Archive for July, 2009

Now and then

Published 30 July 2009 Best Practice , KM , Knowledge , Lawyering , Technology 1 Comment

A couple of days ago, Patrick Lambe posted a really thoughtful piece considering the implications of heightened awareness from the new generation of social software tools as opposed to the traditional virtues of long-term information storage and access. If you haven’t read it, do so now. (Come back when you have finished.)

Laid down

The essence of Patrick’s piece is that when we focus our attention on the here and now (through Twitter or enterprise micro-blogging, for example), we forget to pay attention to the historically valuable information that has been archived away. This is not a problem with technology. He points to interesting research on academics’ use of electronic resources and their citation patterns.

How would online access influence knowledge discovery and use? One of his hypotheses was that “online provision increases the distinct number of articles cited and decreases the citation concentration for recent articles, but hastens convergence to canonical classics in the more distant past.”

In fact, the opposite effect was observed.

As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. … If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. … By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly.

Now this thinning out of long term memory (and the side effect of instant forgettability for recent work that does not attract fast consensus) is observed here in the relatively slow moving field of scholarly research. But I think there’s already evidence (and Scoble seems to sense this) that exactly the same effects occur when people and organisations in general get too-fast and too-easy access to other people’s views and ideas. It’s a psychosocial thing. We can see this in the fascination with ecologies of attention, from Tom Davenport to Chris Ward to Seth Godin. We can also see it in the poverty of attention that enterprise 2.0 pundits give to long term organisational memory and recordkeeping, in the longer term memory lapses in organisations that I have blogged about here in the past few weeks…

Jack Vinson adds another perspective on this behaviour in a post responding to Patrick’s.

I see another distinction here.  The “newer” technologies are generally about user-engagement and creation, whereas the “slower” methods are more focused on control and management activities much more so than the creation.  Seen in this light, these technologies and processes spring from the situation where writing things down was a time-consuming process.  You wanted to have it right, if you went to that much effort.  Unfortunately, the phrase “Document management is where knowledge goes to die” springs to mind.

In knowledge management, we are trying to combine the interesting knowledge that flows between people in natural conversation as well as the “hard knowledge” of documented and proven ideas and concepts.  KM has shown that technology just can’t do everything (yet?) that humans can do.  As Patrick says, technology has been a huge distraction to knowledge management.

I think Jack’s last comment is essential. What we do is a balance between the current flow and the frozen past. What I find fascinating is that until now we have had few tools to help  us with the flow, whereas the databases, archives, taxonomies and repositories of traditional KM and information management have dominated the field. I think Patrick sounds an important warning bell. We should not ignore it. But our reaction shouldn’t be to reverse away from the interesting opportunities that new technologies offer.

It’s a question (yet again) of focus. Patrick opens his post with a complaint of Robert Scoble’s.

On April 19th, 2009 I asked about Mountain Bikes once on Twitter. Hundreds of people answered on both Twitter and FriendFeed. On Twitter? Try to bundle up all the answers and post them here in my comments. You can’t. They are effectively gone forever. All that knowledge is inaccessible. Yes, the FriendFeed thread remains, but it only contains answers that were done on FriendFeed and in that thread. There were others, but those other answers are now gone and can’t be found.

Yes, Twitter’s policy of deleting old tweets is poor, but even if they archived everything the value of that archive would be minimal. Much of what I see on Twitter is related to the here and now. It is the ideal place to ask the question, “I’m looking at buying a mountain bike. For $1,000 to $1,500 what would you recommend?” That was Scoble’s question, and it is time-bound. Cycle manufacturers change their offering on a seasonal and annual basis. The cost of those cycles also changes regularly. The answer to that question would be different in six months time. Why worry about storing that in an archive?

Knowledge in law firms is a curious blend of the old and the new. Sometimes the law that we deal with dates back hundreds of years. It is often essential to know how a concept has been developed over an extended period by the courts. The answer to the question “what is the current position on limitations of liability in long-term IT contracts?” is a combination of historic research going back to cases from previous centuries and up to the minute insight from last week’s negotiations on a major outsourcing project for a client. It is a real combination of archived information and current knowledge. We have databases and law books to help us with the archived information. What we have been lacking up until recently is an effective way of making sure that everyone has access to the current thinking. As firms become bigger and more scattered (across the globe, in some cases) making people aware of what is happening across the firm has become increasingly difficult.

Patrick’s conclusion is characteristically well expressed.

So while at the level of technology adoption and use, there is evidence that a rush toward the fast and easy end of the spectrum places heavy stresses on collective memory and reflection, at the same time, interstitial knowledge can also maintain and connect the knowledge that makes up memory. Bipolarity simply doesn’t work. We have to figure out how to see and manage our tools and our activities to satisfy a balance of knowledge needs across the entire spectrum, and take a debate about technology and turn it into a dialogue about practices. We need to return balance to the force.

That balance must be at the heart of all that we do. And the point of balance will depend very much on the demands of our businesses as well as our interest in shiny new toys. Patrick is right to draw our attention to the risks attendant on current awareness, but memory isn’t necessarily all it is cracked up to be. We should apply the same critical eye to everything that comes before us — how does this information (or class of information) help me with the problems that I need to solve? The answer will depend heavily on your organisational needs.

Book review: Made to Stick

Published 29 July 2009 Book Review , Stories 2 Comments

This has been a Summer of story for me. Back in June, I attended a workshop run by Shawn Callahan on “Storytelling for Business Leaders”. I was vaguely aware (from reading Shawn’s blog if nothing else) of the power of narrative, but he drew out the key elements really well. Now I realise that a lot of what I thought were stories were in fact limp examples. Even a good example can have some persuasive power, but a story with the right elements is by its nature indisputable.

