Incrementally Speaking

I had an opportunity to speak last week as part of a panel on sustainable development sponsored by the US Green Building Council in Central Florida. I'm not telling you this to let you know that I think it's important that our industry take a leadership role in sustainable development. I tell you this because it drives home something I recently learned from a good friend the week before which has the applicability to the sustainable/green movement and to all of us. Like many of you, throughout my career I've been in a constant state of curiosity. Sometimes it gets me in trouble, because I'm seen as always questioning things and sometimes I may come across as "difficult". But I wouldn't give up my curiosity for anything. So it was with great sincerity combined with this curiosity, that I asked a friend of mine how they got to be so smart. How did they manage the accomplishments they had in a seemingly short period of time. To set the stage for you, my question, "How did you get so smart?", was a reaction to something I heard from the lunch speaker and was written on a note pad. My curious nature had my brain wandering beyond what the speaker was trying to enlighten us about. This is no commentary on the speaker or the content, it's just more insight into the fact that my curious mind seems to always be seeking something. Without giving it a moment of thought, my friend quickly wrote this on yellow pad...INCREMENTALLY. It hit my brain like an explosion. It was concise. It was accurate and it was absolutely honest. But more than those things, and I'm sure she had no idea when she wrote it, it had impact that was going to carry forward. And it's a rare occasion when we hear or see something that carries enough punch that it becomes repeatable.

So while my brain did go back to paying attention to the speaker because it really was interesting to me, I kept coming back to the wisdom in that one word. Incrementally. Incrementally is not only how things happen, it's how things should happen. It's a great visual to remind ourselves that if we just do something, incremental change happens. Picture how many times have you stopped doing something, or worse yet, never started doing something, because all you could see was the finished product as opposed to the incremental steps and processes that would happen until you got there. I witness this all the time when consulting. People are unwilling to implement a new system and/or software to make changes because they feel they must do it all or do nothing at all. The all or nothing attitude is not really useful for most of us personally or as real estate professionals.

So, back to the program that I was so fortunate to be a part of; Financing a Green Building Project. The goal was to have some professionals from engineering, lending and valuation perspective discuss how to build, illustrate value and loan on a sustainable or "green" project. Talk about an incremental process. You might be surprised to learn that there's something called the Vancouver Valuation Accord Document - agreed to by 20 countries which adopted the definition of sustainable development created back in 1987. You may or may not know that the US Green Building Council, was the creator of and administers the LEED -Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Green Building Rating System certification. Or that the LEED certification system has been in use for more than seven years in commercial construction. See the incremental movements? See the power of doing things incrementally?

Now the bad news. As I look at the players in our industry - appraisers, assessors, insurance adjusters, lenders, tenants, owners, buyers, sellers, brokers etc., there's not been a lot of incremental movement on valuation issues. It seems that architects and engineers have really been on the forefront and it is only recently that many of the more generalists are starting to join in. But in some ways it's okay because, as I was reminded very clearly last week, the best way to get really smart is incrementally. Try it yourself. You know there's something you've been meaning to do. A new software you been meaning to implement. An organization you've thought about joining. A project you'd like to begin. Or a trip you'd like to take. Take it on incrementally...One step at a time. When you do, it'll be sooner rather than later when someone wonders how you did it. You can simply and succinctly say, "Incrementally".