The Knowledge Architecture Founder and CEO is bringing together his staff and clients in vibrant communities that help everyone get smarter.
How can you build a firm that is a standout player in software for the architecture, engineering and construction industry? Chris Parsons is a great person to ask.
The founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture has achieved positive results through a focus on building a customer community. And he has helped his firm stand out through their signature AEC product: an AI search system called Synthesis.
In this episode of Everything Thought Leadership, Chris joins us to discuss how Knowledge Architecture serves its customers, what makes Synthesis special, and how the firm has evolved over the years. He also talks about why having a narrow but deep focus serves his clients far better; and how his firm’s communities are making it easier to identify client problems to solve, develop products that solve them, and help everyone keep up with changes in the industry and grow smarter together.
Edited Transcript: Chris Parsons and Bob Buday
Bob Buday: Chris, I have been admiring you and your firm since 2011, when I became interested in the topic of how B2B companies were building in-person and online communities to advance the collective wisdom of everybody involved. You had a LinkedIn group at the time, and today you have your own private group, but I always looked at you as best practice in use of community, in nurturing your product and service offering, and in building relationships with clients and potential clients. I wanted to have you on our podcast because I believe B2B companies that compete on thought leadership can learn a ton from you and from Knowledge Architecture about using a customer community to develop thought leadership and improve their product and service offerings.
In 2014 you invited me to speak at your KA Connect annual conference in San Francisco. That’s 11 years ago, and it seemed that thought leadership was less of a thing in the architecture and engineering industry. I’m wondering if my presentation about thought leadership was relevant to your audience then.
Chris Parsons: I’m also an admirer of your work, and all of your writing really influenced how we market and think. I remember how you talked about the connection between thought leadership and knowledge management, and how knowledge management was a foundation for thought leadership. That is true, but I think it’s more of a loop, more of a two-way relationship.
You told a story of your old firm (CSC Index) that pioneered business process reengineering. They got credit for the idea, but they didn’t necessarily win the lion’s share of the delivery of that work because they didn’t change the consulting on the back end. Firms like Accenture win that. We discussed how one of the core reasons was that knowledge management wasn’t there. They didn’t figure out how to translate it from key subject matter experts’ heads into dozens of people who could then take that out and run their own implementation. Training programs, documentation of best practices, and communities of practice to share and learn from each other are all important.
Thought leadership is oftentimes the tip of the spear. But it will have minimal impact if it doesn’t get backed up, and if you don’t build the processes and the knowledge to help translate that through the organization. You don’t scale it. Knowledge management is a key tool for scaling thought leadership, as well as surfacing new ideas that can be developed. There’s a very symbiotic kind of relationship between the two.
Bob: I totally agree. As I said in my book, I look at the demand and the supply part of thought leadership. But most people — 99% of them — focus only on the demand part: how to create content for marketing, selling, and winning work.
Very few people look at the supply side of thought leadership, which is how a company can scale up its services and uphold the promises to clients that have embraced its big idea.
These are the promises you’re making to the marketplace with your Harvard Business Review article, your bestselling book or whatever it is that clients think they’re buying. It’s like deciding whether you want your firm to be famous for an idea, or to change the world by having an impact on other organizations.
Chris: I agree with your assessment. It feels people are investing in Let’s just get our name out there and get known for this idea.” But then as you scratch the surface with that, it’s “Well, how are we going to deliver this? How does that happen inside our company?” In other words: “Do you want to be famous for your ideas, or do you want to be famous for the client work?”
I’m not judging. There’s a lot to be said for being an influencer like Adam Grant. He’s making an impact just on speaking. But if you’re an architecture firm or a software company or whatever, it’s not our job to have a singular celebrity in the company who’s known for their ideas. You want to deliver architecture or software that makes an impact. That’s where you need to operationalize for thought leadership.
Beyond Pretty Buildings
Bob: A few months ago, I interviewed the head of the global head of editorial at Gensler, Sam Martin, on this podcast. And they’re the world’s largest architecture and design firm by far. It seems to me that Gensler is way ahead of the pack among architecture firms in thought leadership. Is that a fair perception?
Chris: I would have agreed with you more in the past. I can’t speak definitively for everybody, but my observation over the last 25 years is that architects are part artist, part mathematician, part engineer, and part businessperson. You need to assemble a motley collection of skills to be a really successful architect. I think the comfort zone is in solving problems for a specific client, in collaboration with the client, in collaboration with the engineer.
