to be in a really bad spot. And so firms oftentimes bring us in when they've gone, when they're in through growing pains and they're realizing we can't keep working like we used to work.
Speaker 2:You know, like one of the firms that always talks about this is Turner, fleischer and Toronto. When they first started working with us. They were 60, 70 people and all of the knowledge was in people's heads. It was like, and so they spent the first year basically like, really like, just like developing for the first time written policies, procedures, standards, like identifying who's the right person to go to for what, like it was just getting all of that out of their heads and consolidating from their systems and just having a firm, wide knowledge base, which now, if there are 250 people, I'm not causing like claiming direct causal link between those things and then hiring us, but like it definitely has unlocked and smoothed the growth process. And now you have to constantly keep revising your knowledge as the firm grows and changes. So I think a blind spot is just thinking you can scale perhaps without fundamentally you have to keep redesigning your business. It's back to designing the business again and that's just part of life.
Speaker 2:That's part of what it is.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, and there has to be too. You know the idea of building the knowledge management system right, and all that knowledge that's in everyone else's head.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:There are some examples out there. There's some famous examples. Thornton Thomas said he has some, has one, and so on and so forth. But the key to success, as I understand it and this is not my area of expertise either, obviously it's yours. But part of the key to success has to be documentation and data capture too. Right, Because you've got to feed it, You've got to have a data lake you know, I assume RAG and then data, and you've got to somehow pull all of this together, pull it out of people's heads and into a repository. You know what kind of challenges does that create?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm thinking of a client of ours, uh Bora um architecture and interiors, up in Portland, oregon, and they hired a director of sustainability named Corey Squire to come in and help, you know, take their sustainability efforts to the next level. And Corey one of his first. He wrote a book about sustainability called people, profit, planet design. People, planet design, design, and in it he's got a knowledge management chapter.
Speaker 2:His view is like sustainability is knowledge management, like that's the key to unlocking it is. It's not that people don't care about the environment generally in our industry or don't want to solve the problems that they don't know what to do. And so he went through a really extensive process on their internet of documenting like here are the core strategies, like here's why that they're important, here's why we do it this way at Bora, here are the different outcomes we're trying to achieve, here are the best practices, here are the materials. So you kind of like start with that big vision for the company and you just work all the way down to give context to people. And I think this is I guess I'll go in the bucket of blind spots a little bit is a lot of times. What firms do is they capture knowledge from experts. But the experts write it, which isn't great, because they usually write for other experts or at the expert level and they don't remember what it was like to be a novice and they have the curse of knowledge, like they'll just use acronyms or assumptions that, like other people don't understand. And so I think what the best firms are doing is they're trying to write more down at that intern or novice level and provide a lot of context.
Speaker 2:The why is equally important than the what, right. So, for example, window to wall ratio right. Like, maybe it should be 20 to 40% on a building, right, but why, like? Why 20%? Why 40%? When would you do 20 versus 40? Like, understand beyond, just like. Here's this rule of thumb, apply it. And so that's what I think Bora has done really, really well, which has set them up. They actually uploaded Corey's book to their intranet and now that's all searchable too, which is an awesome, awesome thing. So, yes, we're using retrie. You retrieve a log, banded generation, you ask questions, you pull answers back, but the AI benefits from context too. Like it's better when you write for AI at that novice, intern level than writing at the expert level, cause it doesn't know what window to wall ratio is right.
Speaker 2:It doesn't it's agnostic, and so the more clarity and simplicity and context you can provide. Like that's where we see a lot of the investment, because you're writing for two audiences Now you're writing for humans and you're writing for agents in the future. Right, you have two, you have a hybrid workforce coming and you have to write for both of them. But it turns out that, like the writing does the best, writing serve both of those people the same, when it's simple, clear, has context, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. I hadn't hadn't really thought about it in that way before. Uh, yes, absolutely, uh, ai, uh, benefits. You know it's going to return, return better with, with context where. So here we are it's it's roughly the middle of 2025 as we're having this conversation right now. So, as we look into our crystal ball, as we look ahead, where's this heading over the next three to five years? What's, what's going to change? Grok heavy is is out now. Where's, where's knowledge management headed?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great. No mean, I think, um, I do think km 3.0, that wave, we are early, early in that wave. So I think it's going to take a while for it to roll through the industry. I'm like roll through even a firm. You're gonna have early adopters and laggards and all the kind of same stuff sure, Sure, yeah, absolutely Firm by firm it's going to take a while.
