Archive for July, 2008

The new Glossators

Published 30 July 2008 KM , Lawyering , Tradition Leave a Comment

Today I stumbled across Paul Maharg’s account of last April’s KM Legal conference (Day 1 | Day 2). I was glad I did: having helped the conference organiser to design the programme, I was very cross that I couldn’t get to it because of clashing commitments. In particular, I had wanted to see Paul again (one of my last commitments as an academic was to share a platform with him), as well as hearing Dave Snowden. Paul’s account of the conference was very good — not just a summary of the presentations, but a useful critique as well.

Paul’s own presentation, “The Future of KM” is available on Slideshare (as adapted for a subsequent occasion).

Like all good visions of the future, Paul’s is rooted in history. In particular, he links the current practice of KM in law firms (and more generally) with the mediæval glossators whose views on the basic legal texts effectively developed the law itself.

Browsing through the slides, I was reminded of two related tools that were first developed over ten years ago: CritLink and Harvard Law School’s Annotation Engine. These were designed to overlay external web pages published by others with locally-created annotations. They never really took off. I remember trying to get both of them to work, but my limited Perl skills weren’t up to it (and the fact that I was using a Windows server probably didn’t help). However, this is still a key area where Web 2.0 doesn’t quite hit the mark.

As slide 14 of Paul’s presentation says, blogs can be seen as glossed commentary, and wikis as glossae, but the problem with both of them is that they are usually remote from the material that they refer to. If one could read legislation or cases with a gloss attached, surely their usefulness would be improved? Perhaps this is something that someone could take on now that the UK’s government information is being opened up. 

In the meantime, I suspect that we will stick to guidance notes and know-how documents that refer selectively to legislation and cases, without being able to put them in a wider context. Paul suggests that legal knowledge managers might be Glossators, but I suspect that in fact we are Commentators.

The Commentators went beyond the glossators, who had had treated each text separately. The commentators instead wrote prose commentaries on the texts (rather like lectures,) working through, book by book, through the Digest.

I think there is merit in both approaches, but technology currently favours commentating.

Good, better … best?

Published 30 July 2008 Best Practice 2 Comments

A while ago, I promised Mary Abraham a summary of my thoughts on “best practice”, which grew into quite a long draft, and then WordPress and I conspired to lose it. Rather than try to re-create it, I have started again. Undoubtedly, the lost version was much better.

In my comment on Mary’s blog, I mentioned that I have tried to avoid using the phrase “best practice”. I have identified three contexts in which my unease about the term arises. These can be summarised as compliance, comparison and complacency.

Compliance

Last week I visited another firm to share our thinking on a project that we are (separately) engaged in. One of the people on the other side of the table was their Head of Best Practice. I found this job title intriguing, as her main role was to ensure that the firm complied with its regulatory obligations. It is fair to say that mere compliance was not her aim in performing that role — she was thinking imaginatively about how their lawyers could work more effectively as well. However, in this organisation (and possibly many others) the term “best practice” is equated with compliance with some external standards.

In my mind, “compliance” suggests doing something because you have to, even if you think that it is not necessarily the best thing to do for the business. Sometimes it means doing the minimum necessary to avoid the disapproval of a regulator. That doesn’t sound like the best practice possible.

Comparison

Sometimes the appeal to best practice is a veiled request to emulate other businesses. As Matt Elliott puts it, this stifles innovation:

I’ve been seeing a lot of the Best Practices Guy lately. If you’ve been in the work world long enough, you’re probably familiar with this person: he or she is the one at any and every meeting whose only real contribution to the discussion is to harp on the need to look at “best practices.” Before we can do anything, Best Practices Guy argues, we need to determine what everyone else is doing.

And then, presumably, we’ll just copy them. Because that’s how profits are made.

In the interests of balance, I should point out that Dennis McDonald has issued a riposte: 

It’s hard to argue with that. Simply adopting how someone else does something — without thinking long and hard about similarities and differences — would be stupid. 

