Archive for March, 2009

Why are we doing this KM thing?

Published 31 March 2009 Expertise , Knowledge , Science , Work 3 Comments

I was reading Strategic Intuition (there will be more on this fascinating book at a later date) on the train home yesterday, and was prompted to ask myself an odd question: “why are we doing knowledge management? What will be different, and for whom?”

The passage that made me ask this question was a description of a firefighter’s decision-making process.

Never once did he set a goal, list options, weigh the options, and decide among them. First he applied pressure, then he picked the strongest but newest crew member to bear the greatest weight of the stretcher, and then in the truck they put the victim into the inflatable pants. Formal protocol or normal procedure certainly gave him other options — examine the victim for other wounds before moving him, put the victim into the inflatable pants right away, and assign someone experienced to bear the greatest weight of the stretcher — but Lieutenant M never considered them.

The researcher whose work is described here (Gary Klein) started out with the hypothesis that the decision-making process would conform to the model of a defined goal, followed by iterative consideration of a series of options. However, he rapidly discovered that this model was wrong. Instead, what he saw in the experts that he studied (not only firefighters, but soldiers in battle, nurses, and other professionals) was overwhelmingly intuitive weighing of single options. (There is more in the book about why this is.)

We often talk about decision-making processes, and one of the goals of knowledge management is often to improve those processes by, for example, ensuring better access to information, or by honing the processes themselves (the HBR article by Dave Snowden and Mary Boone on “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” is an excellent example of the latter). Although these activities may well improve decision-making, those decisions are ultimately made by people — not processes. The question I posed for myself, then, was: what impact does KM have on people? Exactly how will they be better at decision-making as a result of our work?

My instinctive answer is that I want them to become experts (and therefore able to act swiftly and correctly in an emergency) in whatever field they work in. That means that we should always return our focus to the people in our organisations, and respond to their needs (taking into account the organisation’s direction and focus), rather than thinking solely about building organisational edifices. The more time that is spent on repositories, processes, structures, or documentation, the less is available for working with people. In becoming experts in our own field, we also need to be more instinctive.

Coincidentally, I read two blog posts about experts over the weekend. The first was Arnold Zwicky bringing some linguistic sanity to counter fevered journalistic criticism of ‘experts’ and ‘expertise’.

Kristof is undercutting one set of “experts”, people who propose to predict the future. Lord knows, such people are sitting ducks, especially in financial matters (though I believe they do better in some other domains), and it’s scarcely a surprise that so many of them get it wrong.

Other “experts” offer aesthetic judgments… and still others exhibit competence in diagnosis and treatment…, and stlll others simply possess extensive knowledge about some domain…

The links between these different sorts of expert/expertise are tenuous, though not negligible. Meanings radiate in different directions from earlier meanings, but the (phonological/orthographic shapes of the) words remain. The result is the mildly Whorfian one that people are inclined to view the different meanings as subtypes of a single meaning, just because they are manifested in the same phonological/orthographic shapes. So experts of one sort are tainted with the misdeeds of another.

Expertise that results from real experience, study, insight, rationality and knowledge does not deserve to be shunned as mere pontification. It can save lives.

The other blog post, by Duncan Work, is a commentary on a New Scientist report about how people react to advice they believe to be expert. It appears that key areas in their brains simply turn off — they surrender the decision-making process to the expert.

This phenomenon has both adaptive and non-adaptive effects.

It is evolutionarily adaptive by being a “conformity-enforcing” phenomenon that can kick in when a large group needs to quickly move in the same direction in order to survive a big threat.   It’s also adaptive when the issues are extremely complex and most members of the population don’t have the knowledge or experience to really evaluate the risks and make a good decision.

It is evolutionarily non-adaptive when there is still a lot of confusion around the issue, when the experts themselves don’t agree, and when many experts are guided by narrow interests that don’t serve the group (like increasing and protecting their own personal prestige and wealth).

The real problem is not just that many of the crises now facing businesses are founded in actions, decisions and behaviours that few people understand. It is that we make no distinction between different categories of expert, and so we follow them all blindly. At the same time, as the New York Times op-ed piece critiqued by Zwicky illustrates, many of us do not actually respect experts. In fact, what we don’t respect are people who style themselves experts, but who are actually driven by other interests (as Work points out).

So if our KM work is at least in part to make people into experts, we probably need to rescue the word from the clutches of people who profess expertise without actually having any.

Book Review: Generation Blend

Published 29 March 2009 Book Review , Culture , Technology , Web2.0 , Work Leave a Comment

I have already voiced my scepticism about Generation Y, so it may seem odd that I chose to buy Rob Salkowitz’s book Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap. However, there is a lot in this book that does not depend on an uncritical acceptance of the “generations” thesis. It provides a sound practical basis for any business that wants to, in Salkowitz’s words, “develop practices and deploy technology to attract, motivate, and empower workers of all ages.”

As one might expect, underpinning Generation Blend is the thesis that there are clear generational (not age-related) differences that affect how people approach and use technology. In this, Salkowitz builds on Neil Howe and William Strauss’s book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. However, generational differences are not the starting point for the book. Instead, Salkowitz begins by showing how technology itself has changed the working environment irrevocably. In doing so, he establishes the purpose of the book: to allow organisations to develop the most suitable strategy to help their people to cope with those changes (and the many more to come).

