- Welcome to the Architecture for Health Friday lecture series.

We're excited about today's program.

We've got a great one for you.

Our speakers today are coming from the Innova Group and I'll briefly introduce them and then hand the program to them.

First, I'll introduce Kevin Schlaht.

He is the president and founder of the Innova Group, 35 years experience in the industry, 25 as president of the Innova Group.

Prior to that, he worked as actually the health studio manager for Anderson DeBartolo Pan.

Some of you will remember that firm.

And after that, he served as an army officer in the Health Facility Planning Agency.

Again, a familiar agency to those of us in healthcare, from '83 through '90.

Now, he didn't train here at A&M, but he did send a child here who graduated from A&M.

So Kevin, congratulations on that.

Our other speaker today is Luis Martinez, and Luis works at the Innova Group in a very interesting capacity.

His job is senior healthcare consultant medical planner.

Now, what is interesting about all of that, his background includes both a Master's in Health in Hospital Administration and a Master's in Architecture.

So he's dually trained in that field.

and one of his expertises in the Innova group, he is the GIS lead analyst for geographic information systems as part of what the Innova Group does.

And I'll let them talk about that as I turn the program over to them.

Please help me welcome Kevin and Luis from the Innova Group.

(audience applauds) - Very good.

Thank you, Ray.

Appreciate it.

Glad to be here today.

We're going to go through the presentation.

Both Luis and I have non-traditional education and professional experiences.

And even though we're generations apart, they're still very relevant for today in terms of what opportunities are for students that are graduating, and the career opportunities that they have ahead of them.

So Luis is the main author of today's presentation and I'll let him take you through it.

And then being the old guy, I get to chime in now and then when I want to to add a little flair.

So Luis, please.

- Thanks, Kevin.

So, hello everybody.

I'm humbled to be here today and I'm going to share a little bit of our story.

So today, we wanted to talk to you about four different things.

One of them is kind of engage you in what a non-traditional path with a architecture education looks like.

Then also talk about what is the value of an architecture education, like what do you learn that you can translate to different industries?

And then third, we're going to talk about some planning fundamentals that apply to everything.

One, for example, problem solving.

That is crucial in everything we do in the Innova Group and any industry you go and find, whether it's architecture, filmmaking, design, graphic design, urban planning, you name it.

Even managing restaurants, problem solving is crucial and we will talk a little bit about that when we talk about our fourth point, which is, we'll walk you as how did this all come together when we're discussing like, "Okay, this is what I learned, how do I take it and apply to problem that we have from one of our clients?"

And we'll walk you through it and we'll show you some of the techniques we've used and kind of explore how we came from what the problem was to what recommendation we came up with for the client at this point.

So a little introduction, just as Ray shared with us earlier is my background is my first life, I was actually a biomedical science major.

I graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine here at Texas A&M University.

So it started originally as what we call a pre-med with biological chemistry.

And proceeded then to get my Master's in Healthcare/ Hospital Administration from the Public Health School.

That program, I think, has gone through a lot of changes.

Originally, it was dedicated for rural public health.

And so I believe now it's transitioned into all kinds of health.

And after that, we'll talk a little bit about the external forces that kind of brought me back.

But one of the conversations was with yours truly, George Mann, when I was doing my Master's in Health Administration.

He says like, "Have you ever thought about architecture?"

And I said like, "No, I have never thought about architecture."

And then one of those conversations was like, "Well, let me explore it."

And through a lot of questions and asking, "Well, what could I do with this degree?

How can I add more value to it?"

I decided to enroll in the program, the Masters of Architecture, and completed that.

When I graduated, you know, I proceeded to go work in the hospital setting with Johns Hopkins Health System, first as the surgical administration resident, so I did a lot of the finance, operations, and because of my unique background, I did a lot of construction management, owners rep kind of role, you know, helping them with all these plans in construction and clinical transitions they were doing.

And clinical transition means they were renovating a unit on a floor in the hospital and I had to help them move patients from an old unit or wing to the new location and trying to figure out the logistics of how are you going to move patients in the unit to the new location, and at the same time, not impacting their health in any way.

And then did that for a couple years and then transitioned, I got the invitation through Peter and Kevin to join the Innova Group, where I've been with them for over eight years now.