I think the trickier part has been rising above individual projects and looking for trends that cut across projects, across clients, speaking in the language of the client versus in the language of design. There’s been this gravitational pull to want to talk about design and making beautiful, functional, amazing buildings.
It feels like that has changed. You see much more recognition of people wanting to speak at the level and the language of their clients. You see that manifested in an increased investment in R&D programs. Thought leadership plus knowledge management plus research and development — that’s the Holy Trinity in really building a smarter [architecture] firm.
Gensler has inspired a lot of firms. I don’t think everyone’s doing it the Gensler way. They are known for these big strategic insight reports, especially around workplace strategy. But there are other ways to differentiate your firm and speak the client’s language. One New York firm, Mancini Duffy, has a podcast called The Anti-Architect podcast. They interview clients and other really well-known architects about the state of things in the industry, and where it’s going and how it’s changing. I’m not totally sure if that’s thought leadership or if it gets packaged up into deeper insights. But there’s a lot of knowledge sharing about where the industry is going. Architecture firms have recognized they have to speak in their clients’ language about the things they care about, and then connect it back to design.
Bob: My perception of architecture industry marketing 20 years ago was they put pretty pictures of the buildings they design on their websites. And that’s about it, and maybe some high-level description of what they do.
Chris: Now it’s about climate, equity, health, affordable housing, fire — broader trends that people are figuring out. If you look in California, what are we going to do about fire? What are we going to do about water? Many more big, societal-level changes are driving the conversation in design than there were 15 years ago.
Building a Community
Bob: Let’s talk about your community building. In the early years of KA Connect I saw a different form of community building for CIOs in Fortune 500 companies, starting around 1987 when I went to work for CSC Index, a $40 million management consulting firm, considered big at the time. They showed how a research-based, multicompany sponsored community could lead to big ideas. They didn’t commercialize every idea, but one of them — business process redesign, or reengineering – was a big one. You could look at this as a model for the way just about any B2B company should be working with clients: Get them together every year. And I know big software companies like Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP have big user meetings every year. But it seems to me what you’re doing is very different than what the average software company does with its clients. Is that a fair statement?
Chris: Let me get back to intentionality. Even before starting Knowledge Architecture, when I was a CIO, I navigated any big new change by bringing people together. We went through a massive change in workflow in our industry, called building information modeling. Basically, that meant that instead of drawing everything in two dimensions, we were going to model everything in three dimensions, a whole big change.
I got together the other CIOs and design technology managers and had a Digital Design Breakfast Club. We got together once a month. It was a community of practice. “What are you seeing?” “What are you trying?” “What’s working, what’s not working, what do we think is coming next?”
That is an amazing way to learn when you’re at the beginning of something new, and nobody has all the answers. But people have pieces and parts of the answers. And so in a community, it takes far less time to see a much bigger picture of what’s happening, and you can all move faster.
When I started Knowledge Architecture, there were two big things. One, I was trying to bring knowledge management to AEC [the architecture, engineering and construction industry] because it hadn’t really been done. And number two, we were in the middle of what I called the “KM 2.0” wave, which was bringing the stuff on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook into the enterprise, for knowledge sharing between offices and teams.
The way I knew how to do that was through community. It was to say, “Look, I know you’re doing something with this. Let’s get together and share what we know so that we all get smarter faster.” And we’re there again with AI, which is changing the way you access knowledge and share knowledge again and again. Community is right at the heart of that. It’s a killer app for navigating change as a community. It’s also a win/win — a benefit for the community members, a benefit for Knowledge Architecture. The product gets better. It’s a very symbiotic way to do it. It’s also super-fulfilling for me.
I enjoy learning that way. You get a lot of good raw inputs. And then, as you start synthesizing and crystallizing the ideas, you’ve got a built-in community for testing those ideas during every step along that product journey or thought leadership idea journey.
Focusing on Ongoing Relationships
Bob: Do you think Knowledge Architecture would have been less successful had you started with the traditional software industry approach of having an annual user group meeting, but not an ongoing customer community?
Chris: Whether you’re talking about Gensler or whether you’re talking about Knowledge Architecture, programs like thought leadership or a [customer] community is in the DNA of the founding team. It’s so deep in the way that we relate to clients.
Our biggest competitor is SharePoint from Microsoft, which is essentially free. If you’re going to take on a huge company that’s basically distributing their product for free, you need to make it very clear that not only is your product completely different, but the whole experience of interacting with your company is also different — whether that’s our community, our client success team, the fact that we build AEC-specific advice and best practices, or that we can point to successful case studies from our community. I can’t imagine Knowledge Architecture without our community at the heart of it.
