When one was freed, he turned his back on the wall and was temporarily blinded by the light of the fire. Once he recovered, he became curious enough to leave the cave and experience a superior, yet incomprehensible, new world.<\/p>\n He returned to the cave wanting to share his experience but, now accustomed to the sun, was blinded by the darkness. The prisoners believed that whatever existed outside the cave caused his blindness and, in their ignorance, refused to be dragged from their cave.<\/p>\n 2,400 years later, could this \u2018cave\u2019 metaphor be applied to how we\u2019ve adapted to our new digital world?<\/p>\n Many businesses believe they\u2019re \u2018forward-thinking\u2019 and have escaped the \u2018cave\u2019 of analogue to \u2018see the light\u2019 of digital \u2013 but the question begs: have we even left the cave yet? Or have we only made it as far away from the wall as the fire? We might \u2018think\u2019 we\u2019ve escaped the cave, but if we understood what\u2019s really possible, we\u2019d realize we have a long way to go before we can truly call ourselves \u2018freed\u2019 of analogue.<\/p>\n Fast forward to 2013, when DreamWorks created a beautiful 3D animated film called \u2018The Croods\u2019. It too tells the story of a cave-dwelling family. They are governed by an overprotective and stubborn patriarch, Grug, who refuses to believe that life outside of the family cave can ever be safe.<\/p>\n His curious teenage daughter, Eep, is coaxed out of the cave by a torch of fire, where she meets an inventive and forward-thinking boy named Guy, who warns her of an impending apocalypse. Grug, fearful of change, is not convinced by this \u2018different\u2019 and \u2018new\u2019 way of thinking, and bans Eep from seeing Guy.<\/p>\n When a massive earthquake destroys their cave, they\u2019re forced to flee their home. With their lives irreparably disrupted, Grug has no choice but to listen to Guy and allow him to guide his family to the safety of a mountain, where Grug retreats to his old ways of thinking and insists that his family hide out in a new cave. His family refuse, saying they don\u2019t want to \u2018survive\u2019 but to \u2018live\u2019 in a new, safe land that Guy calls \u2018Tomorrow\u2019, a place where a person\u2019s curiosity is allowed to flourish.<\/p>\n Certainly, engineering is one of the last bastions of analogue. We\u2019re making incremental steps forward but, compared to other sectors, we probably haven\u2019t left the cave yet. Even though digital technologies are generally seen as enabling collaboration on design projects or infrastructure management and optimization, there are still trust issues around sharing information between partners due to legacy contractual structures, IP concerns and data security. We\u2019re suspicious, and we prefer the comfort of what we know.<\/p>\n Is there ever a \u2018right\u2019 time to leave the cave?<\/strong><\/p>\n Both these cave stories relate to one of our primal behavioral instincts of safety and the cautionary tale that the grass isn\u2019t always greener somewhere new. Of course, there\u2019s invariably been an element of risk in leaving the cave but, as Grug shows us, there\u2019s always an element of risk in staying, too.<\/p>\n We\u2019d all prefer to be Guy rather than Grug, but we\u2019d also like to know what \u2018Tomorrow\u2019 looks like before we make our metaphorical move there. We also know that with something as invisible as digitization, that\u2019s impossible.<\/p>\n If we think of the freed prisoner as a dot-com pioneer or early digital adopter, who was temporarily burnt by his experience, then his fellow prisoners are his peers, who vowed never to fall into the same trap. They stayed in the cave, while he ventured back into the sunlight and carried on exploring and learning about the new digital horizons.<\/p>\n Today, his extensive knowledge of both the analogue cave and the digital new world gives him a significant advantage over his peers who, unless they change, risk certain extinction.<\/p>\n You have to know how to step out of the cave<\/strong><\/p>\n The Johari Window model is a very useful tool for gaining even more self-awareness, which we can adapt to look at our blind spots of knowledge. Let\u2019s call it the Four-roomed Johari Cave:<\/p>\n Clearly you and your organization want to be residing in Room 3, where your extra digital knowledge can create opportunities that exist because of your competitors\u2019 knowledge gaps.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll also need to be up-to-date with everything that\u2019s happening in Rooms 1 and 2 if you want to maintain your advantage and maximize your opportunities.<\/p>\n Yet, interestingly, Room 4 is the most important of all. It\u2019s in here that the next, yet unwritten, chapter of our digital future will unfold. The best way to prepare your organization for whatever comes next in the digital space is to place yourself as far away from Rooms 1 and 2 as possible, and as close to Room 4 as you can get (the * in the above diagram).<\/p>\n What\u2019s lurking outside the cave?<\/strong><\/p>\n The realization of a built environment which is digitally enabled, monitored, responsive and optimized has the potential to be one of the defining developments of the 21st century.<\/p>\n Digital engineering has the potential to enable countries to realize not only all of the inherent value in building its infrastructure assets, but, more importantly, harnessing an ever growing body of data to better manage the assets through their life cycle. This becomes even more critical with the realization that approximately 80% of the assets\u2019 costs are incurred in the operational phase, dwarfing development costs.<\/p>\n There will be many complexities, some of them terrifying, such as new contractual models and data sharing, as we leave the cave behind. Governments looking to drive a digital economy and infrastructure for their nations need to realize that applying current day thinking to an unknown future simply won\u2019t work. We have to understand that our knowledge is only beginning to form before we lock down \u2018immovable\u2019 strategy.<\/p>\n Our fear of the unknown is often our greatest fear. Yet, if Plato was still around today, he\u2019d urge us to be more like Guy and less like Grug as we journey towards \u2018Tomorrow\u2019. Stepping into the digital light will require exploring the unknown and expanding our horizons \u2013 but at the very edge of the unknown, we\u2019ll discover a new world exists.<\/p>\n Aurecon launched a new futuristic blog, called\u00a0Just Imagine<\/a>, to\u00a0provide a glimpse into the future for curious readers, exploring ideas that are probable, possible and for the imagination.\u00a0This post originally appeared on Aurecon\u2019s Just Imagine<\/a> blog. Get access to the latest blog posts as soon as they are published by subscribing to the blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many businesses believe they\u2019re \u2018forward-thinking\u2019 and have escaped the \u2018cave\u2019 of analogue to \u2018see the light\u2019 of digital \u2013 but the question begs: have we even left the cave yet? Or have we only made it as far away from the wall as the fire? We might \u2018think\u2019 we\u2019ve escaped the cave, but if we understood what\u2019s really possible, we\u2019d realize we have a long way to go before we can truly call ourselves \u2018freed\u2019 of analogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":26772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[107,1589,4739,54,96],"class_list":["post-26771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions","tag-cloud","tag-cyber-security","tag-cyber-threat","tag-security","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"digital-cave1\"](\"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/digital-cave1.jpg\")
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