Organizations invest in succeeding waves of new technology — and thus subject their workers to waves of changes in their lives and workstyles — to increase their productivity and competitiveness. Historically, productivity has increased when new technology replaced labor-intensive processes, first with mechanical machinery, and now electronic information systems. (p. 24)

Dave Snowden has started an interesting analysis of these waves of change, and Andrew McAfee’s research shows that IT makes a difference for organisations. What Salkowitz does in Generation Blend is to provide real, practical, insights into the way in which organisations can make the most of the abilities of all generations when faced with new technology. When he does discuss the generations, it is important to remember that his perspective is entirely a US-centric one. That said, the rest of the book is generally applicable. This is Salkowitz’s strength — he recognises that there are real exceptions to the broad brush of generational study, and his guidance focuses on clear issues with which it is difficult to disagree. As one of the section headings puts it, “software complexity restricts the talent pool,” so the target is to accommodate different generational approaches in order to loosen that restriction. Chapter 3 of the book closes with a set of tables outlining different generational attributes. I found these very useful in that they focused the mind on the behaviours and attitudes affecting people’s approach to technology, rather than as a hard-and-fast description of the different generations.

Salkowitz’s approach can be illuminated by comparing three passages on blogging.

The open, unsupervised quality of blogs can be deeply unsettling to people who have internalized the notion that good information comes only from trusted institutions, credentialed individuals, or valid ideological perspectives. (p. 82)

On the other hand:

Blogs and wikis create an environment where unofficial and uncredentialed contributors stand at eye level with traditionally authoritative sources of knowledge. This is perfectly natural to GenXers, who believe that performance and competence should be the sole criteria for authority. (p. 147)

And, quoting Dave Pollard with approval:

“I’d always expected that the younger and more tech-savvy people in any organization would be able to show (not tell) the older and more tech-wary people how to use new tools easily and effectively. But in thirty years in business, I’ve almost never seen this happen. Generation Millennium will use IM, blogs, and personal web pages (internal or on public sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and FaceBook) whether they’re officially sanctioned or not, but they won’t be evangelists for these tools.” (p. 216)

 There is here, I think, a sense of Salkowitz’s desire to engage older workers as well as his concern that unwarranted assumptions about younger people’s affinity with technology could lead businesses towards the wrong courses of action.

At the heart of Generation Blend is a critique of existing technology, in which Salkowitz points out that current business software has a number of common characteristics:

  • It tends to be complex and overladen with features
  • It focuses on efficiency
  • It is driven by the need to perform tasks
  • It supports a work/life balance that is “essentially a one-way flow of work into life” (p. 147)

These characteristics have come about, Salkowitz argues, because the technology has largely been produced by and for programmers whose values and culture:

…independence, obsession with efficiency as a way to save personal time and effort, low priority on interpersonal communication skills, focus on outcomes rather than process (such as meetings or showing up on a regular schedule), seeing risk in a positive light, desire to dominate through competence — sound like the thumbnail descriptions of Generation X tossed out by management analysts. (p. 149)

Since this group is clearly comfortable with technology, and is also increasingly moving into leadership and management roles, Salkowitz provides them with guidance on making technology accessible to older workers and on making the most of the skills and insights of younger workers. He does this in general terms throughout the book, but most convincingly in the final three chapters. Two of these use narrative to show how (a) the fear can be taken out of technology for older people and (b) the younger generation can be involved directly in defining organisational strategy.

In the first of these chapters, Salkowitz describes a non-profit New York initiative, OATS (Older Adults Technology Services), which trains older people in newer technologies, so that they can comfortably move into roles where those skills are needed. OATS has found that understanding the learning style of these people allows them to pick up software skills much more quickly than is commonly assumed.

While younger people learn technology by handson experimentation and trial and error, [Thomas] Kamber [OATS founder] and his team find that older learners prefer information in step-by-step instructions and value written documentation. (p. 167)

At the other end of the generational scale, Salkowitz starts with a statement that almost reads like a manifesto:

Millennials may be objects of study, but they are also, increasingly, participants in the dialogue, and it is silly (and rude) for organizations to talk about them as if they are not already in the room. (p. 190)

He goes on to illustrate the point with an account of Microsoft’s Information Worker Board of the Future, which was a “structured weeklong exercise around the future of work,” which the company used to help it understand how its strategy should develop in the future. It was judged to be a success by bringing new perspectives to the company as well as showing Microsoft to be a thought leader in this area.

…the organizational commitment to engage with Millennials as partners in the formation of a strategic vision can be as valuable as the direct knowledge gained from the engagement. Strategic planning is a crucial discipline for organizations operating in an uncertain world. When it is a closed process, conducted by experts and senior people (who inevitably bring their generational biases with them), it runs a greater risk of missing emergent trends or misjudging the potential for discontinuities that could disrupt the entire global environment. Opening up the planning process to younger perspectives as a matter of course rather than novelty hedges against the risks of generational myopia and also sends a strong positive signal to members of the rising generation. (p. 209)

Generation Blend ends with a clear exposition of the key issues that organisations need to address in order to make the most of their workers of all ages and the technology they use.

Organizations looking to effectively manage across the age gap in an increasingly sophisticated connected information workplace should ask themselves five questions:

  1. Are you clearly explaining the benefits of technology?
  2. Are you providing a business context for your technology policies?
  3. Are you making technology accessible to different workstyles?
  4. Does your organizational culture support your technology strategy?
  5. Are you building bridges instead of walls? (p. 212)

The last two of these are particularly interesting. In discussing organisational culture, Salkowitz includes careful consideration of knowledge management activities, especially using Web 2.0 tools. He is confident that workers of all generations will adapt to this approach to KM at a personal level, but points to real challenges: “[t]he real difficulties… are rooted in the business model and in the way that individual people see their jobs.” (p. 229) For Salkowitz, the solution is for the organisation to make a real and visible investment in knowledge activities — he points to the use of PSLs in UK law firms as one example of this approach. Given the tension between social and market norms that I commented on yesterday, I wonder how far this approach can be pushed successfully.

Running through Generation Blend is a thread of involvement and engagement. Salkowitz consistently advocates management approaches that accommodate different ways of extracting value from technology at work. This thread emerges in the final section of the book as an exhortation to use the best of all generations to work together for the organisation — building bridges rather than walls.