Still, there may be instances where adopting another organization’s best practices might make good sense. There may also be situations where doing so actually stimulates innovation. The trick is to be able to understand how the “best practice” relates to your own organization’s unique needs.

On the whole, my experience is that very few people who look to emulate someone else’s best practice are actually doing the analysis that Dennis advocates.

Complacency

Interestingly, Matt Elliott suggests that the Best Practice Guy is fearful:

The problem with the type of person I’m describing is that he or she is often motivated almost entirely by fear. It’s not so much research they crave, but safety. If we just do what someone else has done (and succeeded with) we thus have no risk of failure.

Dave Snowden confirms that this safety is misguided in a short note referring to Six Sigma: “Systems that eliminate failure,  eliminate innovation.”

I think the real problem with using best practice to create comfort is that it is always backward-looking. In my comment on Mary’s blog, I referred to a post by Derek Wenmoth about the use of “Next Practice” as an alternative.

At worst, the best-practice approach leads to “doing things right rather than doing the right things. As cited in the presentation; Best Practice asks “What is working?”, while Next Practice asks “What could work – more powerfully?”

Rather than focusing on what has worked for a small number of others in the past to create a universal recipe for action, next practice (as I understand it) focuses on what might be possible in the future, drawing on the widest possible range of stimuli, and requiring a high degree of imaginative thought in applying those stimuli to current problems. As the Innovation Unit puts it in the context of the UK educational system: 

Best Practice looks at and promotes leading educational activity for the benefit of the education system as it currently exists. Next Practice works with outstanding practitioners and other interested groups to try to take us beyond the current system into new territory, both in terms of school-based educational activity and in terms of the systems needed to nurture and develop such activity.  

That sounds much more interesting to me than the safe best practice.

Finally, a word or two from Ovid (Ex Ponto, II 2 31-32): 

Tuta petant alii: fortuna miserrima tuta est;
     nam timor euentu deterioris abest.

(Let others seek what is safe: safe is the worst of fortune; for the fear of any worse event is taken away.)

By trying to avoiding the worse events we are driven to create things that are better. A complacent feeling of safety cannot help us do that.

Motivation

Published 25 July 2008 KM , Rationality Leave a Comment

Here’s an odd press release:

De-motivated UK workers feel the heat of ‘summer sad’

Over half (58 per cent) of UK workers suffer from ‘Summer Seasonal Affective Disorder’ which leaves many de-motivated, unhappy and even close to quitting their jobs, according to a poll released today by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA).

According to this survey (not, in my admittedly limited experience, a common diagnostic tool for ailments), the advent of summer makes many of us feel unhappy in our work. Why is this government agency spinning this story? The clue comes later on:

The survey also delved into how UK workers use their summer months at work, comparing and contrasting the experiences of different professions.

With 13 weeks holiday a year, teachers are more likely to use the summer period for extended breaks with 1 in 4 (25 per cent) using their time to take long holidays abroad – double the amount of most other professions.

So the cure for people who get the summertime blues is to change to a career with extended holiday periods. (And, they are at pains to remind us, “a competitive salary.”)

Within my immediate family, I am surrounded by teachers. My mother, step-mother, mother-in-law and father-in-law were all teachers. Three of my sisters-in-law are qualified teachers. I don’t think any of them were driven to become teachers because there was a chance of long holidays. They did it because they believed that they had a vocation to teach. In my experience, those (in any walk of life) who take on an important task for the wrong reasons are most likely to perform poorly at it.

What are the wrong reasons? I think there are many, but they boil down to paying more attention to one’s own interests than to the job. If you do a job because it is well paid, rather than because it intrinsically interests you or you think you can do it especially well, there is nothing keeping you in that job: as soon as you can see another one that will pay you more, your motivation must drive you to take that one instead. As a result, I think people who take this approach will inevitably be less committed to their job than those who consider it more important that the job is done well.

