Hello Reader,

I look forward to going to work right now. I can’t tell you the last time I could say that plainly.

January was not this. January was start-up mode, and I won’t sugarcoat it: chasing sponsors in Q1 is brutal, because most marketing budgets were allocated the previous Q3 and you’re asking for money that’s already spent. It was a slog. What changed wasn’t the market, and it wasn’t my energy. I built systems that keep things moving whether or not I’m the one pushing that morning. Sponsors are secured through the first half of the year, and I’m working on the second. Somewhere in there I carved out time for my own health, which I’d been treating as the thing I’d get to once the real work was handled.

I’m telling you this in a letter about software for a reason.

The firms I advise ask me constantly which platform to pick. I don’t answer that, and I’m not being coy. Naming a winner would make me the owner of a decision I’m not going to live inside. What I’ll do is help a firm work out how it decides: who holds the authority, what gets measured after adoption rather than before it, and what the honest exit criteria are.

The failure I see isn’t buying the wrong tool. It’s that the decision had a buyer before purchase and no owner after. Someone champions a platform, it gets demoed, priced, approved, and then they move on to a project, and it quietly stops being anyone’s. You can find the license fee on a statement. You can’t easily find the eleven months your team spent routing around it.

​George Valdes, my guest this week, named what sits underneath that. “It’s just this energy of ‘you can just do things.’ When there’s friction or a lack of agency, I’m questioning why. Who’s saying that you can’t do something?” He was talking about careers, but it lands the same way on a stack. Most of the friction firms describe to me isn’t technical. It’s about who believes they’re allowed to make the call.

What turned my year around wasn’t deciding harder. It was building something that held after the deciding was done.

What’s the last piece of software your firm bought and stopped using, and who would have had to notice?

Keep learning and growing,

Evelyn Lee, FAIA | NOMA Founder, Practice of Architecture Host, Practice Disrupted & Fractional COO

P.S. If the version of this you’re wrestling with is less about software and more about who’s in the room when the decision gets made, AISC is hosting a live conversation on architects, engineers, and fabricators working together before the drawings are final. Tuesday, August 18, noon Pacific. Register here.

Also open from AISC: the 2027 IDEAS² Awards; entries close August 31.
​see the categories and enter​

/// practice disrupted ///

Architecture, And: Killing the Profession's Ego, with George Valdes

ToolBlocks' (now Zensets) co-founder on agency, on why so much friction in a career is self-imposed, and on what changes when you decide you're allowed to just do things. listen now

/// the signal ///

Three things that crossed my desk this week, none of them about design, and none of them in my LinkedIn Sunday roundup.

The thread: the firms moving fastest right now didn't pick a better tool; they decided who owns it.

Arcadis took an ownership stake in Nomic, the AI platform it just rolled out to 150 engineers across twelve countries. This one is interesting, because buying equity in your own tooling is a very specific answer to the question of who owns the decision. It sits on their balance sheet now, which means somebody has to keep caring about it. read here

Hooker DeJong, a mid-sized firm without a research budget to speak of, built its own early-feasibility workflow for multifamily instead of waiting for someone to sell them one. Worth a read if you've been assuming this kind of thing only belongs to firms with a technology group. read here​

Someone finally counted. The aec+tech directory now maps 608 tools by project phase, category, and company stage, which is the first time I've seen the landscape laid out in a way you could actually decide against. Useful before your next purchase, mostly as a reality check on how much of what you're being pitched already exists three other places. read here​

/// up steel, together, better /// presented by AISC

Early collaboration for project success, with Georgi Petrov (SOM) and Wade Lewis (Puma Steel). A live Zoom panel on what changes when architects, engineers, and fabricators collaborate before the drawings are final, hosted by Evelyn. - Tuesday, August 18, noon to 1pm Pacific. 1 AIA LU pending.

/// the handoff /// - something you can do on Monday

This week, build the one list nobody in your firm has: every tool you pay for, who owns it now, and what happens when it renews. About an hour to set up, then fifteen minutes a quarter after that.

1. Pull the last three months of card and bank statements and write down every software line item. Include the small ones. The nineteen-dollar subscriptions are usually where the surprises are.
2. Next to each, put a person’s name. Not a department, not IT, a name: whoever would decide whether to keep it. Leave it blank if you genuinely don’t know, and notice how many blanks you have.
3. Add the renewal date. Most are buried in a confirmation email from whenever you signed up, so search your inbox for the vendor name plus renew or invoice.
4. Set a calendar reminder thirty days before each renewal, addressed to the name from step 2, with three questions in the body: is anyone actually using this, who would notice if it stopped on Monday, and what would we buy instead.
5. For every blank from step 2, pick the person closest to it and tell them they own it. One sentence is enough.

Firms track utilization, win rates, and realization on every project, and almost none of them track the software they pay for the same way.

A subscription renews silently by design, which means the default outcome of every tool decision your firm has ever made is that it continues forever without anyone re-deciding it.

Thirty days of warning and a name attached is the whole fix.

/// up and coming ///

AIA Oklahoma Conference, keynote, Enid, September 23 register here​
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NOMA Annual Conference, moderating the AIA/NOMA Leadership Panel, Miami, October 16 register here​
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Your Firm Is the Project, workshop at the Trimble Dimensions User Conference, Las Vegas, November 9 register here​