And I've done a little bit of everything, everything ranging from data analytics, which is all your data mining, scripting, GIS like we talked about with the mapping, to leveraging a lot of my graphic design background and kind of working with, oh yeah, I mentioned that.

Leveraging all the skills, and you know, negotiating, client management.

So there's a lot of things that I picked up along the way with the Innova Group and we'll certainly talk a little more about that.

But before proceeding, I wanted to let Kevin chime in on his unique background as well.

- [Kevin] So again, my background, I went to North Dakota State University and studied architecture, and then went on to the University of Illinois.

I thought I might want to be a professor one day, and of course you needed to have at least a master's degree.

And so the other part of that is I really enjoyed design and I thought I wanted to be a designer.

And I got to Illinois and I became a little disenfranchised with probably their design program and what I thought of it.

But the unique thing about Illinois' program is they had eight different subsets or options within the master's degree.

And I had an undergraduate degree in economics, so then I went in and took their MBA program alongside the architecture program that focused on business administration and architectural administration.

So it became very beneficial to me long term in being able to do those two degrees.

And what was really kind of interesting at the time, two of my roommates both in architecture got their master's degree in architecture, they studied structures as part of their graduate program and they both became licensed structural engineers working for SOM in Houston before they ever became licensed architects.

And so again, it was kind of one of these things, the school opportunity afforded them the opportunities to be non-traditional in how they became architects by being structural engineers first.

I owed the army some time back, so I worked for the Health Facility Planning Agency in their program management, both on the construction site as well as designing, functional design and programming.

Very much enjoyed that.

Transitioned to a traditional architecture firm for five years before starting the Innova Group, really focusing on the parts of architecture and design that we enjoy, and that is that upfront planning, programming, setting the stage for design.

- All right, that's a little bit about ourselves.

Well, what we're here to talk about at the end of the day is like, "I've graduated, now what do I do?"

And so we've kind of articulated that there's, you know, a couple of paths.

In general, three paths.

One is your traditional architecture that's very well defined where you get some experience.

First graduate from a credit university, get the experience working, then you get through the examinations, and then you, you know, get your license.

And that's the traditional path.

The other one we are here to talk about is a non-traditional path, like what other opportunities are there available to somebody?

And you know, both between Kevin and I, we have friends that have gone both into the restaurant business.

We have people that have gone into film, graphic design, urban design, now UX, which is a big one for mobile design and how do we interact with mobile technologies.

So the sky's the limit.

I had friends who've gone into investment banking.

So the sky's the limit in terms of like where can you go with the architecture education.

And the other one is, you know, I always tell people there's a lot of therapy and crying, hopefully there's not a lot of that.

You know, and I do want to highlight a point is that sometimes when we encounter students that, "I've been doing this for three years or I'm about to graduate, I really don't think I want to do architecture."

And so what I say to them, it's like, "Not all is lost."

It's like, "Finish your degree because you're almost done.

Don't start from scratch again."

And we suggest like, "Have you looked at exploring other opportunities?"

And that's when we started asking the questions, like what did you really learn in your college education, specifically in architecture?

What are the things you learned from your different classes?

And we started dissecting them.

One of the things I wanted to kind of set as a primer in the background, and Kevin will talk a little bit about this as well, how his own experience been, I was curious like how many licensed architects have there been in the United States?

And I went back, I can only find information back to 2002 that was really available, and compared that, which is the blue bars, to the light blue, which are the number of students enrolled in the college of architecture across the country.

So we have about an average, the latest poll was about 121,000 licensed architects and about 27,000 students.

21,000 of those are in the Bachelor of Architecture program.

About 7,000 of them are in your Master's of Architecture program, and the rest are in PhD programs or doctorates.

And what we found, as you can see, is 25 plus thousand students are graduating every year.

And it takes them two to three years after they start sitting for the exams to get licensed.

We're not seeing all those numbers, 25 plus thousand going into the profession every year, so where are they going is the right question.

And so I did want to highlight along this continuum, there's two points, 2002 and '03, we had a recession.

The one I more experienced recently was the 2008, 2009.

And that was when I decided I'm going to go to architecture school.

The economy was not a great place at the time to try to go find a job for me.

And so I decided why not double down?

And I had just talked to George and I said, "Let's do this."

