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It’s mine and I will choose what to do with it

Published 30 June 2009 KM , Personal , Rationality , Technology 3 Comments

This isn’t a political blog, and it is a coincidence that I came across a couple of things that chime with each other on the same day that the UK government has started to reverse from its enthusiastic promotion of ID cards for all.

The first juicy nugget came from Anne Marie McEwan. In writing about social networking tools and KM, she linked some of the requirements for successful social software adoption (especially the need for open trusting cultures) to the use of technology for monitoring.

And therein lies a huge problem, in my strong view. Open, trusting, transparent cultures? How many of them have you experienced? That level of monitoring could be seen as a version of Bentham’s Panopticon. Although the research is now quite old, there was a little publicised (in my view) ESRC-funded research project in the UK, The Future of Work, involving 22 universities and carried out over six years. One of the publications from that research was a book, Managing to Change?. The authors note that:

“One area where ICT is rapidly expanding management choices is in monitoring and control systems … monitoring information could connect with other parts of the HRM agenda, if it is made accessible and entrusted to employees for personal feedback and learning. This has certainly not happened yet and the trend towards control without participation is deeply disquieting.

If ICT-based control continues to be seen as a management prerogative, and the monitoring information is not shared with employees, then this is likely to become a divisive and damaging issue.”

On the other hand, the technology in the right hands and cultures creates amazing potential for nurturing knowledge and innovation.

What struck me about this was that (pace Mary Abraham’s concerns about information disclosure), people quite freely disclose all sorts of information about themselves on public social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. The fact is that some of this sharing is excessive and ill-advised, but even people who have serious reservations about corporate or governmental use of personal information lose some of their inhibition.

Why do they do this? In part it may be naïveté, but I think sometimes this sharing is much more knowing than that. What do they know, then? The difference between this voluntary sharing and forced disclosure is the identification of the recipients and (as Anne Marie recognises) trust. Basically, we share with people, not with organisations.

The second thing I found today was much more worrying. The UK Government is developing a new strategy for sharing people’s personal information between different government departments. It starts from a reasonable position:

We have a simple aim. We want everyone who interacts with Government to be able to establish and use their identity in ways which protect them and make their lives easier. Our strategy seeks to deliver five fundamental benefits. In future, everyone should expect to be able to:

  • register their identity once and use it many times to make access to public services safe, easy and convenient;
  • know that public services will only ask them for the minimum necessary information and will do whatever is necessary to keep their identity information safe;
  • see the personal identity information held about them – and correct it if it is wrong;
  • give informed consent to public services using their personal identity information to provide services tailored to their needs; and
  • know that there is effective oversight of how their personal identity information is used.

All well and good so far, but then buried in the strategy document is this statement (on p.11):

When accessing services, individuals should need to provide only a small amount of information to prove that they are who they say they are. In some situations, an individual may only need to use their fingerprint (avoiding the need to provide information such as their address).

But I can change my address (albeit with difficulty). I can never change my fingerprints. And fingerprints are trivially easy to forge. Today alone, I must have left prints on thousands of surfaces. All it takes is for someone to lift one of those, and they would have immediate access to all sorts of services in my name. (An early scene in this video shows it being done.

What I really want to be able to do is something like creating single-use public keys where the private key is in my control. And I want to be able to know and control where my information is being used and shared.

Going back to KM, this identity crisis is what often concerns people about organisationally forced (or incentivised) knowledge sharing. Once they share, they lose control of the information they provided. They also run the risk that the information will be misused without reference back to them. It isn’t surprising that people react to this kind of KM in the same way that concerned citizens have reacted to identity cards in the UK: rather than No2ID, we have No2KM (stop the database organisation).

The conundrum focus

Published 18 June 2009 KM , Rationality , Science 8 Comments

A discussion is currently taking place on the ActKM mailing list about the theoretical underpinnings of knowledge management. Joe Firestone, reaching into the language of philosophy, has consistently taken the view that KM only makes sense when related to the need to improve underlying knowledge processes:

I see [knowledge management] more as a field defined by a problem, with people entering it because they’re interested in some aspect of the problem that their specific knowledge seems to connect with.

Unfortunately, in more quotidian language, the word ‘problem’ suggests difficulties that need to be overcome, but sometimes KM is actually not dedicated to overcoming difficulties but to taking maximum advantage of opportunities. When Joe refers to a ‘problem’ I think he means it as a puzzle or conundrum: “how do we fill this knowledge gap?” Stated thus, I think this is a less objectionable aim for KM.

