The Future of Learning Things

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right, guys. We got like five minutes still. I like to really take advantage of any opportunity to make it awkward and weird, so-- Dad Jokes 101. I have a two-month-year-old, so I'm practicing. Here we go. Hey, what's this? I don't know either. But here comes another one. That was good. All right. Hey, what's this? It's a flock of these. Visual, yeah-- I got eight more. All right.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Do we have enough time for that?

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Oh, we'll cut into the show. This is critical, critical stuff. What do you call someone else's cheese? Nacho cheese. That's not even original. My apologies. I feel like we knew that one. Nacho cheese-- like, it's not your cheese. The word "nacho"--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] explain.

DAN CHASTEEN: Well, yeah. So it's a pun, right? So it's like a-- so "nacho" sounds like "not your." So that's why it plays. You wouldn't say, what do you call someone else's cheese? American cheese. That doesn't make any-- it doesn't play, unless of course it's somebody who is, in fact, American that's owning the cheese. But then, you're still generalizing. You get it, though. All right. My son's going to love this stuff.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: We do start off with a two minute review of a Google Photos album of my child. Are you guys cool with that? All right. Here he is in the bathroom. Here he is in the bedroom. He's always-- it's crazy, because he just keeps moving to different places in our apartment. It's good stuff. I got four more minutes, man. I'm not going to let there be silence. Teasing.

It's this or I start singing Hamilton. [VOCALIZES HAMILTON MUSIC] Anybody? (SINGING) How does a-- (SPEAKING) anybody? Hamilton? At all-- the Broadway show? I'll keep going. You don't know it? I'll just rehearse the whole thing. All right, so it starts off.

[LAUGHTER]

[? Close ?] [? the scene. ?] Lin-Manuel Miranda comes out.

All right, this presentation is either going to be really good or really, really bad. It's all going to be determined by how obnoxious I decide I want to be. I'm just kidding. You know what? I need a cup of coffee. I'm too calm. All right.

AUDIENCE: Hey Justin?

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [? You have ?] a two-month-old?

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Yes.

AUDIENCE: So this is what happens when you get eight hours of sleep.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: So I know, right? So jacked. Honestly, my wife is so upset. She's like, you're going to Vegas. If anything, to go to Vegas to sleep is a little special. But it's two days of eight hours, man. Hooah. It's great. Oh, yeah. So. I mean, I literally went to bed at 9:00 last night. That was my choice. I'm in Las Vegas. What are you going to do? Go to bed at 9:00. Gonna maybe sleep till 5:00-- I don't even know-- because I can. Yeppers.

I called the wife, though. I said, how's it going-- like I could help if she said it was bad. But-- let's FaceTime. Oh, you're crying. Oh, gotta go. He's crying. Super stressful. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Are you in rehearsal for America's Got Talent?

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Oh, first of all, I like the idea that you've seen something in here that is talent. And I appreciate that. So yeah. Yes. Yes, indeed, I'm practicing. I think I got moves like-- yeah, well, you'll see. The ability to never stop talking-- that's my skill.

Welcome. All right. I'm not taking this microphone off. In fact, this is the best. This is it. I'm going to leave the room and be talking during other people's presentations. Hello. Aren't they doing a great job? I think so.

[CELL PHONE RINGS]

Wow. Just kidding. No worries. How we doing? Whoa, one minute. OK, do you want to do the handshake that we practiced?

DAN CHASTEEN: Yeah.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right. Or chest bump or something? Well, you stay there. I'll come-- ready? 1-- all right. Come on in. Wait a second. In fact, I need to capture the moment. Look at you guys, beautiful souls. This is going to go on the Autodesk Activity Stream. Look at this. Are you ready? Who looks good? You guys do. And so do you. Oh, but you guys again. It would be better if I were in it [LAUGHS].

That's going up. Oh, it's blurry. Sorry guys. This is going to be critical. Everybody hold the pose. You guys got it? We're good? [YELLS] All right. Give me some time to post it. We can start late. You ready? All right.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK. [INAUDIBLE]

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right, now I'm going to be serious-- no more. Let's do it. All right.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so it's 8 o'clock. We'd better get started before Justin--

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Keeps talking.