Speaker 2:The technology is going to keep getting better, but what I think seems pretty clear right now is some of the fundamentals still matter. Having high quality data still matters, like it will matter even more and but the good news is you're getting more ROI on that data, so it's going to be easier for people to understand why good data matters, for people to understand why good data matters. I think that seems clear For us as we move towards building knowledge agents into our platform, which is something we've started designing that relies on a really good AI search layer. So being able to understand context and or complicate questions like, for example, like we're working on something called advanced project search right now, which can handle things like the thing I said earlier, like how many higher ed projects over 200,000 square feet in Massachusetts, in natural language, ask that question and get back answers In some cases from structured data, like we would pull in from a Dell tech. In some cases from like unstructured data it might be proposals, it might be a video presentation on that specific project, and so like making good sense of structured and unstructured data and knowing when to use which, and understanding query intent and all those things.
Speaker 2:There's a lot to do to get really powerful search, which is, in our view, the platform that you have to build knowledge agents on top of. So if agents are going to act on your behalf to do a variety of different tasks, they have to be able to get at answers really easily, and so that's what we're excited about is really kind of like a hybrid workforce of employees, kind of like working alongside agents. Maybe there are private agents that you've just created for yourself to help you. It could be something as prosaic as write blog posts, but like using your firm's content, or maybe it's helping you to do you know X, y, learn something Like. I really want to learn project management. Be my buddy in helping me learn project management. Or you can see like firm-wide agents that are developed for you. Know specific use cases, like searching our standards and codes. You probably want to slide the precision knob a little bit all the way to like verbatim right.
Speaker 2:Versus like, if you've got something like write me a blog post. You want to slide the precision knob, to be like, be able to be creative, like cite your sources and like the expansive. So I think it's this how do we build towards a world where we have good knowledge, we can get good retrieval to that knowledge, for both employees and agents. And then we live in a society not society, but like in a time in technology, where a lot of that knowledge is spread across different platforms. So I think integrations like orchestra you know whether it's just straight up integrations like we've always done through APIs, or whether it gets to be in a MCP and agents asking agents from other platforms questions like that seems inevitable. I don't know exactly how it's going to look like, but it seems like that's. That's part of what that future looks like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to ask this question and I know this is, you know, we'll probably generate a recap because we've talked about some of these things. But, um, you, you mentioned early on, as as we were talking, that your, your product is synthesis and you know, of course, you're going through iterations, et cetera. What, what's next on the horizon for Synthesis?
Speaker 2:Well, agents, like I just said. Well, right now we're building the advanced project, like technically, we're building the project search. We're then, as I've mentioned, we're building the learning management system and releasing that, which maybe I can touch on a little bit, but then being able to search all the content in the learning management system, because one of the reasons I'll go so when we finished that I, because one of the reasons I'll go so when we finished that I mentioned we moved off of SharePoint and we replatformed the product. That was what we called Synthesis 6. And that was like a four year, like there was a massive lift, but we didn't have any roadmap coming out of that. Because it was such a big change, we wanted to just let it sit in the community and have people adopt it and then help us find what to build next.
Speaker 2:And so I did a listening tour with about 60 of our clients personally and said, like where's your business going? How's knowledge management going? How can we help? Just like broad brush, like not necessarily where we could help. And I heard AI and I heard learning and development, and people weren't asking us to build the learning and development stuff, but it was so obvious and historically, learning management has been kind of on an island with its LMS.