Do not sit -- Haddon Hall

Towards the end of the workshop, Shawn referred positively to Made to Stick, which prompted me to move it from my wishlist and actually buy it. Written by two brothers, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, it draws out six characteristics of ideas that stick in people’s minds. (The archetype for sticky ideas is provided by a wealth of urban legends, which prove staggeringly resistant to rebuttal.) Pleasingly, the Heaths have made sure the initial letters of these characteristics form a neat mnemonic SUCCESs.

  • S: Simple
  • U: Unexpected
  • C: Concrete
  • C: Credible
  • E: Emotional
  • S: Stories

There is a bit of circularity here: the Heaths advocate the story form both as a container for the other characteristics and as a characteristic in itself.

The book is an easy read, because it is well constructed (naturally, it is suffused with stories and examples) not because it is simplistic. The authors make sure that we understand that there is some real analysis underpinning this work. In some respects, therefore, this can be read as a companion, practical, volume to Predictably Irrational. There is a close relationship between our human respect for stories and the behavioural economics of Dan Ariely. (And Ariely himself uses a lot of story-based examples.)

For me, the key message of the book (and of Shawn’s workshop) is that you can’t argue against a story — that is someone’s experience, not a carefully constructed debating point. That’s why we can’t make horses drink — all we have available to us is blunt persuasion — if we could tell them stories, we could engage more usefully with them.

Recently Mary Abraham highlighted a real issue we often face in convincing people that something is good for them in her post “The Four Chickens Problem.” She likens the problems we have persuading people of the merits of Enterprise 2.0 (although any “jam tomorrow” solution is likely to raise similar issues) to the challenges faced by organisations trying to eradicate malaria.

The most effective way to prevent death by malaria is by using long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets. Yet organizations that distribute these nets have discovered that the folks who receive the nets sometimes choose to trade them for four chickens rather than use the nets.

Why do they want chickens rather than nets? Because the immediate concrete need for food is more obvious than the future abstract goal of eliminating disease. Mary’s solution to similar problems in the business context centres on persuasion.

In order to achieve changed behavior (or adoption of a new tool) we must:

  • Educate people as to the actual cause of the problem.
  • Educate people as to the theoretical benefits of the proposed solution.
  • Prove the solution in such an obvious way so that you make the theoretical real.
  • Include monitoring and evaluation to keep proving your case as you implement the solution in their community.

Don’t just throw your nets (or E2.0 solution) at the nearest group of people. You can’t solve problems they don’t realize exist.

In a comment on Mary’s post, Jack Vinson proposes another approach, using a coaching model:

Even better than educating people is to lead them through a discussion of the core problems and mechanisms for their solution. It is so much more effective to have them come up with the solution, even if it is the same one you would have presented 30 minutes ago. Then you have a much better chance of challenging the solution and presenting its benefits / drawbacks, as you will have their general agreement that it is the right thing to do.

These answers are fine, but they depend on ensuring that the message you are selling actually resonates with the audience. If there is a powerful story to tell, the education piece will follow.

You may have noticed that I have been including images in my posts recently. In part this is just to please myself — apart from one (attributed) example, they are all pictures that I have taken. Largely, however, it is a distraction from my usually wordy posts. Selecting the image can be a bit of a challenge — I like to see a link between the image and the text.  This one was easy.

Earlier this month, we took advantage of the sun to visit a bit of local history, Haddon Hall (famous for being the backdrop to a number of period dramas). Like many such places, they need persuade visitors to be careful with the historic furnishings. The normal approach to this problem is to rope things off or to put notices on chairs telling people not to sit on them. Instead, what they have done at Haddon Hall is simply to place a dried teasel on the chairs and benches. Nobody would sit on a teasel, would they? Without an unsightly rope or notice, they have communicated an important message to visitors. A message made to stick.

So, if you have ideas you need to communicate, Made to Stick will help immensely — it is certainly a worthwhile purchase for people in a range of roles. For those interested in storytelling as a leadership tool, Shawn is running a webinar “Three Questions We Usually Get from Leaders About Storytelling: Reflections, Discussion & Tools” with Terrence Gargiulo next month. (The webinar is running twice, to make the most of timezones.)

Are your leaders great storytellers? And, why should you care anyway?

With over forty years of combined experience, two of the world’s leading narrative consultants divulge some of what they have learned. Join Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net for a 45-minute rousing interactive discussion rich with examples and practical tools.

I will be attending the webinar to continue my Summer of story; I’m looking forward to it.

Making time

Published 28 July 2009 Clients , Conversation , KM , Lawyering , Tradition 1 Comment

One of the things that can prevent us from getting things done is time, and how we manage it. Even without anyone else’s help (or hindrance), the average worker has to deal with procrastination and thinker’s block.

Montepulciano

When those challenges are added to the need to work with colleagues and clients in a managed environment, things can get even more difficult. It is easy to get carried with the flow of life and work without really thinking about how best to use one’s time. Clients have demands to which lawyers are keen to respond, and most firms have financial imperatives that require particular approaches to work management. One consequence is that it can be hard to find time to do other things. In fact, in many organisations, this is intended. Tony Quinlan highlights the problem:

The drive for efficiency and perfect accounting for time is a constant anachronism — and far too much attention goes there, with added implications that activities like lunchbreaks and socialising were wasting time or somehow detrimental to the organisation. It’s often the implication that a work contract indicates a straight exchange of salary for workhours, and that any hours used at work for non-efficient work purposes is time stolen from the organisation. A very dangerous mindset to get into — and one that I’ve challenged more than a few times at conferences (typically, someone talking about email and spam and how many hours can be saved, with a spurious figure of what that means on the bottom line. Spare me.)