DAN CHASTEEN: --goes into a song and dance routine.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: If we have time at the end, I will get back into it.

DAN CHASTEEN: All right. OK, so we want to thank everybody for coming out this morning. I know it's hard to get to an 8:00 AM class. So we really appreciate it. This is going to be The Future of Learning Things, OK? So we're going to discuss maybe some new ways to go about learning, how things are changing in our industry.

So just some quick introductions. I'm Dan Chasteen. I work at Perkins and Will. I'm a digital practice manager. I work out of the Atlanta office. And both of us have "support" underneath or beside our names, there. And we do other things as well. We could have listed other items. But we really wanted to highlight support because that's related to what we're going to be presenting today. And what we're presenting originated out of support. So we'll get more into that.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: So, yeah, my name is Justin Benjamin. I'm a design application manager for the DC office of Perkins and Will. I always think it's maybe good to note that I do focus primarily on just my staff and ensuring that these individual people are able to be successful in their everyday, whereas Dan focuses on the firm in a broader sense.

And so he has the big idea and then kind of brings it down to myself. And then I help implement. And so we kind of cover the gamut that is support. So I tend to think that helps lend itself to how we have come up with something of a strategy today.

DAN CHASTEEN: So another thing, just-- it's not forwarding.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: [INAUDIBLE] I can help. Boom, there it is.

DAN CHASTEEN: Thank you.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Fair warning.

DAN CHASTEEN: Yeah, so fair warning, one of us is a fast talker.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Right.

DAN CHASTEEN: Justin might be the fastest talker at Perkins and Will. And I don't know if I'm the slowest. But a couple of years ago, after I did an AU presentation, I did have a friend come and tease me that BIM is not two syllables. So just fair warning, this could go a little fast and slow. So just bear with us.

OK, so a few things about Perkins and Will as it relates to what we're going to be presenting-- Perkins and Will has 25 offices worldwide. They're mostly in North America. And we have 26,000 employees, more or less. And those are 26,000 potential learners, right? So that's something that we have to deal with-- helping people out with digital tools and digital competency.

And so the machines that we use to do the majority of our design and documentation on, they come with 40-plus apps just as a base install. And that is a lot of applications. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about little plug-ins or add-ins, here, or little utilities. These are real apps. So that is a lot to deal with if you're a Perkins and Will employee, to be able to use those apps to add values to projects.

So also, there's about 25 support people, roughly. And so we have a 1-to-100 ratio there. And probably, like many of yourselves, you're struggling with learning and so forth. That's not a lot of support people for the number of employees that we have. And we have so much knowledge to transfer and new software coming out all the time. So it's a real challenge.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Yes. So yeah, real quick, before we get right into the meat of it-- I know everybody tends to do polls like this. But I really think it's super relevant, more so than the average, in that I want to know who you guys are, all right? And so, just real quick-- and I tend to think the first question is going to get the most-- who here would consider themselves a designer? Sweet. Oh, awesome. Great. Arguably, I'd say that you guys are the tool users, more so than anybody else. You're the tool users that, in fact, are being able to better the product through these applications, right? So you guys are a big deal, right?

Next to that, though, who would be any application innovators, support like myself, or a professor or a consultant? All right, so maybe potential overlap even a little bit there, right? You guys, I mean honestly, we tend to think that as much as we say innovators, we often are mechanics, because we're just solving problems and being overwhelmed by having to solve those problems versus able to take great ideas and implement them, right? It's kind of what we're building into.

And finally, the firm leadership, influencers? Ooh, hello. Welcome. All right. So yeah, in my mind, these are the guys that say, let's be the cutting edge. Why aren't we at the cutting edge? Are we doing the best and greatest thing? And I'm not trying to oversimplify. But often, from that firm leadership, it kind of comes down and asks the designers what tool-- are we using all the latest and greatest tools to ensure that we're doing the most informed kind of design, right? And so it's that big picture inquiry and down to the designers to, again, try to find the tools that support them.

