Lean Design in House: A 2025 LCI Congress Behind-the-Scenes Preview

Get ready for the 27th LCI conference for Lean design and construction, the 2025 Congress, with our sneak peek of the actionable Lean Design in House session. The session’s panel includes Regan Martin and Forrest Zhang of HOK, and Dana Brumley, Zac Smith, and Larry Farey of SSOE Group, all Lean Champions for architecture and engineering firms. We spoke with the team to gain valuable takeaways of what to expect from their presentation.

We hope you will join this session—and all the learning that will be happening at the 2025 LCI Congress, October 20-24, in Arlington, Texas! Register today for the best available rates.

Attendees will gain insights to help them integrate Lean into their firms’ practices.

Forrest offered a broad overview of what to expect from this session: “The panel includes speakers from two firms working towards Lean in our companies. We want to make a compelling story for other Lean practitioners. We are in different stages on our Lean journey. We will give a short presentation of where our firms are right now, and then will field questions on what has gone well, what hasn’t gone well, and how attendees can incorporate lessons learned from us into their firms and practices.”

Challenges include getting across the idea that Lean is a mindset, not just a tool, and spurring broad Lean adoption.

We discussed some of the challenges faced in getting Lean buy-in at their firms. Dana shared, “One challenge we face as Lean Champions is the idea that Lean is just a toolbox—something you pick up, put down, and move on. One barrier we are trying to break through is getting across that it’s a mindset—when we work together with a focus on Respect for People and continuous improvement above all, we start building those mindsets into how we do our practices.”

The panelists agreed that in the design world, sometimes—though not always—an incremental, “stealth” Lean adoption works best and can lead to a cultural shift over time.

Regan noted, “We recognized early on that architecture and engineering were already pretty Lean as it was. And that can inhibit adoption—from the user standpoint, people may think, here’s another thing I have to do that replicates what I’m already doing. We’ve had the best traction in taking things we were doing as a one-off and toolifying them.

We had good progress integrating A3s into our Design Change Log. People saw the value quickly that, a year from now, when no one can remember why something is the way it is, we have this form that says exactly what that story was. Using Lean to support storytelling is where we have had the most success. We try to bring in other things using that technique as a launch pad.”

Dana added, “At SSOE, we found that with a Lean community of practice, things tended to stay in pockets. To drive Lean across the organization, we established Practice Group leads in each of our primary disciplines. I’m the project manager practice group lead. For my community of practice, we are about setting standards for how we work and breaking down silos across the organization. And with Larry joining our company as the continuous improvement subject matter expert, his sole focus is to help us find areas where we can improve and drive that into our work. As leads, we are emulating the Lean behaviors and mindset that we want to proliferate through the organization, and we are seeing a lot of success in breaking down silos that way.”

Forrest noted, “Adoption is challenging. We have a Lean working group at HOK. There are four of us based on the West Coast, and we have tried to get adoption in our closest offices. It’s going well in the San Francisco and LA offices, but getting people to buy in at offices where we don’t have a physical presence has been slower than we’d like.

I found taking Lean and sneaking it in as part of HOK culture works best. Even if you don’t know what Lean is, you are using A3 to track changes. Now we are trying to do it with planning. Engineers are not always the best at planning our work. We love lists, but it’s just a giant list and hard to track what needs to get done to make sure you’re making progress. So we started to sneak in what we call collaborative planning. People associate Pull Planning as being unwieldy. But in engineering, we have four people on a project, each with different scopes. We are doing a “collaborative plan”, which is really a Pull Plan. This year, we have a mandate that all engineering projects will use Pull Planning. There are growing pains, but it’s good.

Sometimes Lean seems intimidating at first. I found by taking pieces of it and starting to use it, then adding another piece, over time it becomes a cultural shift.”

Dana agreed, “The stealth method is one of these things a lot of Lean practitioners are moving towards today because there have been failed Lean implementations out there. A lot of times, if you’re using words like Lean and Pull Planning, people are focusing on things they think of as buzzwords rather than the focus on methodology and mindset. Instead, we focus more on the process and the people.”

