Education Decision Making in Practice LIVE from EdSpaces in Columbus

0:00This episode is brought to you by Shaw Contract. Shaw Contract approaches flooring as a design decision with real consequences. How materials perform, how they age, and how they support the people who rely on those spaces every day. Their work spans workplaces, schools, healthcare, and hospitality, with a focus on creating environments that truly function. Their People Together Planet Forever commitment reflects a belief that sustainability isn't just a single checkbox. It's a system. Material health, circularity, carbon impact, and equity all working together to support better outcomes. You can learn more at shawcontract.com.

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1:32You can learn more at hayworth.com.

1:40Would you rather collaborate with a brand new team at a company you've worked with for years or collaborate with a trusted team that's now working for a company you've never heard of? We often do this in our practice, whether it's engineers or products or anything like that. And I think it's important to have different perspective. You never know what kind of outcome you're going to get with different people. You know, you could have a shorthand with a group of people you already work with. That doesn't mean that's the best design or the best way of thinking. And so sometimes it just takes the right amount of thoughts to create something beautiful.

2:15Building on that point and from a design standpoint, we work really hard to build trust and relationships with our clients. And, you know, I just actually, I moved firms and I'm hoping to continue that client base, grow the new, but also keep the old. And so it's really about that relationship. What you just heard was a clip from the opening exercise of our final live event in this series, recorded at the Ed Spaces show in Columbus, Ohio, in a packed room of more than 50 education end users, designers, GCs, manufacturers, and dealers. When we asked whether they'd rather work with a new team at a trusted company or a trusted team at an unfamiliar company, 60 % chose the company they already trust.

3:05Only 40 % chose the familiar team. And that tells us something important. In education, relationships still matter, and so does the trust behind your brand. Welcome to Season 9 of Design Nerds Anonymous. I'm your host, Amanda Schneider, founder and president at ThinkLab, and speaker now featured on TED.com. In this episode, we're taking you back inside another one of our experiential research events. We call it a hackathon. It's a fast-paced, cross-functional session where leaders from every corner of the design ecosystem come together to explore how decisions for the built environment are changing today, this time through the lens of the education sector.

3:54And here's some motivation to listen all the way to the end. You can earn a half CEU credit by taking the quick quiz linked in the show notes. So with that in mind, here are the four learning objectives for today's episode. Number one, why decision-making in education can stall and what's really driving the slowdown. Number two, what education leaders need most from their design, construction, and product partners. Number three, practical ideas from our cross-functional brainstorm to bring clarity earlier in the process and keep everyone involved in the project aligned along the way. And finally, number four, simple shifts you can use with your own project teams to build trust, cut down on rework, and move education projects forward more smoothly.

4:49Now, if you haven't yet listened to our corporate or healthcare episodes from this series, this one will follow a similar arc. So here's how the event unfolded and what you'll experience in audio format today. As you heard in the opening, we started with a game of would you rather that warmed us up and led into my keynote on new ThinkLab research on the top five challenges slowing education projects today. Next, you'll hear from a live panel bringing that data to life through their own lived experiences. Then you'll step into our cross-functional brainstorm session, where all of our varied participants from end users to administrators to architects and designers to product partners work together to reimagine practical ways to solve these challenges.

5:40And finally, you'll hear real-time reactions from our on-site podcast confessional. All right, first up, I'll run you through highlights of my keynote on the top challenges ThinkLab uncovered through our private research with education and users, shaping how education projects get done today or what delays them. Here are the three that sparked the most conversation in the room. First, education projects face unforgiving time constraints. Unlike other sectors, education teams operate on these immovable academic calendars. As one facility leader told us, if we miss summer, we wait another year. There's no fallback plan.

6:22Missing a window in education doesn't just cost time. It costs trust, funding, and momentum. Partners who can pivot fast to meet those milestones are the ones schools will call back. Second, bureaucracy is slowing progress as internal workloads soar. So if that first one wasn't new to you, this one might be what's complicating it. Teams today report being busier than ever, but getting less done. Between outdated procurement systems, red tape, and approval processes built for another era, Even simple decisions can stall for weeks. As one participant said, I spend more time explaining procurement than planning.

7:05Another added, We're trying to move faster, but everything still goes through the same old filters. All right. The third one was, Every project now needs strategic justification. Gone are the days of green lighting a project because it simply looked good. Today, every project must align with institutional vision, withstand political scrutiny, and reflect broader values like sustainability, equity, and community impact. As one voice put it, it's not just, is it good? But it's also, is it defensible? Now, of course, these are just three of the top five. We'll share a link to download additional insights in the show notes.