So again, there's a lot of overlap, which is good. I find that all of us are going to be-- oh, I have one more question I guess, which is, did I miss anyone? But if I missed you, you're probably not that important. [LAUGHS] I'm just kidding. Did I miss anyone? I'm kidding. You're important. If somebody raised their hand, that would have made me feel super awkward. Anyway, all critical parties [? on, ?] which is a going to be further validated in a moment.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so always a good idea to go over the learning objectives. So we're going to try to cover how to quickly advance your firm's expertise, not just with Autodesk tools but with lots of digital tools. This could apply to any digital tools. And then, we're going to show a strategy for capturing concise how-to answers. And then, you need to be able to share those, so a technique for sharing expertise in a very quick-to-follow format. This is important, because if it's not quick to follow, nobody's going to use it.

And then, once you have a lot of how-to information, you need a place to house it. And also, it's not a job for one person. We want to be able to have everyone contribute. So you want to be able to expand it, right? And so when you house it and expand it, you want also for people to be able to access it, so that they can sort of do self-help.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right, who's pumped? Huh? Huh? It's crazy. You guys, I'm telling you right now, best looking crowd-- today-- that I've seen.

DAN CHASTEEN: [LAUGHS]

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: I love it. All right, let's do it.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so we're going to cover the agenda also, here, so everybody knows where we're headed. So first section is what, why, and how. If it's not clear, this is the argument that we're making for why to do this. And then, we're going to move on to reality check. So the reality check is our observations of what people are doing today in terms of learning. What is and isn't working?

And then we'll move on to relevant history. As I mentioned earlier, this solution, it originated out of support. And it developed further within support, which has everything to do with how it looks and sort of justifies the fact that it actually works. And so it was an issue where we were trying to troubleshoot doing support. So then, we're going to, of course, do the big idea, which is obviously the solution.

And then, we'll do what's next. So it's evolving. We're taking on new stuff. So what are we doing immediately in the immediate future? And then, in the not-too-distant future, what do we plan to do? And then, of course, we'll just reflect and make sure that we covered our objectives.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Cool. I've got to be honest. That's an exciting agenda. Well done so far. I love it.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so what inspired our thinking? We'll start here. And just last week, I went to Autodesk's website. And I realize all these icons on the screen aren't all Autodesk. But that's not really important. Autodesk's website listed 146 products. I mean, that's pretty exciting. It's also kind of overwhelming. And none of us use all of those. Our industry may not use all of those. But it's still a lot of software. And Autodesk is a big player. They're arguably the player. But there are lots of other software companies, too-- lots of other software out there.

And so we live in a software-rich environment. But all those tools is very exciting. They could add a lot of value, right? But they don't add any value to anybody's project until the team learns how to use them properly. And then, that requires us to learn it first. But this is what we're asking is, do we really have to learn it first?

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Ooh, what? I don't have to learn software to use it and be successful? I don't-- that seems crazy. You have to tell me more.

So having said that, though, I like to think of a designer with all these tools, potentially in this kind of situation, when in fact, earlier on-- oh, this tool. This is a game changer. Let's buy it. Let's purchase it. Come on. We need to invest. Firm buys it, purchases it. It's in their back pocket. But sure enough, they buy all these other applications, which, again, would potentially support this concept of be it a dozen to two dozen tools sitting on their shoulders.

When it comes to actually using them-- overwhelmed. Which tool is the best tool? These kind of overlap. I don't know. I'm just going to use Revit and draw by hand. So I tend to ask you to reflect on your own office and firm and say, hey, how many applications do you have licenses to right now? And of those applications, how many of those licenses are you using on a regular? And at one point, when you bought those licenses, did you not say to yourself, this is worth buying? This is going to change the workflow. This is going to streamline.

So again, with this being the burden, I tend to think the reason why we're not using these applications is, well, adoption, right? You've been overwhelmed. You don't know when to use what application and when it's best to serve you.

So Mr. Clippy, which, if you're not familiar with Mr. Clippy from the Microsoft products, early 2000s, late '90s, he was arguably obnoxious, which was probably why I liked him. But he-- it was an idea that Microsoft had that was really quite impressive-- it just was not [? poorly ?] thought out or implemented-- which was hey, look. We have Microsoft Word. We have Resumes. We got all these other features and workflows and plug-ins that nobody ever uses.

