They say, “Familiarity breeds Contempt.” It’s an oft studied neuroscience fact that we believe that others around us don’t get it as well as we do.
On the road to work everyone else is a bad driver.
The illusion is one of the most common failures of managers.
Ok. Translate “manager” to human being.
I Know Better
This seemingly twisted personal perspective (in psychology it’s called a “false frame”) isn’t always the purely “negative” thing it’s made out to be by the purveyors of popular better management and leadership messaging. We do need to keep it in mind.
However, you can argue this personal bent has a certain survival benefit built in. Human beings don’t appear have the natural tendency to follow others over the cliff. Systematic group hunting and many knock down drag out death matches probably taught us something.
"I Know Nothing"
This famous line from Hogan’s Heroes and spoofed again by Laugh-in is too telling. I trust you recall the dress in which it was delivered.
We’re all skeptics until we believe we don’t know.
Then the Stupid Switch gets thrown.
We’ll buy the most cockamamie and irrational of arguments backed up by pseudo-fact, accusation, and rumor. Unfortunately, and all too often, most of that stuff of argument is internally generated. It’s just our brains trying to connect dots that have nothing to do with the unknown, incomprehensible problem we face.
People make sense out of nonsense which is both truly amazing and utterly terrifying depending on the context, the results, and our expectations.
The Aurora Borealis
Yeah. The northern lights and the current event reference may be a somewhat tasteless but poignant pun.
Perhaps the more substantive issue is that “Familiarity leads to Complacency.”
The familiar cannot matter to us as much as the exceptional.
This is built into how our brains are wired. It’s our real world need to depend on our Human Autopilot to handle 99% of the decision making process most of the time. We must unconsciously reconstruct reality on a minute by minute basis just of have a chance of making it through the next Dark Night or Night of the Living Dead.
Worrying about the details except where they differ just doesn’t pay, but the mental phenomena of the familiar can lead you to do a bunch of unless work in AutoCAD Civil 3D.
The Familiar History
Can you convert the Jump to run in CTB?
Yes. But why bother?
It’s what everyone knows and does now.
Ok, CTB is familiar but STB is a lot easier to employ and a lot easier to maintain. Like the rest of Civil 3D, STB is named Style based.
Realistically anyone can understand “Medium” or “10% Screened” a lot faster than color number 172 (a shade of dark blue) that translates to .35mm.
Changing how the colors appear on the screen hardly matters in the Jump Platform solutions. By default we even supply both light and dark background schemes and multiple Layer States to maintain them in InstantOn Basic. Color doesn’t matter except what your USERS care about.
The Case of Intelligent Publish On Demand
But they don’t believe STB is easier. They don’t understand how it works.
So, have you had them use it? To use creates belief.
No. They want it converted first.
Ah. They want you to do a whole bunch of pretty much useless busy work so they don’t have to really use the new software for even longer? The unfamiliar and unexpected is overwhelming. No one likes to be made stupid by a piece of software. Civil 3D can do that.
That’s not it exactly. Some of the Project Managers are also worried that their contracts might require CTB deliverables.
Ah. Maybe they don’t want to risk their project on the next new thing with untrained people? Can’t say I blame them.
Ok. That’s a lot easier to deal with and that is a reasonable and valid concern. Maybe other contracts will require the company publish to ACAD, DGN, or something else too? All of that has NOTHING to do with STB or CTB, a Layer scheme, or any other graphic standards preference decisions the must be delivered to either.
Huh?
You can build a Publish on Demand (POD) template to get them what is exactly and specifically required by your client.
That’s much less work. It’s specific. You KNOW where you must end up. You have a very limited set of controlled and manageable conditions to meet.
The number of Styles or Sets you need to do a specific POD is much, much smaller than what you really need to do the civil engineering or survey work faster inside Civil 3D in any release or version.
In unfamiliar times and with new and growing software capabilities we need more potential choices and expanded flexibility. It makes more sense.
Don’t Stop...Thinking About Tomorrow
Taking that POD approach doesn’t stop the rest of the folks from getting to work on the project and learning how to use the software. The approach also gives you time to learn how to build POD templates.
Learning to build a template “translator” to a specific set of standards is not rocket science. It’s a learnable skill, but it takes time because all things take repetitions for all people.
We must recognize it is a process to develop. It is not a “thing” or a magic button. In older software the process was more complex, mixed together, and that muddied the waters a great deal.
We’re all too familiar with THAT.
We're justifiably concerned.
Getting the project data built inside of AutoCAD Civil 3D is another set of skills that everyone must learn anyway.
That includes how the Project Managers learn to deal with allocated and estimated man-hours, quality assurance, and all the rest.
That includes USERS understanding how to construct, manage and maintain the Dynamic Model. You’re much better off learning together as a team than everyone waiting for you to KNOW what they may never need to understand.
The boss signs the check. Whatever he wants is what I’ll do.
You bet.