Disruption expert shares recipe for success in tough times
From lawsuits to AI, “the more uncertain the future, the more options you need,” innovation professor Luke Williams told attendees at the T3 Tech Summit.
What do you do when you're facing a moment of epic challenge and change? It's a relatable question for the real estate industry right now.
Disruption expert Luke Williams says the key is to "stop trying to avoid the things you're trying to avoid" — like a lawsuit that could reshape the way agents get paid, for example.
Regulations are "social constructs, and they can be reinvented with the stroke of a pen," Williams told a room full of industry leaders at the T3 Tech Summit in Fort Worth, Texas.
Push yourself to imagine a world without something that seems fundamental (like commissions) and let the ideas fly, Williams said. "The more uncertain the future, the more options you need."
Some other things you need to do, according to Williams:
Capture your ideas. Be disciplined about documenting your thoughts so that you can return to them as circumstances change. Ideas that seemed impossible a few years ago look a whole lot different in the ChatGPT era, just like ideas from the 1900s seemed impossible before the smartphone.
"The world of ideas is about abundance," Williams said. "There is no limit on the amount of value you can create in your organization."
Challenge your perceptions. If you want to win at Scrabble, you need to be willing to rearrange the letters. If you want to win in business, you need to break apart traditional structures to find the space to do new things.
"Your existing model prevents late-arriving resources and ingredients from getting into your recipes," Williams said. And the key to success isn't necessarily cooking more and more, it's finding the perfect recipe.
Label at your own risk. Putting Airbnb into the category of "hotels" limited people's perspective on what the company could do and become. What it really was, Williams said, was a "sharing economy," and it succeeded in ways that defied expectations of hotels.
For the real estate world, this might mean changing the labels agents and other professionals put on themselves, and understanding the fact that "you might have to justify your services," Williams said. "Some of you have never had that conversation before."