7:47Okay, now let's turn it over to our live panel. If you've listened to the previous episodes in this series, today's panel will sound a little bit different. Rather than hosting multiple end users, we feature Dusty Lake representing DLR Group, a top 10 interior design giant of design for the education sector, and her client, Alex Trevino, Director of Capital Improvements for Columbus City Schools. Now, while much of our private research leading up to this event reflected perspectives of higher education entities, you'll hear these challenges come to life through a local K-12 voice and their design partner.

8:25Here's our panel host, AJ Perrone of Sandow Design Group, who will share some highlights of this panel. We look at the design process and the thing that kind of goes wrong is we didn't really understand what the users really needed. How has your school district engaged people in the process that you understand what is needed from the schools that will help that community? I can explain to you what I think we should do. I don't know if I can tell you that we've actually done it. I think we maybe do a better job of it on the project side. I mean, we try to never show our end users something that we can't agree to.

9:03You know, so it's kind of pre-designing, pre-vetting, also giving options. But in the perfect world, I think we would go out and ask some very broad questions to the community to at least get some initial feedback. You know, I think one of the other things that comes up here that is a struggle is time. So like when we can't get timely decisions made at the front end, we lose the time to be able to take that time through that whole process. So some of these things play together. So I'm a third person. I'm like doing planning. I like to hear from everyone. I will, you know, I've recently just sat through, for instance, like 60 focus group meetings.

9:37Because at the end of the day, I would rather say, yes, we've heard from you and we're going to do the best we can with it. Right. We're not going to be able to solve everyone's needs, everyone's challenges. But at least everyone has felt like they had a voice in something. You know, sometimes your loudest voices are the ones that don't want to show up to those, you know, workshops or town halls. But they don't want to be collaborative. Right. Exactly. Good. Okay, we're going to go back to the pain points because here we see it's a lot on the upfront, the internal planning, the design process, the construction installation.

10:12Do you feel like that resonates to both of you where your pain points are when you're looking through the process of where things need to be improved? This one for sure resonates for me. I would tell you our biggest struggles with the internal planning and it's having all the right stakeholders at the table, which one of our struggles is just frankly getting people to understand. We are an academic organization. Like they are my customer. And yet oftentimes they don't understand why they're important in the process. Like, just tell me what you want to do. So making sure they understand why we're asking for their feedback, because frankly, they're typically the voice.

10:45They are the face to our users. We're behind the stage getting the work done, but not necessarily front and center. Like I need our principals to be the ones who are speaking with our staff, with our families, because frankly, you're the face they recognize, not mine. How about you, Destinia? So if pre-design planning, open communication is done really well and we can engage a school district that is open, right, to having multiple stakeholders part of the conversation, those pain points in my experience are usually pretty low. And it leads to a design process that just gradually has less and less pain points.

11:21I typically see on my end, more of the pain points come out when no one wants to talk at the beginning of a project. And we're designing or just working. So, you know, one-on-one with you, for instance, Alex, and we've included no one. We've included no educators in the room. And then all of a sudden we get to the end of designer construction. Well, that's not what I thought we were going to get. Or why are we doing this? That's when I typically see more of the pain points. So it's a little bit more inverted. I like to see no pain points in the beginning if we can have an open communication and a dialogue about what we're doing, why we're doing it, so we can have a better end results as a team.

12:05So let's go a little bit towards some solutions. What are some things that you've learned that can be maybe more preventative in the process to help alleviate those pain points or streamline the decision-making process that you have to do. Oh, this one's super easy for me too. It's not easy to do. It's just time and it's FaceTime. Like this is not emails. This is not texts. This is not even Zooms. This is handholding, talking to people, looking them in the eye, smiling gently, listening to their problems, even if you totally disagree with what they're telling you and investing the time to understand people.

12:43Something has changed and it seems like it just gets worse since the pandemic that everybody expects immediate, I'm gonna tell you what to do and I expect you to respond in 60 seconds or less or we're not on speaking terms or something. And I got to have my own head in the right space to be able to respond to people when they come at you that way. But you have to know too, like you can fire that text back as quickly as you want to and it's just a matter of time before you're going to get it right back. Like you really have to work to slow people down. Yeah, I think on that, I mean, we've hit on it a couple of times, but the time communication and just building trust upfront, instead of coming in as on like our side, feeling like we're the experts in the room and that we know everything.

13:21We've got to come in and be a partner. We don't know everything about every single school district. So it's about those open lines of communication early on, seeing where we can lend our expertise. Again, just being a partner through the process up front so that we can have more success throughout. I want you to consider everything that we just kind of went through, right? All the challenges, the risks, and each of you have a different vantage point. What's one thing project partners, we have a lot of project partners in the room, what's one thing that project partners, whether it's clients, A &D, or brands, could do to help align decision-making with your organization?

