As a child growing up in Australia, Michelle Watson was influenced by her father’s love of a TV program called Why Is It So? The charismatic host, Julius Sumner Miller, carried out experiments to show curious young viewers how natural phenomena could be explained by the laws of physics. Throughout Watson’s childhood, her father would recount stories and enthusiastically ask, But why is it so, Michelle? It is an approach to life and business that resonates with her today.

“I love to understand why things work and why they don’t work in a different way,” she says. “And that has really fuelled my whole career, I think.”

Today, as the global director for geospatial solutions at Jacobs, one of the leading global, full-spectrum consulting, technical, scientific, and project delivery solutions firms, she continues to ask questions meant to unlock insight. Using the analytic power of location intelligence—a form of business intelligence that multiplies the value of location—Watson helps Jacobs’ clients find patterns in data that lead to streamlined workflows, reduced risk, increased work site safety, and new forms of value at the intersection of built and natural environments.

At the centre of her work is a geographic information system (GIS) that models huge, varied datasets into intuitive location intelligence. That might take the form of a smart map of a city showing ongoing construction projects alongside metrics on green space and social equity.

Watson and Jacobs’ location analysts help business leaders arrive at better, more holistic solutions by surfacing important insights from each project’s geographic context. It’s an approach that sees in a defective bridge not just an infrastructure project but a chance to improve the surrounding community, environment, and transportation network by building smarter.

The Art of the Possible

As Jacobs has grown—today it has a workforce of more than 55,000 professionals, with $13 billion in annual revenue—its mandate has broadened, extending beyond core capabilities and into digital domains like cybersecurity and the Internet of Things. In 2019, company leaders named geospatial technology one of the five main areas of Jacobs’ strategic focus, recognizing the potential of location intelligence to create new value for customers and bridge disciplines.

Through location intelligence, “We start to see that the challenges our clients are facing interconnect more so than they ever have before across all industries and client sectors,” says Chrissy Thom, vice president of global solutions and technology. Planning and designing in this era of extreme weather events, for example, requires an understanding not just of how projects have been designed in the past, but how to plan for future weather patterns, renewable energy sources, and the resiliency of construction materials. “That’s where Michelle’s team comes in,” Thom says, “really looking at how we integrate across the tools we use, resulting in a stronger outcome.”

As one of nearly 30 global solutions directors in the firm, Watson is a key adviser on many Jacobs projects. She and her team contribute location intelligence to ventures that range from high-speed rail lines to wastewater treatment plants to smart city planning. In this leadership role, she oversees Jacobs’ 700 location analysts and geospatial experts while helping connect the C-suite in charge of project life cycles with clients. It’s a position that demands both empathy and corporate savvy. “I think my role in the business is a bit of a translator,” Watson says. “I’ve always put myself in the client’s shoes.”

Watson’s goal is to integrate GIS into the planning stages of projects as a platform that can capture input from a variety of stakeholders and model outcomes. She sees older, traditional approaches to project planning—which often include expensive contingencies and reactive problem solving—as no longer sustainable. Projects are becoming bigger; infrastructure is aging; and, especially in a time of pandemic, budgets are shrinking. At the same time, data is becoming cheaper and more plentiful, even overwhelming.

Watson believes that a team of location analysts, using GIS technology, can confront these realities, empowering clients to think three steps ahead. With location intelligence, a client might see how the layout of tree lines will deflect gale-force winds from a coastal building or how property values for new condominiums can be increased by creating viewsheds that highlight nearby amenities.

As the interconnectedness of buildings, structures, and the natural environment becomes more apparent, it’s in the spaces where disciplines meet—engineering, architecture, and environmental science—where the greatest gains can be found.

“Innovation happens at the intersections,” Watson says.

Geospatial: A Realm of Exploration, Innovation

Raised on Magnetic Island, a natural oasis and tourist destination in North Queensland, Australia, Watson grew up surrounded by national parks and the Great Barrier Reef. Family camping trips and up- close interactions with sea life fuelled an interest in one day becoming a marine biologist (see sidebar).