And so I jumped in head in, not very aware of how long studios really took to get accomplished, so that was eye-opening.

But then from there on, you know, all the way to 2021 COVID-19 pandemic that, you know, impacted everybody.

So these three periods in time, where we had recession or something more dramatic, you know, risk like the COVID-19 impacted externally what job opportunities might there be available in the traditional sense for architecture students.

So in those time periods, you saw jobs declining, but you still had the same number of students going into the degrees.

So, you know, we are creative and so we decided to allow the students go branch out to different opportunities.

What's available, what can I leverage?

And this is a theme you'll hear me kind of reemphasize over and over again that what you learn, you can take to any industry.

But at the same time, I want to, like, Kevin shares experience also, you know, because it's very cyclical what we're talking about here.

- That's why I said this chart doesn't go far enough to the left.

Ray and George will remember the days back in the probably early 1980s, you think we had inflation now?

I think interest rates around 18% at the time.

And there wasn't a lot of work for architects coming out of school, and that's why two of my roommates became structural engineers first is because that's where the work was.

It wasn't in traditional architecture.

I had 10 close friends of mine in our graduate program, and to this day, only one of the 10 ended up in a traditional architecture role for his entire career.

All the rest of us either branched out, worked as owners, representatives, developers, three of them worked for IBM, one for his entire career.

So there were a lot of opportunities that came out of that education that didn't lead to a traditional architecture design firm for the entire part of their career.

Anyway, we found that rather interesting that there were some parallels in history as it tends to repeat itself, especially during recessions.

- Right.

And more than likely, you will experience one or two of these recessions in your lifetime or more.

And then just to let you know that we all been there, we've all had similar questions, what do I do?

And we all had different opportunities, and we rose to the occasion and just ran with them.

Now, one of the things I wanted to also share with this group was like, well, "Luis, you talked about what I could bring to the table, but what's really happening externally?

What does the labor market say?"

Well, in the last 35 years, most of the occupations, the ones that have just exploded, are looking for social skills and analytical skills.

That's what we're seeing on the bottom and that's data provided from the Pew Research Center.

And what does that mean when talking about social skills?

Social skills, you know, what do we hear?

You know, you've heard before, they're the soft skills, but in reality, we're talking about those skills that deal with persuasion, interacting with people, coordinating, whether it's, you know, with how you're going to go to the movie, how are you're going to get a job done.

You know, there's a whole spectrum of social skills that are leveraged in order to do your day-to-day functions.

And analytical deals with the, you know, like the mathematics, your technical aspects of it, which include physics and things like that, that you apply data analytics in your day-to-day.

And we've seen that explosion along the technology side, but more importantly, we've seen it in all the industries are now asking for these skills.

And so what does that mean when we're looking at, you know, there's another little graph in the middle, that 4 out of 10 of the people report that currently, the most important things are the social and they call fundamental and analytical.

Managerial, it's still speaking to managing of services.

These five categories are what the, what is it, the Department of Labor uses to categorize 35 different critical thinking skills when they're finding different jobs, and they group them into five.

Of those five, like we discussed, social, which talks about, you know, how do you interact with people?

It's really important.

Fundamental includes problem solving, writing, like do you know how to write a narrative?

Do you even know how to write an email if somebody asks you for different occasions?

Those are really important life skills to have.

And there's something that we, as you know, not only as students, but as people needed to continuously be learning about it, and how do we improve about that.

And as you can see, the mechanical at the very end is not as important as what we've seen has just been a decline in the manufacturing industry.

So that's what that last point is alluding to.

And as we wanted to highlight is, in our careers, there's a lot of triggers that have led us to jump into these different things.

But more importantly is we don't see people that are graduating from these programs, that's having been a one trick pony.

You can't just be strong in the analytical and say, "I'm really good at Revit or scripting with Python or you know, Grasshopper or whatever other program."

You can't say that, "I'm really good about that."

You also have to say, "I'm also working on developing my social skills.

How do my time management skills exist?

Am I good with that?

Am I following up with people?

Am I networking?

Am I good at customer service?"

Like, those are all great things that people in the positions of hiring are looking for.

They're not looking for a one trick pony.

They're looking for people that are well-rounded individuals.

They don't want somebody that's amazing at just one thing, they want to be able that you can do other things.

