I’ve been reading a great new book on why some technologies succeed in the marketplace while others never get off the ground, The Change Function by Pip Coburn (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2006). While the book is primarily concerned with the fate of new computing and electronic technologies for both consumer and business markets, the lessons it presents are broadly applicable to green buildings.

In essence, Coburn documents two critical factors in the success of new technologies. One he calls the “Total Perceived Pain of Adoption” (TPPA) and the other the degree of “Crisis” involved. The first critical factor, TPPA, deals with the full costs of understanding and deploying new technology. In Coburn’s view, the problem with most new technologies is that they’re developed by technologists (scientists and engineers, computer programmers and geeks) whose main interest is in doing with technology whatever “cool” things can be done. Their primary worldview is that anyone who doesn’t see things their way is “uncool” or a “dummy” (as in all the “cool things for dummies” books.)

The second factor, Crisis, is equally important. Most new technologies don’t get mainstream acceptance unless there’s a “crisis” of some kind with current technology.

For example, Coburn thinks that RFID (radio frequency identification) devices are going to have a hard time getting into the mainstream because they solve a problem with bar-coding that no one knows they have, namely, the inability to track what’s in a pallet without actually counting every item with a bar code scanner. Without a genuine crisis of performance or economics, most new technologies can’t overcome people’s genuine concerns with the economic and technical risks of new approaches.

What’s need for the rapid adoption of new technologies is the combination of both factors: TPPA needs to be relatively low (i.e., pain of adoption needs to be far less than the gain from adoption) and the sense of organizational or personal Crisis needs to be high. In this respect, Coburn’s approach is entirely consistent with other classic works on the theory of innovation adoption, such as the classic works of Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 5th ed., 2003) and the more recent work of Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point (New York: Harper and Row, 2000). Things don’t change just because new things are available; people need good reasons to make significant changes in business and personal affairs.

Think about some of the new technologies that you or your colleagues have adopted in the past few years. Quickly, Blackberries come to mind. The TPPA factor is not large, since the Blackberry™ is basically a marriage of a Palm Pilot, on the market for at least ten years, and a cell phone of similar vintage. The Crisis factor lies in the need for increasingly mobile workers to stay in touch with the home office and with each other. Voilá, the Blackberry (or “Crackberry,” to those addicted to it.) Think of how you feel getting a return email, usually quite short, “sent from my wireless email Blackberry.” Pretty left out, right? The TPPA is also not large because the cost of failure is small: just a few hundred dollars and a return to your Starbucks-enabled T-Mobile™ world of cell phones, laptops and iPAQs.

Now think about the adoption cycle for green buildings. What about the TPPA and the Crisis factors? Recently, I attend the “Campus of the Future” conference in Hawaii, hosted by three major professional associations and attended by 3000 “serious” people in the daily business of higher education (www.campusofthefuture.org). One of the presentations dealt with the use of LEED and green building approaches by 11 campuses in the Boston area, in most situations a “hotbed” of new ideas and quite receptive to new technology and green buildings, the location of such renowned institutions as MIT and Harvard. Of these 11 institutions of higher education, only three were actually members of the U.S. Green Building Council, and less than half had completed even one LEED-certified building to date. What became clear from the presentation was that neither the TPPA factor nor the Crisis factor is yet at work in green building adoption.

My own research and analysis suggests that higher education adoption of green building practices is still in the “innovator” stage (less than 3% of new buildings or major renovations actively pursue LEED certification), but is rapidly moving into the “early adopter” stage (with LEED accounting for 3% to 16% of total new building or renovation projects), primarily because of campus pressure from below (students and faculty) and sometimes from above (presidents and chancellors). A June 2006 conference of California’s public higher education institutions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, representing more than 40 universities and community college districts, drew more than 600 delegates, ample evidence of the rising tide of campus community interest in sustainability of all kinds.

But let’s get back to the Boston example. As we stated earlier, the TPPA factor needs to be low, not high, for green building adoption to occur. What are the facts? Turner Construction’s 2005 national survey of some 665 design and construction industry executives, including owners, showed that they thought the additional cost of “going green” ranged from 13% to 18%, a killer in today’s high-cost construction environment (survey available at www.turnerconstruction.com/greensurvey05.pdf.) Most of the Boston-area facilities would probably concur.

There is still the perception, true or not, that “LEED costs too much” for the benefits received. At the conference, I argued with an architect that $100,000 extra cost of studies and documentation on a $30 million project was “in the noise level,” at 0.33% of total cost, but she emphatically disagreed. OK, I’ll listen to the users, something technologists are accused of not doing, in fact being totally uninterested in. If users think “LEED costs too much, what can be done to lower the perceived costs of LEED projects, other than actual experience with such tasks? So, it appears that TPPA is still thought too high by most potential users to justify using it on a regular basis.

What about the Crisis factor? Is there a crisis (problem) for which green buildings are a logical and compelling answer? In the opinion of many, such as New Mexico architect Edward Mazria (www.architecture2030.org), the need to get new buildings to be 90% or more efficient, compared with today’s standards by 2030 (and 60% more efficient by 2010), is compelling, in terms of their cumulative global environmental impact. However, such large-scale “crises” seldom enter into day-to-day decision-making among design and construction teams and building owners or developers. What might constitute a Crisis for a facility director, project manager or architect is when the president of the university makes a public commitment to “LEED Silver” for all new projects. Then it’s hard not to see a reason to go forward with a LEED project. Absent that imperative (and implied, career-busting threat), most people try to achieve less lofty goals, such as basic certification (still more than 40% of all LEED certifications), or to “design to LEED standards” without certifying at all (probably at least a third of projects that have sustainability goals.) But whenever I hear this, I ask people to think of what our tax system would be like if we all just decided to pay our taxes “according to IRS guidelines,” without having the actual IRS lurking in the background, a government computer to check our math and the (even remote) threat of an audit!

How to promote the rapid growth and adoption of green buildings and new green building technologies? Now the answer is relatively easy. Lower the TPPA, the Total Perceived Pain of Adoption, by continuing to work to make LEED easier to use and more certain in the outcome, less bureaucratic and more open to fair innovations; in addition really publish case studies that reveal design team processes and choices that result in lower total capital costs for high-performance projects (for a case study of a prospective large LEED Platinum project, see the report at www.interfaceengineering.com that documents just this result for an Oregon healthcare project.)

As for Crisis, there’s not much that green building advocates can do to increase the sense of crisis in energy and water costs for buildings and the continuing interest of user groups in more sustainable approaches for building design and corporate responsibility. Global warming concerns and $75 per barrel oil already do that job quite nicely. Unfortunately, the crisis is not yet pointed enough for most project teams to take action for high-level LEED buildings, unless some CEO or university president or political leader makes it so.

Those in a position to determine the future of LEED should continue to reflect on how to make it more transparent and user-friendly to those in the trenches of building design, construction and operations. Those financing and developing new products for the green building market have a new tool to assess how well their offerings will do in the marketplace. Those trying to make green buildings standard in their company, agency or institution need to figure out how to decrease TPPA and increase the understanding of Crisis. For the readers of this column, I say: take a look at The Change Function and see what impact it can have on your own decision-making.

Jerry Yudelson is Senior Editor of IGreenbuild and Sustainability Director for Interface Engineering, Inc. He is the author of the recently released real-estate book, Developing Green: Strategies for Success, available at www.naiop.org. He welcomes comments on this article at: Jerry@igreenbuild.com.