14:00I think trust is the foundation of any project success. And I think just, again, the open line of communication, whether that's building trust, again, within our own teams, within other vendors in the room, within our clients. If trust isn't there, then project is not going to go smoothly. I have found that the more trust there is within a project team, thinking about time, things move a lot quicker because we're not second-guessing everyone. We're not second-guessing, well, I don't know if I trust what she's saying or what he's saying or what they believe in. So I think again, for any project, you have to establish that foundation early on to be able to move forward.

14:49Alex, what about you? I mean, my entire capital team is seven of us servicing 112 schools. Like I don't have a choice, but to lean on third party services, just like the people who are in this room. And if we can't get to a point where I can delegate you, trust you to be able to go out and interact with my principals, with my staff, like we're just not gonna be able to do work together. I can't, we just simply can't manage all the work on our own. And maybe the only other thing I would say too is, well, it might be the hardest thing to do sometimes is I just need people to be honest. Like if you can't do something or if you've messed something up, you've done something, you know, just tell me.

15:28I'm gonna find out about it one way or the other. I would rather you tell me or if I've asked you to do something and you can't do it, just tell me. We'll figure it out. as long as we're having that conversation. But when you find out about, like as the delivery is supposed to showing up, oh, your delivery is two weeks late. It just doesn't work well in our environment. It probably works well in nobody's environment. But so yeah, same thing. Trust, honesty, having a very straightforward relationship. I don't know how else to do it. I'm filling out your list of non-negotiables right now. So trust, honesty, what else?

16:03Hopefully this doesn't sound too goofy, but I mean, the work is very serious, but I try not to take myself too seriously. Like, I hope we're gonna have a good time doing the work too. And like, I need people to be kind. Like, if you can't be kind to the adults in the room, how are our adults gonna be kind to the students that we're serving? Like, I just, like, we can do the hard work and we can also get along and we can have fun about it, right? We don't have to be afraid of that word. And that brings our panel to a close. Along with AJ's reminder that trust, time, and honest conversations aren't nice to haves.

16:35Today, they're what makes projects work. Because every data point we shared in that intro only matters if it resonates with the people living this process every day. The principals, planners, designers, and their partners trying to serve these communities while navigating constraints that don't show up on a heat mat. That panel grounded us in the realities. But from here, we shifted into possibility. Each table selected one challenge and wrestled with this. So what can we actually do about it? What followed was rapid fire, collaborative, and surprisingly hopeful ideas, sketching out what better could look like.

17:18So up next, you'll hear a few of the sparks from our shareback session. Important to note that what you hear them refer to as challenge number two was the one titled, Education Projects Face Unforgiving Time Constraints. Challenge five was referred to as every project now needs strategic justification. And challenge three was titled indirection plus turnover equals clouded decision making. Here's our first share back. Yeah, so we came up with number two timelines because we have a real life scenario going on here. Georgia. So she was telling us how sometimes that they just get the budget. They got eight months to work.

17:58Super stressful. How do we actually provide a great solution for that if we're just working on a time constraint and now you're putting everybody in a box, and so we can't be creative and we can't create those classrooms of the future. So we started talking about we should do more pre-planning and get more of the influencers involved, the GCs involved, even the vendors involved, and have more conversations with what is the exact need for these schools of the future, have the pre-planning done, and that would develop options up front already. So say we have three great classroom options available and admin area options available.

18:35So, and it's all been vetted, done based on the research. So when that budget does come and you have eight months to do it, to get it done, hey, you have three great options to choose from layout wise. We already have great vendor partners. We have great pricing pre-negotiated. Now we just got to fit with what works best within your school. But now that creates cohesiveness within the district so that each school kind of has a similar style, similar layout. Nobody feels left out. And as you go, you start to create these new ideas based off the feedback you're getting. And so you're always continuing to create new ways, new classrooms, and you're implementing into those options that we have.

19:12So then when you have eight months to work off of, you can have those options to choose from already. All right, next up is table six. Well, good afternoon. My name is Will Anderson. I'm from Columbia, South Carolina. I'm a chief operations officer of a school district. If I can solve five, then I can maybe solve the others. And what I mean by that is that we need the decision makers and the folks who are the school boards, the state officials, etc. To have the information to kind of let us do our jobs, then everything else kind of goes in place. So what we decided and talked about was we need data.

