The Shrinking Pie

Since the quest for knowledge is the purpose of our little get together. Let me pose the question that really nags at me after all these years of working with some of the best and the brightest.

"Why is it that we pay thousands of dollars for software and only use or understand a very small percentage of it?"

I once heard this phenomenon described as the "Shrinking Pie Syndrome" by dave espinosa-aguilar. dave is one of the most knowledgeable and entertaining instructors at Autodesk University and I look forward to them every year. This is how the Shrinking Pie Syndrome works.

The Shrinking Pie Syndrome looks at our total knowledge of our CAD software in terms of a Pie Chart. The whole pie represents everything there is to know about your CAD package. The two slices of the pie represent the things that you know and the the things that you do not know about the software you are using.

When you bought your first seat of (insert favorite or most used CAD software here) and installed it. Most of us sought out some training or read the manual cover to cover to learn everything that we needed to know. Then we spent hours practicing and learning how to use the VERY expensive tool we had to mortgage the house to afford.

After learning all we could. A process was developed to accomplish whatever task actually made us money and allowed us to repay, among other things, the newly acquired mortgage. At this point the "Things I Know" slice is probably quite large. Then the next release came out.

This is where the slice of pie that represents what you know about your CAD software begins to shrink. ( I will refer to AutoCAD produced by Autodesk from here out because that is what I am most familiar with and how I originally heard the analogy explained.)

Some of you reading this may have actually stopped there. Currently you are very contentedly hacking away at projects with your excellent and very stable version of AutoCAD R14 or other sunset version of CAD. I know many of these companies are out there. They are profitable, but they still have not escaped the ever shrinking slice of pie. The world is moving on around them and they are missing out on efficiencies and time/money savings every day.

Those that have upgraded are a slightly better off. We at least have the new tools in our possession. However, if a little time is not allowed to fairly investigate the new tools then I might as well have not spent the money to upgrade. I will probably still use the new version in the same way that I used the old version. And my slice of the pie will continue to shrink until it is just a sliver of the whole.

dave's suggestion is to sit down with a beer (after hours please) and work your way through every command in the manual. This will probably take quite a while. In fact, if you try to do it all in one sitting and drink your way through the manual; I am fairly certain that there will be a trip to the emergency room in your near future. There are literally thousands of commands in AutoCAD and it will require months to go through.

If this is too much of a commitment, (it is for me) then my suggestion is that you sit down with a beverage of your choice, go through one item in the new features tour every day and learn it. This will at least give you the chance to make an informed decision about whether or not the feature is helpful to your process and worth the time to implement.

After all...you bought the pie, and it was expensive. Shouldn't you get to eat the whole thing?