Practice of Architecture: Shelby and Emily on the methods that matter right now
Published about 1 month ago • 2 min read
2026
Hello Reader,
May is AAPI Heritage Month. Every year when it arrives, I find myself sitting with the same question I have carried across most of my professional life: what does it actually mean to be heard in a room, not just present in it?
Seeing and hearing are not the same thing. Presence is visible. Being heard is relational. And in most professional spaces, the quality of that relationship is built, or isn't built, through the conversations we choose to have and the ones we keep deferring. I've been thinking about this a lot since I got back from Atlanta, where we recorded the first-ever live episode of Practice Disrupted at the NASCC Steel Conference, standing on a stage with two leaders who spend a significant part of their working lives thinking about exactly this.
Shelby Morris is the Co-Managing Director of Gensler's Atlanta office and a former AIA Atlanta president. He has led more than three billion dollars in transformational projects across the Southeast, and he is thinking hard right now about what it means to adapt when the market shifts faster than most firms are prepared for.
Emily Schickner is a Principal at Harrison Design, the firm's first female principal, and a past president of AIA Atlanta. She chairs the AIA Women's Leadership Summit and brings an unsentimental clarity to questions of mentorship, equity, and what it costs firms when they treat human development as an afterthought.
Together, they make the case that the firms navigating this moment well are not the ones with the most sophisticated tools, they are the ones that have built cultures where people are actually heard and where hard conversations happen before the damage does.
In Atlanta right now, zero new office buildings are under construction. Billions are pouring into data centers. The profession is being asked to pivot faster than most curricula or firm structures were designed for, and clients are showing up with AI-generated renderings and expecting architects to tell them what's missing. Shelby and Emily do not flinch at any of this. What they offer instead is something more useful: a framework for leading through transformation without losing the human systems that make the work possible.
One of the threads running through this conversation is the gap between adopting AI tools and being structurally ready for them. If that gap is still open at your firm, I am co-hosting a webinar with Egnyte this Tuesday, May 5, that works through the data infrastructure side of that question. The registration link is below.
What is one assumption about how your firm develops people that has never been tested against what those people actually need?
Keep learning and growing,
Evelyn M Lee, FAIA | NOMA
Founder, Practice of Architecture
Host, Practice Disrupted & Fractional COO
/// May Webinar /// - THIS TUESDAY - LAST FEW DAYS TO REGISTER
Is your firm's data ready for AI?
I'm co-hosting this webinar with Egnyte on May 5. We'll dig into what it actually takes to get your firm's infrastructure ready for where the work is going. 12:00 PM PST.
How do we manage the rapid transformation of the AECO industry without losing the human systems that make the work possible?
In this first-ever live recording of Practice Disrupted, captured at the NASCC Steel Conference in Atlanta, Evelyn Lee is joined by Shelby Morris and Emily Schickner to discuss the "methods and mindsets" required to lead through industry-wide change.
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