The contractual exchange of time for money is absolutely explicit in a law firm, where fee-earners record time in six-minute blocks, which then get converted into bills for clients. (I know many firms are moving away from the extreme version of that model, but very few of them have actually done away with the need to record time.) This can have a corrosive effect on any activities (including knowledge sharing) that are not “fee-earning” or which make it harder to reach time-related targets. Tony goes on to recall life in a more relaxed working environment.

I remember the tea trolley at Racal, back in the 1980s when I was testing radar systems.  It was actually a very useful social space — a specified point in the day when a bunch of people from different areas and specialisms met and talked as we waited to buy anything that I’d probably not allow my children to have today.

There’s a serious denigration of such social spaces these days, usually on efficiency or bottom-line grounds but (as in the case of smoking rooms) health ones too.  The value was in building cross-functional networks and communication channels and talking in non-formal environments.  And non-policed too, which made them more powerful for sharing problems or warnings of potential future issues.

Like Tony, I think the social aspect of work is crucial. If we make it harder for people to interact casually, we lose a real opportunity for creativity, change and insight. Gossip (of the non-malicious kind) almost always conveys more useful and actionable information than the formal corporate communications channels. (We need those too.)

[I]f the smoking room, the tea trolley, the staff canteen (and lunch hour) are all disappearing, where do we meet other parts of the organisation except in meetings?

A good question, Tony, and one which would frighten many people.

Do we have too many meetings? Possibly, and they may well be poorly focused as well. However, Paul Graham puts his finger on a more subtle issue. Different people are affected by meetings in different ways.

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

Where do lawyers fit into this model? Are they makers or managers? And clients — where do they fit? I don’t think there is a simple answer. However, it is a question we should always ask. Will this meeting that feels innocuous to me actually disrupt another person’s day to such an extent that they feel unable to spare the time to do something that might deliver more value instead (like chatting to someone as they make a cup of coffee)? Or, alternatively, is this meeting actually the time when something critical gets done — like finding out from a client exactly what their commercial objectives are?

Who are you looking at?

Published 22 July 2009 Clients , Innovation , Knowledge , Lawyering Leave a Comment

Something puzzles me. Why do law firms find it so hard to ignore their competitors? More than that, why do some firms (US ones, typically, I think) dedicate significant resources to finding out as much as they can about other law firms? Is this a lawyer thing or is it more widespread?

Canal boats, Pontcysyllte

The questions come up because I have seen a flurry of interest in Competitive Intelligence in a number of places.

It started with Emma Wood, reporting in Steve Matthews’s blog on a CI session at SLA 2009. The whole thing was a bit new to Emma as well.

Coming from the relatively small Canadian legal market, I was fascinated to hear about the competitive nature of major law firms in United States. I described it afterwards to a friend as it almost being like the rivalry between McDonalds and Burger King. I knew that the American legal industry was bigger and different from ours, but I didn’t realise just how fierce the competition between major law firms is.

So what do these firms get by way of information about their competitors?

McAllister created a newsletter that captures information in seven categories: mergers & acquisitions; office openings/closings; lawyer moves; law firm management trends; finances, fees, bonuses, salaries; the firm in the news; and special reports such as AmLaw 100, etc.

What puzzles me is the result of all this information. In my previous incarnation as a competition lawyer, I was very conscious that the competition authorities were often particularly interested in markets with high levels of transparency (especially with regard to pricing, which I assume is not relevant here). The reason for this interest is that the authorities consider that transparency can often lead to a reduction in pricing and product differentiation between companies where there is a degree of concentration. (For an economics view of the question, see this paper.)

Aside from this, I feel instinctively that a business that focuses as much effort as Emma describes on learning about its competitors is probably looking in the wrong direction. Surely it would be more sensible to concentrate on what clients need, on the directions their businesses are heading, and on more general economic and market trends (outside the legal sector).

Another guest blogger, Laura Walters on the 3 Geeks… blog provides a worked example of CI in action for a law firm, using LinkedIn (originally written by Shannon Sankstone).

A quick search for a well-known law firm listed one of their attorneys as the top result. Although Mr. Lawyer made his connections private, he did not shy away from requesting recommendations. He lists over 40 recommendations, 26 of which are from clients. Some of these clients are (names have been withheld, but are available on Mr. Lawyer’s profile):

  • A publicly listed hotel and resort corporation;
  • A large biotech company; and
  • A private equity firm.

At first glance, the CI pro now knows at least 20 of Mr. Lawyer’s clients (some clients had more than one person recommending Mr. Lawyer). Were a firm considering approaching Mr. Lawyer as a lateral hire, they would include this information, and an analysis of the clients, to determine if Mr. Lawyer’s client base was in line with the firm’s business development goals.

If, on the other hand, a firm was competing with Mr. Lawyer’s firm for work from a company in the hotel industry, then Mr. Lawyer’s recommendations might be leveraged to the CI pro’s firm’s advantage. While Mr. Lawyer may point to his recommendations as proof that he has delighted clients in this industry, the competing firm may highlight this as Mr. Lawyer having a better relationship with a competitor company.

If I were a client, I think I would be more impressed by a firm that highlighted the real benefits of instructing them, rather than raising allegations of conflicts of interest with my existing lawyers. The latter argument tells me nothing about (a) why I should change lawyers at all, or (b) why the pitching firm should get my business. In short, I am not sure that I would be especially impressed by even an implied impugning of my choice of lawyer. This kind of comparative advertising sits poorly in a profession that sets great store by the creation of genuine working trust-based relationships.

Any business that concentrates its efforts on working out what its competitors are doing makes it very difficult to generate new ideas, to find points of difference that appeal to clients or customers. This is the point of “differentiation” — a goal of most businesses. Any organisation can do things differently (although that can be hard too). Real value only comes when those different things (whether they be core legal services, or a way of working) actually resonate with clients — there is real differentiation from competitors. However, an understanding of what will differentiate the firm cannot come from an examination of what one’s competitors do — that can only result in painting the same products in different colours. As this summary shows (drawing on this HBR article), the questions to be asked all focus on the client.