But more importantly, and we'll definitely talk about this, is that you're critical and problem solving skills are there.

That what's going to set you apart in a lot of industries.

And one thing that I use as a reference is that I found very interesting is, since 1975, the body that accredits College of Architecture programs states, as a shared profession and discipline, three different things they highlight.

One, knowledge and innovation is continuous, that the practice of design is collaborative.

It's not a one person project, you involve all these kinds of disciplines in different talents.

And the third one that this is a profession, a career, that is a lifelong learning.

So right there, those things like, you know, kind of bringing it back together that they're embedded within your college education experience.

Now, I do want to highlight Kevin, but one interesting fact when I was looking at NCAR was that it takes 13 years to get your license and that means from the beginning of your freshman year all the way till you finally receive the stamp and say, "I am a licensed architect."

Now that number varies now and it continues to change across time.

And like we mentioned, there's 121,000 architects.

Going through architecture, school is tough.

Nobody's denying that.

There's long nights, it's expensive, there's a lot of supply runs, you know, who has this material, you know, there's a lot of projects you do, but you know, at the end we talked about, it's like, "What if I don't want to become an architect?

Did I just throw everything away?"

And the answer is no.

You went through a great program that you can leverage over and over again through your careers and your lives.

I want to pause a second and just talk about, you know, I've told you, we've spoken about the things that you can accomplish, but at the end of the day, what did I learn?

"Luis, tell me what can I explain to people or translate that I've actually learned in my college education here at Texas A&M or another architectural program."

One of them is connecting the dots.

That is something that I'm very grateful for the A&M experience in the sense that whenever there was a problem, it didn't matter the scale.

I remember one of one of my classes, and looking at the undergrads with George Mann, when you would bring these large master planning projects from overseas, huge ones.

And it was like, it would be almost, you know, too complex to break down.

But then we would start thinking about it like, "What's the real problem we're trying to answer?"

You know, it's like, okay, there's a problem here in one area that leads to this one.

You start tracing it, you know, connecting the dots on the network.

That was invaluable.

And the other one in the same breadth is, well, now that I've understand like what the big picture, let's start, you know, orchestrating what people need to come into play to actually do this work and make it happen.

You know, that's something a great skill you pick up as a student throughout your time at the university because you're always working on projects, whether it's early in the morning or late at night, and there's people that work at different schedules.

You might be a morning person, you're working with a late one, you figure it out and you make it happen.

These are great skills.

At the same time, one thing that we always have to take into account is thinking spatially and translating that into something people can see is fantastic.

And what that means is, for example, somebody might be talking about an abstract thought or a concept, and what we've learned in the architecture experience is, "Okay, this is what you're saying, let me show you what it means or this is translate into something."

And then the other point I wanted to make is, now we talked about collaboration.

It takes all kinds of personalities to make work happen.

You know, you have people that, it's not just the great master builder, like you have people that are really good at structures, but you have this other person that's really great at business development or this other person that's great at doing presentations.

This other individual is great, you know, at making the design look, you know, just fit right.

It takes everybody to make a project happen and be successful.

And that's something that we cannot forget as we move through it.

And I want to pause just Kevin, if there's something else you'd like to add to this one.

- I think, you know, again, we're going to get into this, but I think one of the things that we found most valuable is the problem solving skills that you learn that can be applicable to so many different things.

Luis is going to touch on that in a few minutes.

And then I think the other thing that the architecture school and education teaches you is the ability to develop a concept.

And a lot of times people don't understand the ability to build a concept and then build solutions around a concept.

I think that's a really important takeaway.

Keep moving.

- And just wanted to share with you a snapshot is how do we take what we just discussed into something that I do.

This is a snapshot of what I do in the Innova group.

You know I took all the things that we talked about, orchestrating, being able to connect the dots, you know, it takes all kinds of people, and then being able to present it visually.

All those skills I took and translated into, like I had to learn how to do coding, how to do GIS mapping, how to do better graphic design, how to network better.

Those are things that all translated back from my education here.

Now what we want to talk about is we're going to transition into is like a project.

How do you bring in all these talents and skills together into doing one of our projects?

And what we're going to talk about right now, it's a project from the military health system for the Department of Defense.