Left to themselves, workers of different ages will apply their own preconceptions and experiences of technology at work, sometimes leading to conflict and misunderstanding when generational priorities diverge. But when management demonstrates a commitment to respecting both the expectations of younger workers and the concerns of more experienced workers around technology, organizations can effectively combine the tech-savvy of the young with the knowledge and wisdom of the old in ways that make the organization more competitive, more resilient to external change, more efficient, and more open. (p. 231)

I think he is right in this, but it will be a challenge for many organizations to do this effectively, especially when they are distracted by seismic changes outside. My gut feeling is that those businesses that work hard at the internal stuff will find that their workforce is better able to deal with those external forces.

Social norms and knowledge sharing

Published 28 March 2009 Book Review , Collaboration , Culture , KM , Rationality , Work 5 Comments

Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational, is a really eye-opening read. He deconstructs a number of traditional economic constructs with humour and insight. Most importantly, he uses careful experimentation to demonstrate exactly how irrational we are.

In the video above, Ariely talks about the difference between people’s behaviour in a situation governed by social norms by comparison with market norms. He examines this difference in Chapter 4 of the book: “The Cost of Social Norms.” Reading this chapter, I thought I had found the answer to why incentives do not work in knowledge management initiatives.

Ariely’s argument is that in a situation governed by social norms, people will help without thought of a financial reward. On the other hand, interactions governed by market norms are very different.

The exchanges are sharp-edged: wages, prices, rents, interest, and costs-and-benefits. Such market relationships are not necessarily evil or mean — in fact, they also include self-reliance, inventiveness, and individualism — but they do imply comparable benefits and prompt payments. When you are in the domain of market norms, you get what you pay for — that’s just the way it is. (p. 68)

The trouble is that whilst knowledge sharing is at its heart a social activity, it takes place in an environment governed by market norms — the workplace. Naturally enough, there is an inclination to want to recognise good knowledge behaviours in the only way that an employer knows: financially. As Neil Richards has explained, this just does not work. Ariely describes an experiment in which people were asked to perform a mundane and fruitless task on a computer. One group was paid $5 for the task, another group just 50¢, and a third was asked to do it as a favour. The productivity of the $5 group was slightly lower than the ‘favour’ group, but the 50¢ group was over 50% less productive than the others.

Perhaps we should have anticipated this. There are many examples to show that people will work much more for a cause than for cash. A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services to needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour. The lawyers said no. Then the program manager at AARP had a brilliant idea: he asked the lawyers if they would offer free services to needy retirees. Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes.

What was going on here? How could zero dollars be more attractive than $30? When money was mentioned, the lawyers used market norms and found the offer lacking, relative to their market salary. When no money was mentioned they used social norms and were willing to volunteer their time. Why didn’t they just accept $30, thinking of themselves as volunteers who received $30? Because once market norms enter our considerations, social norms depart. (p. 71, my emphasis)

It is possible to use gifts to thank people for their efforts, and still stay inside the social norms. However, if one suggests that the gift has a monetary value, the market norms reassert themselves. Although Ariely doesn’t say so, I suspect that using small-scale rewards on a regular basis (such as a box of chocolates for the best contribution to know-how every month) would also be regarded as market-related. Gifts need to be a surprise to be valued as part of a social interaction.

Later in this chapter, Ariely describes how a social situation can take a long time to recover from being drawn into the market. He tells a story of a childrens’ nursery that had previously used social sanctions (guit, mainly) to control parents who picked their children up late. When the nursery started to impose fines for lateness instead, parents applied market thinking and the incidences of lateness increased. When the fines were removed, the parents continued to pick up late as they had done in the fines era — guilt no longer worked as a sanction.

One problem for some law firms is that they have given knowledge management responsibilities to a specific group of people (Professional Support Lawyers, or equivalent). Because those people (rewarded according to the market) have a defined role, it can be difficult to motivate others in the firm to share knowledge as a social obligation. Unfortunately, the market value of effective knowledge sharing is almost certainly more than most employers could afford. “Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.” (p. 86)

Having established that the balance between social and market norms is a very senstive one, Ariely is still convinced that there is a real place for social norms in the workplace.

If corporations started thinking in terms of social norms, they would realize that these norms build loyalty and — more important — make people want to extend themselves to the degree that corporations need today: to be flexible, concerned, and willing to pitch in. That’s what a social relatinonship delivers. (p. 83)

As well as these thoughts on knowledge sharing in the enterprise, Ariely’s chapter explains much to me about the success of so-called social computing tools (and also why they are well-named). They play on the genuine human desire to comply with social norms of exchange, assistance, generosity and collaboration. The challenge is to import this desire into the organisational context, without running into market norms.

Where do lawyers come from…?

Published 24 March 2009 Irrationality , Lawyering , Learning 4 Comments

From a number of directions, there is a lot of son et lumière at the moment about the relationships between legal education and law firms and law firms and their in-house clients. As someone who has sat on two of the three sides of these fences, I naturally have a view.

Before I started working in a law firm eight years ago, I spent nearly 13 years teaching law — for the greater part of that time at the University of Bristol. During that period there was considerable debate (fostered for the most part by the late Peter Birks) about the proper relationship between the legal academy and the profession (I speak of a singular profession, although there are actually two in England and Wales — solicitors and barristers). Birks was adamant that the legal profession should prefer law graduates to non-law graduates, but that the profession should leave the question of defining a suitable law degree to the universities. I thought he was wrong about the former question, but right about the latter. My view has not changed in the years I have spent since then observing lawyers at work.