This issue is also relevant to knowledge management activities. Two of the objectives of KM are to make sure that the job (a) is done well and (b) can be done well again in the future by someone else. The behaviours supporting these objectives require people to put aside self-interest to some extent. If we adopt incentive schemes to encourage people to participate in KM, we reintroduce self-interest, which I think will then start to undermine the process. I don’t expect everyone’s motivations to be pure, but I don’t think it is sensible to introduce impurities at the outset.

(As an aside, I think the TDA’s use of SAD to promote teaching is particularly unworthy. For those who suffer from it, SAD is not a joking matter.)

Getting a clue

Published 18 July 2008 Clients , Culture , Web2.0 Leave a Comment

A little while ago, Doug Cornelius posted a review of Groundswell. At the time, I looked at the book and the authors’ blog;* I wasn’t tempted to buy it, but something looked familiar. When a colleague recommended the book to me today, I took another look and realised where the resonance was: the Cluetrain Manifesto.

I remember when the Cluetrain Manifesto was all the rage. Nine years ago, I was working in a University, and was part of the group trying to plan for or avoid Y2K meltdown. For both those reasons, the significance of the Cluetrain passed me by at the time. Looking back at it recently, it made much more sense, and chimed with some of the things I think we should be doing (as part of KM or otherwise).

I wondered whether the Groundswell editors referred to Cluetrain. I still don’t know if they do so in the book itself, but Josh Bernoff has written a number of related posts in their blog. One of them (“Corporate social technology strategy, Purists, and Corporatists — why companies CAN participate“) is particularly insightful.

On the one side are the folks who say, “The social world is an emergent phenomenon generated by people connecting.” The original Cluetrain Manifesto rails against many aspects of the corporate world and basically posits that the right way for companies to get involved is for people inside those companies to connect to their customers. … For shorthand, let’s call these folks the Purists.

On the other side are companies who are looking at the social Internet and saying “how can we exploit this to do what we already do — PR and advertising, for example?” PR and advertising are mostly one-way, broadcast type communications, and these folks continue to try to adapt those one-way modes of thinking in the two-way, read-write world of social computing. I’ll caricature these folks as the Corporatists.

I’m here to stand up and proudly say, Purists and Corporatists, you’re both wrong.

Josh then goes on to provide reasons why they are both right. Then he gets to the heart of the matter:

As a corporate staffer, you have no business in the groundswell unless you know what you are trying to do there. You could be trying to increase awareness, generate word of mouth, surface leads, save on support costs, on tap into innovation. But regardless, no corporate activity should go forward without a measurable goal, and this is no different.

Looking back at the Cluetrain Manifesto, and at the list of case studies in Groundswell, I wonder what the typical law firm view would be. There is a clear bias in both publications towards examination of relationships between businesses and individual consumers. That is not to say that B2B relationships do not involve individuals, but those relationships are already conducted on a different level (in professional services firms, at least).

The first of the Cluetrain Manifesto’s 95 theses is:

Markets are conversations.

As far as I can tell, professional services cannot be provided effectively without conversations. However, this is often only true at the point of delivery. Looking at law firm newsletters, for example, we might reasonably conclude that firms have no interest in conversing with their clients. Adding that attitude to lawyers’ professional risk aversion, it is not surprising that very few firms have ventured into public engagement with their markets in the way that the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto or Groundswell might suggest.

—-

* Coincidentally, it is Charlene Li’s last day at Forrester today. I don’t know whether the blog will survive her departure.

Dilemmas

Published 9 July 2008 Collaboration , Innovation , Management , Rationality Leave a Comment

Reading Tom Davenport’s brief polemic on the meaning of management (and the comments on it), I have realised that some of the things that I believe (and have promoted here) may be mutually contradictory.

Commenting on IBM’s explicit change in terminology from “knowledge management” to “knowledge sharing”, Davenport argues that (a) the equation of “management” with “command-and-control” is simplistic and misleading and (b) “sharing” as a concept is too unstructured to be useful in the enterprise (but equally, there is scope for tools of that nature).

