The Sawtooth Chart Was Never the Enemy
📰 The sawtooth was never the enemy. Phil Read makes the case that the jagged stopping points everyone spent twenty years trying to smooth away were where judgment got applied, and asks what replaces them now.
Leadership
237: 'The Interns Will Have Interns', with Phil Read
A conversation with Phil Read about treating AI as an intern, preserving human judgment through sawtooth decision points, and the need to teach delegation early in architectural practice.
The Crit That Wasn't About AI
📰 Olson Kundig put 300 people in a room and asked what wastes their time. One rule: don't call it an AI meeting. The lists came back honest, and a big share of the complaints already had a fix sitting inside the firm.
235: 'How Olson Kundig Scaled AI Adoption Across a 300-Person Firm', with Marlene Chen and Blair Payson
A conversation with Marlene Chen and Blair Payson about scaling AI adoption across a 300-person architecture firm by prioritizing culture, office-wide critiques, democratizing visualization, and managing change and software licensing.
Stop Before You Start
📰 Steve Burrows exposes how time‑based billing and noisy meetings cripple AEC firms, urging a simple “sheet of paper” daily log to cut waste, shift to value‑based pricing, and harness AI for repeatable work.
228: 'What Did You Actually Do Today', with Steve Burrows CBE
A conversation with Steve Burrows about why the construction industry rewards dysfunction, the pitfalls of time‑billing, the promise of value‑based billing, modular construction challenges, and how AI is reshaping engineering work.
The Three Things Firms Get Wrong About Transformation
📰 Organizational transformations often fail by chasing speed over capability. Instead, focus on cash, clarity, and capability, address cultural and knowledge‑transfer gaps, and treat AI as a design challenge, not just a productivity metric.