  1. Have you researched your clients’ requirements and preferences?
  2. Do you know what the points of parity or hygiene factors are?
  3. Do you know what the motivation factors are?
  4. Do you understand, from the client’s perspective, what the relevant importance of each of the motivation factors are?
  5. Can you substantiate how your offering creates value for your clients?
  6. Can you deliver a resonating CVP – one that really appeals to the client’s key motivation factors?

Unfortunately, the lack of differentiation that comes from examining competitors rather than clients is extremely visible to outsiders. We should not fool ourselves that it is not. Eric Karjaluoto recently gave a splendid example of how obvious this failure to understand differentiation can be.

A few weeks ago we met with a company that was having exactly this problem. They’re a respectable law firm whose website just didn’t seem to be doing what it needed to. They particularly liked a website that we had crafted for another firm, and decided that they should get in touch with us.

The meeting went swimmingly. They were all pleasant and had a lovely office space. They explained to us that they were quite different from other law firms, and that while others were rather boring and stodgy, they are in fact much younger, more progressive, and “out of the box” thinkers*. They didn’t think this came across in their current materials, and were highly dissatisfied with their existing website. They felt that if we built a site for them like the one we built for their competitor, it would remedy this problem.

…

*Incidentally, Almost every law firm we’ve met with has told us exactly the same thing. I have yet to encounter the law firm that claims to be “boring and stodgy”.

Unfortunately for Erik, the engagement didn’t work out, but he is at least able to draw a wider conclusion from the firm’s behaviour.

Although I’m talking about one specific operation, my point applies to many. In our (nearly ten) years in business, we’ve spoken with a lot of people. Almost all face similar challenges, and they typically lack one of two requirements needed to remedy the situation and spur change. The first and most important is a willingness to differentiate; the second is the allocation of appropriate funds, in order to make this happen.

The law firm in question knew their problem–they came off as “beige” and boring like everyone else. They then looked to all of their competitors and decided to copy the site that they liked most. While I understand what leads to this, it’s a rather perverse notion: “Let’s differentiate our firm by copying the one that we like the most.” (Riiiiight.) They wanted the result without the price–a price which is both monetary and psychological in nature. In order to actually stand out from their competitors, they’d have to find a story of their own to share. With this does come some small amount of risk; it also brings with it the opportunity to create something powerful.

You don’t differentiate by copying the most attractive brand you can find. (If we did, KFC would be marketed like Louis Vuitton, and that would be sort of weird, wouldn’t it?) No, you have to isolate that which is uniquely yours and amplify it compellingly. You need a story that’s plausible (and one that people want to hear) and then you need to share it effectively. Not doing so leads to what one might consider the marketing “doom loop”, in which new campaigns are crafted and deployed haphazardly–destined for failure before they’re even out of the gates.
Although I’m talking about one specific operation, my point applies to many. In our (nearly ten) years in business, we’ve spoken with a lot of people. Almost all face similar challenges, and they typically lack one of two requirements needed to remedy the situation and spur change. The first and most important is a willingness to differentiate; the second is the allocation of appropriate funds, in order to make this happen.

The law firm in question knew their problem–they came off as “beige” and boring like everyone else. They then looked to all of their competitors and decided to copy the site that they liked most. While I understand what leads to this, it’s a rather perverse notion: “Let’s differentiate our firm by copying the one that we like the most.” (Riiiiight.) They wanted the result without the price–a price which is both monetary and psychological in nature. In order to actually stand out from their competitors, they’d have to find a story of their own to share. With this does come some small amount of risk; it also brings with it the opportunity to create something powerful.

You don’t differentiate by copying the most attractive brand you can find. (If we did, KFC would be marketed like Louis Vuitton, and that would be sort of weird, wouldn’t it?) No, you have to isolate that which is uniquely yours and amplify it compellingly. You need a story that’s plausible (and one that people want to hear) and then you need to share it effectively. Not doing so leads to what one might consider the marketing “doom loop”, in which new campaigns are crafted and deployed haphazardly–destined for failure before they’re even out of the gates.

I can see that there is a natural inclination to compare ourselves with the neighbours, but that is not a useful long-term strategy. It leads one down avenues that do not fit our real preferences, or into courses of action that lead to social, emotional or real bankruptcy.

Our competitors do not have the key to improving our businesses, but our clients do. I think we should look (and listen) to the right people, and spurn the siren voices.

Learning from experience?

Published 22 July 2009 Collaboration , Lawyering , Learning Leave a Comment

I find it useful to keep an eye on developments in our universities. Two reasons: our future lawyers are seeing and using teaching and learning techniques that they might expect to find replicated in the firms they join as trainees; and just knowing what is going on elsewhere can give us insights into new possibilities.

Winery

With that in mind, I was interested (in catching up with Paul Maharg’s blog)to see that he has been developing his work on professional legal education at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law.

Over a period of years Paul and his colleagues have developed an online simulation-based learning system to support professional education at the GGSL. This requires students to engage with realistic legal problems at to solve them individually and collaboratively, through “transactional learning.” This requires, in Paul’s words:

  • active learning
  • through performance in authentic transactions
  • involving reflection in & on learning,
  • deep collaborative learning, and
  • holistic or process learning,
  • with relevant professional assessment
  • that includes ethical standards

The presentation from which this is taken (embedded below) provides a tangible overview of the system, and there is a more detailed paper to go with it, as well as the site itself.