But the clue to where her career would lead lay closer to home. Her parents ran an auto mechanic shop and instilled in Watson a strong work ethic and a client-focused view of service. Her knack for problem solving and spotting waste was apparent from an early age. Visiting her father’s workshop one day, she watched her mother and father doing inventory. Already a budding consultant, she advised them that if they bar-coded each part, they could streamline the organizational system and help ensure the right parts were on the shelf when needed. “I hate inefficiency,” she says. “I hate recreating wheels. You see how hard it is in business, that every cent counts.”

At dinner, she would play the devil’s advocate in wide-ranging conversations and arguments with her father that went on long after the table was cleared. “It used to drive my mother and sister nuts,” she laughs, but the dialogues were good practice for seeing thorny issues from multiple perspectives and finding surprising places of agreement.

She discovered a love for geography in high school, but it was as a student at James Cook University that the power of geospatial technology hit her “like a lightning bolt.” More than just a tool for creating maps, GIS identified patterns that could change how businesses attacked problems. “It’s like being an explorer,” Watson says. “You get to see new combinations of data and things that people haven’t necessarily seen.”

[On Einstein's theory of relativity:] All of a sudden, he could see it, and it just made sense. And then he spent the rest of his career trying to explain it to people. For me, geospatial has been like that my entire career. It just makes so much sense.

Michelle Watson, Jacobs

Turning Experience into Influence

As degrees in GIS were not yet available, Watson focused on environmental science—a field she believes empowers geospatial professionals in the business world by fostering a collaborative mind-set and an appreciation of the world’s interlocking ecosystems. “That concept of integrating data and understanding that one thing pulls another is just inherent to what geospatial represents.”

After graduating, she joined the consulting and engineering firm Sinclair Knight Merz—acquired by Jacobs in 2013—in an environmental science position. Over the next 20 years, she applied the lessons and insights of location intelligence and a knack for interdisciplinary thinking across the company. She worked on projects dealing with water, telecommunications, mining, defence, ports and other sectors.

That broad exposure trained her to become a highly effective communicator, able to span the work of data scientists, engineers, and planners with corporate executives who develop and sell projects.

“Michelle’s background, having spent time both in the sales side of our business and the operations side, means she really does sit on both sides of the tables and can be very effective,” says Gary Nuss, a senior vice president at Jacobs who’s worked closely with Watson. “Michelle is one of the key influencers in the organization.”

When I talk to clients, they really respond well to things visualized. And we can process visual data a lot faster than we can process things we read or hear. So being able to see the challenges of our projects visually is something that geospatial really helps us with.

Gary Nuss, Jacobs

GIS as Information Management

Jacobs’ involvement in an infrastructure recovery program in Christchurch, New Zealand, following earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 epitomized for Watson how GIS and her team of location analysts could act as strategic advisers.

The geospatial team was originally brought in to assist the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) with maps and surveys, but location analysts saw an opportunity to deliver more value. They suggested that construction crews and surveyors use mobile applications to input information; that data, combined with geotagged photos, gave planners a full picture of progress in specific locations. Moreover, before field teams even stepped outside, geospatial analysts gathered data to create hazard maps highlighting the safest routes.

“To me, it epitomizes the value of having geospatial practitioners in from day one,” Watson says.

The geospatial team’s facility with data and its strategic approach led to the creation of a forward works program. This allowed the recovery effort’s hundreds of workers to share advance notices and coordinate on rebuilding efforts, streamlining workflows and avoiding unnecessary disruptions to local businesses.

“They gained efficiencies, made their project safer, and reduced latency in information sharing,” Watson says. “It was a genuine collaboration.”

Finding the Synergies in Systems

For location intelligence to improve client outcomes, geospatial experts must step outside technical roles—and sometimes, out of comfort zones.

“I’m challenging the team,” Watson says. “You need to step up and lead because often [clients and project planners] don’t know what they don’t know. It’s our job to help shape the art of the possible and bring them along.”

A recent big win for the team of location analysts came when Jacobs was selected as the Lead Masterplan Coordinators providing specialist advisory services associated with statutory planning, infrastructure, sustainability, logistics, and transport planning on the Meridian Water regeneration program in the Upper Edmonton area of North London. The Enfield Council is redeveloping 200 acres there, comprising 10,000 homes, parks, multiuse streets, and work spaces for makers. The effort is expected to generate 6,000 jobs. Project leaders want to maximize green space in an urban setting and offer a range of affordable housing options in one of the most expensive cities in the world. The Jacobs team was able to use location intelligence and a geodesign approach—harmonizing physical structures with the natural world—to meet those ambitious goals.