What about the nature of the conundrums that face organisations? Rightly, in linking to an earlier post of mine, Naysan Firoozmand at the Don’t Compromise blog suggested that there was a risk of vagueness in my suggestion (channelling David Weinberger) that KM might be about improving conversations in organisations.

Which is all true and good and inspiring, except I want to wave my arm about frantically like the child at the back of class and shout ‘But Sir, there’s more … !’. There’s a difference between smarter and wise that’s the same difference as the one between data and information: the former is a raw ingredient of the latter. And – when it comes to organisational performance and leadership (which is our focus here, rather than KM itself) – simply being smarter isn’t the whole story. Clever people still do stupid things, often on a regular (or worse, repeated) basis. Wise people, on the other hand, change their ways.

This is a fair challenge. Just improving the conditions for exchange of knowledge is not enough on its own. (Although I would argue that it is still an improvement on an organisation where conversations across established boundaries are rare.) There are additional tasks on top of enabling conversation or other knowledge interactions, such as selecting the participants (as Mary Abraham made clear in the post that started all this off), guiding the interaction and advising on possible outcomes.

Those additional tasks all help to bring some focus to knowledge-related interactions. The next issue relates to my last blog post. In doing what we do, we always need to ask where the most value can be generated. The answer to that question, in part, is driven by the needs expressed by others in the organisation — their problems or conundrums. However, not all problems can be resolved to generate equal value to the organisation.

The question, “what value?” is an important one, and reminds us that focus on outcomes is as important as avoiding vagueness in approach. How can we gauge how well our KM activities will turn out? Some help is provided, together with some scientific rigour, by Stephen Bounds (another ActKM regular) who has created a statistical model for KM interventions using a Monte Carlo analysis. His work produces an interesting outcome. It suggests that on average, the more general a KM programme, the less likely it is to succeed. In fact, that lack of success kicks in quite quickly.

To maximise the chance of a course of action that will lead to measurable success, knowledge managers should intervene in areas where one or more of the following conditions hold:

  • occurrences of knowledge failures are frequent
  • risks of compound knowledge failure are negligible or non-existent
  • substantial reductions in risk can be achieved through a KM intervention (typically by 50% or more)

Where possible, the costs of the intervention should be measured against the expected savings to determine the likelihood of benefits exceeding KM costs.

So: simple, narrowly defined KM activities are more likely to succeed, all other things being equal. Success here is defined as it should be, as making a contribution to reductions in organisational costs (or, potentially, improving revenue). Stephen’s analysis is really instructive, and could be very useful in encouraging people away from a “one size fits all” organisation-wide KM programmes.

In sum, then, our work requires us to identify the conundrums that need to be solved, together with the means by which they should be addressed, and to define the outcomes as clearly as possible for the individuals involved and for the organisation. We cannot hope to resolve all organisational conundrums by improving knowledge sharing. So how do we choose which ones to attack, and how do we conduct that attack? Those are questions we always need to keep in mind.

It’s not my problem

Published 15 June 2009 KM , Projects , Work 1 Comment

As I was catching up on my RSS feeds this morning, something by Jack Vinson caught my attention.

Tools of the trade

When LinkedIn launched groups, in which like-minded people could discuss topics of common interest, it seemed like a sensible idea. Unfortunately, it is much easier to start a group than to search for an existing one, so there are many groups covering similar ground. As a result, one ends up being a member of a multitude of groups and participating in none.

Unlike me, however, Jack has engaged with some of these discussions, and in one in particular (referenced in his blog post) he tries to move the responses to a standard question in an interesting direction.

The question (posed by a knowledge manager in the mining industry) was simple enough:

I need to put together an AFE (authorization for expenditure) to start the KM program in my company, but the executives are still asking ROI questions. They have the mandate to innovate but just don’t get it. KM is about setting the baseline for indirect ROI or am I wrong?

Naturally enough, this produced some interesting answers focusing on measuring ROI or on ways of persuading the executives by other means. Jack’s response came from at the problem from a different angle:

Maybe it is not time to implement software? Instead approach the executives with the problems they have articulated (such as “innovation”), and propose changes to the process that will help remove or reduce the severity of the problems. A lot of that will have to do with the way people work, regardless of whether there is specific software in place to make it happen. What can you do with the software you have today? What could you do in addition if you were to buy the software you are proposing to buy?

