Not quite. Try again.
Today, 1:00 to 5:00 PM, at the CKD studio. Everything for a module lives inside that module, so this reads top to bottom without jumping back. The printed Word version is the one to carry in the room.
The two playbook files are ours. Their addresses are published only on this page, so do not paste them anywhere CKD can see.
The team is with us for the first eighty-five minutes and again from ten past four. Amy and Keith carry the middle on their own.
| Time | Runs | Block | In the room |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:00 | 15 min | Module 1 · Welcome and warm-up | Whole team |
| 1:15 | 30 min | Module 2 · CKD on a Page | Whole team |
| 1:45 | 40 min | Module 3 · Brand and the market | Whole team |
| 2:25 | 10 min | Break · the team heads back to work | AI window 1 |
| 2:35 | 30 min | Module 4 · Vision and the numbers | Amy and Keith |
| 3:05 | 45 min | Module 5 · The growth engine | Amy and Keith |
| 3:50 | 15 min | Break · the team comes back in | AI window 2 starts |
| 4:05 | 25 min | Module 6 · The next 40 | We present |
| 4:30 | 30 min | Summary and close | Whole team |
If we run long, protect the summary and close. Trim Module 5 first by reviewing three items per board instead of all of them. Never trim the close. The last twenty minutes are what the team remembers.
Every module maps to a phase they already run. Say it out loud at the top of the day.
| Their phase | Today |
|---|---|
| Programming | Modules 1 and 2 |
| Schematic design | Module 3 |
| Design development | Modules 4 and 5 |
| The rendering | Module 6 |
| Construction documents | Summary and close |
Let's get to know everybody first. We'll go around the room. Name a project you were excited to work on, and tell us what made you proud of it.
Say this before the first person answers, or you will get an apology instead of a story:
No titles. We write keywords live as each person talks.
Translate fast. "I had no idea how to do it and I figured it out" goes up as LEARNING SOMETHING NEW or BIG CHALLENGE. Ask "did we catch it?" and let them correct the word.
Circle a word when it repeats. At the end, gold-sticker the ones the room agrees define CKD.
When someone names what they were proud of, ask whether it was the feeling or the money. Both are useful and they point opposite ways.
If Amy says profitability, take it somewhere: "if a prospect wants something genuinely interesting for five hundred dollars, do you walk away or do you entertain it?" That is where the real operating principle shows up.
Then the weekend question. What would you do with a free weekend and no money worries? This is a talent audit wearing a party hat. Somebody in that room shoots, writes, or lives on social, and they go into the marketing plan instead of a vendor.
Attached is the warm-up whiteboard from the CKD discovery session, 3 Sept.
Eight people: Amy Cupples (principal), Keith Billick (studio director),
Monty Hill, Nathalia Frignani-Burini, Cathryn Ng, Mark Penaran,
Mim Hossain, Lin Ellis. Several are recent hires.
Transcribe every word on the board, then:
1. Group them into themes and say which repeat across people.
2. Give me eight to twelve candidate brand words in their language,
not ours, ranked by how often the idea came up.
Hold these. More boards are coming.
Now let's map the business itself. Five headers on the wall.
Three of them you fill in yourselves with stickies. Two we'll talk through together and we'll do the writing.
All five titles go up. The three sticky zones sit together on the left so we can draw lines across to the two we facilitate.
Keep all five visible even while the right two are empty. We come back and draw the connections between them, and star the ones that matter.
Who we serve and what we make. This is where we want her focused.
Same two. He fills the gaps Amy leaves.
Welcome to add to any zone, but what gets in the way is theirs. Challenges today, things that are inefficient, anything they are working around. A brand new hire can draw on a previous job.
Ten minutes of quiet writing, then everything goes up.
Pipeline first: where does work actually come from? Then money: which project types are profitable, and what are the win rates?
The thing to chase, which Amy has hinted at before: a low win rate in a highly profitable area. If that shows up, the job is not more marketing, it is more RFPs in that lane and better material to win them. Draw the line on the board between the pipeline zone and the money zone when you find it.