Having read all of this, I was particularly struck by one of the concluding slides (slide 41) in the presentation, which is headed “there’s no such thing as experiential learning.” Citing Schratz and Walker, Research as Social Change: New Opportunities for Qualitative Research, Paul claims the following:

  • We don’t learn from experience
  • We learn by working to interpret experience, given that, when learning:
    • we have different prior knowledge
    • our aims are always different in subtle ways
    • we learn different things from the same resources
    • ‘resources’ means symbolic objects like books & web pages, but also people, including ourselves
    • we can learn intimately and deeply from any resource, given a suitable context
  • Teachers and students need to encode those interpretations as complex memories, habits, skills, attitudes or knowledge objects if they are to re-use them

 That first bullet point is a real challenge to the attitude of many practising lawyers. “Learning on the job” is a classic response to the question, “How do you maintain your knowledge of law and practice?” I am not sure that this approach typically includes “working to interpret experience.” Nor will it often include a formal opportunity for feedback and assessment (of the learning, not the work).

Turning to a recipe for the future, Paul suggests a move away from the current traditional model (in workplaces as well as educational institutions, although his focus is primarily on the latter) (slide 43):

Still focused on:

  • Organisations, ie LMSs, silos of knowledge
  • Products, ie handbooks, CDs, closely-guarded downloads
  • Content, ie modules, instruction, transmissive content
  • Snapshot assessment of taught substantive content

The replacement will require a rather different emphasis (slide 44):

Focus shifts to:

  • Organisation has weak boundaries, strong presence through resource-based, integrated learning networks, with open access (open courseware initiatives, etc)
  • Focus not on static content but on web-based, aggregated content
  • E-learning as integrated understanding & conversation, just-in-time learning
  • Assessment of situated learning

Coincidentally, I have just finished reading Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. It is a fascinating and accessible introduction to the art of communicating messages so that they really make a difference. Towards the end of the book, the Heaths look at the power of narrative and how it is linked to simulations. (I have been interested in this for a while, but have really caught the story-telling bug since attending a workshop led by Shawn Callahan last month.) It appears that good stories allow listeners to participate by picturing in their minds the sequence of events, the emotions, the situations and reactions, and so on. This process of imagining (or imaging) actually invokes the same areas of the brain as performing the actions or experiencing the emotions described. I have long been familiar with physical simulators that are used to train pilots and astronauts, but I hadn’t realised that mental simulation can be nearly as good at building skills. As the Heaths explain:

A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone — sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish — improves performance significantly. The results were borne out over a number of tasks: Mental simulation helped people weld better and throw darts better. Trombonists improved their playing and figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical activity (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice is large on average: Overall, mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

For me, this also links to the theme of deliberative practice, which I have touched on a couple of times in the past, and which Shawn has also picked up on during his trip to the UK. In his second post, he responds to a comment on the first which suggests that we might not have time to be experts in a business context.

To put the effort in to be bloody good requires time and dedication. Consequently we need to pick our desired expertise carefully. Here are some things to consider:

  • do you love the skill that much that it doesn’t seem like work to you?
  • is it a skill you can use in any job?
  • will people value and recognise your expertise and therefore motivate your ongoing efforts?
  • can practice feel like play? If so then there is much more chance you will keep practising.

We will always need content experts. Your social network should help you connect to these valuable folk. What will also need are people who can thrive in complexity and the skills we’ll need to deliberately practice will include designing, leading, managing, innovating, storytelling, strategizing, implementing, sensemaking, and engaging (I’m sure you can think of others). These skills will be helpful in any job and so feel free to dedicate 10,000+ hours to any one of them and know you haven’t wasted your time.

The key, yet again, is to focus and prioritise. And visualise…

Using expertise — a survey

Published 17 July 2009 Collaboration , Expertise Leave a Comment

I recently participated in a survey on how expertise is leveraged and managed in organisations. This is part of an open research project where the results of the research are made available to the KM community as they are finalised. The project blog is at http://usingexpertise.blogspot.com, and there is also a wiki showing the outcomes of project workshops at http://usingexpertise.wikispaces.com.

If you have time to complete the survey as well, please do add your perspective. The survey is at http://tinyurl.com/expertisesurvey, and when you have completed it, you will see the results of the survey collected so far. This has the potential to be a really useful resource and source of learning, especially if as many people as possible share their experiences.

Back to basics

Published 13 July 2009 Creativity , Culture , KM , Technology , Web2.0 1 Comment

Recently I have caught up with two Ur-texts that I really should have read before. However, the lessons learned are two-fold: the content (in both cases) is still worthy of note, and one should not judge a work by the way it is used.

Recycling in Volterra

In late 1991, the Harvard Business Review published an article by Ikujiro Nonaka containing some key concepts that would be used and abused in the name of knowledge management for the next 18 years (and probably beyond). In “The Knowledge-Creating Company” (reprinted in 2007) Nonaka described a number of practices used by Japanese companies to use their employees’ and others’ tacit knowledge to create new or improved products.

Nonaka starts where a number of KM vendors still are:

…despite all the talk about “brain-power” and “intellectual capital,” few managers grasp the true nature of the knowledge-creating company — let alone know how to manage it. The reason: they misunderstand what knowledge is and what companies must do to exploit it.

Deeply ingrained in the traditions of Western management, from Frederick Taylor to Herbert Simon, is a view of the organisation as a machine for “information processing.” According to this view, the only useful knowledge is formal and systematic — hard (read: quantifiable) data, codified procedures, universal principles. And the key metrics for measuring the value of new knowledge are similarly hard and quantifiable — increased efficiency, lower costs, improved return on investment.

Nonaka contrasts this with an approach that is exemplified by a number of Japanese companies, where managing the creation of new knowledge drives fast responses to customer needs, the creation of new markets and innovative products, and dominance in emergent technologies. In some respects, what he describes presages what we now call Enterprise 2.0 (although, tellingly, Nonaka never suggests that knowledge creation should involve technology):

Making personal knowledge available to others is the central activity of the knowledge-creating company. It takes place continuously and at all levels of the organization. And … sometimes it can take unexpected forms.