As a law teacher, I saw many students who had clearly signed up for a law degree solely for the purpose of smoothing their progress towards a lucrative career in a commercial law firm. Some of them really resented the subjects that they were required to complete in order to get a qualifying degree, but which they saw as irrelevant to legal practice. Since I taught two of those subjects (Public Law and Jurisprudence), this resentment was plainer to me than it might have been to some of my colleagues. (Since then, many of my former students have said that in retrospect they value the wider perspective on the law that those courses gave them.)

At the same time, I knew many young lawyers who had studied law, but who spent much of their time wishing they had been able to read further into subjects that interested them more, whether that be History, Physics, or Underwater Basket Weaving. That made me wonder whether the right approach would be to turn Law into a postgraduate degree. (In the Anglo-Scottish tradition, Law is an undergraduate degree, with a postgraduate professional component for those intending to go into practice.) I do not now think that would be right — such an approach would effectively exclude from legal studies those with a genuine interest in law as a human and social science, but who had no intention of becoming joining the profession.

The natural conclusion of these views is that the legal profession should be open to those with law and non-law undergraduate degrees. That is the position in England and Wales today, as it has been since the profession became closed to non-graduates. Certainly, non-law graduates should be required to take a postgraduate course in law, but I do not think they should be excluded altogether. My observations of lawyers in practice has not changed this conclusion — without knowing someone’s academic history, I have found it impossible to tell whether or not they have a law degree. That does not prevent those with law degrees being convinced that they have a right to priority entry into the legal profession, as some of the comments on this report in The Lawyer illustrate.

One of the reasons why a law degree is not an essential prerequisite to a legal career in the England and Wales is that the vocational training of lawyers takes place entirely after the degree is obtained. I have been intrigued by the discussion of the value of a JD in business and the subsequent discussion between Ron Friedmann and Doug Cornelius, captured on Ron’s blog. Historically, only 70% or less of English law graduates enter the legal profession (I wish I had a citation for this, but I haven’t been able to track one down — it was certainly my recollection of Bristol graduates). In some other European countries, where Law is also an undergraduate degree, the proportion is even lower. In Italy, for example, there is a long-standing tradition (exemplified by Gianni Agnelli — nicknamed “l’Avvocato”) of law graduates going directly into commerce and business. Ron and Doug’s discussion makes it clear that European assumptions about the merits of legal study are not shared by our North American counterparts.

And what of that vocational training? Toby Brown has argued powerfully that BigLaw contributes significantly to the development of lawyers who can then turn their back on those firms and strike out on their own. This argument is even stronger in England and Wales. Once our fledgling lawyers leave the classroom and the lecture hall, they still need two more years (in the case of solicitors) before they can call themselves qualified. That two years on a training contract is typically spent in medium-sized to large law firms. (A search on LawCareers.Net suggests 180 firms in that category, which will typically have 5-100 places on offer each year. In addition, another 750 small firms are listed, but most of these will have less than two places on offer.) The solicitors’ profession therefore depends heavily on large commercial firms to train their new blood.

Which brings me to clients. My guess is that all clients of all law firms everywhere are pressing for lower fees (or at least reduced legal costs). If those fees are considered to be solely reimbursement for services rendered, law firms run the risk of short-changing themselves: of failing to be recognised for the wider benefit that they offer to the legal profession — especially its future. Many in-house legal teams in commerce, industry and the public sector add to the pool of qualified lawyers by offering training contracts. However, their contribution is small compared to the training work that law firms do, and to the numbers of qualified lawyers employed in those teams. My guess is that there is a net flow of qualified lawyers from private practice into in-house teams. The problem for those businesses is that their short-term cash-flow concerns might cause a shortfall in the pool of available talent in the longer term by making it more difficult for the firms to offer as many training contracts as the market will need in the future.

At the beginning of the year, I read a powerfully-argued polemic comparing major law firms to a dysfunctional coffee-shop.

Then I notice a coffeehouse that I had never seen before. It’s surprising because it’s bigger than normal and has a very staid, conservative name. More like a string of names, actually, followed by a “P.C.” I take this to mean “professional coffeehouse,” or something.

The first thing I notice inside is that the décor is heavy on the mahogany and expensive modern art. A sign on the wall talks about how they have stores in 30 states and eight countries, and that they just opened a location in Shanghai. The sign suggests that they’re very excited about this.

I go to the counter and I’m greeted by a tired-looking twentysomething. Her nametag says she’s a “Coffee Associate.”

…

When I’m all but delirious from my lack of caffeine, my barista finally tells me that my latte is ready. It seems well made, and it tastes fine, although I would have preferred to have it more quickly. The young woman thanks me and wishes me a good day.

“But I haven’t paid you yet.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll send you an invoice.”

Nearly two months later, I receive an envelope with the name of the coffee company on it. By now, I’ve already forgotten what I had gotten. I open the envelope and nearly faint.

And so on.

In fact, I don’t think major law firms are coffee shops. They are more like the motor dealer servicing departments. When one buys one’s luxury car new or nearly new, the need to maintain its resale value as far as possible means that one tends to go to the most expensive (but hopefully most up-to-date) place for regular servicing and repairs — the franchised dealer or service outlet. As the car gets older, and knowledge of the technology in it is more pervasive, it makes more sense to save money by finding a local mechanic who can work on it. But the local mechanic can only do that if he can tap into the expertise coming out of the main dealership. He and, by extension, you the customer depend on that expertise. You have paid for it in the past by using the main dealer, and now you can reap the reward by using a cheaper alternative. This analogy is still not perfect, but it is not as pernicious as the coffee shop one. Making coffee is not as complex as maintaining a modern car, which is nowhere near as tricky as training a lawyer.

Beauty, truth, modernity, tradition

Published 22 March 2009 Creativity , Culture , Design , Tradition Leave a Comment

I have just read a perfect summary by Stephen Bayley of one of the principles underpinning my thoughts on this blog.