Attached are the five zones of CKD on a Page from the 3 Sept session.
Sticky colors: blue is Amy, purple is Keith, green is the team.
1. Transcribe each zone separately, noting sticky color per item.
2. Draft CKD on a Page in their own words.
3. Which zone is thickest, which is thinnest, and what does that say
about where their attention actually goes?
4. List any contradiction between what leadership wrote and what the
team wrote. Be blunt about these, they are the valuable part.
5. Flag any low win rate sitting next to high profitability.
We've just looked at the business from the inside. Now let's look at it from the outside.
Three things: how you talk about yourselves, who you come up against, and what your clients say. We'll do them one at a time, about five minutes each.
Put all three headers up at the start so they can see what is coming, then work through them one at a time.
Everyone writes their own at the same time. Not the official version, the one they say at a dinner.
Names on the stickies. We post them in order of seniority, Amy first, then Keith, then Monty, then down to whoever joined most recently. The point is watching the story change as it travels down the studio. Everyone should see that their intern has a different version, because that is the argument for doing this work at all.
Two columns on the board. Get the list first, then work the second column.
| The firm | What a client would like about them, and what they would not |
|---|---|
Do not grind through all of them. Pick one apart properly. The point is what clients like and dislike about the alternative, the way Christa told us those HOAs never answer their email. If that is the bar, answering email is a positioning line.
Put a target mark next to the one they most want to beat. It is a good moment in the room.
A conversation, not an exercise. They will not have quotes ready. Ask it open and we write:
Cut, do not run: the thirty printed word cards. Handing them our vocabulary leads the witness. The list is in the back of their workbook as a takeaway, and at the bottom of this page if the room dries up.
Attached: the "what do you tell people CKD does" stickies from the
3 Sept session, posted in seniority order (Amy, Keith, then the team
down to the newest), plus the competitor board and the client-quote board.
1. Transcribe each answer with the person's name.
2. Show me the drift: what does leadership say that the newest people
do not, and what do the newer people say that leadership never mentions?
3. Pull the words and phrases appearing in three or more answers.
4. From the competitor board, list each firm with what a client likes
and dislikes about them, and what open ground that leaves.
Do not invent firms I did not give you.
5. Keep the client quotes verbatim. Do not rewrite them.
Thank the team properly and let them go. Make it feel like a milestone, not a dismissal. Tell them we want them back at ten to four for the good part.
You now have the warm-up board, all five zones of CKD on a Page, and the
Module 3 stickies and competitor board from the CKD session, 3 Sept.
In under ten minutes give me:
1. A draft "CKD on a Page" in their own words.
2. One positioning line in their voice, plus two alternates.
3. The words that repeat across the whole room, with who said each.
4. Any contradiction or non-alignment worth raising this afternoon.
5. One thing we should ask Amy and Keith in the next hour that we
would not have thought to ask before reading this.
Keep it short enough to read standing up.
Frame this before anything else. We are their marketing and brand people. We are not telling them how to run an architecture practice and they will smell it if we try. We need the target so we do not market them into a corner.
Three questions. We'll take them one at a time. Five minutes to write, then we talk it through before we move on.
Put numbers on it wherever you can, whatever you actually run the business by.
One big pad each. Same three questions on both, taken together, one at a time.
Do not ask them to draw the org chart. We moved away from their organizational structure on purpose.
The personal half is the one to protect. Keith may want to be a name partner. Amy may have a revenue number and a book. Neither has necessarily heard the other say it. If a gap opens, Chris notes it and it goes in the follow-up to Amy, never on the wall.
Attached: Amy's board and Keith's board from Module 4, 3 Sept. Three
questions each: where they are today, where they want CKD and themselves
to be at the 40th in 2028, and the long game past that.
1. Transcribe both boards, keeping the numbers exactly as given.
2. Work out the gap between today's capacity and each milestone. How much
more work per year is implied, in their own units?