And we're going to show you how from a healthcare perspective, we're taking all these talents and capabilities and said, "We're going to solve this problem."

The first thing, and Kevin talked about this, problem solving.

You cannot solve a problem unless you know what it is.

That's crucial.

Well, we see time and time in again, you'll describe something, this is what needs to be done, and they'll jump in without really understanding what the problem you're trying to solve is.

And sometimes you have to just take a moment, you know, I know we're all pressed for time, we have deadlines, but, you know, if you just wait a second and try to, what is the thing I'm trying to understand?

Who is my client?

Who is my stakeholder?

Why is it important in the first place for me to answer this?

You know, those are things that are crucial, you know, and I said that's a quote from Willie Pena from the problem seeking book.

Now, our clients, well, one of our clients, is the Defense Health Agency.

Now through the military system, they are in charge of managing delivery of care for active duty service members, the reserves, retired people, and also the family members of the active duty members and the retirees.

And that translates to about 9.5 million people across the world that they manage their care for.

What's the problem that we see that our client present?

Well, the problem is they receive guidance to manage all the infrastructure associated with delivering care to all these 9.5 million people.

You know, they include everything from a large medical center that does tertiary, quaternary care, burn centers, all the way to a small clinic, you know, out on the field.

And this is all over the world.

Problem is it can't be everywhere.

So their problem is what buildings do I need to keep sustaining and putting money in?

What buildings do I look at replacing entirely?

Where should I actually be delivering the care?

And in what order do I put them in place?

Do I just put 15 buildings at one time or do I do one at a time, three at a time?

What's the right mix that makes sense?

Like, they ask of us, in this project, in the Tidewater Market with Virginia Beach at one of its points all the way north to Williamsburg, at the northern Virginia, the Market said, "Can you help us develop a realistic high level facilities plan, capital investment, that aligns with the initiatives and goals that all the stakeholders have?"

So it's not only the client in DHA that has a goal, but also what are the local stakeholders?

In this case, we have the people that are running these military facilities.

That is also our set of individuals that we have to consider when we're doing these plans.

Now into the project, the Tidewater Market, you have a map on the right side right behind me that kind of gives you a geographic understanding of the areas.

We first wanted to understand, okay, we're here at the market.

Even if we've been here 30 times already, we never assume that we know what the problem is.

We have to observe what the information is.

So we laid out, "Okay, what are we looking at?"

We have a market that stretches north to south, which is in the yellow.

We did what we call drive times to understand if you drop a dot and you try driving 60 minutes, how much far can you get?

And we did also a circle to understand what does 60 minutes look like?

That means it's like what is the ability of somebody travel to seek specialty care?

So if you are a patient and you say, "I want to look for a cardiologist, or I want to look for urology or gynecology services, how far would I need to travel to seek that specialty care?"

And that is the standard that the Department of Defense has for accessing care, delivering.

We also point in green what are the facilities that are in this market to really understand like, okay, do you even have enough?

What do you have?

How many of one kind is, do you have all small clinics?

Do you have large hospitals all throughout the area?

And then another thing we wanted to understand is the population, what you see in green in the map, that are highlighted what we call densities.

So that means it's like how many people live in that area per square mile.

It's like the darker the color means there's more people living there, and the lighter means there's less people living in that geography.

We also want to understand, well, are the buildings good, bad, or they just need to go?

Or fair.

And then we laid it all out.

This is our kind of first blush of what an understanding of what are we working with here is.

Kevin, I want to pause if you want to add.

- No, I think, you know, we again use a lot of population based demographics to understand where to place facilities and where to provide care.

And the whole part of this is to develop an effective service delivery strategy for our client to best access and reach their patient population.

And so oftentimes, our facilities aren't in the right place or they're not offering the right amount of services.

And this gives us that opportunity to help our client make those decisions.

- This is kind of, it's still part of the understanding what are we trying to solve is.

When we looked at this market, we really came to understand, we're really talking about two different territories, if you will.

And what I mean by that is you have a body of water that separates the geography, like down the middle, and the tunnel can be backed up, it can be an accident, it could be, you know, just bad traffic or whatever the reason might be.

This tunnel adds a level of complexity that is beyond of what we can solve.

And we found out through more further investigation, people are really not going from the north, the north side of what we call the peninsula, going down the south to where the big medical center is.

