Ep 4: Before the First Drawing with Stacey Root and Chad Kruse

The moment a project moves from conception into design, something shifts. The owner's questions change, the team changes, and the leadership required to hold it all together changes. Most projects never acknowledge that transition out loud. This episode is about what happens when you do.

GUESTS

Stacey Root is Health Practice Leader for the Denver Office of Canon Design, with deep experience in IPD, design-build, and complex healthcare projects. Stacey brings a practitioner's honesty to what onboarding actually looks like from the design side, and what owners rarely understand about the process they are putting teams through.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceymroot/

Chad Kruse is Executive Director and Project Advisor at Nebraska Medicine, where he provides business support for strategic and campus planning. Chad joins as co-host throughout the series, offering the owner's perspective as the conversation moves from concept to concrete.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-kruse-6714b47/

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why owners often answer the question of what before they have answered the question of why, and what that costs once design begins
• How some design firms are embedding strategy and data analysis upstream of architecture to help owners arrive at design ready, not just willing
• Why bringing designers on too early can be just as damaging as bringing them on too late, and what the right timing actually looks like
• What the RFP process does well, what it fails to do, and why both owners and designers are complicit in a process neither side thinks is working
• How the best owners structure selection around team chemistry and problem-solving rather than page counts and project resumes
• Why chartering works on paper and fails in practice, and what it actually takes to hold a team to what it agreed to in that room

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Introduction: when leadership changes hands and no one says so

01:50 - Stacey's introduction and what her real job description actually is

03:35 - The most common misunderstanding between owners and designers at project launch

05:22 - Brought on too early, too late, or just right: what timing looks like from the design side

07:10 - How Canon's Blue Cottage team works upstream of architecture to ground projects in data

09:16 - Why owners answer what before they answer why, and what that costs in design

11:04 - When smaller owners rely on their designers to fill the strategy gap

13:43 - Is there value in bringing designers into ambiguity, or does it just slow things down

15:00 - The RFP process: what it is supposed to do and what it actually does

16:27 - Stacey's 80-page response, 50-minute interview, and what that signals about how owners decide

18:55 - How one owner ran a work session instead of a pony show and what the team learned

20:29 - Chad on running two procurement processes simultaneously and why he weights interviews at 70%

26:07 - Selecting teams instead of firms: why Chad asks designers and builders to come as a package

31:29 - Chartering: what it looks like when it works and why it almost never does

35:28 - Why owners think they are giving context when they are actually giving ambiguity

37:38 - What happens when the owner preaches collaboration and then does not behave it

39:32 - Why the owner's representative in the room is the difference between IPD and theater

41:00 - The owner's role is not to have all the answers; it is to hold the team accountable

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Canon Design Blue Cottage: strategic advisory and data analysis arm of Canon Design, referenced in the context of upstream owner strategy work
• Owner Project Requirements (OPR): referenced by Chad as a foundational document that most projects launch without
• Gallup CliftonStrengths: referenced by Chad in the context of team selection and understanding how people are wired
• IPD chartering process: referenced throughout as both a best practice and a commonly misapplied one

WHERE TO FIND STACEY

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceymroot/ Canon Design: https://www.canondesign.com