Hello Reader,

NCARB just released the 2026 edition of NCARB by the Numbers. It is the fifteenth. For fifteen years, the profession has been able to see the path to licensure plainly: too long, too rigid, quietly losing people we should have kept. For most of those years we argued about it and changed little. What is different now is that the numbers are finally reshaping the path itself, into something more flexible and modular, built around where the data says people actually fall out. This year's edition counts more than 127,000 Record holders, exam times at a record low, and a candidate pool slipping a little. I dug into it this week with Jenny Kawecki of NCARB and Gabriella Bermea of Perkins Eastman on the latest Practice Disrupted. The data was never the hard part. Acting on it was.

The same pattern runs inside firms, just smaller. You already see it. The weekly meeting where real decisions get made, and then the record scatters across five notebooks and nobody's inbox, so a month later you relitigate a call you already made. Nobody in that room is short on information. What is missing is the system that holds what everyone already knew.

Building that system is smaller than it sounds, and you can start this week. Take the one recurring meeting you rebuild from memory every time and give it something that keeps the record, so the decisions live somewhere you can find them instead of in whoever happened to be paying attention. The handoff below is exactly how.

What can your firm already see clearly, and still hasn't acted on?

Keep learning and growing,

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

This week's episode partner is also backing the letter. NCARB just released the 2026 edition of NCARB by the Numbers, their annual read on the state of licensure, now tracking over 127,000 Record holders, a record low time to complete the exam, and a candidate pool worth watching. See what the data says. Explore the data here​

/// practice disrupted ///

Inside the Data: NCARB by the Numbers and the Future of Flexible Licensure

Jenny Kawecki, Assistant Vice President of Data, Analytics, and Research at NCARB, and Gabriella Bermea, Senior Associate at Perkins Eastman, on what NCARB's data shows about the real path to licensure, and how a more modular, adaptable roadmap could reshape how future architects qualify. listen now

/// the signal /// - news you may have missed

Three signals, one uncomfortable thread: the value is leaving the billable hour and pooling around whoever owns the product, the tool, or the position.

Higharc raised a $95M Series C to turn permit-ready construction documents and takeoffs into a product. The CD set, the deliverable firms have billed by the hour for a century, is now something venture capital funds as software, which tells you where the margin is expected to live. read here​

Autodesk is calling neural CAD the first real change to CAD in 40 years. When the foundation of the design tool gets rebuilt around AI geometry reasoning, whoever owns that layer sets the terms every firm draws under, a quieter kind of power than any single feature. read here​

The AIA and Deltek Architecture Billings Index fell to 44.5, its lowest reading since January. Demand is contracting while the tools accelerate, and that squeeze is what turns the value question from a panel abstraction into a this-year problem. read here​

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

Give one recurring meeting a memory this week. It is the fastest place to stop losing decisions to whoever happened to take notes, and you can set it up before your Monday meeting.

1. Pick the meeting. The weekly one you run half from memory, the project check-in or internal sync that repeats. One meeting, not all of them.
2. Put an AI notetaker in the invite. Add the recorder built into your video tool, or a standalone notetaker, so the transcript, summary, and action items are captured without anyone typing.
3. Standardize what comes out. The same three headings every time: decisions made, who owns what, what happens next. Point every meeting to one doc, folder, or channel so the record lives in a single findable place.
4. Review, do not rebuild. Spend two minutes correcting the draft instead of thirty writing it. Your judgment shapes the record, the tool does the capturing.

Why it matters: the decision now lives in a system instead of one person’s memory, so next week you open the record instead of a blank page, and anyone who joins can catch up without asking you. You give away the part that never needed you, and keep the part that did.

/// up and coming ///

Season 13 of Practice Disrupted opens Thursday, July 30. Until then, the feed belongs to a wonderful word from our partners, starting with the Trimble 0-60 bonus episode.