“Hierarchy is the last refuge of those who cannot share knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov never wrote that sentence.
But after reading a recent manifesto by Block, I found myself thinking that he could have.
What struck me was not the headline about organisational change. It was the underlying idea: hierarchy may not exist because somebody needs to command. It may exist because, for centuries, it was the most efficient way we had to move information through large groups of people.
And suddenly I saw BIM differently.
For centuries, organisations have been drawn as pyramids: executives, directors, managers, coordinators, operators. Each level gathers information from below, compresses it, interprets it and sends a smaller version upward. Decisions then travel back down through the same chain.
We call this management. In Italian, the word almost sounds like magic.
But what if it was also a workaround? A cultural solution to an information problem we no longer have in the same form?
I have always been fascinated by the human body. Perhaps because I am the daughter, granddaughter and sister of doctors. And while thinking about this, one image kept returning to me: the nervous system.
There is no BIM Manager neuron. There is no BIM Specialist neuron. There are billions of cells exchanging signals continuously. No single cell holds the complete picture. Yet together they produce something we call intelligence.
Modern medicine is showing us, more clearly every year, how distributed that intelligence really is: the nervous system is in constant dialogue with the gut, the heart, the immune system and many other networks we are still trying to understand.
The more I think about it, the more the keyword seems to be the same one we have repeated in BIM for almost twenty years: information.
Collect it. Share it. Interpret it. Act on it.
The Roman army was organised into centuries, cohorts and legions because a general could not give instructions directly to fifty thousand people. Each level of command was also an information filter: a way to collect, simplify and transmit what mattered.
Like a funnel. Or, in digital language, like compression.
We copied that logic into modern companies because it worked.
And then BIM arrived.
We have spent years saying that BIM is not really about models. It is about information. Yet much of our daily work still consists of moving files, chasing revisions, calling coordination meetings, updating spreadsheets, consolidating reports, checking lists and hunting for approvals.
How much of that work creates a decision? And how much of it simply carries information from one place to another because our systems still cannot make the connections themselves?
There is a scene in The Matrix where Neo stops seeing walls, people and objects and sees only code.
Maybe BIM works like that too.
We think we are coordinating buildings. Sometimes we think we are coordinating people. But underneath it all, we are coordinating information.
The 3D model was simply the most intelligent interface we found to make that information visible to designers.
If somebody had tried to sell architects a relational database instead, BIM might never have left the starting line.
Geometry was the Trojan horse.
It allowed designers to embrace something that was much closer to an information system than to a drawing tool.
So perhaps BIM was not difficult to adopt because it was too complex. Perhaps it arrived too early.
Too early for organisations built around silos. Too early for cultures where information was something to own rather than circulate. Too early for teams in which knowledge created power precisely because it did not move freely.
And that leads to an uncomfortable question: did we really struggle to adopt BIM, or did we become very good at turning it into something that would not force us to change?
We called it BIM. But often we used it as advanced CAD. We became excellent at modelling. Much less so at building shared knowledge.
Now AI is entering the conversation, and we risk making the same mistake again: treating it as one more tool to add to the software stack.
But the deeper shift may be elsewhere.
For the first time, information can be searched, connected, interpreted and summarised without always travelling through a long human chain before it becomes useful.
A CDE does not have to remain an archive. It can become part of the nervous system of a project.
An information model does not have to remain a container. It can become context for reasoning.
That is when the metaphor clicked for me.
Perhaps BIM was always designed as a nervous system.
We used it as a skeleton.
We invested enormous energy in structure. Much less in connections.
But intelligence does not emerge from structure alone. It emerges from relationships between signals, contexts and decisions.
So what happens to the BIM Manager?
I think that is the wrong question.
The more interesting question is: what happens to the work of the BIM Manager?
I expect a large part of the least valuable work to shrink: chasing files, finding the latest revision, consolidating reports, updating spreadsheets, relaying messages between disciplines.
What remains is harder.
Giving meaning to information. Making decisions. Taking responsibility. Building trust.
Professional judgement becomes more important, not less, when every decision carries technical, financial and human consequences.
And this probably applies far beyond BIM.
Maybe we will keep talking about BIM Specialists, Coordinators and Managers. Maybe we will not. Perhaps we will simply have professionals with different levels of experience, supported by increasingly intelligent systems.
People who model by talking to AI. People who no longer spend days writing rules that a system can enforce automatically. People who do not need to launch the same checks, assign the same issues and compile the same reports by hand.
Their job will be something much more demanding: interaction.
With clients, to understand needs that no algorithm can infer safely on its own. With colleagues, to turn separate expertise into a team. With professional communities, to keep learning as the tools change.
Because if AI is teaching us anything, it is that intelligence is not created by storing more information.
It emerges from connections.
That is why the most interesting question raised by Block’s manifesto is not whether managers disappear. It is whether hierarchy remains the best architecture for moving information.
BIM professionals should be among the first to ask that question.
Perhaps we always thought BIM was teaching us how to model buildings.
Maybe, without noticing, it was teaching us something more ambitious: how to build collective intelligence.
When I go snorkeling, I can spend ages watching a school of fish. There is no director. No project manager. No BIM Manager. And yet thousands of individuals change direction almost at once.
For years I saw it simply as one of nature’s wonders.
Now I also wonder whether it is a lesson in organisation.
Perhaps we keep building companies like armies, while nature has spent millions of years experimenting with networks.
Maybe BIM was never only about building models.
Maybe it was teaching us how to build connections.
And every form of intelligence begins there.
P.S. The real Asimov line I had in mind is: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Maybe this is a good summer to reread science fiction with different eyes.