They're just not.

And the reason is they have other hospitals nearby, other clinics.

There's no reason why they should be stuck in a bridge for an hour, just an hour on the bridge or tunnel.

So, you know, that was the first ending.

And like Kevin said, "Okay, if we know there's two different markets you were working here, one on the north, which is the peninsula, and the south, which is the mainland, okay, so we're going to have two different sets of strategies."

And like Kevin was saying, do we have enough care in the north?

What type of care should we be delivering?

Should we be everything to everybody?

And by that means it's like, we should be delivering cardiology and every subspecialty available.

Does that make sense or not?

And then, you know, we illustrated, like, well, we talk about what type of care they should receive, like, well, what's the right type of patient also that you should be getting into our system?

Like, do you take anybody that's over 45 years old that all of those are going to come in or anybody comes in?

Are you more selective?

And what's important to understand is, you know, not only can we afford this, but these patients that are more complex or have more chronic diseases end up getting specialty care, they might end up getting elective surgery or other types of services that not only help, you know, basically we can manage their care better, but also helps our physicians that are working in these facilities get trained and, you know, be more efficient.

So for example, do they do one type of case a year of that surgery, or they do 250?

So the more they do, the better, you know, the better quality and outcomes it is for the patients.

Now one of the things we discussed is in our project is like there's two markets, we said, there's the north one.

In the north one, we said there's five main initiatives we said that we're going to kind of try to understand in this project.

One, can our facilities be much smaller than there really are?

You know, and basically maximizing our footprint.

Second, do we even have enough space, physical space?

Do we have enough staff and do we have the services that support that staff?

Do you have enough linen cloth?

Do you have enough people there can clean the rooms turning around?

Do you have pharmacy, all that to deliver the care?

Do you have everything, you know, to continue delivering the care?

Infrastructure priorities, where do you put the money?

Do you reinvest them in smaller clinics that yes, they have a greater reach and that means people that are farther away in the market can access them easier.

But then again, it's like, well, I'm only seeing 100 patients, but if I put more money in another location, does that give people more access, you know, and access to more people?

So these are conversations we balance, you know, we talked about maximizing the footprint and then right care, right patient.

What is the type of patient that's the right one at the right time for us as a healthcare system?

- [Kevin] And I think a takeaway too for all of this, obviously all of our clients have different missions, but especially with Department of Defense, the readiness posture and taking care of soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen is a priority, and so that is a non-negotiable, essentially almost non-expense related commitment and mission requirement in all of this.

- This just is more background information.

And you know, we wanted to understand, you saw the questions asked, we understood that 96% of the people that lived in the north live between two of our main installations.

One that's called Ft. Eustis, and we have Langley Air Force base, and they're only 18 miles apart, which is about 30 minutes.

So then it starts painting the picture for us.

Okay, we know most people live here, we know if they're between these two facilities.

Which one has better resources, which one has newer buildings?

We know that when we're doing our facility assessments, our buildings had, okay, there's 12 buildings that are over 50 years old in Ft. Eustis.

It's like, does it make sense to keep revitalizing the building?

Does it make sense to leverage the other set of buildings in the installation that are much newer?

And this is just to help us, this information helps us tell the story.

So when we are asking this question does it make sense, here's the information that we're gathering.

This is what it's telling us, that's part of the main message we're trying to communicate.

- [Kevin] I think the real challenge too is you have to understand the cultural differences between an army installation and how they've been running their business for the last 50 or 60 years.

And the Air Force installation, which is 18 miles away and how they manage and run and operate their business and how you bring these two together and being able to tell that story effectively to senior leadership.

They get it.

They're not dumb people, they're very smart.

And when you lay out data for them, you lay out information for them, you tell the story in a way that helps them make hard decisions.

And that's really where our focus is, is how do we help clients make hard decisions?

- And then this is one of our, you know, we talked about storytelling with data analytics, you know, using data effectively in communicating.

We have lots of information available to us, what does it all mean?

And so we try to do a couple of things.

One, keep it simple, like, what's really important?

I know when I was in school, they're always telling me pick one concept or two and run with them, that's your main drive.

Don't try to solve all the problems that you have.

You know, all 15 of them.

Narrow it down, focus areas, okay?