But we put-- our dev team has built them and put all this time into them. We see value. Why aren't people using it? Because they don't know it exists. Or rather, they forgot that it exists, even if they liked it at one time, right? So Mr. Clippy just kind of jumps in and says, hey, you're trying to build a resume-- which I never was. I was like 19 years old. I was working at Burger King. But Mr. Clippy, again, constantly insisting, hey, can I help you? If I can, I'm going to show you this feature that would apply.

So same kind of concept, here, is if somehow we can take all your tools and, again, ask the designers not to worry about learning all of them. And after learning all of them, you'll know best when to use them. Rather, have them in your back pocket. And then, just have a way to have something kind of conveniently inform you that, hey, look. You're about to broach something that-- I don't know if you remember-- you've got this tool for. Do you want to give it a go? And by the way, this tool-- you don't need 100% of it. You need 2% of it.

So notice again, you're going from overwhelmed to being put at ease. And that's kind of where our goal is with all these applications. So with that faster-- with the ability to adopt, in theory, these tools that you purchased more quickly, one would assume that you guys would use them more, right? So that said, again, we're trying to remove the idea of learning an application thoroughly, so that you know when to use it and just being able to be, in fact, an expert [? in a ?] moment.

So I tend to think of this going grocery shopping. I don't-- if you have to go to the store to buy a series of ingredients for a big old recipe, even if you don't know the store, you're not going to go there, all kind of, oh, my god. There's so much-- there are so many options, so many aisles. Where am I going? I mean, and instead, you're going to walk the aisles. You're going to calmly say, oh, of all this type of pasta, I want that one. Of all this type of-- be it-- I want this, that, and the other thing.

And that's the same way I want applications to be. I want Revit to be an aisle. I want Rhino to be an aisle, et cetera. And I want you to go there and say, you know what? I only want this bit of Revit. I want this bit of Rhino. So that same kind of ease, that's kind of where we're building.

So that said is-- that again, of being our goal, I reflect on my own staff right now. And I'm going to reiterate that out of 65 staff in the DC office, on any giv-- depending on the tool, we have two people that can use it. Everybody can use Revit at this point and AutoCAD for that reason. But again, Computational Design, Dynamo, Rhino, Grasshopper, be it all these things-- we only have a couple of people that can use these tools.

And so when a project wants to use them, they would have to resource those one or two people. And that's just an impossibility. That staff is-- that person is going to be working 80, 90 hours, if not double that, because every project manager is going to try to jump on them, because they know the tool.

So again, I guess, to further reiterate, that's the challenge. So our goal is to make it so that you can use the tools as though you were an expert on day one. So no matter the task, you can approach it and tackle it as though you've been doing it every day, all right? So again, I know we're kind of beefing up the big picture here. But that is our goal, to make it so you can be an expert.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so how can we change? And what I really mean here is, how can we change what we're doing about learning, how we go about learning, adopting software? So Justin and I both work within a group at Perkins and Will called Digital Practice. And so in Digital Practice, we're asking three questions. Is it possible to benefit from tools before learning? Can we improve digital competency without training? And can we make adoption convenient? So those are really what we're getting at here.

So we're going to move on to the reality check. And again, this is the observation about the tools that we are-- how are we going about learning tools today-- what we've observed.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right? [INAUDIBLE]

DAN CHASTEEN: It's all you.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Oh, good. Excellent. Yeah, so the first thing we have to do is unsuccessful solutions. I know this is going to hurt a little bit, because I'm sure we're all using these. In fact, even Perkins and Will to this day, at certain moments in time is, in fact, still creating written tutorials and creating other firm-specific content. But we find these ultimately unsuccessful. And I'd argue that so must you, if, in fact, you're in the same situation as we, in that a lot of applications that you've purchased. But you're only using a small percentage.

Because if that is the case-- if you are feeling that challenge-- well, then, heck, your written tutorials are not covering the gamut of your staff. And why aren't they working? Because they're overwhelming. I'm sorry. I don't have time to read this. I don't care how simple, on this one sheet of paper. It's too much. You know what? Can't do it.

