Since the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, I’ve been paying close attention to how and where those funds are being apportioned. When we think about infrastructure, our mind takes us straight to rail, road, and bridges. While that’s part of it, that’s not where these funds focus. They focus on dependencies - alternatives to the brick-and-mortar infrastructure that we see every day. These investments are considered transition investments and they provide alternatives and variety, a key factor in reducing dependency. Variety leads to resilience in agronomics, and it might do the same for organizations transitioning to modern work strategies.

It’s amazing to watch what happens when the whole world grabs onto something. General-purpose technologies have widespread applications and influence across a multitude of industries. This is causing innovation and economic growth by enabling new processes, products, and services. Our biggest challenge….bullshit.

Right now. That’s when things happen. Every second, every minute, every hour of the day. For those of us who are blessed with thought-perspective, we can set time aside and dive into thoughtful dialogue, experiment with different ideas, and explore. There are no tasks in exploration, only creative ideation followed by intense research. There’s truth in knowledge and chasing down the truth is a virtuous endeavor. It happens slowly at first, then all at once.

It’s no coincidence the Orion Growth logo is a series of intertwined circles. Back in 2009 when we designed it - the purpose of the company was to break down the vertical silos of commercial real estate and introduce circular, regenerative thinking to a traditional, linear process. We were slightly ahead of the market, but things have taken off lately. It turns out that circular processes and sustainable design mean something now. Circularity is becoming a regulatory requirement for our largest clients, and solving for that is tricky.

In August of last year, I was given the opportunity to open a conference in San Francisco. We were on a biotech campus in Santa Clara and the theme was sustainability. To me, sustainability starts with the foundation. Like buildings, organizations need a stable base. Post covid, most organizations were knocked off their base. This is about reorganizing back to stable. This is about people getting back to a stable platform. This is about the organization as organizing.

In part 1 of this 2-part series, we broke the word sustainability down into its parts. The word ‘sustain’ is a verb meaning to support, hold, or bear up from below. This is something we actively do - not something we are or something we have. When we shift that word to a noun - sustainability - it takes on a whole different meaning and carries a political vibe. Foundational and supportive transforms from functional and necessary to polarizing and subjective. That’s the crossroads that needs exploration.

What if we were in business to be pro-planet? Imagine if we used ‘sustainable’ as a baseline rather than a goal. What if we applied this approach to agriculture, land management, and urban planning - where the focus shifts from minimizing harm to actively enhancing the capacity of the land to sustain us? What if the bottom line was breakeven - and the top line was better AND profitable?

Boy, it’s exhausting in AI….and the vocabulary continues to deepen. Despite what you’re seeing on LinkedIn live feeds, CRE might not be the best place to seek SMEs on AI - especially ML/LLM’s/Tokenomics. Like pollen in the Spring, CRE is allergic to DeFi. Vector databases are the antihistamines and prescription strength is only available after seeing the data doctor. Sadly, data doctors don’t traditionally work in CRE. Maybe they’re in the basement with their dev teams, crushing Celsius and jamming to metal in their PJ’s? They certainly aren’t concerned about RTO’s and mandates.

Those who choose to practice technology and innovation see it. Advancements in chipsets and compute power will jettison us to next-level processing. The shift from central, to graphical has moved to neural. It feels fast because it is fast. We’ve never had more ability to ‘do’ than now. This is when we, as humans, give that speed the direction it needs. This is where speed turns into velocity - and we influence the intended outcome. This is a phase change.