For me, the debate was a chance to go rhetorical about the single cultural principle I hold most dear: that history and tradition are things you build on with pride and conviction, not resorts you scurry back to when you can think of nothing better to do. I believe that to deny the present is to shortchange the future. These things I learnt from Nikolaus Pevsner.

Bayley was reporting on the National Trust ‘Quality of Life’ debate, “Britain has become indifferent to beauty.”

In Bayley’s account, the debate sounds very stimulating. Supporting the motion were David Starkey and Roger Scruton. Bayley caricatures them thus:

Starkey and Scruton see culture as a serial that has been recorded in episodes and canned in perpetuity for posterity. The task, in their view, is not to augment architectural history with up-to-date improvements, but regularly to revisit the past for edification and instruction.

Bereft of optimism or enthusiasm, bloated with sly and knowing cynicism, they see no value in contemporary life.

Opposing the motion were Germaine Greer (“after Clive James, our Greatest Living Australian National Treasure”) and Bayley himself. The outcome of the debate? The motion was lost resoundingly. Clearly the audience was convinced by the notion that beauty was not fixed at some past time, but is still being made, albeit in a different tradition.

This was not because we were so very clever, but because Starkey and Scruton were so very wrong. And what was the turning point? One, Greer said what a beautiful spring day it was. Whose mood was not enhanced by sunshine and flowers and blue skies? No dissenters, there. Two, in despair at their negativism, cynicism and defeatism, I asked Starkey and Scruton: “Why is it I like what you like (which is to say: medieval, renaissance and Victorian), but why you are so limited and snitty and crabby you see no value in what I like?” No dissenters here, either.

Wonderful to prove that the British are not, indeed, indifferent to beauty.

Reading Bayley’s account, I felt that the traditionalists’ view was not just applicable to beauty. Many things, including language and weights and measures are held by some to be better in some historical form. On the other hand, I am not sure that the resistance to modernity is a related to fear of change, which is how it is often characterised.

The problem, I think, is that we see the past in a sanitised form. The things that are left from bygone eras tend to be the most beautiful. However, we forget this and assume that we see a true picture of what our forbears experienced. Keats’s grecian urn is a prime example.

Famously, Keats’s poem ends with an assertion that truth and beauty are inseparable. For me, however, the phrase before that is more interesting:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst…

Keats appears to be suggesting that the urn will always persist because of its beauty. Given the fragility of antique ceramics, this must be a forlorn hope. In general, however, the probability of survival of any given artefact must surely be proportional to its beauty: people are more likely to take care of such things than they are of their uglier counterparts. As a result, our view of the past is inevitably a sanitised one, containing only the good parts, with little of the bad.

By contrast, we experience all of the present — the good and the bad. Sometimes it is difficult to tell which is which. In the face of such uncertainty, it is not surprising that some people prefer to turn against the present and seek solace in the past. I think this is where Scruton and Starkey sit, whereas Greer and Bayley are happy to explore the present — risking the possibility that what they regard as worthwhile will turn out with the passage of time to be ugly and worthless.

I think they are right to take that risk. To do otherwise is to fail to take part in the process by which the things that are worthwhile are preserved for future generations. We need to remember to do the same in our organisations — not to hold on to repositories of old knowledge just because they are old, but to open our minds to the possibility of the creation of new knowledge by whatever means (and to risk some of that new knowledge being worthless).

Jargon or vocabulary?

Published 18 March 2009 Irrationality , Language Leave a Comment

The British news media appear to be unanimous in approving the Local Government Association’s call for less jargon and more plain English in the documents created by local councils. Unfortunately, in their quest for a story, they appear to have missed an opportunity to look critically at what the LGA is advocating.

In December 2007, the LGA sent to councils a list of ”100 words that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide.” That sounds like a sensible thing to do, doesn’t it? Well, yes — if the concern is that the language that councils use is making life difficult for people who want or need to use their services. If, on the other hand, their view is that all council documents should have these terms removed, then I would be worried that this advice could dilute the accuracy or effectiveness of those documents. What the LGA appears to have done is failed to make a distinction between documents for public users of local authority services and internal discussion papers, for example.

As a result, the 100 “non-words” include mutants such as “predictors of beaconicity” alongside comprehensible, but non-standard, terms like “core message”. Bizarrely, it also suggests that the phrase “most important” should replace “priority”. Why? Is importance more difficult for people to understand than priority?

Today, the LGA has doubled the size of the “bad words” list, and reiterated its demand for councils to use plain English. New on the list are words like “taxonomy” and “proactive” (neither of which need be used at all, according to the LGA). In fact, the alternatives suggested by the LGA can be just as cumbersome or confusing as the original word or phrase: can anyone tell me why the phrase “devil in the detail” is more acceptable than “cautiously welcome”? There are even inaccuracies: “privatisation” is not a synonym for “outsourcing” — an outsourced service can be provided by another public body.

Looking down the list, I see very few words or phrases that actually appear in my local council’s public documents. On the other hand, I am sure that many of them appear in their internal working papers or in documents that deal with technically complex matters. I think that is perfectly acceptable.

The point about jargon is that some of it is actually useful. It may be used to exclude people from understanding something, in which case it should be shunned, but often a simple word or phrase encapsulates an idea or concept economically in a way that is acceptable to all those who use it. For many years (and possibly still) people at IBM maintained a dictionary of their jargon. The 1990 version of that document ran to 65 pages, but not one of the words or phrases in it could be defined by a simpler word or shorter phrase.

I think many organisational activities (including knowledge-related work) depend on good outward communication as well as effective internal discussion. It is clearly counterproductive if the language we use in our outward communication exclude people who need to know about our work. On the other hand, use of a rich technical language and vocabulary can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our work. Branding everything unusual as “jargon” and calling indiscriminately for its banning is pointless and two-faced: the LGA illustrates the hypocrisy in its use of a number of the hated words in its own mission statement.