Also lacks convenience. I mean, we have 26 offices. Which network do we need to go to, to find which tutorial? Ah, come on. Written tutorials just again, for that very reason, are pretty challenging.

Firm-wide videos and the ethernet-- if you guys-- we have a [INAUDIBLE] page, which is like an internal web page that in theory one can navigate relatively well to find the resources and tutorials they need. I'd argue it's still way overwhelming. Look at this. I mean, I'm clicking on links. I'm cycling through. If anything, I'm going to a solution that has pages of written text and an embedded video-- if you want to watch that-- which is probably 20, 30 minutes long. And maybe it has bookmarks to maybe where I want to go.

But again, if I'm telling staff, hey, look. You can use this tool tomorrow. Just go to this page, and make sure you have four hours to read this documentation. It's not-- arguably, again, it's a fail.

Then I think, formal training. Honestly, telling somebody how to do something that they're going to ultimately do in eight months is not going to be helpful. They're going to need to be retaught it in eight months, right? So again, not saying that these solutions aren't potentially helpful here and there. But they're not covering the gamut.

And finally, Lynda. Lynda, I personally love. But-- [INAUDIBLE]-- I personally love, but again, that's for the ambitious user that has ample time to really learn something, the non-billable user. So that said-- oh, that's you.

DAN CHASTEEN: That's me.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: [? Talk. ?]

DAN CHASTEEN: All right, so now we want to talk about another issue which is distractions. So when we were approaching various support people around the firm about this idea of creating lots of [? how-to's ?] on how to do things, a really common argument that was made is, why do we need to make all these how-to answers? We can just Google it, right? And yes, you can.

But there are a lot of distractions on the internet. And so every time, as designers, we leave our design space and we go out to the internet to look for answers, we're at risk for being distracted. And there's lots of good information on the internet, obviously. There's bloggers from our industry that we very much appreciate. And they can write lengthy articles about a topic and really go in-depth about it. And that's great.

But what we need most of the time is we need a quick answer on how to do something. That's the piece that's missing. So there's also other websites that are-- which is arguably-- most of them are designed to really keep your attention. That's what they're trying to do. So there's an issue there with getting distracted. And so that's to say nothing of stuff that we already know about, like Facebook.

So it all starts this way-- all very honest-- where you leave your design space to go search for a question on Google. And you end up maybe checking out Facebook. Or maybe something comes up with an interesting video. And you watch a little bit of YouTube. And next thing you know, you're shopping for shoes and maybe planning a vacation. And then, all these ads start popping up. You just get inundated with all this, right?

So what we're talking about is, what's the cost of that? Is it really a quick answer? And so we're suggesting to have answers where people get the answer to their question immediately. It tells them exactly what to do. And they move on and do what it is they really want to do, which is focus on the design they're working on.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right, so then, the observation part is we've accepted that we are flawed or that our current situation is flawed. These current methods of training and learning are not getting the job done. So what does work? Well, I would say that before I started at a company, prior to Perkins and Will, my wife told me all about the boss I was going to meet the next day, and how he just went to Germany, where he went to school, his wife, and-- oh, and his kids. His daughter just got a puppy or something. What? I don't even know his name. I didn't even know I was working with him tomorrow. How is it that you figure-- you know what you know?

It's because my wife is obsessed with Instagram. No. It's because, quite literally-- social media. She just goes through, unconsciously learning things, because it's easy to browse and to find your way through a person's profile. So really, social media-- as much as I don't love it, I love it.

Its successes are unquestionable, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. All these platforms do something very, very well. And arguably, they're informing you. Whether the information's good or what it's about is really on them.

And then, finally, networking, word of mouth. This is my favorite, because I get to talk. I just love talking out loud. But it's really-- it's through chatting with people, also, whether you're at the-- getting a cup of coffee in your office, and you end up chatting with a co-worker. And, oh, you're having that problem, too? Me, too. This is what I did. Oh, my. Super interesting. And now, you just evolved. You've learned something, right?