3. Given that gap, what does the marketing have to deliver, and more
importantly what must it NOT deliver? Where would too much demand
hurt them?
4. Where do Amy and Keith answer differently, especially on the personal
question and the long game?
Do not recommend hires or org structure. We are the marketing team.
Now the ideas. Write down every growth project you have, meaning the work you do to win work rather than the client projects themselves.
At least five, and as many more as you want. Things you already do and things you have only thought about.
Draw the axes on both pads before they sit down. Effort along the bottom, impact up the side. Write the quadrant names on, not just the axes.
← low efforthigh effort →
Every sticky gets marked E if they already do it today, or N if it is a new idea. That marking is where the value is: watching an existing monthly commitment land in the money pit is the moment that pays for the session.
The two boards are a comparison, not a duplicate. Where Amy's easy wins are Keith's big bets, that is a difference of belief about the business and it is worth more than the list. Follow-up note to Amy, never on the wall.
Fifteen minutes. Coffee, and the room fills up again. This is deliberately the moment the team returns, so they come back to the best part of the day rather than to a debrief.
Upload the Module 4 and 5 boards now and start the prompt below. It runs while Chris presents The Next 40, which gives us roughly forty minutes of work before the summary.
You now have everything from the CKD session: the warm-up words, CKD on a
Page, the brand and competitor boards, the capacity and milestone numbers,
and both growth boards.
Give me, in under forty minutes:
1. A one-line positioning statement in their words, plus two alternates.
2. The six to eight words that came up across the whole room, and who
said each.
3. The three moves that matter most, sequenced, sized against the capacity
number from Module 4.
4. What did we miss? What is high impact that nobody put on a board, and
what did they put in the wrong quadrant?
5. One thing to say in the close that will land with the newest people in
the room, not just with Amy and Keith.
Be direct where you disagree with the room.
Chris presents from the portal page. They sit back. This is the most enjoyable stretch of the day and the right note for the team to have rejoined on.
This one is on us. Sit back. We're going to show you what a great anniversary and brand moment can look like, from firms in your field and a few from well outside it.
All we want from you is your reaction.
Screen only. Their workbook has the reaction columns.
Andy notes what they lean toward and what they wave off. That reaction tells us more about their appetite than any questionnaire.
Playback and close are one block now. Andy puts the output on screen, Michael reads it back, Chris closes.
The balance to hold. Enough that it feels impressive and worth their afternoon. Not so much that we have given away the plan. The readout in a few days is the paid work. Show them the themes and the words, not the strategy.
Say plainly that nothing is final and we are not asking anyone to decide today.
The team was out of the room for over an hour. Left alone that reads as decisions behind closed doors. Fix it out loud.
The outcome we want from the last five minutes is that the team leaves feeling closer to each other and clear that we are here for all of them. If they feel that, every idea we bring back next month lands with less resistance. That is a marketing outcome, not a nicety.
Pads go flat on a table to write on, then onto the wall. The easel falls over.
Every board, straight on and whole, then a second shot close enough to read the stickies. Upload immediately rather than batching it to the end of the day.
Unknown at the time of writing: the size of their whiteboard and the shape of the room. It is supposed to be a whole other floor. Get eyes on it early and be ready to move more of the session onto pads if the board is small.
Only if the room dries up. These are what other firms in their field actually say about themselves, taken off the about pages of Mithun, Hood Design Studio, SWA, CMG, PWP, Sasaki, GGN, OLIN, RHAA, Andropogon, Surfacedesign, SmithGroup and Perkins&Will.
Do not open with these. Their own words have to come first or we have led the witness. This is a rescue, not a plan. The same list is in the back of their workbook as a takeaway.
The gap worth knowing about. Only two of those thirteen firms mention being woman-owned, and neither builds anything on it. Almost nobody claims to be good at complex institutional work: hospitals that stay open, schools in session, public agencies and their review cycles. For a studio whose portfolio is the VA, Highland and Fremont High, that is the emptiest ground in the sample.