I found this recasting of the question really valuable. Too often, issues are raised about the ROI of particular interventions (social software, KM activities, and so on), but account is rarely taken of the price of doing nothing. The fact is that these projects are rarely undertaken for their own sake — at least, they shouldn’t be. Instead, they are (or should be) proposals to deal with an existing business problem. That problem usually belongs to someone else — whether that be a manager in a particular part of the business, or someone in the leadership team. As Dave Snowden put it in a discussion panel at last weeks KCUK conference, we need to think about what the objects of KM are. He proposed just two:

  • improving decision making
  • creating the conditions for innovation

Given that the decision making process generally belongs to someone else, they need to judge whether (a) it is in need of improvement and (b) how best to improve it. We have a role in helping them with those judgments (by showing them alternatives, for example), but they have to make the call whether a KM approach is the right one.

Ultimately, then, it is our job to show people what is possible, and to offer a variety of options for resolving problems. Our preference for one solution over another may well be misinformed — we can rarely appreciate the full context. That is one reason why many big KM projects have failed in the past — they were not driven by the business, and so the investment that really counts was missing.

Navigating the seven Cs of knowledge

Published 2 June 2009 Clients , Collaboration , Conversation , Creativity , Culture , KM , Knowledge 3 Comments

It dawned on me today that a lot of our knowledge-related activities reflect, depend upon or contribute to things beginning with ‘C’. In that spirit, today’s post is brought to you by the letter C and the number 7.

On the rocks near Kilkee

In no particular order, here are the things I had in mind. Feel free to add more (or detract from these) in the comments. (And I apologise for inadvertently stealing a idea.)

Conversation. As mentioned in my last post, this is a critical part of knowledge sharing. Be aware, though, that this realisation is not enough:

simply being smarter isn’t the whole story. Clever people still do stupid things, often on a regular (or worse, repeated) basis. Wise people, on the other hand, change their ways.

Collaboration. Good collaboration may be a product of good knowledge sharing. It may even produce it. We need to be confident that what we think is collaboration really is that: 

So what is collaboration then? It’s when a group of people come together, driven by mutual self–interest, to constructively explore new possibilities and create something that they couldn’t do on their own. Imagine you’re absolutely passionate about the role that performance reviews play in company effectiveness. You team up with two colleagues to re-conceptualise how performance reviews should be done for maximum impact. You trust each other implicitly and share all your good ideas in the effort to create an outstanding result. You and your colleagues share the recognition and praise equally for the innovative work.

The important factor is mutual self-interest. When people create things they really want to create, and it is also good for the company, it energises and engages people like nothing else.

Communication. Don’t forget that this is not something you can judge for yourself. Good communication comes when someone else can understand what you say. They will judge whether you are communicating well. Empathy is required.

One way of talking that inhibits the exchange of knowledge is speaking with conviction. That may seem contrary to what we’ve all learned in communication and leadership workshops, where one of the lessons often taught is to speak with confidence- “sound like you mean it”. Yet, as I examine conversations in the work setting, stating an idea with conviction tends to send a signal to others that the speaker is closed to new ideas. When speaking with conviction people sound as though no other idea is possible, as though the answer is, or should be, obvious.

Connection. I can’t decide if this flows from the points above, or if it is a necessary pre-condition for them. The fact is, it is pervasive. Without good connections, we cannot function properly as good knowledge workers.

As the economy has worsened, there’s been some talk about eliminating “nice to have” functions such as KM.  Think again.  Without good matchmakers, it’s hard to have good matches.  Without good matches, it’s hard to have much productivity.

Creativity. This is not something that is reserved to highly-strung artists. We all need to think in interesting ways about the problems that we face. Unless we do so, we will just come up with the same old answers. And in many cases the same old answers are what created the problems in the first place.

…we need two processes, one to generate things we can’t think of in advance, and another to figure out which of the things we generate are valuable and are worth keeping and building upon. In science, the arts, and other creative activities, the ability to know what to throw away and what to keep seems to arise from experience, from study, from command of fundamentals, and—interestingly—from being a bit skeptical of preset intentions and plans that commit you too firmly to the endpoints you can envision in advance. Knowing too clearly where you are going, focusing too hard on a predefined objective, can cause you to miss value that might lie in a different direction.

Culture. We can use this as an easy escape: “I am doing what I can, but the culture doesn’t support me.” Yes, there are dysfunctional organisations which cannot accept that the world around them is changing. But we have a part to play in bringing a realisation that the wrong culture is wrong.

…the magic of the corporation (and the thing that makes the corporation the best problem-solving machine we have at our disposal) is that it can be all things to all people. Anthropology can help here because it understands that the intelligence of this complicated creature exists not just in the formal procedures and divisions of labor of the organization, but in also in the less official ideas and practices that make up the corporation. Once again, anthropology is about culture, but in this case the culture is the particular ideas and practices of a particular organization. Anthropology can help senior managers re-engineer their organizations.