Knowing how to be disruptive

Published 17 March 2009 Clients , Innovation , Knowledge , Music , Tradition 2 Comments

If nothing else, the state of the economy must make us wonder what things are going to be like when it is all over. At a personal level, there are people whose careers have been forced in a direction they neither expected or wanted. Some household names (such as Woolworths in the UK) have already disappeared, and there will doubtless be others.

Mary Abraham has taken a look at what firms may need to do to see a clear way through the current economic crisis.

Rather than focusing on what doesn’t seem to be working, focus on your organization’s strengths. Ask yourself, what are we doing right? How can we do more of that? How can we do it better? Then, look at your mission. Is it the right mission for your organization? Does it line up with your organization’s core strengths? Are your colleagues and their activities aligned with that mission? Is all of this supported by your organizational culture?

In the midst of all this upheaval is a golden opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to create something new. The “Clean Sheet of Paper” exercise is just a tool to help you get started. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by.

I commented on Mary’s post, but I want to develop some of those thoughts a bit further. My initial reaction to the post was to refer to something else I had read recently on a similar point.

The questions you suggest as part of the “Clean Sheet…” exercise leave out an important part of the equation. What do our clients want? What are people buying?

At the end of his recent long article (“The Great De-Leveraging“) Bruce MacEwen reminds us of Andy Grove of Intel’s reaction to a similar crisis:

Better yet, or more realistically yet, perform Andy Grove’s famous thought (and reality) experiment when Intel was a low-end maker of commodity DRAM chips, having their lunch eaten in the late 1970′s by the voracious and talented Japanese, threatening Intel’s very existence.

I paraphrase: Grove said to his top management team, “If we don’t turn things around in a very serious way, the Board will fire us. So why don’t we ‘fire’ ourselves. Let’s march out of this conference room and march back in assuming we’re the new team the Board has hired. What would we do then?”

They performed the exercise, decided to abandon DRAM’s and invest in microprocessors. The rest is history, and it’s history residing under your desk or in your lap.

I think the Andy Grove approach is an essential part of the clean sheet exercise.

There is a real problem for businesses that want to innovate their way out of the crisis. We are used to working with clients to identify what products and services they need. This symbiosis requires a degree of stability. Even if someone doesn’t know what they need until they see it (and who knew they needed an MP3 player with such minimal controls and so few features before Apple created the iPod?), disruptive innovation depends on people realising when they see it that the new product or service does actually fill a hole. The need, niche or desire is created in the same moment as it is fulfilled. At the moment, it is extremely difficult to know how the market will react to novelty. We can’t rely on understanding our clients’ needs to get us through this — we need to walk with them and discover together what is required. We cannot know what the outcome of this perambulation will be. In particular, I don’t think we can assume that the status quo ante will be any part of the future. As Seth Godin puts it:

It’s amazing that people have so much time to fret about today’s emergency but almost no time at all to avoid tomorrow’s.

A glimpse at the TV and internets shows one talking head after another angsting about today’s economy. These are the same people who needed to devote entire hours to mindless trivia nine months ago when they could have done an enormous amount of education about avoiding this mess in the first place.

His point is that we need to concentrate on what is coming, not what is happening now. In a business that depends heavily on the brain-power of its people, like a law firm, that means that we need to focus a significant part of our knowledge efforts on working our what we and our clients need in that future. Tending to our past knowledge needs will not get us safely out of this crisis.

There is another strand to this. Whose knowledge are we talking about? To what extent will the stresses and strains of the current economy affect firms themselves, especially when coupled with tools that could facilitate very different organisational forms. Consider John Roberts’s view of the firm, couched as an objection to a hypothesis that “the firm is simply ‘a nexus of contracts’ — a particularly dense collection of the sort of arrangements that characterise markets.”

While there are several objections to this argument, we focus on one. It is that, when a customer “fires” a butcher, the butcher keeps the inventory, tools, shop, and other customers she had previously. When an employee leaves a firm, in contrast, she is typically denied access to the firm’s resources. The employee cannot conduct business using the firm’s name; she cannot use its machinery or patents; and she probably has limited access to the people and networks in the firm, certainly for commercial purposes and perhaps even socially. (The Modern Firm (Oxford, 2004): 104) 

What does this mean for knowledge-intensive firms? The resources that Roberts refers to are less relevant — the machinery is either freely available (Google has a few useful tools on offer) or is located in the heads of the knowledge workers. The networks that he highlights as important are increasingly located outside the firm — in Facebook, LinkedIn or twitter, for example. One consequence of this may be that firms which fail to reinvent themselves or provide other compelling reasons for their existence could end up as empty shells — with their people relocated to other firms or new forms of self-organisation.

The brick building in the centre-right of the picture above was one of Manchester’s Victorian railway termini, opened in 1880 and closed in 1969. As the railways were rationalised and nationalised, and as passenger numbers fell, there was clearly no need for a city the size of Manchester to have six major railway stations. There are now just two. Of the others, one is at the heart of a museum, one is a car park, the one pictured is an exhibition hall, and one is derelict. The building on the left of the picture is the Bridgewater Hall, home of the Hallé Orchestra (Britain’s oldest symphony orchestra). The Hallé’s previous home, the Free Trade Hall, is now just a facade for a hotel. Rising above the old station is Manchester’s tallest building, the Beetham Tower. The solidity and apparent permanence of all these buildings was (is) no guarantee that they would always fulfil the same purpose. In fact, the longest-lasting thing in this tale is the orchestra — an excellent example of a group whose purpose cannot be separated from its form. A symphony needs to be played by a symphony orchestra: individual musicians cannot replicate the sound by playing on their own. As long as people are willing to pay to hear symphonies, the Hallé and orchestras like it will continue to exist.

Is your firm an orchestra or a collection of soloists? Is there still an audience for its repertoire?