Where I'm going with this is that the commonality, rather, of all these methods of learning things is just a short burst of knowledge and crazy convenient. Whether it-- talking to people is arguably pretty convenient. Hey, how are you? What's going on? How's it going, Josh? See, now I know he's good, because I'm informed. But it's that convenience. And again, well, heck, if you're on social media, you can-- whether you're on your phone or your computer, you're again accessing data really, really well and really easily.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so we're going to move on to relevant history, here, and talk about how this format or solution came to be. So it really started as canned responses. So early on, when I was working at Perkins and Will, I was responsible as the primary support person to five offices. It's really a lot of people. I had people standing in line at my desk, and while I'm emailing someone, and on the phone with somebody, and instant messaging of some kind. And it was a little overwhelming. Couldn't get to everybody. I'm unhappy. Other people are unhappy. They're not getting their questions answered.

And so through that, I realized a lot of the questions were repeat questions. And I started creating just text-based canned responses. And I mean, this worked really well. It definitely reached more people, helped more people get answers to their support questions. But this text-based answer, it didn't work for everybody. There were people who kept hitting reply, right? They kept coming back. And that's frustrating when you're trying to save time and so forth. Not suggesting that I hit anybody with a stick, but it was very frustrating for me.

So through that, we revised the canned responses. And eventually, that led to a new format. And so this format, it favored graphics. It minimized the text. We had arrows to lead people around from one mouse click to the next. And then, we numbered the steps. And once we did all this, the replies stopped. So everybody was happy. This was a format that worked for everybody. We know it works, because we've been sending stuff out like this for more than a couple of years.

So it's a great format. It worked for us. And now, we're trying to do more with it. So after we did that, it grew. And other support people got involved. They started making their own canned responses. And then, they began sending them back to me, sharing those canned responses. And so we had a lot of canned responses, and we needed a place to put them.

So we put them in this thing called Quickparts, which is a part of Outlook. And that worked great. We were able to store all of our Quickparts and organize them in there. And then, when we responded via email, we could just quickly pull them up and post them in the email. And it worked great. And so we had sort of matured the format.

And we began answering these really complex questions, which was exciting, because then we began to think, well, how far could this go? It seems like there's no answer we can't put in this format. And we even played around with doing some processes, which was a bit more tough-- so just some simple processes.

But then, IT updated Outlook. They wiped our Quickparts clean. So it was a little bit frustrating. So we went back to old emails, got all our canned responses, organized them again. And then, we created backups of our Quickparts. But I don't know what the problem was. But we never could seem to make this work. IT continued to wipe our Quickparts out. It was really frustrating. And I finally just gave up on it as a means of trying to organize our how-to answers. So it was time to look for something else.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: All right, so even though Dan was absolutely pretty successful with his solution in his office-- [? be it ?] Atlanta-- even though it was super frustrating at the end there-- that solution would have to make its way to, of course, even our firm to get to really a proper-- to be seen, rather, as a proper resource by everybody. And that happened, I think, almost unintentionally. It was serendipitous.

We do a DA summit, which is a Design Applications summit, every other year or so, where 25-plus of us get into a room. And we just kind of talk, try to innovate-- common problems and again, what-not like that. But at this summit, we did a couple of things that are pertinent to this topic. And one of them was-- can't do it. It's Pikachu. I know what that says.

DAN CHASTEEN: Pecha Kucha.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Nope. Pikachu. So I don't know if you're familiar with this. But we were all given three-minutes-plus to run through, I think, 10 slides or so.

DAN CHASTEEN: 10 slides.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: 10 slides to kind of cover an idea. I don't remember my idea, what it was exactly. But I know that it was probably awesome. So I was good. But that's not-- but his idea-- Dan's idea-- was basically the relevant history that you just saw. He showed us what he was essentially trying to work out in his own office.

And that really-- it was a Eureka moment, because during the same summit, we did pass the dragon, which is the only way you're going to make it so one person talks at a time, where if you have the dragon, you can talk. That's it. But as we pass the dragon, we're all just venting about the same thing. We're supposed to be innovators. We're supposed to be doing all sorts of great things, cutting edge technology for Perkins and Will. And yet, we can't, because why? We don't have the time. We're mechanics. We want to be innovators, but we are constantly, every day, solving these small problems that are arguably repetitious. And it just-- it takes the bulk of our week.

