I have spent some time reflecting on my posts over the past year. There has been a strong workplace slant to them. On reflection, this makes a lot of sense. The problems facing CRE professionals are down to how to design and build an office for the post-pandemic world.
For most of my time on the blog, my focus was on the challenges of optimizing a regional or global real estate portfolio. My career has been spent on solving the big strategy problems of real estate and there has always been more money at optimizing the collection of sites than on any one location. This has shifted dramatically because the nature of the problems we all face have changed.
Right now, it is not feasible for most of us in the industry to think about the full portfolio. When it is not possible to get single location solutions agreed and deployed, it is going to be exponentially harder to solve a problem involving many of them at once. The dollar value associated with solving the portfolio question has only grown in scale, but the ability to solve for it has proven to be incredibly difficult.
It is not always possible to solve the big problem on its own. When the scale and complexity of a situation grow too large, it is important to break the problem down to its component parts (critical path theory for those who speak the lingo). Solve the problems that are preventing a solution first. In our current world, that means figuring out the strategy for any given location. What are the puzzle pieces, financial considerations, employee considerations, and long-term design elements that are known but simply need to be optimized for a project? How do we get business leaders to support this new direction and not throw up new roadblocks for each one?
Stepping back from the big problems to focus on the smaller ones is often a tremendous efficiency play. Would it help you right now?