“From a geodesign perspective, what we’re trying to do is find the synergies between systems that provide opportunities for innovation and creative leaps forward,” says Shannon McElvaney, Jacobs’ global director of geodesign and one of the leads on the Meridian project. Jacobs won the work by pitching a data-driven, GIS-forward approach. The team’s technical prowess complemented Jacobs’ value-by-design approach, executed with the predictive analytics of location intelligence.

Contracted to provide technical design and planning advisory services for the Meridian work, the Jacobs team began by creating a digital master plan that captured building footprints and types, as well as the demand for water and electricity generated by the new construction. Next they performed a proximity analysis, clarifying how affordable, multifamily homes would sit in relation to the transit station, bike lanes, parks, and shopping in an effort to become a “15-minute city,” a neighbourhood where most needs can be met within a short walk or bike ride.

The team used GIS to track and log all incoming data, translating that into 3D models of planned sites and dashboards showing KPIs and progress against goals. Jacobs team members use the dashboards to update the Enfield Council executive team on a weekly basis. The dashboards were so well received that the client asked for new metrics to be tracked, among them social equity, air quality, and heat levels.

According to McElvaney, the project spurred Jacobs to propose a similar approach to four prospective clients, with location analysts again in the role of advisers and value generators.

“We’ve become essential to the program managers,” McElvaney says. “The planning bit of the big AEC wheel is taking us into the larger picture. If we hadn’t applied a GIS backbone to it, this would not have happened.”

For me, location intelligence has always been a business fundamental.

Michelle Watson, Jacobs

Socratic Leadership

The success of such ventures also validates Watson’s leadership approach to geospatial teams, designed to create momentum without micromanaging the result, all while improving business outcomes for Jacobs and its clients.

“We are seeing that our business is increasing because of the combination of big data, robust infrastructure, and practitioners like Michelle and her team,” Nuss says.

Always inquisitive, Watson often leads through curiosity, throwing out questions to Jacobs’ location analysts meant to get them thinking in innovative ways.

“Michelle’s superpower is that she empowers her team,” Thom says. “Her strength is that she has a vision and really pushes her team out in front of her to help them develop the capabilities and leadership that are going to expand the outcomes beyond herself.”

It’s a leadership style that aligns with Watson’s vision for the rise of location analysts: individuals who can sit at the intersections and drive innovation, using location intelligence not just to analyse data but to generate new visions of what’s possible.

This article was originally published in the global edition of WhereNext

In 2015, a technology race among the biggest real estate firms was accelerating, with each striving to win business and serve clients using the latest digital technologies. Executives at CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate firm, looked around at the competition and realized they needed to take a major step forward on digital strategy—and do so quickly.

That was when CBRE set its sights on taking the lead in an industry-wide digital transformation. As part of its strategy, the company incorporated a geographic information system (GIS) more directly into its client work. CBRE created Dimension, a groundbreaking application that has enabled CBRE professionals to turn data into compelling visual stories, transforming how clients select office, retail, and industrial sites; recruit employees; and choose vendors and tenants. An agile, hyper-fast, high-tech platform, Dimension drew comparisons to a Ferrari from CBRE professionals. Now that the company had the platform, it needed a driver to navigate the new capability.

Into that role stepped Tahirah Mahan Thomas, a marketing executive who had already been with the company for nine years and was known for her relentless work ethic and charismatic leadership. When the company asked if she’d be willing to lead the project, she admitted she had hardly heard of GIS. But she leapt at the opportunity.

Under Mahan Thomas’s stewardship, Dimension has become one of the most powerful tools in the CBRE sales professionals’ kit. When using Dimension, win rates increase significantly, and brokers use the platform in client presentations more than any other technology save PowerPoint.

Mahan Thomas’s talent as a digital storyteller and versatile communicator helped drive adoption of the new technology. She showed how to pair the visual expressiveness of GIS-based maps with data-rich location insight to create narratives that speak to clients’ business needs.

Laura O’Brien—executive vice president of operational excellence at CBRE and a champion of Mahan Thomas’s work—sees that as a core component of the technology. “The fact that we can tell stories using Dimension enables our sales professionals to really dig deep with the people in front of them,” she says. “They can take clients on a visual journey of discovery, with interactive story maps. That’s the magic.”