Clients/customers. Why do we do this? It is easy to forget that the organisation does not exist for its own reasons. It exists to fulfil a purpose, and that purpose often means that there are consumers, customers or clients. When we know what they need, we are in a better position to understand what the business should deliver. That may hurt. Things would obviously run better if we didn’t have to worry about client demands, but that is just facetious.

This is a hard lesson for marketers, particularly technical marketers, to learn. You don’t get to decide what’s better. I do.

If you look at the decisions you’ve made about features, benefits, pricing, timing, hiring, etc., how many of them are obviously ‘better’ from your point of view, and how many people might disagree? There are very few markets where majority rule is the best way to grow.

Five continents

There are some additional things that are often linked to knowledge activities. I am not entirely sure about some of these. 

Change. This is often linked with culture. In addition, some knowledge management activities bring change with them. Doesn’t it seem odd (and a serious risk) that one project is supposed to bring about significant organisational change? Surely we should try and fit with what people are already doing?

Why won’t this work for you?

Capture/conversion. Traditionally, KM projects have focused on squeezing knowledge out of past actions, or in converting so-called tacit knowledge to explicit. John Bordeaux torpedoes both of these.

Lessons learned programs don’t work because they don’t align with how we think, how we decide, or even an accurate history of what happened.  Other than that – totally worth the investment. 

and

…it should now be evident that relating what we know via conversation or writing or other means of “making explicit” removes integral context, and therefore content.  Explicit knowledge is simply information – lacking the human context necessary to qualify it as knowledge.  Sharing human knowledge is a misnomer, the most we can do is help others embed inputs as we have done so that they may approach the world as we do based on our experience.  This sharing is done on many levels, in many media, and in contexts as close to the original ones so that the experience can approximate the original. 

Content. Otherwise known as “never mind the quality, feel the width.” Need I say more? We shouldn’t have been surprised by the Wharton/INSEAD research, but in case people still are:

The advice to derive from this research? Shut down your expensive document databases; they tend to do more harm than good. They are a nuisance, impossible to navigate, and you can’t really store anything meaningful in them anyway, since real knowledge is quite impossible to put onto a piece of paper. Yet, do maintain your systems that help people identify and contact experts in your firm, because that can be beneficial, at least for people who lack experience. Therefore, make sure to only give your rookies the password.

Control. David Jabbari nailed this one:

This trend is closely related to the shift from knowledge capture to knowledge creation. If you see knowledge as an inert ‘thing’ that can be captured, edited and distributed, there is a danger that your KM effort will gravitate to the rather boring, back-office work preoccupied with indexes and IT systems. This will be accompanied by a ritualized nagging of senior lawyers to contribute more knowledge to online systems.

If, however, you see knowledge as a creative and collaborative activity, your interest will be the way in which distinctive insights can be created and deployed to deepen client relationships. You will tend to be more interested in connecting people than in building perfect knowledge repositories.

Before we leave the alphabet, a quick word about ‘M’. If we dispose of the continental Cs above, what happens to measurement and management? That is probably enough in itself for another post, but for now a quick link to a comment of Nick Milton’s on the KIN blog will suffice:

Personally I think that dropping the M-word is a cop-out. Not as far as branding is concerned – you could call it “bicycle sandwich” as far as I am concerned, so long as it contained the same elements – but because it takes your attention away from the management component, and taking attention away from the management component is where many KM failures stem from.

Management is how we organise work in companies, and if we don’t organise it with knowledge in mind, we lose huge value. What doesn’t get managed, doesn’t get done, and that’s true for KM as much as anything else. See http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/03/knowledge-management-in-defence-of-m.html for more details.

What do we talk about when we talk about work?

Published 29 May 2009 Conversation , Creativity , Happiness , KM , Work 2 Comments

For too long, I have had Theodore Zeldin’s little book, Conversation, on my wish-list. Prompted by a colleague’s comment I finally tracked a copy down. (It is out of print, but extremely easy to find on Amazon or Abebooks.) I wish I had done so sooner.

The word ‘conversation’ is scattered throughout this blog. Like many others, I have made the assumption that people at work converse readily with each other and that one of our challenges in making knowledge use at work better is to capture those conversations or their product in as simple a way as possible. Zeldin’s argument is that in fact we do not know how to converse.

[T]he more we talk, the less there is that we can talk about with confidence. We have nearly all of us become experts, specialised in one activity. A professor of inorganic chemistry tells me that he can’t understand what the professor of organic chemistry says. An economist openly admits that “Learning to be an economist is like learning a foreign language, in which you talk about a rational world which exists only in theory.” The Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies [sic], established to bring all the world’s great minds together, was disappointed to find that they did not converse much: Einstein, a colleague said, “didn’t need anybody to talk to because nobody was interested in his stuff, and he wasn’t interested in what anybody else was doing.”