I think this tension between the structure of a managed knowledge environment and vague knowledge sharing is symptomatic of the tension between what people want to do and what the business requires them to do. For example, people may be very keen to read widely to feed their creativity and improve the chances of innovation, but in order to perform their primary function they need to focus on the things that are more obviously related to the job. However, prioritisation of activities that are demonstrably valuable will result in a situation where people will only contemplate low-risk strategies. (As an aside, I think this might be particularly a problem in law firms: recording time in six-minute units is not conducive to activities that are not clearly relevant to client work.) As Bruce MacEwen has pointed out more than once, this is not a time to be concentrating on low-risk strategies.

So it is not sensible to encourage everyone to engage in what one of the comments on Davenport’s piece calls the “passive” activity of knowledge sharing. Equally there are dangers in insisting only on structured formal knowledge creation and capture. How do we manage our way around this dilemma?

I don’t know, but I think we need to be clear with people about the limitations of all the different approaches to knowledge in the enterprise, and the consequences of their over-use or misuse. By doing this, we can help them find a way that suits them and the business. Surely, that is knowledge management.

Going with the flow

Published 7 July 2008 Culture , KM , Technology 5 Comments

I had a number of discussions with people last week that brought to mind Michael Idinopulos’s description of the relationship between wikis and work.

Wikis can be used for many different activities, which fall into two broad categories:

  • In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.
  • Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).

When wiki champions complain that it’s hard to get people to use wikis, they’re usually thinking of above-the-flow wikis. Modeled on  Wikipedia, these wikis typically aspire to capture knowledge and insights that people collect in the course of their work. That’s a hard thing to get people to do.

Michael’s assertion is true for know-how systems generally. Too many appear to have been built on the Field of Dreams principle (“if you build it, they will come”). Even if that isn’t true, my impression (derived from reading articles and listening to conference presentations) is that many firms spend inordinate amounts of time devising elaborate systems of incentives and cajoling their people to contribute to the know-how database. Why do they have to do this? Because the capture and collection of knowledge is above the flow.

More importantly, the availability of rewards for know-how is not likely to make participation in the knowledge process part of the flow. In fact, I suspect that they make it easier for people to opt out of that process (or to become free-riders on the labours of those who support it). The challenge is not to get people to break out of their flow so that they engage with KM systems, but to change the flow so that those systems become part of the flow — a natural part of the daily routine.

That is easier said than done, of course. There is an upside, though. In essence, this is what we need  to do in order to create a knowledge culture. Expressed in those terms the problem becomes much more tangible and therefore potentially more manageable. If someone is asked to create or change the knowledge culture, the task looks (and probably is) insuperable. If it is defined as moving certain activities into mainstream processes, the task can be broken into smaller pieces that are less daunting.

The classic example of knowledge systems that fit in the flow must be the case of the Xerox photocopy engineers. As part of work developing an expert system for photocopier fault diagnosis, Xerox discovered that their engineers were less than impressed with the system because the hardest problems they encountered were not already documented and therefore outside the scope of the expert system.

We decided to spend more time observing what technicians actually did day to day. We started with US technicians, accompanying them on their service calls. Most of the time, they would look at the machine, talk to the customer, and know exactly what to do to put it in good working order. Occasionally, they ran into a problem that they hadn’t seen before and for which there was no documented answer. They would try to solve these problems based on their knowledge of the machine. This often worked, but sometimes they were stuck. They might call on a buddy for ideas, using their two-way radios, or turn to the experts—former technicians now serving as field engineers—who were part of the escalation process. When they solved unusual problems, they would often tell stories about these successes at meetings with their coworkers. The stories, now part of the community, could then be used at similar gatherings and further modified or elaborated.