Speaker 2:It's a separate system from knowledge management and it just seems kind of bonkers to me that you watch subject matter. So do I post my how to help people learn in the LMS or do I put it in the knowledge management system on the intranet? Where do I share If I'm a user? Where do I go to learn about a thing? We're like that. Just we got to stop the madness and so building an integrated system that's intranet plus LMS, with AI search over it means, from an end user perspective, I can just go look for knowledge and learning. I don't have to think about is this a lesson learned? Is this a course? Is this a standard? Is this a conversation? Like I just can go ask my question and get the best of our knowledge brought to me. So like that's what we're building towards.
Speaker 2:But the LMS part of it too, it's like we just think. Like you know, there are like essential core curricula that like firms want people to go through, like to just understand how the firm works, what its markets are. If you're going to be a new project manager, a learning path to teach you the way that we do project management here at our firm or the way that we do the retail or healthcare design here at our firm. So we think there's so much opportunity towards just being really intentional about upskilling people. Yeah, so there's so many things, jeff, like it's all, like it all feels. Like it's kind of like I've been working in 25 years in AEC and kind of KM combined and like this is the moment I think I've been kind of like building towards, like it's, like it's really feels like all the roads are converging and it's the most fun I've had in my career. Like right, like right now, like it's a really good time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's got to feel good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think a lot of knowledge managers feel the same way. They're like, finally, like people see it, like what I've seen in my head as a knowledge manager like all of a sudden it's like lighting up. I remember struggling at one of my architecture firms partly because I wasn't very good at these are kind of like founder lessons but like I wasn't very good at putting what good looks like in the term in the language that the architect or the principal that I was trying to get to change, like I was seeing it from a KM lens or what would be cool about it technologically. I wasn't very good about like connecting to, like what made them tick. You know gotten better at that, but the that that it always drove me crazy.
Speaker 2:It's like we have, like that firm specifically, we were really good at master planning, like we had done tons of it, we were well known for it, but like you couldn't find any information on our network, on our internet, like it was all like in people's heads and I'm like I tried unsuccessfully to convince them to try and do it. But this is what we see taking off across our clients. It's always been easy to get in IT information and HR information and marketing information like ops. Like yes, it's always been easy to get the employee handbook put on the intranet forever.
Speaker 2:Of course it's been harder to get the master planning, best practices or like here's all the jargon we use in healthcare projects and here's the different user groups and what they mean. Those people are running a hundred miles a minute, they're oversubscribed. It's hard to get them to slow down and share because they're just so busy working and so that what we're seeing happen right now is like the practice, people are getting into it and they're like yep, this is an investment. Like my quality of life will improve if I slow down and transfer this knowledge and I will help also mentor this next generation. Like it's, all the dots are connecting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point, that's really good. Takeaway what? What are? What are a couple, three takeaways? And maybe this is for you know, I'm kind of thinking of our audience. Certainly, like I mentioned, in our mastermind groups, there are a lot of these directors of innovation. Their firms are working on LMSs, kmss.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there are some that are building their own? Of course there are some that you know, haven't even started the journey yet. Maybe there are some that are asking the question that all of these, uh, all these folks are asking is do we build it, do we buy it, do we partner? Um, what are the two or three takeaways from this conversation and and your work and um, what you learn and talking to your clients and others across the aec industry? What are the two or three takeaways for folks that are in in the game?
Speaker 1:somewhere somewhere in the maybe. Maybe it's the early stages of the game, early-ish stages of the game for learning or knowledge management. What do they need to know right now?
Speaker 2:I mean I will. I'm just going to start by going back to the executive sponsor. Make sure you have that executive sponsor in your room who knows what matters most to the business, so you don't like go like it's cool that you can fly from LA to Boston, but what if the firm's trying to go to Seattle?