So his idea was this epiphany. If we could just go ahead and remove at a minimum the most common challenges or questions from staff weekly, then maybe-- we worked it, did the math-- roughly saving around six to eight hours over the course of five days if we could answer these just common questions easily. So again, we wanted to embark on this effort.

And so at that very meeting, we said, OK, great. You know what? Let's build on this. Everybody break into groups. Come up with questions that you always have to answer in your office. And then together, we found, out of 200 complaints that we probably listed, we came down to 50 common complaints that were shared by most offices. And at that very moment, that very same day, we all went ahead and tackled two or three of these questions, creating these Quickpart-like solutions. And we termed it differently. And you're going to see that in a second.

But sure enough, we walked away from that meeting, in one day, with 50 cards, 50 questions answered. And we did it in a way that was complemented by everything we've talked to you, just now, as far as having learned all that we've learned, observations and whatnot like that. We had our solutions-- 50 solutions. We went back to our offices. And you know what? It frickin' worked. It was awesome.

So that, arguably, is the foundation for [ BLOWS] the big idea. That was a good segue. I've never done it like that before. Oh, my god.

DAN CHASTEEN: Let me-- I want to go back here just for a second, though. Sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

I was thinking about something where-- so it was also at this time that microKnowledge was-- that term began to be used. Or maybe we branded the [? how-to's. ?] So you're going to start hearing us say microKnowledge. Well, we're referring to both all these how-to answers as well as a website, which we'll talk about later. But we might also use the term MK card. That's also referring to the [? how-to's. ?] So just in case-- those terms are sort of interchangeable there.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Mm-kay. Mm-kay.

DAN CHASTEEN: All right, so let's just move on to the big idea, what the solution is. So our original idea was not approved by HR. So we had to move on to the second best idea, which is the transfer of knowledge.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Indeed, indeed. So again, reflecting a bit-- what makes social media super successful? Well, there were two aspects in our minds-- comprehension-- [? I thought ?] it was comprehensive-- and also super convenient. That was our goal, right? So to be comprehensive-- short bursts of knowledge, favoring solely images, super brief, which is very challenging for some of us. And then we got easy to follow. Those were things that we pulled from social media.

And again, now, as far as convenience goes-- now, this is critical, really, really important. As far as I'm concerned, this is under-the-hood infrastructure kind of stuff. It's got to be easy to contribute, adding cards. It's got to be easy to, of course, navigate and find the card you want, kind of like going to grocery shopping and finding the condiment or item you like, and also super easy to update, because things change.

I didn't mention this-- back to when I mentioned videos and how much we sometimes think that those are valuable sources of learning-- but nothing like doing a video that sure enough, the next year, because of a release, the interface changed. And you have to somehow go back and really edit and reproduce. It's super challenging. So again, where we're going is these tasks-- both comprehension and the ability to be convenient in these manners was crazy critical. It's you.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so just want to reinforce the idea of respecting brevity. So Mark Twain may have been the first person to say something to the effect of, if I'd had more time, I would have typed a shorter tweet. And obviously, he didn't tweet it. But this is a quote that's been-- something similar to this, like writing a shorter letter-- it's been attributed to a number of famous and smart people. So not really concerned who said it first. But what's important here is they all recognized that it takes more time to make something concise.

And when we were trying to propose this to support, in terms of doing these how-to's, we got a lot of pushback from support people that were trying to create the how-to's, because they're like-- they wanted to make them really big and long and all these things. And first off, you can't have a question like, how do I do a project in Revit? It's too broad, right? And so sometimes, that's the problem. But then there are just other issues where it's important to take the time to do a concise answer.

And while some of the microKnowledge cards might look really obvious, they probably weren't to the person who authored them originally. It takes a while to get there. It takes time, but it's worth it. So because of the resistance, one of the things we did is we created a size limitation. And we did that by creating one card. Everything has to fit on that card. And so if your question, no matter what you do, can't fit on that card, your question's probably too big, because remember, we're trying to do short bursts of knowledge.

We're not trying to do an entire training course on a card. So it's important to respect brevity. And so also, there's a direct relationship between this and convenience. So if you move away from brevity, and you make it long, it's no longer convenient.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Oh, all right.

