Page 268 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

246 CHAPTER 8

largely they preach to the already converted. We brokers, on the other hand, are in
contact with the vast majority of people who haven’t yet been exposed to sustainable
ideas and practices. In slightly fancier language, for green building to hit a tipping
point of broad market acceptance, the diffusion of information and innovation relies
on brokers.
We have already seen this s-shaped diffusion curve in Chapter 1. First come the
innovators, followed by the brokers who spread the word well beyond the small
cadre of folks who have begun to innovate. Then come the early majority adopters,
followed by the late majority adopters, and finally the laggards or resistors. The pace
of acceptance is largely determined by how successful the brokers are at dissemi-
nating new ideas. A comparison of two s-shaped diffusion curves—one with a slow
adoption rate, the other with a much faster adoption rate—can be seen in Figure 8.2.
Once the company as a whole got our heads around this basic concept, our prior-
ities changed. Brokerage, earlier viewed as a small appendage of the company’s over-
all operations, moved to the forefront as a critical focus for our overall sustainable
agenda. We realized the touch points within the brokerage division, both quantita-
tively and in terms of diversity, were much richer than those provided by our develop-
ment division. Our brokers met with a much greater number of potential developers
and had access to a much deeper pool of financing sources. And there was a multi-
plier effect as well, since our brokers by and large had longstanding business rela-
tionships with other brokers well beyond our small community, and these brokers had
a wealth of social contacts as well. It seems so obvious in retrospect—if an aspiring
green real estate company is seeking to seed change, it needs to move beyond its own
groupthink and bring into its scope of work those who are thinking and acting more
conventionally.

# OF ADOPTEES
# OF ADOPTEES Resistor
Resistors
Late Majority
Late Majority
Tipping
Tipping
Point
Point
Early Majority
Earl y Majority
Brokers
Br oker
Innovators
Inno ator
TIME
1 2 3 4 5 TIME
ast-P
Fast-Paced Adoptionaced Adoption
Figure 8.2 Two adoption curves for sustainability.