Recognize what the problem is, maybe two to three, what should you be focusing on for each one of those problems to solve?

Is it a bad building?

Is it a capacity issue or is it a population growing or decreasing?

And then prioritize the problems.

You've already outlined the problems.

What's the most important things you need to accomplish first?

Kevin already shared that the mission is we take care of our service members.

That's priority one, you know?

Then if there's no other, you know, resources available to solve any other problems, that's where you should focus at the end of the day.

And then we talked about, you know, how do you explain the story, you know, and this is just one graphic we used to tell the story visually, you know, to talking to the client because it is a complex problem we're trying to solve.

So you have to be able to, how do we walk the client and other people that Kevin said, there are very smart people that deal with information all the time.

How do we translate what we're hearing and what the information is telling us?

And at the end of the day, our recommendation in this case was like, we can help you reduce the footprint if we, A, you know, don't proceed with some building initiatives and focus our efforts in the larger building where people are more likely or inclined to go because it's a nicer looking building.

And there's other reasons, like Kevin talked about, there's cultural challenges that we still have to face, but we wanted to lay out objectively what the data was telling us.

And then I want to, you know, kind of pause a second and just reiterate the fact you know, not all architecture students are the same.

We know that, you know?

And I always like to talk to the students and ask you guys, "Do you like planning?

Do you like HR?"

You know, some people really like finance.

They really like getting to the estimates.

You know, some people, you know, "I really like design.

You know what, I really like making the renders and go into filmmaking."

We have all type, there's no right answer, you know?

And I think one thing you have to keep asking yourself is what would I rather be doing?

And is there a path for me based on my interest?

And for me, you know, it's taken me a long time to connect both sides of the brain, both the technical data analytics with the creative aspect.

You know, I go back and forth, you know, I tell them bridging chaos and order is something we do a lot in healthcare.

And one thing that I learned from Kermit the Frog is, "If necessity is the mother of invention, then creativity must be the father."

That means if there's a need, your skills will meet them.

Because you are creative, you have what it takes.

Thank you.

- [Ray] Kevin- - Please, nope.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the opportunity.

(audience applauds) - I think we want to open it for questions.

- [Ray] We are opening it up for questions.

Do we have any?

While y'all are putting your thoughts together on questions, let me echo an early theme in your remarks, which I particularly enjoyed.

Thank you very much.

I enjoyed talking your comments about architecture being not just about getting a building designed, that it can be more than that.

I'm reminded of the, I think it might have been the first presentation I made after joining a faculty.

Well, shortly thereafter anyway.

And it was entitled something like architecture is not just building a building.

It's a thought process.

- [Luis] It's design thinking.

- It is, it is design thinking.

That's well said.

- [Luis] Yep.

- And if we could see ourselves as learning how to think, then suddenly we are relevant to just about any discipline you can point us to.

- [Kevin] I know in our business, we kind of look at the three bubbles between strategy, healthcare, strategy, and delivery.

You gotta have design thinking around that.

The tactical operations of how you're going to deliver that strategy and the facilities that you do it in or the resources needed to do it, and how all these things intersect, lends itself to our architectural education as kind of being the conductor of people and things and bringing them together.

And we find that our staff that have been schooled in architecture may not be architects, but are very effective in working in these three realms and being good integrators of that information.

- [Ray] That's the word, integrator.

I just love that message, it's one of the strongest our audience can hear.

Thank you for bringing that forward, that was terrific.

Questions from the audience?

Anyone?

Anyone?

George, I see your hand.

Come on.

(Ray laughs) - [George] Do you want me to come up?

- No, you can ask it from there.

I'll repeat it for you.

- [Kevin] We have a hand up in the back.

- [George] Take the student first.

- Okay.

Hey Greg.

- [Greg] I just want to ask Luis how George convinced you to go to architecture?

(Luis and Ray laugh) - [Luis] Well, that's an interesting question.

I think, you know, I started, when I was doing my Master's in Hospital Administration, one of the things that was given a lot of options is, "Well, you have these electives."

And I said, "Well, I really want to do a little more operations management."

And somebody said, "You can either look at the business school or the college of architecture, you get a construction management class."

And I think I did some research, you know, I was like, and I stumbled on the center and you know, and George was one of the first names that popped up.

