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Lead, Grow, Thrive: Advancing Your Career & Practice

FRI-A10: Breadth and Depth: Building Organizational Capacity from Emerging Practices to Legacy Firms

Friday, September 18, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:15 AM PT
1.25 PDH, LA CES/non-HSW

How can landscape architects build the capacity to adapt in a profession facing rapid change? This session brings emerging, mid-size, and legacy firm perspectives to compare how organizational scale shapes the balance between specialist depth and generalist breadth, and how that balance can position both practices and individuals to evolve.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Define adaptive capacity as the skills, systems, and structures that enable landscape architects to perform effectively and respond to change.
  • Identify the external forces that pressure firms to evolve their current capacities (market shifts, increasing project complexity, changing construction methods, emergent technology, etc.).
  • Compare how firms of different size and maturity balance specialist and generalist roles to build adaptive capacity.
  • Apply a framework for evaluating capacity gaps to a firm, team, or individual trajectory.