One of those unexpected forms is the development of a bread-making machine by the Matsushita Electric Company. This example of tacit knowledge converted into explicit has become unrecognisable in its repetition in numerous KM articles, fora, courses, and so on. Critically, there is no actual conversion — the tacit knowledge of how to knead bread dough is not captured as an instruction manual for bread making. What actually happens is that the insight gained by the software developer Ikuko Tanaka by observing the work of the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel was converted into a simple improvement in the way that an existing bread maker kneaded dough prior to baking. The expression of this observation was a piece of explicit knowledge — the design of a new bread maker, to be sold as an improved product.

That is where the critical difference is. To have any value at all in an organisation, peoples’ tacit knowledge must be able to inform new products, services, or ways of doing business. Until tacit knowledge finds such expression, it is worthless. However, that is not to say that all tacit knowledge must be documented to be useful. That interpretation is a travesty of what Nonaka has to say.

Tacit knowledge is highly personal. It is hard to formalize and, therefore, difficult to communicate to others. Or, in the words of philosopher Michael Polanyi, “We know more than we can tell.” Tacit knowledge is also deeply rooted in action and in an individual’s commitment to a specific context — a craft or profession, a particular technology or product market, or the activities of a work group or team.

Nonaka then explores the interactions between the two aspects of knowledge: tacit-tacit, exlpicit-explicit, tacit-explicit, and explicit-tacit. From this he posits what is now known as the SECI model. In this original article, he describes four stages: socialisation, articulation, combination and internalisation. Later, “articulation” became “externalisation.” It is this stage where technology vendors and those who allowed themselves to be led by them decided that tacit knowledge could somehow be converted into explicit as a business or technology process divorced from context or commitment. This is in direct contrast to Nonaka’s original position.

Articulation (converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge) and internalization (using that explicit knowledge to extend one’s own tacit knowledge base) are the critical steps in this spiral of knowledge. The reason is that both require the active involvement of the self — that is, personal commitment. …

Indeed, because tacit knowledge includes mental models and beliefs in addition to know-how, moving from the tacit to the explicit is really a process of articulating one’s vision of the world — what it is and what it ought to be. When employees invent new knowledge, they are also reinventing themselves, the company, and even the world.

The rest of Nonaka’s article is rarely referred to in the literature. However, it contains some really powerful material about the use of metaphor , analogy and mental models to generate new insights and trigger valuable opportunities to articulate tacit knowledge. He then turns to organisational design and the ways in which one should manage the knowledge-creating company.

The fundamental principle of organizational design at the Japanese companies I have studied is redundancy — the conscious overlapping of company information, business activities, and managerial responsibilities. …

Redundancy is important because it encourages frequent dialogue and communication. This helps create a “common cognitive ground” among employees and thus facilitates the transfer of tacit knowledge. Since members of the organization share overlapping information, they can sense what others are struggling to articulate. Redundancy also spreads new explicit knowledge through the organization so it can be internalized by employees.

This silo-busting approach is also at the heart of what has now become known as Enterprise 2.0 — the use of social software within organisations. What Nonaka described as a natural form for Japanese organisations was difficult for Western companies to emulate. The legacy of Taylorism has proved too hard to shake off, and traditional enterprise technology has not helped.

Which is where we come to the second text: Andrew McAfee’s Spring 2006 article in the MIT Sloan Management Review: “Enterprise 2.0:The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.” This is where the use of Web 2.0 technologies started to hit the mainstream. In reading this for the first time today — already having an an understanding and experience of the use of blogs and wikis in the workplace — it was interesting to see a different, almost historical, perspective. One of the most important things, which we sometimes forget, is McAfee’s starting point. He refers to a study of knowledge workers’ practices by Thomas Davenport.

Most of the information technologies that knowledge workers currently use for communication fall into two categories. The first comprises channels — such as e-mail and person-to-person instant messaging — where digital information can be created and distributed by anyone, but the degree of commonality of this information is low (even if everyone’s e-mail sits on the same server, it’s only viewable by the few people who are part of the thread). The second category includes platforms like intranets, corporate Web sites and information portals. These are, in a way, the opposite of channels in that their content is generated, or at least approved, by a small group, but then is widely visible — production is centralized, and commonality is high.

So, what is the problem with this basic dichotomy?

[Davenport's survey] shows that channels are used more than platforms, but this is to be expected. Knowledge workers are paid to produce, not to browse the intranet, so it makes sense for them to heavily use the tools that let them generate information. So what’s wrong with the status quo?

One problem is that many users aren’t happy with the channels and platforms available to them. Davenport found that while all knowledge workers surveyed used e-mail, 26% felt it was overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity.In a survey by Forrester Research, only 44% of respondents agreed that it was easy to find what they were looking for on their intranet.

A second, more fundamental problem is that current technologies for knowledge workers aren’t doing a good job of capturing their knowledge.

In the practice of doing their jobs, knowledge workers use channels all the time and frequently visit both internal and external platforms (intranet and Internet). The channels,however, can’t be accessed or searched by anyone else, and visits to platforms leave no traces. Furthermore,only a small percentage of most people’s output winds up on a common platform.

So the promise of Enterprise 2.0 is to blend the channel with the platform: to use the content of the communication channel to create (almost without the users knowing it) a content-rich platform. McAfee goes on to describe in more detail how this was achieved within some examplar organisations — notably Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He also derives a set of key features (Search, Links, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions and Signals (SLATES) to describe the immanent nature of Enterprise 2.0 applications as distinct from traditional enterprise technology.

