It’s easy to think extinction events are rare or dramatic—but the truth is, change often creeps up quietly, and many don’t see it happening until it’s too late. Just ask the makers of cassette tapes, film projectionists, or the people who mortgaged their house to buy a $1M New York Taxi medallion just before Uber hit the scene.
Some disruption is sudden. In some cases, butterfly events create a significant shift. But more often, it’s slow and painfully obvious–what I call the turtle effect. The change is visible for years, but people still cling to the comfort of old systems. Whether it’s fear or misplaced optimism, we keep going until the cost of standing still becomes unbearable.
It’s not just modern business. Resistance to change is a feature of the human psyche, and sometimes, it comes at a heavy price.
For over a millennium, it was assumed that all matter was made of four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Until the early 1800s, John Dalton proposed atomic theory, challenging this long-standing ancient belief. Later, Ludwig Boltzmann expanded on it, developing statistical mechanics. Yet despite growing evidence, Boltzmann faced relentless ridicule for promoting the existence of atoms, which many considered hypothetical and even fantastical. Even as evidence began to mount—most notably Einstein’s 1905 explanation of Brownian motion, which helped validate the atomic theory —acceptance came too late. Tragically, Boltzmann took his own life in 1906. A sobering example of how deeply resistance to change can take root. Despite his groundbreaking ideas, the world only recognized he had been right years after his passing. A stark reminder that life, and progress, are not always fair. My point is, even in Academia, where we all assume innovation is the main purpose of its existence, resistance to change exists.
Then there’s the QWERTY keyboard. In the 19th century, typewriter manufacturers designed keyboards to slow down typing—literally—to prevent the machine’s metal arms from jamming. That’s how we got the familiar Q-W-E-R-T-Y layout.
There’s no mechanical reason we still use it. It’s not the most efficient or ergonomic. But it persists. Why? Because the cost to educate the market to change outweighed the perceived gain.
Or consider the famous monkeys and the ladder experiment, which is often misattributed to various sources in psychology, to illustrate how groupthink and unexamined traditions form.
It's a made-up parable, but one that can explain our resistance to change:
Five monkeys are put in a cage with bananas at the top of a ladder. Every time a monkey climbs the ladder, the others are sprayed with cold water. Eventually, they all stop trying and punish anyone who does. One by one, monkeys are replaced. New ones never experience the spray, but still attack anyone who touches the ladder. Eventually, no original monkey remains, and no one touches the ladder, but no one remembers why.
It’s a parable, not science. However, it sheds light on corporate behavior. Ask, “Why do we do it this way?” And you’ll often hear: “Because it works. Don't touch it.”
Now imagine this in the context of commercial real estate lending. There’s a clear opportunity to reach something better, even more efficient and more profitable, but many teams settle for what’s easily within reach. It’s not ideal, but it’s safe. Environments where risk is carefully managed, sticking to what is familiar often feels like the safest choice.
The result? Progress stalls. Not because the path forward isn’t clear or visible, but because the current setup is good enough to justify staying put. The goal subtly shifts from improving to simply maintaining.
So why do we resist change? It’s not always fear or stubbornness. At its root, it’s an efficiency instinct–what evolution might label productive laziness. Not the negative kind, but the evolutionary kind. Humans are hardwired to minimize effort. We naturally favor routines and tools that feel familiar, even if they are no longer the most effective. Change often requires energy, time, and risk. And unless the benefit is undeniable, we tend to default to the path of least resistance.
Let me give you an example from nature:
Dinosaurs didn’t all go extinct. Current research suggests that birds are their evolutionary descendants–specifically a small and agile subfamily that adapted and survived.
One such modern descendant is called the Black-capped Chickadee. Their name originates from their distinctive "chick-a-dee" call, which varies depending on the level of threat. When they spot a predator, such as a hawk or an owl, they intentionally make a loud "Chick-a-Dee" to make it clear they're aware of the predator. Predators, as a result of millions of years of evolution, prefer unsuspecting prey because they require less effort to catch.
This is an example of evolutionary laziness. Even if a specific chickadee is too tired to escape, that evolutionary programming kicks in. Laziness, as an efficiency mechanism, wins.
Laziness is paradoxically also very important for innovation… It's the type of person who is too lazy to walk to the TV who invents remotes.
Innovation doesn’t start with expertise. It starts with humility.
The people who say, “I don’t know,” are the ones who move us forward.
They recognize that challenges aren’t Greek curses—they’re opportunities. They don’t have all the answers, but they’re willing to find them. That mindset? It’s essential to evolve.
The current research suggests that dinosaurs became extinct due to a massive asteroid hitting Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, approximately 66 million years ago.
The vast majority of dinosaurs went extinct not because they were weak and small. Because they were big and strong, it wasn’t the giant Sauropods that survived–it was the agile, adaptable ones. A sauropod required ~1,000 pounds of food per day. That’s 500,000 calories. If one lived today, one would need a $25,000/day Whole Foods budget just to eat.
Their size made them powerful, but it also made them fragile. Any disruption to the ecosystem meant extinction. Sound familiar?
There’s a saying: “Staying in the same place means falling behind, because the world is moving forward.”
In the animal kingdom, it’s still survival of the fittest. In business? It’s survival of the most agile.
The information revolution, followed by the AI revolution, is making fertile opportunities for change in a much more rapid way than ever before. The more data we have, the faster we can act. But speed alone isn’t enough. It’s about adapting.
Being big means you have the resources to also be agile and stay ahead in the ever-changing market.
If you are big, slow to adopt, and make lots of $$$, you are precisely the target for someone competent to create a product that leverages the value you are accumulating and spreads it to the masses.
Owning a monopoly on city taxis? Enter Uber and Lyft.
Control TV broadcasting? Now, any kid with WiFi can have a bigger audience.
Dominating the lending market using Excel? Tick, tick, tick…
In CRE, we observe that many of our customers continue to use Excel as their primary tool for making lending decisions.
Yes, Excel works. Microsoft pours hundreds of millions into making it one of the most powerful tools available. For many lenders, it’s familiar, flexible, and dependable. But that flexibility has a ceiling that we’re starting to hit. Using it as your system of record for CRE lending? That’s like using a flip phone to run a fintech startup.
This is what everybody uses. For the most part, it works, and everybody is happy. However, Excel is not the right tool for such a task.
Here’s what Excel can’t do:
In short, relying on Excel for lending doesn’t signal stability. It signals stagnation.
That’s why we built Blooma.
Blooma was created for CRE underwriters and lenders who want the flexibility of a spreadsheet — with the intelligence of a platform.
Here’s what you can do:
We harvest hundreds of comparables from multiple sources, and our AI comparable picker selects the ideal set of comparables for each deal. Underwriters can tweak the AI model to fit their specific needs.
Our AI scoring enables underwriters to gain an immediate view of a deal, checking the score over time and allowing them to identify changes in both the deal itself and the market.
At any given point, underwriters have flexibility that is not far from Excel, allowing them to adjust deal aspects while reaping the benefits of a system that collects intellectual property and utilizes it to enhance deals further, decrease risk, and simplify and ease the lives of underwriters.
CRE lenders today are doing great work optimizing individual deals. However, the real leap forward will come from optimizing at scale – building institutional knowledge and staying ahead of the market, rather than just reacting to it.
Blooma helps teams do just that.
Because in today’s market, it’s not the strongest or richest who win. It’s the ones who evolve.