Once upon a Time in Ohio

Born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in the suburbs outside Cleveland, Mahan Thomas knew from an early age that she was a natural storyteller with a knack for presentation.

“When I was a little girl, I used to make up ads,” she says. “I’d jump out of the shower and suds up my hair into an ice cream cone and make up shampoo commercials.”

That habit was in part a family inheritance, shaped by her upbringing. Her mother was an educator, working as a school psychologist and administrator, and her father spent his career in the radio broadcasting business. “My dad is a big storyteller. When we would be on road trips, he would make up stories and tell them to us. My uncles are big joke tellers.”

She graduated from Georgia State University, where she studied journalism and communications and earned a minor in marketing and theatre. Afterward, she hopped between Atlanta and Houston, joining CBRE in 2006.

The world of marketing suited her instantly. “My personality is very motivational, being a cheerleader,” Mahan Thomas says. “I like to talk. I like to present. I’m social. Marketing was a natural fit.”

Long before Dimension landed on her plate, she recognized that storytelling was at the core of the real estate business. While it is an industry powered by numbers—square footage, lease rates, ZIP codes—CBRE’s brokers needed narratives to engage clients’ imagination and help them see the future. By reaching people on an emotional level, she saw, you could figure out how to better serve them.

“Storytelling is a huge part of the human tradition,” she says. “Before we wrote, we sat around fires and told stories. It’s how we educate. It’s how we connect with other people. It’s how we learn.”

Choosing a Digital Leader

Mahan Thomas was hand-picked to lead Dimension’s adoption by O’Brien, a senior executive, 28-year veteran of CBRE, and former broker herself. Following the pioneering work of Peter Patnaude, who began the GIS evolution at CBRE, O’Brien volunteered to integrate the new technology into the brokerage organization. At first, it seemed like a simple task. Nearly everything CBRE did began and ended with location, and the company’s US mapping centre already generated as many as 70,000 maps a year. Dimension appeared to be a fairly straightforward digital upgrade of what had traditionally been an analogue process.

But through her initial conversations with GIS specialists inside the company, O’Brien realized the task was more complex and that the platform had capabilities that went far beyond the PDF and paper maps the salesforce was then using. With GIS-powered location intelligence, companies could identify otherwise unseen patterns in data, and those patterns could strengthen site selection, reshape the mix of merchandise in retail stores, pinpoint up-and-coming neighbourhoods, and predict which combination of vendors would create maximum revenue in multi-unit buildings.

“That made me realize that what this needed was a special leader,” O’Brien says. “This wasn’t just our same old mapping centre hiring a few more people with new skills. We needed someone who was really willing to dig in and see the opportunity not just then, but for the future. That made me think to explore our marketing organization for someone who excelled at highly visual presentation modes and wasn’t afraid of trying new platforms.”

After hearing Mahan Thomas’s manager describe her as a visionary, O’Brien had a feeling she’d found the right person to lead Dimension. Just as important as Mahan Thomas’s marketing skills was her ability to be a servant leader. “She would listen to the need first, figure out how to serve, and do everything she could to knock it out of the park,” O’Brien says.

When O’Brien asked Mahan Thomas if she would take on the project in early 2016, the answer was an emphatic yes. But the new leader realized she had a lot of work ahead of her. She had heard the hype around Dimension, but the transformative potential that people kept talking about wasn’t clear to her. She thought it was just about dots on a map.

A Mapping Paradigm Shift

The moment the power of Dimension clicked for Mahan Thomas was when Marko Haarma, the GIS director at CBRE, first showed her a commute-optimizer tool. Using data from a client that was considering relocating its headquarters, CBRE created an interactive map that let the company’s executives pick various locations and instantly see the average commute time, distance, and costs for their workforce to reach each site. What in the past would have required hours of work designing and printing dozens of paper maps could be accomplished in real time and changed on the fly, on a single screen.

“Up to that point, I was thinking, ‘How am I going to get people excited about this?’” Mahan Thomas says. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my friends, we are about to make some magic here.’”

Working with O’Brien, Mahan Thomas devised a strategy for driving adoption of Dimension within the company. They began by working one-on-one and in small teams with the most forward-thinking brokers in the company’s retail and industrial sectors. As those early adopters started winning business through Dimension, demand grew within the departments and spread throughout the company.

