Page 39 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

18 CHAPTER 1

colleagues seem both intrigued by the openness of our dialogue and highly skeptical,
as if to say I’m not going to be brainwashed by this corporate mumbo-jumbo about
values. After a while (and it can take quite a while for this transition to take place)
there is a growing awareness that others are true to who they are, and that this might
be a safe environment to speak openly about what matters most. A still longer period
of time elapses before this evocation of sincerity evolves into a much more liberating
sense that this is a community of people whom I not only can trust but who will enable
me to trust myself.
This continual process of revising oneself toward greater authenticity is a critical
part of values-shaping. It has taken time for us, as a company, to get our hands around
the idea that aspiring to be a sustainable real estate company means more than simply
developing LEED certified buildings. A fly on the wall at one of our company retreats
would get an earful of debate regarding why we should confine our development to
urban core areas or why we should limit our growth or how we can be a real estate
company and not degrade our natural environment to some extent. At heart, we are a
learning company, learning primarily about ourselves and our relationships to our land
and community. Such learning, as Peter Senge points out, that

changes mental models is immensely challenging. It is disorienting. It can be frighten-
ing as we confront cherished beliefs and assumptions. It cannot be done alone. It can
occur only within a community of learners. 31

This community of learners can be most effective when mutual trust allows for
authenticity of belief, expression, and action.

5. Tension Can Be Good: Tension among values can be good, creative, and pro-
ductive. Unless there’s a deliberate effort to hire an entire staff of like-minded souls all
holding to the same precise values, there is bound to be tension among the various val-
ues espoused by staff members. Such tension, like cholesterol, can be healthy or prob-
lematic. Frans Johansson, whose book The Medici Effect considers how we create “an
explosion of extraordinary ideas” with paradigm-shifting consequences, notes that
viewing situations and problems from multiple perspectives and providing for the ran-
dom combination of ideas are two critical components of positive, ground-breaking
creativity. Both are facilitated by a diverse working team that knows how to deperson-
alize the conflicts that arise by virtue of their different disciplines, cultures, styles, atti-
tudes, and values:

...if you wish to generate intersectional ideas, you should see environments where you
will work with people who are different from you. Put another way: A sure path to
inhibit your own creativity is to seek out environments where people are just like
you.... Your team will get along great and it will get a lot of things done. But will it be
innovative?... At the Intersection, we need as many opportunities for random combi-
nations of ideas as possible. A team of diverse people who feel free to exchange and
combine their ideas is exactly what can make that happen. 32