The story-telling referred to actually took place informally as part of the daily routine. As these technicians travelled around their areas, they would meet their colleagues in coffee-shops or rest-stops. Their conversations — part of the daily flow — would probably cover the usual range of topics, as well as the tips they had learnt or developed to deal with previously unforeseen copier faults. In order to make the most of these interactions, the system that Xerox developed (named Eureka) had to expand on them, and keep the knowledge-sharing process in the flow. As their director of knowledge management for worldwide customer services, Tom Ruddy, put it:

When people hear about Eureka, they always want to see the software. But it’s really the environment that we are creating. We realized early on that technology wasn’t the solution-that if we didn’t work on the behavioral side of the equation, it wouldn’t be successful. We concentrated on understanding what would make people want to share solutions and take their personal time to enter stuff into the system.

Coincidentally, one of the hottest blog posts of the weekend touches on a similar cultural problem: how do you get people to share knowledge using blogs? Tim Leberecht’s solution: mandatory employee blogs. As Doug Cornelius points out, there is a strong tide of opinion against this choice. In part, this tide is driven by the desire to reflect people’s normal work patterns and habits in knowledge sharing and collaboration. In part, I think there is also a recognition that blogging is not yet mature enough to become a part of those work patterns and habits. (In a separate post, Doug refers to some work done by Forrester which suggests that only 13% of consumers would participate in social media to the extent of creating content (which covers blogging as well as uploading video to Youtube.)

Pollyanna-like, I have a tendency to see opportunities in problems. I don’t want to make blogging mandatory, but I am sure that there are people who would blog, but don’t share knowledge, just as there are people who would like an easier way to share knowledge as part of their work. I want to bring those people together (and then throw a few non-sharing non-bloggers into the mix) to see what kind of culture we can create. At the same time, I want to find as many ways as possible of bringing knowledge into the work-flow. (It looks like Mary Abraham and I have similar views.)

Reading around

Published 2 July 2008 Collaboration Leave a Comment

In an earlier blog post, I referred to James Webb Young’s book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, which links innovation and creativity to the capacity to see new relationships between old elements. I was originally directed to the book by Shawn Callahan at Anecdote. Now Shawn has written a blog post on collaboration. In it, he points to the use of analogies to prolong interesting conversations.

In collaborative conversations an analogy provides a new frame for thinking about a problem. …

So to be a good collaborator we need to have a repertoire of analogies at our disposal. So how do we do it? …

The first thing is to increase the variety of experiences you have. A short film festival analogy will lack richness or might not even occur to you if you’ve never been to one. But simply doing heaps of new things is not enough because you can’t do everything. So the second best way to is to hear, read, experience stories. …

But you can’t stop there. Experience without some form of mindfulness is unlikely to stick with you in a way that you might remember when grasping for an apt analogy. If you want to remember something, tell yourself a story about it that you can picture in your mind, smell, taste and hear.

So: discovering more about things beyond one’s immediate area of work can promote innovation, and stories can promote collaboration. What more could one want to justify a wide range of reading?

Beyond the Golden Rule

Published 1 July 2008 Collaboration , Culture , Technology Leave a Comment

I am still catching up with unread blogs, but I want to add something to Mary Abraham’s commendation of the Golden Rule as the key to collaboration. As the Wikipedia entry on the Rule suggests (at the moment), it can be the cause of problems when there are differences in values or interests:

Shaw’s comment about differing tastes suggests that if your values are not shared with others, the way you want to be treated will not be the way they want to be treated. For example, it has been said that a sadist is just a masochist who follows the golden rule. Another often used example of this inconsistency is that of the man walking into a bar looking for a fight. It could also be used by a seducer to suggest that he should kiss an object of his affection because he wants that person to kiss him.

I was not alone in admiring the late Jon Postel, perhaps the quietest genius behind the creation and early management of the Internet. One of his lasting legacies, sometimes forgotten in the rush for innovation, is found in the heart of one of the basic definitions of the Internet’s Transmission Control Protocol, RFC 793:

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

I have found this a useful general principle for human communications too, even though I sometimes forget it myself. The wheels of collaboration run much more smoothly when one resists enforcing rules against others, whilst maintaining one’s own obedience to the same rules.

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