DAN CHASTEEN: So Justin is going to show us some examples of a few microKnowledge cards.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: Yeah, and so I'm not going to walk through what these cards are saying. But rather, I'd like you to take away the fact that I'm crossing applications. I'm talking going from Revit to Rhino. A common question from staff-- how do I export my Revit models for Rhino? Just encouraging interoperability-- that sounds like a great card.

How about introducing Dynamo? Nothing more overwhelming for staff to tackle than learning visual programming-- heck, a whole other language, right? We're able to teach Dynamo through a series of MK cards. This particular one is extracting the element ID of something-- of an element.

Now we're jumping over to Newforma-- how to create a shared folder in Newforma. So you're constantly having a kind of FTP site-like environment. Then again, this is back to Dynamo. Loving it. Loving it. Loving it. All these little cards-- and finally even Bluebeam. So what Perkins and Will has done-- I mean, through the time that we've been working on this-- is created cards not just for our main application, which is arguably Revit. But now we've gone-- we've crossed applications. The success of it said, you know what? It's worth it. Let's just keep going and whatnot.

So these are just a couple of flavors of cards. And you're going to find, at the end of the presentation, you might have access to even more of them on your own. What are you going to do tonight, huh? Read our MK cards. All right. And is it still me? It's not. Good.

DAN CHASTEEN: OK, so another thing that's really important is being able to contribute to all these how-to answers. So it's a group effort. It's not something for one person to do. It's too much work for one person to do. But more importantly, you probably have lots of people at your firm who have an expertise. Those should be the people to share their expertise. And really, for the most part, people want to share their expertise.

So one of the ways that you can make that possible-- and this is what we did at Perkins and Will-- is we said, well, we've got to have an application that everybody already has. We don't want to get into some new, unique application. And then, before somebody can create a microKnowledge card, they have to go and download this app and get it installed or whatever. So we just wanted to really lower the barrier to creating a microKnowledge card.

And so once you know that you're going to have an application-- and for us, it was PowerPoint, not my favorite application. But for this purpose, it's worked great. We've been very happy with it. And so we went with PowerPoint. And then we created a template for it. So what you see here is the single slide.

The white portion, that's your single slide in PowerPoint. It's already set up, down there at the bottom, with a title for you to begin to fill in. How do I--? And then, we have all of these graphics that you would use to create the MK card, so including icons and other things. So that really shortens the process. And then, you just use a screen capture card-- sorry, a screen capture application to place images on the card after that. And then, put your arrows and things, so forth.

JUSTIN BENJAMIN: So I know what you're saying. These are great. You're using all these-- PowerPoint-- you're using all the things that Dan just suggested. But you want to help. You want to contribute. Well, heck, we have an MK card to teach you how to create MK cards. So and I love this gif, because he is constantly impressed by this. He really likes his MK card.

But yeah, so sure enough-- granted, this particular card might be our more overwhelming one, as it's just trying to be able-- maybe covering potentially too much. But it's covering anything from those guidelines on top, maintaining all the things that we want to consider, all the way through downloading the tools and whatnot. So again, another great use of MK. Yeah.

All right, so you're going to find that Box proved super critical. If you're not familiar with Box, that's just-- it's like Dropbox and whatnot. It's just a nice environment where you're going to save on the cloud, super accessible via any computer or mobile device. And being that it's shared on Box, which you have a Perkins and Will account, you can, of course, select content via the interface and edit it on the interface.

So we're actually able to edit our PowerPoints via Box, because again, these are all things that we considered as far as simple implementation. And even more so, we can add comments to cards on Box. So in fact, if somebody does post a card, and there is a concern about the card-- maybe it's lacking or flawed or whatever-- someone could thread to it and say, hey, look. This needs to be changed our updated.

But what you're also noticing, here, is that in order for us to really be successful with the push of these cards is that we do need to vet them a little bit. Everybody's got great ideas. Everybody does certainly mean to do well. But perhaps a card that's create by staff isn't aligned with some standards that they just weren't aware of. Or maybe, in fact, their card has a flaw. It was an oops-a-daisy that really needs to be also tweaked.