Speaker 2:you know like so like that kind of like alignment, like just triple checking to make sure you're working on the right thing. I just feel like that's so important. Um, from like a just an alignment and strategy perspective, I think that having practice so in addition to like executive level, I think having people from the practice involved like if I look back on my career and I'm critical of where I could have been better as a knowledge manager is I think I'm pretty smart and I've like reverse engineered what would make this architect more effective, but I didn't actually talk to them first. And so I think grounding in as much time with those technical folks and even better if you can spend time doing their job or shadowing them Like I picked up red lines, that sure helped me a lot. You know, I went on job sites, I did some CA work, I went and took some architecture classes, like the more empathy, like if you're a non-technical person and you're in that role, like just absorbing as much AEC-ness as you can and building that empathy and building allies on the practice side stress how important that is, like just to build that credibility and show interest, like people love it when they like being asked about their stuff, you know, and I think good knowledge managers can provide a really a good service to subject matter experts because they can interview them.
Speaker 2:Like it's hard to ask someone to go to a blank piece of paper and write down what you know.
Speaker 2:Like it's hard for all the reasons we discussed before. But knowledge managers can be knowledge brokers right. They can interview, can interview like Jeff, like, let's say we were talking about podcasting. It's like I could spend half an hour to an hour with you asking you how you prepare, how you get organized when a podcast goes off the rails, how do you bring it back on, how do you decide whether to follow up, you know, or just let it go and ask a different question. Like there's all this critical knowledge and deep smarts that you have on how to do your work that, as a non-podcaster, I could. I have like an advantage of actually being naive to what it is your expertise is, and I think knowledge managers have the same thing. If you're not an architect and you're trying to like, you can ask them really dumb kind of dumb questions, but it can help expose like and then you make it accessible to like emerging professionals and interns and all that kind of stuff, if that makes sense, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, you're not plagued by the curse of knowledge.
Speaker 2:You're not plagued by the curse of knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting because it's, um, you and I have talked about this. I mentioned this at the very beginning of the the episode here. Um, we just launched our our or earlier this year, we launched our Catalyst, which is our online community, and I've one of the things that we've done for Catalyst. You know, how do you build in 2025? How do you build an online community, which you know this is it's not my first online community rodeo, but it's you know, it's different. Right, it's 2025. We're talking about something very niche. So how do you launch something and build something that's highly engaged? And I'm reminded of Gary Vaynerchuk saying you have to do the things that are unscalable, and so people put their name on a wait list.
Speaker 1:I interview, I vet and interview every single person. So I've had a hundred and some odd of these interviews by now. And one of the things that I tell everybody in that interview and this is sort of a test, right, I say this to people just to see what their reaction is I say I need you to show up curious and I, you know what what you're saying right now just totally resonates in that, in that space, because we, we need to show up curious, um, curious about the problem, curious about the topic, curious about what people know they don't know how they're going to receive it, et cetera. I've got a different purpose for saying that in the context of the community than you do for knowledge management, but I think, at the base, as human beings, if we can show up curious, how much better are we, how much better is our society potentially, If, if?
Speaker 1:that's the if that's the hat that we're wearing.
Speaker 2:Totally Showing up curious, showing up humble, right and being willing to learn and like start from the ground up, I think, a thing that's hard for a lot of people to get drawn toward this work. This is again I'll just tell you from my personal experience. I've got a core value at our company is actually based on some hard one.
Speaker 2:Lessons is we work on the most important thing, no matter how hard it is. And so there's two parts to that. Right. We do work on the most important thing from a strategy level, but there were times along our journey where I mean the first time, we did search not the AI search, but the search. Before that, like, I was just like convinced that that was outside of our capability to be able to build a reasonably good search engine and went on hey, my wife is actually my design partner for the software and she and I went on a listening tour.
Speaker 2:Before building Synthesis 5, which is the version before the one, we went off SharePoint and in time after time, people were complaining about the SharePoint search. They're like, oh my God, this, this, this. And I get to the end of the listening tour and I'm like cool, so we're going to work on these three things. This seems what's obvious. She goes were you not in those meetings? She's like it's search, bro, you know, kind of like that's the thing I Like there's no way we can do that. And she's like if you don't do it, you're never going to have a great product. And so that we I listened, thank God, and dug in, and then we ended up.