And I said, "Okay, let me send an email."

And I came to one of these lecture series, one on a Friday afternoon at the college just to see what's this about, you know, understand.

I was like, "Well, I really like what they were saying," you know, and talking to George, one of the things that came out during my time when I was doing my hospital administration was that there was two things that every graduate was doing in my program as they came out.

One, they were doing new construction projects.

So as a hospital administrator, they were jumping in to be the one leading the charge of how do we schedule, you know, how do we coordinate capital assessment or, you know, to build a new hospital or the other side of the coin.

They were doing renovation projects of all kinds, emergency departments, clinical transition units, you know, like an oncology unit, you know, changing and learning about change orders, bulks, bulk ceilings and you know, and things like that that I was, you know, I would've never had the opportunity to learn had I not been through the college, you know, architecture program.

You know, when I went through like, okay, it makes sense to everything they're throwing at me in the hospital.

And you know, coincidentally enough, like, you know, I was sharing afterwards, my first role after school was, you know, helping the Department of Surgery at Johns Hopkins kind of pushed these projects together, you know, orchestrate them, if you will.

And how do you bring in all these people that should be doing like, "Okay, we need to do that project, that one and that one."

And so when George talking to me, it was like, it made sense.

You know, when I shared that, he's like, "It makes perfect sense for you to come overboard over here."

- [Ray] Thanks.

Good answer.

Okay, good?

George, talk to us.

- [George] Thank you.

Thank you for an excellent presentation.

I've known Kevin for many years through his work in the army, and Kevin is very comfortable with people.

He makes you feel good, and I've known Luis.

So my question is, I can't remember how you two crossed paths.

- Yes.

So my first exposure to the Innova Group is Wendy Weitzner, one of our partners came to do a presentation, the Mays Business School with, I can't remember the professor's name, but Leonard Barry, yes, Professor Barry, yes.

I came to do one of his classes.

And I was like, "Well, what is this consulting in healthcare all about?"

So I went to listen, and you know, nothing happened.

Years went by, and at Johns Hopkins, I went to a conference, you know, I was just like, "Yeah, I'm going to go to a conference."

There was a professional development.

So by the way, if your company says you should go to professional development, you should take them up on that.

Just go, you know, that's a great benefit.

Not everybody gets the opportunity to learn.

But in one of those conferences, I met Peter Trice, and at that point, I was doing feasibility studies in overseas in Vietnam, I was doing them.

And he was telling me about his experiences in China.

And he said, "Let's go eat," you know, and then we went to eat Chinese food, a place he knew.

And I was like, "Okay," in Washington, DC.

So we went and afterwards, I think he said, "I'll call you in a week."

And then a week went by, just as he promised, he called me back and he said, "I want you to talk to Kevin."

He says, "Do you want to go to Tucson or Austin?"

And I said, "Let's do Austin."

So I said, "Yes, I'd like to go to Austin, Texas, please."

And so a week went by, we get his call.

And Kevin, you know, we never met in person, it was just a phone call.

- No, and then- - And then you flew me out, yeah, to Austin.

And I met everybody in the office, and the rest is history.

- [George] I want to share a theory I have.

5% of the students know what's going on all the time, 5% of the students don't know what's going on any of the time.

And 90% are switch hitters according to convenience.

Luis knew what was going on.

He'd float around the school, he'd ask questions.

He was out of the School of Public Health.

And this coming together in retrospect seems like a perfect match for what I've known about Kevin and the Innova Group and Luis.

So you have to circulate around.

And again, there's only one person who gave me his card.

I'd recommend him, I wouldn't recommend the rest of them.

But anyhow, Kevin has a great sense of humor, attitude, well-prepared presentation.

When you're in Austin go down and visit, and don't act like students, act like professionals that we see here today.

So I'm taking up too much time, but it's meant with love.

So when I give you a little wrap, Dan King, it's meant with love, right?

I know you have a job.

You do a lot of work with firms.

Oh, let someone else.

I have a question if nobody else wants to ask you.

- Well, George, I'm going to let you save that question for lunch because our time is up for this morning.

So thanks to everybody who came.

Thank you to our presenters.

One more thanks.

(everyone applauds) - [Luis] Thank you.

- And we hope you'll join us next time.

(upbeat music)