What interests me about McAfee’s original article is (a) how little has changed in the intervening three years (thereby undermining the call to the Harvard Business Press to rush his book to press earlier than scheduled), and (b) which of the SLATES elements still persist as critical issues in organisations. Effective search will always be a challenge for organisational information bases — the algorithms that underpin Google are effectively unavailable, and so something else needs to be simulated. Tagging is still clearly at the heart of any worthwhile Enterprise 2.0 implementation, but it is not clear to me with experience that users understand the importance of this at the outset (or even at all). The bit that is often missing is “extensions” — few applications deliver the smartness that McAfee sought.

However, the real challenge is to work out the extent to which organisations have really blurred the channel/platform distinction by using Enterprise 2.0 tools. Two things suggest to me that this will not be a slow process: e-mail overload is still a significant complaint; and the 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality seems not to be significantly diluted inside the firewall.

Coincidentally, McAfee has posted on his blog today, asking for suggestions for a new article on Enterprise 2.0, as well as explaining some of the delay with his book.

Between now and the publication date the first chapter of the book, which describes its genesis, goals, and structure, is available for download. I’m also going to write an article about Enterprise 2.0 in Harvard Business Review this fall. While I’ve got you here, let me ask a question: what would you like to have covered in the article?  Which topics related to Enterprise 2.0 should it discuss? Leave a comment, please, and let us know — I’d like to crowdsource the article a bit. And if you have any questions or comments about the book, I’d love to hear them.

I have made my suggestions above, Andy. I’ll comment on your blog as well.

First, think…

Published 6 July 2009 Best Practice , Information , KM , Web2.0 Leave a Comment

I wasn’t at the Reboot Britain conference today, but there were some valuable nuggets in the twitterstream for the #rebootbritain hashtag. Of these, Lee Bryant’s reference to Howard Rheingold’s closing keynote resonated most for me.

@hreingold triage skills vital to new world of flow

The most common challenge I see from people about social software, Enterprise 2.0, whatever you want to call it, is that it looks interesting, but they are busy enough as it is, and can’t we do something about information overload. “Where do you find the time to do all this?” I can point to examples where these technologies can save them time (using a wiki over e-mail, for example), but these are often seen as problematic for some reason or another.

Wood stack

What Lee has spotted in Howard’s keynote is that people are being faced with a new challenge in life and work, and it probably frightens them.

Up until now, much of the information we need (as well as a huge amount that we don’t need) has been selected by someone else. Whether it is stories in a newspaper, TV programmes on the favourite channel or information within an organisation, someone has undertaken the task of choosing what the audience sees. As a result, we often have to live with things we don’t want. For example, I have little interest in most sports, so all newspapers have a sports section that is too long for my needs. Our tolerance for this redundancy is incredible. But we still resist changing it for a situation in which we can guarantee to see just what we want (and more of it).

According to Wikipedia (and this chimes with other accounts that I have read, so I trust it for now), triage was formalised as a means of dealing with large volumes of battlefield casualties in the First World War. One approach to medical emergencies might be to treat them as they arise, irrespective of their chances of survival. However, doing this is likely to lead to pointless treatment of hopeless cases and to a failure to treat those with a chance of survival in time. The result is a waste of resources and a higher than necessary death rate. Triage means that immediate treatment can be focused on those whose chances of survival are not negligible and where urgency is most important. Triage in medical emergencies is now a highly-developed technique, with incredibly effective results. (However much it may be resented by the walking wounded who are inevitably kept waiting in hospital accident & emergency departments.)

What would triage mean for information consumption? In the first place, it means no filtering before triage. One of the causes of information overload is that traditional selectors (the TV scheduler or news editor) inevitably pay no attention to the personal needs or interests of the audience. How could they? So, unlike the A&E department, we cannot rely on a triage nurse to make our choices for us. Rule zero, then, is that everyone does their own triage.

One of the key things about hospital or battlefield triage is that we don’t waste time with it if there is a clear life-saving need. So rule one of information triage is that anything life-threatening for the organisation or for ourselves needs immediate attention.

After that, we can sit down calmly to review and classify information as it comes in. Rule two: only two questions need to be asked. These are: “is this important to me in my role?” and “does this need attention now, or will its message still be fresh later?

Taking the answers to these questions together, we should be able to assess the importance and timeliness of anything that comes up. Anything that is time-bound and important needs attention now. Anything that can wait and is not relevant must be junked.

The final stage isn’t strictly triage, although it might correspond to a medical decision about who treats a patient. Having decided than a piece of information or an information flow is worthy of attention, we need to decide what to do with it. That is rule three: don’t just read it, do something with it. If information is important, it should need action, filing, or onward communication. What form each of those take is not a question for now, but there is no point paying attention to something if you or your organisation immediately loses the benefit of that attention.

Information triage is just like medical triage in that it stops action before thought. That is potentially a huge change if people have been accustomed to taking in pre-digested information flows without any thought and either acting immediately or not acting at all.

That’s all off the top of my head. Have I missed anything?

We are all in this together

Published 2 July 2009 KM , Science , Technology , Work 2 Comments

A couple of links to start with: John Stapp and “Has ‘IT’ Killed ‘KM’?“

Picture credit: Bill McIntyre on Flickr

I don’t have much truck with heroes. Many people do great things, in the public eye and otherwise, and it seems invidious to single certain individuals out mainly because they are better known than others who are equally worthy of credit. However, I make an exception for John Stapp.

Every time you get into a car and put on a seat belt (whether required to by law or not), you owe a debt to Dr Stapp. As a doctor in the US Air Force, he took part in experiments on human deceleration in the late 1940s. During the Second World War it had been assumed that the maximum tolerable human deceleration was 18G (that is, 18 times the force of gravity at sea level), and that death would occur above that level. The Air Force wanted to test whether this was really true, and so a research project was set up. In order to test the hypothesis, an anthropomorphic dummy was to be shot down a test track and abruptly brought to a halt. Measuring equipment would be used to gauge the effect of the deceleration on the dummy. An account of the project is provided in the Annals of Improbable Research. That account indicates that Stapp had little confidence in the dummy.