19:45When we get done building our new buildings or doing our renovations, we need to show why it worked. Look what actually happened because the outcomes and results for the school as opposed to just, hey, it's a pretty school. Because most taxpayers, 80 percent, don't go to the school district. So they just think, you wasted my money on this big building with big windows, blah, blah, blah, where in actuality, test rates are up, absenteeism down, behavior is down. Teachers want to work in this brand new building. Houses are being built by this. Those things now you send to people to making decisions, and they're like, oh, my return on my investment actually was a good thing.

20:22So now they've set the bar here, and then everything else goes down. So it's a big, broad idea, but that's how we think we can do that is by really in the grant summit up providing data and doing the extra data after you finish to show that what you did is working. So that would be our feedback. So I work at an architecture firm and we do, we're trying to collect data for the end user. So are you saying in your scenario would be somebody else, like if I had a project previously and I had the data, like you would trust me more if I showed you my other projects that had these data? Because I'm not going to have the data for you if I'm, you know, if you're a new client.

21:10I'm thinking more big picture. Like what I would like to see is that you're not just going to say, all right, here's your building, here's the handbook, and the colors look good. And I want you to say, all right, let's talk to people and see, did this actually work for kids? Because we're designing buildings for kids and for teachers, not for a maintenance guy who can make sure the carpet works. I mean, that's very important because this is a 50-year, 60-, 70-year building. But in the day, how is the end user doing that? I think that's where we've missed a lot of times. How is it impacting the users at the end of the day?

21:45So I would say, what is your, like, do you do any real true post-occupancy? That is kind of, I think we assume, we make assumptions, like just even like the manufacturers make assumptions. Like we don't tell you these things of all these things that we've tested and backed because we don't want to like mansplain things to you. We don't want to like, and I think there's that communication of like, And they, you think that you can read drawings and there's so many people that cannot read drawings and like educators don't want to say like, I have no idea what you're looking at. Or like, I don't know the background of why you're doing this.

22:21And it's like, it's that honest feedback and communication. Like you're saying, if you just give me examples of how you've used this before, that would break down a lot of the misc or the, not the trust. I don't know. We've noticed that. So we've done that. we haven't per se recorded that so now actually we have a research assistant on from University of Michigan that he's doing research now so the project we completed in 2022 we brought him on in 23 and he's doing that post evaluation with the veterans the old teachers that came over from the last school to the next school so yes we're getting there we still have that per se yet that's that's perfect I mean sharing that information and doing and doing those things So if we can bridge that gap with research assistants from other universities to help us with it, we've got the data.

23:10Here it is. Help us analyze this and put it into, again, 80 % of the people who have no – 90 % have no clue what you're doing. So, yeah, again, we know facilities matter, tremendously matter, and how do we share that story? And I think right now we just build a new building, and maybe I'm the only one in the room, But most people I talk to just tell me, why did you waste my money on this big old building? I have to defend why I'm doing X, Y, and Z. If I can show you bought this new building and it is having a tremendous impact. Look, you can't argue with this. And if you do start arguing, then you just shake your head, smile, and wish them a good day.

23:50Because they can't argue with that. Awesome. All right, let's give it up for table six. All right, table seven is next. We chose number five. And when you're kind of justifying the work that you're doing and having these bigger picture goals, what are you putting out to the client or to the stakeholders that justifies that? And I think one of the conflicts that we're having is how do you ensure that your vision is future-proofing, right? And so over the five years or ten years that a project is continuing, you'll have leadership that comes out or decision-makers that are not there anymore. So how do you ensure that that goal is still there?

24:30And so what we thought of was possibly creating a field manual. And so we kind of do something similar in the firm that I work for. And it's really kind of documenting the process along the way so that whoever comes into this process, from the client side, from the architecture side, that there's a shared vision. So it's no longer about who made that decision, but it's we're collectively making that decision. Making decisions not based off of the person, but the goal, right? And so why am I making these decisions? Because A, B, C, and D, right? And so creating a documentation of that and distributing it to those people, whoever are part of that decision-making process.

25:10I love that everyone volunteered you and now they're like... It's a collaborative experience here. Clearly, clearly. There is one thing that we did talk about, and it's building that into your budget, right? It's the programming, it's the scoping, it's really important. And so when you go back to, you know, why am I spending money on these windows? Well, it wasn't about windows. It was about the data and it was about, you know, all the other things that made you make that decision. All right. Table one. So we started off with number five and then we found ourselves quickly talking about number three.

25:45And then we discovered that we were actually talking about number two, the timeline. So as we're working our way down in the timeline, we are identifying the most important thing that I think often gets overlooked is really setting KPIs. So having the entire team, the community buy in on the KPIs. So here's the challenge that's being solved for. And here's how it was, you know, education, scorecards. Here's how the project scored. And here's how it resulted for the community. So we kind of broke that down into three different processes once the KPIs are established. So identifying the right team members.