White space, thinking, speaking, doing

Published 8 March 2009 Clients , Design , Lawyering 2 Comments

Compare these two images.

Despite the fact that the left-hand advertisement proclaims its message in bolder and larger text than the right-hand one, I think the right-hand one has a greater impact. However, in some contexts an advertisement like the one on the left would be entirely appropriate. The image, and the insight, are taken from an interesting article by Mark Boulton at A List Apart on the use of whitespace in design.

The content is the same on both designs, as are the other elements, such as photography. Yet the two designs stand at opposite ends of the brand spectrum. Less whitespace = cheap; more whitespace = luxury.

A lot more goes into brand positioning than just whitespace, but as a brief lands on your desk for a luxury brand, it’s very likely that the client—and their target audience—expects whitespace and plenty of it to align the product with its competitors.

It is clear from the article that a key part of the designer’s job is as much judging how much to leave out as deciding what to put in. I think there is something there for lawyers to learn too.

It is difficult for someone with clearly defined skills, tasks and tools to hold back from doing what they do. A blacksmith with a hammer and an anvil needs to use them quickly and effectively. Too much time spent pondering where to strike the hot iron is not time well-spent. Likewise, a lumberjack shouldn’t pause mid-way through felling a tree. On the other hand, good craftsmen will plan their work carefully — “measure twice, cut once” is not a meaningless mantra — and so wielding the appropriate tool is not usually the first thing that they do. Sometimes I think this is not a discipline that comes easily to professional services advisors.

When a client comes to us with a problem, our natural inclination is to flex our muscles. “I see what your problem is; I’ll draft this document and we can start clearing things up…” Because of the tyranny of the billable hour (a topic best dealt with elsewhere), we need to show that we are solving problems with recorded time and demonstrable outputs (documents, meetings, e-mails, phone calls). Often, however, the client is not interested in those things — their focus is on the outcome, not the output.

A little while ago, Bruce MacEwen asked ”Are you beginning to get the same creepy feeling I am, that large organizations discourage deep or creative thinking?” This question was prompted in part by a discussion piece on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site: “Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?” That piece starts thus:

A since deceased, highly-regarded fellow faculty member, Anthony (Tony) Athos, occasionally sat on a bench on a nice day at the Harvard Business School, apparently staring off into space. When asked what he was doing, ever the iconoclast, he would say, “Nothing.” His colleagues, trained to admire and teach action, would walk away shaking their heads and asking each other, “Is he alright?” It is perhaps no coincidence that Tony often came up with some of the most profound insights at faculty meetings and informal gatherings.

I sense that, especially now, the opportunities for creatively doing “nothing” are very limited in law firms and similar organisations. Unfortunately, now is the very time in which we need profundity in our thinking. Our leaders need that space in which to ponder things, so that they can lead us out of the current mess. At any time, when working with clients, we can only produce a better quality outcome by cogitating before drafting. The white space in a magazine layout does not take away from the words on the page — it enhances them. In a similar way, the time we spend thinking about what to do, or write, or say, the better those deed or words are likely to be.

There is another school of thought, exemplified by a light-hearted essay by Heinrich von Kleist: “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the gradual formation of thoughts while speaking“). It can be read as a carefully thought-out manifesto for blogging.

My dear thoughtful friend: if there is something you want to know without being able to find it out through meditation, turn to any acquaintance you run into to talk about the matter. There is no need for him to be a sharp mind. Also, I do not mean to say that you should ask him about this matter: Oh no, never! Rather, you should tell him the solution yourself. I can see you making big eyes and telling me that you have been advised earlier to speak of nothing except of what you understand. But at that time you may have had the mad ambition to instruct others. but I want you to tell him so you instruct yourself!

The French say l’appétit vient en mangeant, and this empirical maxim remains true if one makes a parody of it and says l’idée vient en parlant.

Often I sit over my papers and I try to find out from what angle a given conflict has to be judged. Usually, I look into the light, as the brightest spot I can find, as I try to enlighten my inner being. Or else I seek out the first approach, the first equation which expresses the obtaining relations, and from which the solution may be derived simply through plain arithmetic. And look what happens: as soon as I talk to my sister — who is sitting and working behind me — about this matter, I realise what hours of hard thinking have not been able to make clear to me. It isn’t as if she was was telling me in any direct sense. She does not know the law, and has never studied her Euler and her Kästner. Neither is that what she leads me to the crucial point through deft questions — although this latter case may occasionally occur. But since I have some vague thoughts that are in some way connected with what I am looking for, then once I have embarked on the formulation of the thought it is as if the need to lead what has been begun to some conclusion transforms my hazy imaginations into complete clarity in such a way that my insight is completed together with my rambling sentence.

I don’t think Kleist is proposing a different approach to the pursuit of white space in our work. Rather, he is suggesting a way of dealing with the inevitable consequence of thinking: thoughts. When we ponder, we may generate many possible solutions to problems. We are then faced with the difficult task of gauging which of those solutions is the best. Alternatively, some of our thoughts may be more fully-formed than others, and we need to guard against them — the inchoate ideas may actually be the better ones. If we do as Kleist advises, we can start to see how things fit together or how they might be flawed. For me (and for others, I suspect) this is one of the benefits of blogging. It helps me sort things out in my own mind, even if nobody else takes notice. (But many thanks to those of you who do, of course.) It works in other contexts as well. In the programming context Scott Ruthfield says: “when you’re stuck, write it down.”

Say you’re trying to figure out how to do something in [pick a framework], and you’ve Googled the heck out of the most-likely search terms, and nothing’s coming up.

Then write down your question as if you were going to ask a teacher/email it to a friend/post to a Google group/etc. Write down all the details: explain the thing you’re trying to do, the problem you have, and the number of things you’ve tried. Be as clear as you can, but don’t worry about being concise.