Speaker 2:Then search has become one of our. It's still one of our core strengths today. So had to get over some like mental block that like this thing is too hard, but it is the most important thing, so important thing, so that's what we always. That's like kind of a rallying cry for us now, and I find people will avoid working on that hard thing because there's something that's easier, and sometimes the hard thing is also boring too, you know, and there's a shinier object that seems like a lot more fun, that that would be cool to play with, but if it doesn't move the needle, you haven't really advanced your company in terms of knowledge management or AI or whatever the thing is. So I don't know, that's a, that's a little thing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that, that I like, that. I like that as a core value. One final question Um, what is one thing that you want everybody that's listening or watching you know if they're watching this on YouTube. What's one thing that you want people to take away, either about knowledge, architecture you know the, the company or synthesis, and or synthesis the tool.
Speaker 2:I think that I want them to take away the community aspect of what we do. So um we so. We have K connect, which is the annual knowledge management conference which I talked about. It's open to folks in the AAC industry. It's not only for clients of ours. I've got the Smarter by Design newsletter you talked about. We do almost monthly webinars where someone's doing something interesting.
Speaker 2:I'm very active on LinkedIn and we are not a company that if you kind of get in our ecosystem, we're going to hound you to death in terms of trying to get you to buy our product.
Speaker 2:We have had people in our ecosystem coming to our conference, speaking at our conference, who are non-clients, who are really thoughtful about knowledge management for well over a decade at this point, and so I would encourage folks that want to learn from other people who are doing knowledge management or learning and development or AI or whatever it is, but just get involved with our community. Sign up for our mailing list, hit me up on LinkedIn, come to our conference, know that you're welcome there. You don't have to buy our product to be a full member. You won't be like a second-class citizen. We really want to help the industry learn how to do knowledge management and all the related things around learning development better, and so I think that's what our goal is to get smarter together. That's what we talk about. The mantra for the community is, and a lot of the insights that have made us smarter over the years came from outside of our clients and great, and then we put it back out. So, like we hope, it's a virtuous cycle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. Chris Parson and I have been talking about a number of things, but especially knowledge management, and, as I said earlier in the episode, this is a hot topic. It's a regular topic. It's something that's being discussed throughout our entire ecosystem the KP Redico ecosystem, certainly in our mastermind groups and beyond knowledge management systems, learning management systems. Great conversation. Chris is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture. Their platform is called Synthesis, their conference is KA Connect and their newsletter is Smarter by Design.
Speaker 1:You should check each of those out in sequence so you know you can hit pause and back it up. That's the beauty. That's the beauty of this technology, this brand new technology that we're using right now. You should check out all of those things and connect with Chris on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, you're going to see him as Christopher Parsons. Before we hit record, we talked about the conflict there and people ask me too, right, what's my name? Well, my name is Jeffrey, but only if it's my mom speaking and I'm in real trouble. So, if you're looking for Chris on LinkedIn, look for Christopher Parsons, ceo and founder of Knowledge Architecture. Chris, thanks so much for joining me and it's been a fantastic conversation, yeah.
Speaker 2:Thanks for being such a good interviewer. That was a lot of fun. Great Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. Thanks for being such a good interviewer. That was a lot of fun, oh great. Thank you for that. I appreciate it, and for everybody listening. We appreciate you listening. I'll be back again next week with another conversation. Maybe I'll be with KP Reddy, Maybe it'll be another surprise guest here on KP Unpacked. We're really starting to expand the offerings here on KP Unpacked, so you never know who might show up next week on the podcast. So thanks for listening. We appreciate all of you. If you haven't joined Catalyst yet, go to kpready K-P-R-E-D-D-Y dot C-O. Fill out I believe it's three forms or three fields right there on the homepage. Jump on the wait list. You'll end up having a conversation with me, for better, for worse and you can jump into our online community called Catalyst. It is the place to talk about and push innovation for the built environment. So I appreciate you being here. My name is Jeff Eccles. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again next week. Thanks everybody.