O’Brien and Mahan Thomas also incorporated Dimension training into popular internal education programs to teach sales professionals how to weave a location story. The training walked them through the process of narrative building by posing questions such as, Who’s the client? What’s their challenge? What are they trying to do? What datasets can we build?

Mahan Thomas helped brokers bring location intelligence to life through storytelling. “The subject location is the main character and the surrounding data points are the supporting characters. They are working together to do something special, whether it’s solve a problem or create an opportunity.”

Unlocking Narratives with Psychographics

One of the best examples Mahan Thomas found for this approach came as the company was advising the owner of an outdoor, mixed-use shopping centre in Texas. The centre’s occupancy had declined and wasn’t producing the expected results. Through Dimension, CBRE was able to pull aggregated data and dig into the psychographics (a more psychologically nuanced form of demographics) to understand the centre’s average customer and their corresponding shopping behaviours. CBRE discovered that the centre was actually drawing a more diverse demographic, including shoppers who were willing to commute and interested in retail experiences that involved the whole family.

CBRE developed a new management strategy based on the data about who was coming and what they desired. That insight unlocked a host of creative solutions, including video-equipped, pet-friendly amenities; branded towels to dry off kids who went splashing in the fountains; and on-site concerts and yoga classes. Nine months later, the mall was 90 percent leased and the amount of time customers spent on the premises had jumped to 135 minutes from 97.

For Mahan Thomas, who often talks about real-estate advisory as an art and a science, this case exemplified the power of both—the secret sauce, as she calls it. The location intelligence that Dimension provided was grounded in science and data analysis, but what the company did with that insight—the breakthrough solutions that others might not have been imaginative enough to create—that was more art than science.

“We really encourage being creative, being problem solvers, not being afraid to look at things differently,” Mahan Thomas says. “Our sheer scale at CBRE provides a lot of opportunities to learn, grow, and get really creative. It’s that X factor you can’t replicate.”

A Company Culture Open to Innovation

While Mahan Thomas tends to think of herself as right-brained and creative, she’s also a stickler for details, immersing herself in the nitty-gritty of whatever subject she’s assigned to.

When she was appointed to work on Dimension, Haarma—who had seen other leaders come and go—was sceptical that real change would happen or that the GIS department’s full potential would be tapped. But in Mahan Thomas, he found a leader willing to get down into the trenches and wrestle with the problems that her team faced.

“She sat down with every employee, no matter how high or how low, all the way down to our entry-level logo-map maker,” Haarma says. “She spent time one-on-one with them to understand the ins and outs, the ups and downs—everything about them. Nobody had ever done that before.”

When the time came to allocate more resources for the department, Mahan Thomas drew on her knowledge of the team’s inner workings to make a bold ask to significantly grow the team. Haarma still remembers the multi-tab spreadsheet she created with a quantitative case for why CBRE needed the labour power to reach the company’s goals. In short order, they began the process of bringing on several new hires.

Through connecting with employees, amassing data into a compelling case, and overcoming odds, Mahan Thomas inspired those she worked with, creating internal momentum that helped drive Dimension’s adoption.

“Based on what I’ve seen from Tahirah, her ability to make change in the company is unrivalled,” Haarma says. “We had the creativity. We had the products. But we were lacking the ability to make change and convince the powers that be.”

It didn’t hurt, he speculates, that she was a natural centre of attention. “Tahirah is a huge personality,” Haarma says. “When she walks in a room wearing a bright orange dress, heads turn. But her clothes are dwarfed by her personality. People listen. People stop.”

Timeless Principles of Communication

CBRE’s digital transformation began with a sophisticated GIS platform and the desire to stay ahead of the competition. But executives soon found that in order to achieve the technology’s full potential, they needed great leaders with a human touch who could mold data science into narratives that spoke to the heart and mind. Putting location intelligence into the hands of gifted digital storytellers has helped the company remain at the top of its field, with over $20 billion in revenue last year.

For Mahan Thomas, who was promoted to vice president and head of CBRE Advisory Services Marketing (while still overseeing Dimension), the process affirmed that technological advances never supersede certain fundamental principles.

“Technology doesn’t necessarily replace old forms of communication,” she says. “We just have new tools to tell our story better.”

This article was originally published in the global edition of WhereNext.