If you have six minutes, please do yourself a favor and watch this video. But instead of thinking about video games, think about BIM adoption in firms. Specifically think about people learning ArchiCAD, Revit, or one of the other BIM authoring tools out there.

Here’s the best analogy from the video, or an approximation at least. If you’re under 40, you’ve probably played Street Fighter II. Or something very similar. In Street Fighter II, there was this dick move you could do with just about any character. You’d move towards your opponent hit something like up,down,A+B and you’d kick your opponent down. By the time their character stood up, you’d have moved forward and already pressed up, down, A+B again. With no opportunity to react, your opponent would get knocked down again. This was repeated until you’d won and your friend was angry. The move took no skill, but it was very powerful. As long as you were fighting other people who were of equally low skill, you’d always win. But this move became completely useless once you fought the kid who knew to roll when his character stood up; or knew to stay crouching; or I don’t know, I wasn’t that good at Street Fighter II.

The point being this: a move like that is about power, not skill. It’s good against low skill or low complexity opponents.

Learning BIM (and BIM applications) is no different. You might have early successes with basic or crude moves, but if you just rely on these early techniques you are are going to fail in the end. To move down the path of BIM from lonely little bim to Social BIG BIM your skills need to improve. You need to learn how the programs work; how to think BIM; how your models need to evolve; how your documentation needs to evolve. This is the paradigm shift everyone talks about. It’s easy to model. It’s also VERY easy to model in a fashion that works but creates a bloated, slow model. A model that does not create profits for the firm; a model that can not be used for higher dimensional extraction (time, cost, energy, sound, touch); a model that can not support augmented reality. Or more simply a model that is difficult to document and useless for rendering or real-time exploration with the client. That basic failure is due to modeling through brute force and power. A model done with skill might be harder to do at first, but easier in the long run to change and much more robust.

If you’re not focused on developing your skills, you will hit a wall which is impossible to surpass. Power not rooted in skill will always fail you when things get tough. We’ll need to revisit this topic in the future because isn’t this also at the core of why we all need to learn BIM?

Power is easy. Skill is hard.

If you’ve played role-playing games (especially early Dungeons & Dragons) then you are probably familiar with the phrase “I disbelieve.” This declaration was a form of meta-gaming-of doing something that the character shouldn’t know, but that the player does. The classic example was when a party came to a dead end corridor in a dungeon or castle. Nothing but stone all around them. The characters had no reason to believe that anything was amiss. But the players had run through plenty of adventures before. They knew that the wall had to be an illusion. There had to be magic hiding the route.  The result is everyone would yell “I disbelieve!” They were declaring that they were willfully ignoring the reality of what was presented to them because they knew it was false.

When people say “I know people who…” followed by some poor practices that back up their views-like modeling in another program and using ArchiCAD only for 2D documentation-I want to yell “I disbelieve.” When people tell me that “They know what they’re doing” followed by “ArchiCAD just can’t do X, Y, or Z well”, I want to scream into the phone “I disbelieve.” When people tell me that “They are using everything ArchiCAD has to offer, or most of it at least” and then continue ‘And quite frankly SketchUp is taking the lead”, I want to walk away then holler “I disbelieve.”

The next time you are struggling to learn a new program, tool, or process, stop and think “am I trying to force my way to success through sheer power or am I taking the time to learn the skills I need to succeed?” And if you look around and see people failing all around you, claiming that whatever they want to do is impossible or beyond the capabilities of a fine program like ArchiCAD or Revit or SketchUp, pause for a moment. Proclaim “I disbelieve” and look past the illusions they have built around themselves.

If you could do it over again, would you go to school and study video game design instead of architecture? I probably would. But there’s no time machines for us to use. So instead, follow Shoegnome on Facebook and Twitter for more on being an Architect in the 21st Century.