Our goal is not to be biggest software company in the world. Otherwise, we’d be doing this very differently. We would have raised venture capital. We would have a whole different go-to-market strategy. We’re trying to build an experience for clients who want to use this. We use the term “smarter by design.” We want to help clients make the best use of their knowledge to empower people to trust and share.
Michael Schrage of MIT wrote a book called “Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?” The whole idea is having a vision for who you want your customers to be and who you want them to become through working with you. We have a strong vision around that.
A Tightly Integrated System
Bob: Do you guys deliver consulting services as well as your platform – and only to AEC firms that license your platform?
Chris: It’s a tightly coupled system. Yes, we provide strategy and implementation and ongoing [customer] success [services], and a lot of that advice is drawn from our community. So our customer community is a feeder system to our advice as well.
Bob: Are you ever asked to provide consulting services to companies that don’t have your platform?
Chris: Yes, we are asked. And we tell them, “Sorry.” We explain the whole integrated system. I believe that software is a form of thought leadership because it is so directly rooted in the insights we learn through our community. Those insights show up in the software as an advantage.
If the client doesn’t have our platform, consulting for them is like putting one arm behind our back – they won’t be able to use our product to help deliver the results that we’re trying to deliver. It doesn’t make any sense for us to do this without our technology. It’s like asking someone to help run your cab business who came from Waymo [the driverless car ride sharing app.] There may be a car at the center of this. But the way that car is manifested out into the world is dramatically different.
We’ve made a lot of investment in AI search. That’s the primary way we’re deploying AI that’s tightly woven into our platform, which is connected to the AEC systems like the ERPs [enterprise resource planning systems] and the CRMs [customer relationship management systems] and all those enterprise systems they use. We’re also adding a learning management system into that mix. So that intranet with those integrations, the AI, search and the LMS, are all tightly coupled.
Bob: Has it ever been tempting over the years to take on a customer who is willing to spend whatever – a half million dollars or more – to help them ramp up the knowledge management curve without purchasing your platform? To just be knowledge management consultants?
Chris: It hasn’t been tempting. In fact, it’s been the opposite of tempting, and part of it is because I started my career in consulting. I’m probably going to offend a lot of people on your podcast. I’ve worked in the time-and-materials, billing-by-the-hour model. I got very frustrated in it because usually at the end I delivered a report and that was the end of the engagement. You might help with some implementation work, but [largely] you’re not there.
We’ve got clients that have been on our platform for 15 years, and we’ve watched leadership change over. We’ve watched people grow from being interns to being leaders in the program. A client I was talking to last week had 60 people when they joined us. They have over 250 people now. They built a knowledge management department. We have this long-running relationship, and it scales.
If we were offering consulting services to companies that didn’t have our platform, it would be me and maybe a few other senior people spending all our time working on that half million-dollar report. But we would not be building impact for our other clients. Community is that way to navigate change together, and we all learn from it.
Why Communities Are Vital
Bob: I sense a lot of people will not really understand the importance of a customer community like the type you’ve had for years. So, convince somebody who said, “Is the community really that necessary? You could have spent that time and money somewhere else — hiring more salespeople to sell your product, etc.”
Chris: It depends on your priorities. A lot of us have experienced community through software companies — as an example, you sign up for this thing, and it’s a way to do [service] ticket deflection. You ask your question, and they try and get their client base to answer your question instead of their own people.
There’s an emerging use case for our technology that we’re calling “marketing research assistant.” Because we have all that information about past employees and project work, past proposals and other things, people can ask questions like “When was the last time we built a project in Oregon that was over 50,000 square feet and had X challenge with it?” Or “Write me a draft approach to how we talk about mass timber and climate change,” or something like that.
This emerging capability seems very promising but is not ready for prime time yet. I pulled together five CMOs and marketing directors from our community, and we’re meeting monthly to work through what “great” might look like, and what’s working now. So it’s partly product development, but it’s also understanding what it would mean for their businesses. If this works, what’s the impact? It’s a step up from a small research group.
We have a Research Council of 20 firms. That’s a little bit more of a permanent thing. We meet in person once a year and get together almost monthly. We have an online community that’s had continuity over many, many years and a deep level of trust. They are great as a way for us to test our research, but they also use it for themselves too. So if someone’s trying to tackle a new program or trying to do something new, they can use that same community to learn. We talk about our hopes and dreams with one another, and then it scales up to larger clusters and groups, then all the way to our conference, which is the biggest manifestation of it. Every step along the way, you can curate these groups of people who share common interests to help us all advance and get smarter together.