While the brass assigned a 185-pound, absolutely fearless, incredibly tough, and altogether brainless anthropomorphic dummy — known as Oscar Eightball — to ride the Gee Whiz, David Hill remembers Stapp had other ideas. On his first day on site he announced that he intended to ride the sled so that he could experience the effects of deceleration first-hand. It was a statement that Hill and everyone else found shocking. “We had a lot of experts come out and look at our situation,” he remembers. “And there was a person from M.I.T. who said, if anyone gets 18 Gs, they will break every bone in their body. That was kind of scary.”
But the young doctor had his own theories about the tests and how they ought to be run, and his nearest direct superiors were over 1000 miles away. Stapp’d done his own calculations, using a slide rule and his knowledge of physics and human anatomy, and concluded that the 18 G limit was sheer nonsense. The true figure he felt might be twice that if not more.

In the event, Oscar the dummy was used merely to test the efficacy of the test track and the ballistic sled on which his seat was first accelerated and then decelerated. Once that was done, testing could start.

Finally in December 1947 after 35 test runs, Stapp got strapped into the steel chariot and took a ride. Only one rocket bottle was fired, producing a mere 10 Gs of force. Stapp called the experience “exhilarating.” Slowly, patiently he increased the number of bottles and the stopping power of the brakes. The danger level grew with each passing test but Stapp was resolute, Hill says, even after suffering some bad injuries. And within a few months, Stapp had not only subjected himself to 18 Gs, but to nearly 35. That was a stunning figure, one that would forever change the design of airplanes and pilot restraints.

The initial tests were done with the subject (not always Stapp) facing backwards. Later on, forward-facing tests were done as well. Over the period of the research, Stapp was injured a number of times. Many of these injuries had never been seen before — nobody had been subjected to such extreme forces. Some were more mundane — he broke his wrist twice; on one occasion resetting the fracture himself as he walked back to his office. It is one thing to overcome danger that arises accidentally, quite another to put oneself directly in such extreme situations.

And he did it for the public good.

…while saving the lives of aviators was important, Kilanowski says Stapp realized from the outset that there were other, perhaps even more important aspects to his research. His experiments proved that human beings, if properly restrained and protected, could survive an incredible impact.

Cars at the time were incredibly dangerous places to be. All the padding, crumple zones and other safety features that we now take for granted had yet to be introduced.

Improving automobile safety was something no one in the Air Force was interested in, but Stapp gradually made it his personal crusade. Each and every time he was interviewed about the Gee Whiz, Kilanowski notes, he made sure to steer the conversation towards the less glamorous subject of auto safety and the need for seatbelts. Gradually Stapp began to make a difference. He invited auto makers and university researchers to view his experiments, and started a pioneering series of conferences. He even managed to stage, at Air Force expense, the first ever series of auto crash tests using dummies. When the Pentagon protested, Stapp sent them some statistics he’d managed to dig up. They showed that more Air Force pilots died each year in car wrecks than in plane crashes.

While Stapp didn’t invent the three point auto seatbelt, he helped test and perfect it. Along with a host of other auto safety appliances. And while Ralph Nader took the spotlight when Lyndon Johnson signed the 1966 law that made seatbelts mandatory, Stapp was in the room. It was one of his real moments of glory.

Ultimately, John Stapp is a hero to me because he was true to his convictions — he had a hypothesis and tested it on himself. In the modern business vernacular, he ate his own dogfood. Over and above that, he did it because he could see a real social benefit. His work, and (more importantly) the way he did it, has directly contributed to saving millions of lives over the last 60 years. Those of us who seek to change our environments, whether at work or home, or in wider society, should heed his example. If there are things that might make a difference, we shouldn’t advocate them for others (even dummies) without checking that they work for us.

Now, the other link. Greg Lambert at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has extended the critique of IT failing to spot and deal with the current financial crisis by suggesting that KM is equally to blame.

Knowledge Management was originally an idea that came forth in the library field as a way to catalog internal information in a similar way we where cataloging external information. However, because it would be nearly impossible for a librarian to catalog every piece of internal information, KM slowly moved over to the IT structure by attempting to make the creator of the information (that would be the attorney who wrote the document or made the contact) also be the “cataloger” of the information. Processes were created through the use of technology that were supposed to assist them in identifying the correct classification. In my opinion, this type of self-cataloging and attempt at creating a ultra-structured system creates a process that is:

  1. difficult to use;
  2. doesn’t fit the way that lawyers conduct their day-to-day work;
  3. gives a false sense of believing that the knowledge has been captured and can be easily recovered;
  4. leads to user frustration and “work around” methods; and
  5. results in expensive, underutilized software resources.

In a comment on that post, Doug Cornelius says:

I look at KM 1.0 as being centralized and KM 2.0 as being personalized. The mistake with first generation KM and why it failed was that people don’t want to contribute to a centralized system.

We have to be careful, as Bill Ives points out, not to throw out the baby in our enthusiasm to replace the 1.0 bathwater with nice fresh 2.0 bubbles. However, Greg and Doug do have a point. We made a mistake in trying to replicate the hundreds or thousands of databases walking round our organisations with single inanimate repositories.

The human being is an incredible thing. It comes with a motive system and an incredibly powerful (but probably unstructured) data storage, computation and retrieval apparatus. Most (probably all) examples of homo sapiens could not reproduce the contents of this apparatus, but they can produce answers to all sorts of questions. The key to successful knowledge activities in an organisation, surely, is to remember that each one of these components adds a bit of extra knowledge value to the whole.

Potentially, then, we are all knowledge heroes. When we experiment with knowledge, the more people who join in, the better the results. And the result here should be, as Greg points out, to “help us face future challenges.” We can only do that by taking advantage of the things that the people around us don’t realise that they know.

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