Who Else Needs to Be in This Conversation?

Early in my development career, I learned a very expensive lesson about carpet.

We were designing an apartment building, and I wanted the corridors to feel a little more gracious. Seven feet felt better than six. The doors had more breathing room, the hallway felt less institutional, and on a drawing it looked like a perfectly reasonable design decision.

The problem was that I did not yet know enough to ask how the carpet would actually be bought and installed.

At the time, broadloom carpet generally came in six-foot or twelve-foot rolls. We had designed a seven-foot-wide corridor, which meant that every seven feet of hallway required us to buy twelve feet of carpet.

That extra foot of graciousness suddenly came with five feet of waste.

It was one of those lessons you only need once.

Looking back, what interests me is that seven feet was not necessarily a bad design decision. I had simply made it using only one part of the information that mattered. I understood what I wanted the space to feel like, but I did not yet understand the cost embedded in that choice because I did not know enough about the material itself.

Nobody involved was necessarily wrong. We were solving different parts of the same problem, and the information had not come together early enough.

That experience changed the way I think about development, but over time I realized it had also changed the way I think about organizations.

A surprising number of expensive mistakes happen in exactly this way. The information exists. The expertise exists. The people involved may all be very good at what they do. The problem is that the person holding one piece of knowledge is not in the conversation when someone making an adjacent decision needs it.

Real estate makes this especially visible because so many disciplines collide in a single project. The architect is thinking about design. Operations is thinking about how the building will actually function. Construction understands the physical constraints. Finance is looking at what the economics can support. Leasing knows what the customer is likely to value and pay for.

Every one of those perspectives matters, but none of them gets to decide the whole answer by itself.

The trouble starts when one perspective quietly becomes the answer before the others have had a chance to shape the question.

You can make a set of financial assumptions work beautifully in Excel and still end up with a building that does not work particularly well in the physical world. You can design something beautiful that operations will spend the next ten years fighting. You can optimize construction cost so aggressively that you damage the thing the customer was actually willing to pay for.

In situations like those, the problem is usually not a lack of expertise. It is that the expertise was fragmented.

That is why one of the questions I have learned to ask much earlier is: Who else needs to be in this conversation?

Not because every decision needs a committee. Most do not. But consequential decisions often sit at the intersection of disciplines, and the cost of discovering the missing perspective later can be enormous.

The person who seems slightly adjacent to the issue may be the person who knows the one thing that changes the answer.

I think that is true well beyond real estate.

Organizations naturally create lanes because specialization is useful. Finance owns finance. Operations owns operations. Marketing owns marketing. Leadership owns strategy. Those divisions make complicated work more manageable.

Reality is less cooperative.

The hardest decisions rarely stay neatly inside one function. They cross boundaries, which means the quality of a decision depends not only on whether the people involved are smart, but on whether the right knowledge was present when the decision began to take shape.

That is a different question from, “Do we have the right answer?”

Increasingly, I think it is the more useful one.

I still like a gracious corridor. I just know a lot more about carpet now.

But the larger lesson has stayed with me: sometimes the expertise you are missing is not expertise your organization does not have. It is expertise sitting ten feet away that nobody thought to bring into the room.

Who else needs to be in the conversation before the decision gets expensive?