Identifying Problems to Solve
Bob: So does your research lead to product improvements and enhancements, or new services?
Chris: I’ll give you a story. We went through a massive rewrite of our platform between 2000 and 2023. We deliberately didn’t have any product roadmap mapped out past that massive upgrade. What I then did is I launched a listening tour with 50 to 60 of our long-term clients. We asked them what was on their mind right now — not even necessarily KA or Synthesis specific, but about their challenges as a company, and how they thought we could help. What aren’t we doing now that we should be doing, or doing better? Two challenges came out: AI, and learning and development. They’ve got a bunch of baby boomers retiring; the half-life of knowledge is shrinking; they have other challenges that are learning and development related. Out of that, we decided to build a learning management system.
These systems have been around for 25-30 years, but ours came from deep insight that is deeply linked to our clients. We generally work with architecture and engineering firms with 50 to 500 people, although a few are much larger. Most learning management software is written generically, and not industry specific. It’s written for very large companies. Because we have a strong insight of the actual problems our industry is struggling with, we’ve built a technology that’s wildly different than anything that you’ve seen on the market. It’s deeply coupled with AI search in our intranet, which is also unusual. And now we’re vetting our product design again with our community, and as we start putting the product into beta and rolling it out, our community is going to help us figure out how to prepare for it and adopt it. Our community is there in every stage, and it’s minimizing the risk.
Bob: It seems as if it’s tremendously minimizing the risk of a product failure here.
Chris: I think you’re right. Have you ever heard this Jeff Bezos story about whenever Amazon started a new project, they’d start with the press release? We don’t do that, but we do figure out the storytelling all the way along, from the beginning. That storytelling isn’t rooted in how smart we are. It’s rooted in the client challenges and the insights and what we learned from them. It’s really about us getting smarter together with clients. That leads naturally to thought leadership and marketing, because you’ve earned the right to tell that story, because you’ve developed that story together.
Bob: So does Knowledge Architecture have a thought leadership module for architecture firms?
Chris: Let me give you a really good example. One of our clients is LS3P out in Charleston, a 500-person architecture firm. They have started a program where they get two experts together, and one expert interviews the other expert for an hour or so on a really important topic. The goal was to spread deep, tacit knowledge and expertise throughout the company. They record all of that and make it available on their intranet. But marketing is sitting in the room. While the interviews are about employee development and education and knowledge management, they are also throwing off all kinds of juicy insights that marketing can use to develop thought leadership. This helps you source really interesting insights instead of having to go around and interview everybody one by one, and it’s speeding up the content development process quite a bit. It’s like an accelerant to thought leadership.
Bob: It almost sounds like automating the white paper process, content development process, in a way.
Chris: What’s different in this era of thought leadership is it doesn’t necessarily have to come from the most senior people in the organization. The seeds of it might come from a junior person who just saw something different because of their life experience or what they know about technology. They have an angle, and they share it. And then that can get amplified and developed. It’s a much more democratic way of figuring out where good ideas come from.
Making Insights More Accessible
Bob: Let’s talk about your new newsletter, Smarter by Design. What’s, what was the rationale behind that?
Chris: We have historically done a good job at creating long-form video content: recordings at our conferences, webinars, podcasts, me going on podcast episodes. We are pretty good at 45-minute or hour-long content. But we needed to put the front end on our insights to help ease people into them. A lot of people are never going to spend 45 minutes to an hour watching a video or webinar. People may not have the time, and videos and webinars are hard to skim. We have so much good insight that can actually help people, but it’s not as in an accessible format as it could be. The newsletter is one step among many that we’re taking, including the short form stuff on LinkedIn, to help take that deep case study and condense it into 1200 to 1500 words. That’s still pretty rich, but it’s a much lower investment initially. Maybe you’ll end up reading the whole thing, or maybe you got what you needed.
After more than 15 years in business we’ve got 150 K-Connect talks and many webinars in the archive. We’ve just learned so much from this community, and we’re seeing young knowledge managers enter our community now who didn’t have the benefit of being around for the last 15 years. We are starting to figure out how to tell these stories in ways that help people who are new to knowledge management, and to speed up the learning curve so it’s faster than it was for us.
Bob: You can preach to the already converted for hours, right? But you can’t preach for hours to the unconverted, who might only give you a minute or two then decide whether they want to learn any more. The younger generation is used to mobile devices and social media, which make it hard to focus attention on any one thing.