Speaking from the consultant perspective, Larry added, “Having someone like me in the organization who can help people get started with documenting flows is really helpful. Once they are taught, they can teach others and start building that ground-up continuous improvement mindset.”

The panelists have seen more company-wide and leadership adoption of Lean practices as a result of their efforts.

We asked the panelists to talk about the results they’ve seen so far. Dana noted, “For us, with the advent of the Lean practice groups, we see an improvement in the ability of people to work across organizations. We have different business units and sometimes have large projects, and people move in and around. If they see something that works well using a Lean process or was well documented in one part of the organization, they are asking for it when they go to a different part of the organization. We are building a common platform now for SSOE versus one centered in our business units, and people are asking for that and recognize the need for that.”

Larry added, “SSOE had good work and ideas spread out across the organization, and people were recreating it because there was no focal point. With the implementation of the practice groups methodology, it gathered the disciplines across the country and helped us focus on best practices and propagating that throughout the company.”

From the HOK perspective, Forrest noted, “We got leadership buy-in after a while. We were taking the stealth approach, sneaking things in here and there. I was happy to learn that our San Francisco office is using A3s for its business planning. Seeing it at the leadership level, not just the practitioner level, is very encouraging.”

Join this session to gain specific ideas on how to integrate Lean —even if it’s small steps to start—and create a mindset shift.

We asked what they hope attendees take away from this session. Forrest offered, “Sometimes it’s hard for design firms to fully integrate Lean into their practices. We have lessons learned and things that have worked to share. I hope design and engineering firms can take what works for them, even little things, and incorporate them into their practice.”

Regan added, “I hope attendees will recognize that what they are doing is probably pretty Lean as it is, and the real shift is in the mindset from anecdotal or workshop mindset to data-based. Keep doing what you are doing. Just write it down.”

“Even expanding beyond architecture and engineering, some approaches we have can work more broadly anywhere. If you see similar silos within your business, there are ways to break those down. There are different ways to approach it, and we want to give people ideas of how to think outside the box to drive Lean and continuous improvement into their organizations,” Dana offered.

Larry continued, “It’s about developing the mindset vs the tools to use. You’ve got to embrace that mindset of looking at your job every day and how to make it easier. And if you have an idea of how to make it easier, you have a group that you can go to with that idea and ask for help developing it.”

This session is for the design world and beyond—it’s for anyone who wants to champion Lean and continuous improvement at their organizations.

All the panelists agreed that this session applies to attendees in architecture, engineering, and design—and beyond. Dana noted that it applies to “any organization with similar types of growing pains. We see organization after organization where you recreate the wheel every time you start something. You don’t have to do that, but you do have to be intentional about finding out where your commonalities are, documenting them, and working to improve from there.”

Regan agreed, adding that this session is for “anyone who wants to be a Lean champion within their organization, whatever role they’re doing.”

Lean is more than a cost-cutting measure.

During the discussion, it was noted that some designers think Lean is just a cost-cutting measure, but that’s not the case. Forrest emphasized that “we do in particular want architects and engineers to attend. There is inherently some dissatisfaction in Lean on the design side, and a lot of it is this preconceived notion that Lean is this scary thing, and it’s not. Hopefully, they will see how it can benefit our practice and take that away with them. If your first introduction to Lean is feeling like a contractor is using Pull Planning to crush your design schedule, it can be difficult.”

Dana added, “You have to flip it and use Pull Planning to show you can deliver and enable the work. I’ve seen people use the term Lean as doing more for less, and people think, am I going to work myself out of a job? And it’s not doing more with less. It’s expanding your capacity to do more with what you have as an individual and an organization.”

We closed with Larry summing it up: “We talk about the difference between productivity and utilization. You can be 100% utilized but only 50% productive. You can incorporate the Lean mindset of how do I do my job better and more efficiently to get that capacity—with the same amount of hours.”

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