Literally every single time I’ve ever done this – and my rule-of-thumb is to do it after ~1.5 days worth of trying to figure it out myself – I find a number of new avenues to try, and almost always solve the problem on my own.

Putting these elements together, we can see that effective use of white space in our work comes when we combine thinking time with active reflection through the recording of ideas, questions, thoughts, half-baked conclusions. That will allow us to see what we know that will help the client achieve the outcome they want (or identify the gaps that can be filled by others). As a result, this approach will produce a better-quality product — as we saw at the outset, that is one of the consequences of carefully-used white space. Doing without thinking leads to the kind of cluttered, shouty, low-quality output that is exemplified by the first picture at the top of this post.

(Scott Berkun adds another benefit to writing without thinking too much about the output. It can break through a blockage. “The secret, if you can’t start, is to begin without constraints. Deliberately write badly, but write.” That is a different issue from the one I have touched on here, albeit similarly challenging.)

Ten tips

Published 8 March 2009 Clients , Collaboration , Fun , Work 2 Comments

Andrew McAfee lost a bet, so today he is tweeting at least 100 times. So far, he has asked ten baseball-related questions (all way over my head), and posted links to 20 poems that are available online. Now he has listed the ten things he has learned from teaching.

  1. Don’t be afraid of silence in the classroom
  2. Ask clear questions
  3. Trust your students
  4. Be the person who most wants to be in the room
  5. Start on time, end on time
  6. Check your fly
  7. Be more concerned with the destination than the journey
  8. We get smarter via respectful disputation
  9. It’s better to be well-rested than well-prepared
  10. Most students appreciate being held to high standards

These are excellent tenets for all sorts of interactions, not just teaching. Sometimes the relationship between lawyers and their clients has many similarities to the teacher-student relationship. The same is true for internal consultants (like KM people) and their internal clients. In case they need translation, here is my gloss on Andy’s ten points.

  1. Silence is not bad — so long as it signifies that people are thinking about what you are saying.
  2. If you are clear what you want from people, you have to have understood it better, and they will know why it is important.
  3. Internal consultancy is a kind of leadership — the organisation has trusted you to take it somewhere new, so you owe it to those you are leading to trust them too.
  4. If you don’t care deeply about what you are doing (and show it), everyone will know, and take their cue from you.
  5. At the most basic level, punctuality is respectful — but it also shows that you have made a plan and have stuck to it. If you can do that with the small things, people will believe that you can do the same with the big ones.
  6. There is always something obvious to remember to do. Remember to do it, otherwise people will notice.
  7. If there is agreement about what the outcome should be, that is what is most important. If you start to quibble about the route-plan, you run the risk that you lose internal clients along the way.
  8. If there are differences of opinion, they only fester if left unspoken. Clearly-expressed alternative perspectives can lead to a much better outcome — be open to them.
  9. Do the best preparation that you can, but an alert mind can overcome gaps in that preparation (and there will always be gaps).
  10. Just because you have been asked to advise on something, don’t let the client (internal or otherwise) get away without doing their bit — the outcome will be better and will be better implemented if they engage properly.

Thanks for the thought-provoking tweets, Andy! (He has ten good things about Boston coming up, so I’m off to enjoy those. It’s one of my favourite American cities.)

Power isn’t everything

Published 7 March 2009 History , KM , Science , Technology Leave a Comment

I have been reacquainting myself with some of the materials science reading that I did as part of my Physics studies over 30 years ago. My brain is too far removed from the maths to deal with the more technically complex stuff, but there is a classic pair of books by J.E Gordon that are easily accessible to the lay reader: The New Science of Strong Materials, or Why You Don’t Fall Through the Floor and Structures, or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. Reading the latter, I was struck by some of the insights in the chapter on shear and torsion, more from a historical perspective than an engineering one.

Gordon reflects on the development of the aeroplane, and remarks that some aspects of the new aeronautical engineering were easier to tackle than others. 

The aeroplane was developed from an impossible object into a serious military weapon in something like ten years. This was achieved almost without benefit of science. The aircraft pioneers were often gifted amateurs and great sportsmen, but very few of them has much theoretical knowledge. Like modern car enthusiasts, they were generally more interested in their noisy and unreliable engines than they were in the supporting structure, about which they knew little and cared less. Naturally, if you hot the engine up sufficiently, you can get almost any aeroplane into the air. Whether it stays there depends upon problems of control and stability and structural strength which are conceptually difficult. (p.259)

He then goes on to tell the story of the German monoplane, the Fokker D8, which initially had an unfortunate habit of losing its wings when pulling out of a dive. As a result, the Germans could not capitalise on its obvious speed advantage over the British and French biplanes. Only once Fokker had analysed the effect of the relevant forces on the wings did he realise that the loads imposed on the plane were causing the wings to twist in a way that could not be controlled by the pilots. Once the design of the wings was changed so that they no longer twisted, the D8 served its purpose much more effectively.

Gordon makes a similar observation with regard to automobile development.

The pre-war vintage cars were sometimes magnificent objects, but, like vintage aircraft, they suffered from having had too much attention paid to the engine than to the structure of the frame or chassis. (p.270)

Reading this, I wondered whether organisational KM efforts have had similar shortcomings. Certainly, in many businesses, the KM specialists proceed by trial and error, rather than careful scientific study. There is also a tendency (driven in part by the need for big strong metrics and RoI) to focus on things like repositories and databases. Are these the powerful engines of KM, destined to shake apart when faced with conceptually difficult structural challenges? I suspect they may be.

Instead of concentrating on raw power, we need to work out what our KM activities actually do to the structure of the organisation, and how they affect the parts different people play in making the business a success. In doing that, we may find that small changes make a significant difference. It is not an easy task, but it is a worthwhile one.

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