Chris: Half of it is wanting to tell those stories of leading firms and knowledge management. I’m getting to go back and revisit some of the old stories, and I’m doing interviews to bring them up to date. Last week I spoke with a client from 2016, so we could review what’s happened over the last almost 10 years. The other half of it is we’re at this transformation wave with knowledge management 3.0, and I like to speak and write my way through these big changes. This is helping me see trends that cut across firms, and the newsletter is a good vehicle for delivering those insights for people who aren’t going to listen to a full podcast episode.
Bob: I see you now have 921 subscribers after only after one issue. That’s pretty good.
Chris: I feel happy with that. And the thing that’s even better, that you can’t see, is somewhere between 20 and 25% of those are second-degree and third-degree connections on LinkedIn, people who are new to Knowledge Architecture. The virality of social media is helping us bring new people into our universe. We’re talking about 200 to 250 new people who know who we are within two weeks, which is pretty awesome.
Resisting a Broader Customer Base
Bob: A colleague of mine just interviewed somebody who works at a large IT services company. And I saw a transcript of this discussion, and there’s a huge knowledge management problem in this IT services firm. I imagine your platform, your research, and community would be valuable to any professional services firm that is selling advice by the hour, by the project, or whatever. Have you ever been tempted to expand your target market beyond architecture and engineering?
Chris: I think there’s a couple reasons why we haven’t, From a marketing perspective, we want people to land on our website and feel like this company was built just for them, and instead of trying to spread across multiple verticals, most of our team came from AEC. I recently went to a conference that covered multiple markets, and even though we were part of it, it was very jarring to constantly look at somebody’s name tag and try to figure out if they’re in your industry, or whether this talk is going to be relevant to me.
We wanted to build a community where everyone could feel like it’s all their people. And on the product side, we just have these very deep integrations in the systems people care about. For example, we built an AEC-specific video transcription model, trained it on all the acronyms and jargon and lexicon that this industry cares about. So we pushed all our chips in, and we just want to keep plowing the same fields, only deeper. AEC is like the sixth biggest industry in the world, so there’s plenty of runway for us in terms of meeting our goals, and it’s just very satisfying to go very deep in one domain.
Visions of Success – For Clients and His Team
Bob: So where do you see your firm going over the rest of the decade? How will you define success by, say, the year 2035?
Chris: We’re in such a dynamic time right now — so, for example, we’re building the AI search piece only one release at a time. The product allows users to give us really rich feedback, which is helping tell us exactly what we should build next. In 2030 I can guarantee that we will still be investing in building synthesis. The use cases emerging from our clients are very dynamic, so we’ll be staying very close to them through that community iterative loop I talked about before. We will still be building out that learning management piece in 2030. We are releasing version one in private beta at the end of this year, and it will be really focused around on-demand courses and assignments and transcripts. But we could get into mentoring, or skills assessments.
To answer your question about what success looks like: We are building an integrated intranet that is really a comprehensive knowledge management platform. I don’t know of anything that exists like that anywhere, let alone for AEC. And so we think we’ve built something substantially more valuable and interesting. It’ll help us win new business, help us retain people, help our clients go to the next level.
Our team read a book together, “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni, about organizational health. He takes you through the classic mission/vision/values but in a very different way. A key point is that the founding team needs to write the version of the company that you think the outside world will never see. You start with the question, “Why do we exist?” I did a lot of reflection on that and shared it, and we concluded that we are a platform to help our employees build the lives they want.
That’s why I started the company, and why we’re here. It starts with being a really wonderful place to work that gives people the opportunity to be flexible, or to build the things or work on what they want to work on. And that radiates out to clients. This is the core of what success looks like. We might have target profit margins, but they are in service to keeping KA going and being healthy.
I want to be working on this into my 70s and 80s, so there’s no exit strategy. We haven’t raised venture capital, and no private equity is coming anywhere near this company. We are going to keep building as an independent company. And so to me, ensuring the fact that the band can keep playing together for the next 10, 20, or 30 years is our priority number one. The profits serve that priority. Having us be competitive and create value for our clients is all in service to that.
My wife and I don’t need a lot of money. It’s about freedom and the ability to do the work you love with people you love, serve clients you love, and build really great products.
Bob: Chris, it has been great having you on our podcast, and your newsletter is great. I’m going to read every issue, and I think it’ll be a hit.
Chris: I appreciate that, and I’ve been enjoying your podcast. Thank you.