The particular challenges of green building require a highly effective and experienced team that can carry the Integrated Design Process through to a finished building. Mistakes or miscommunication between team members can enormously impair the final quality of the building project and may be expensive or impossible to discover and correct. Because conventional building specialists do not communicate very much during the building process, IDP is a fundamentally different approach which requires changing many of the social conventions and project management approaches of the building industry. Consequently, many of the failures encountered in green building projects are failures to effectively implement IDP. Unrealistic financials and failure to implement IDP have together accounted for many of the green building failures in Chicago.

Working with experienced practitioners in well-established teams seems to be the key to real success. Many green buildings fail to perform because the "green" features were not sufficiently integrated into the building's design or because the contractors doing the work did not understand the standards required to achieve the performance results anticipated. Green building has to be done right from start to finish, and mistakes are not easily corrected. When a half-inch gap running between pipes results in an 10% loss of overall energy efficiency, the problem can be remedied after it is discovered. But when walls are designed and constructed in a way that allows thermal bridging (heat transfer through building materials), there is no easy fix.

Details that seem irrelevant in conventional building are critical problems in high -performance building. "High-performance" building is simply high-quality building, and only a well trained and experienced team will know how to get it right.