No wonder many young people hesitate to embark on highly specialised careers which make them almost feel they are entering prison cells. … Even a BBC producer I met in the corridors of Broadcasting House, when I asked how his job was affecting his brain, said, “The job is narrowing my mind.”

Poor quality conversations don’t just happen at work — Zeldin sees the problem manifested (in different ways) in the family, in love and generally across our social interactions. Our focus, however, is work. What is Zeldin’s prescription?

Almost everyone says that the more varied the people they meet at work, the more fun it is, though often they exchange only a few words. But creativity usually needs to be fuelled by more than polite chat. At the frontiers of knowledge, adventurous researchers have to be almost professional eavesdroppers, picking up ideas from the most unobvious sources.

Zeldin’s book was published in 1998. A year later, David Weinberger made the link between good conversation and KM.

The promise of KM is that it’ll make your organization smarter. That’s not an asset. It’s not a thing of any sort. Suppose for the moment that knowledge is a conversation. Suppose making your organization smarter means raising the level of conversation. After all, the aim of KM was never to take knowledge from the brain of a smart person and bury it inside some other container like a document or a database. The aim was to share it, and that means getting it talked about.

This view puts KM at the heart of business since business is a conversation. … It’s not just that good managers manage by having lots of conversations… All the work that moves the company forward is accomplished through conversations —oral, written, and expressed in body language.

So, here’s a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, “knowledge worker”: A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: They’re unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they’re interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the org chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of KM as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that’s not what KM is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.

One of the ways that we can encourage good conversations is to expose people to a wider variety of experiences and inputs than they would expect for themselves. I mentioned in a previous post how important this is for designers. It is important for all professionals. Likewise, one of the key factors improving people’s collaboration and knowledge sharing through better conversations is familiarity with other people. In most workplaces, it is obvious that different groups engage with each other in different ways depending on how their physical proximity and familiarity. We can influence these factors architecturally.

Brad Bird (director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille) makes this point in an interview in The McKinsey Quarterly. Talking about the Pixar studio building, he said:

Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put all the mailboxes, the meeting rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center — which initially drove us crazy — so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible not to run into the rest of the company.

That’s great if one has the opportunity to influence architecture. What can we do otherwise? Zeldin might be able to come to the rescue. He has created The Oxford Muse: “A foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life.” One of their projects is Muse Conversations:

At the invitation of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, we organised a Muse Conversation Dinner. The participants sat at tables laid for two, each with a partner they had never met before. A Muse Conversation Menu listed 24 topics through which they could discover what sort of person they were meeting, their ideas on many different aspects of life, such as ambition, curiosity, fear, friendship, the relations of the sexes and of civilisations. One eminent participant said he would never again give a dinner party without this Muse Menu, because he hated superficial chat. Another said he had in just two hours made a friend who was closer than many he had known much longer. A third said he had never revealed so much about himself to anybody except his wife. Self-revelation is the foundation on which mutual trust is built.

Even short of this, there are all sorts of small things that we can do. I think the important thing is to be aware (and to spread the awareness) that there are always more interesting things to know than what we already know, and that the people who know them are interesting in their own right. We just need to seek them out.

[A credit and an apology. The latter is due to Raymond Carver for corrupting a title of his. Mary Abraham is owed the former: colleague mentioned Conversation after I referred him to Mary's post, "Confessions of a Corporate Matchmaker", which underlines the point that those responsible for KM have an essential part to play in generating good connections from which good conversations should flow.]

Direction-finding

Published 7 May 2009 Clients , KM , Lawyering 2 Comments

Yet again, Mary Abraham has hit the target. In a blog post earlier in the week, “Off-Route, Recalculate”, she uses satellite navigation as a metaphor for planning KM activities.

As we plan and carry out our knowledge management efforts, it can be difficult to identify the correct route.  And, it can be unpleasant to be informed that we’re off-route and need to recalculate.  Many of us have taken the current economic situation as a call to recalculate our routes.  Unfortunately, given the extent of the economic turmoil, it can be hard to identify our alternatives and most of us are all too conscious of the pressure on us to get the route right.  Further, few of us have knowledge management GPS.  So what should we do?

I was intrigued by the GPS system that Mary described at the beginning of her post. It sounded very bossy, and not at all like the one in my own car. As I put it in a comment on Mary’s blog (the “she” described is the voice of the satnav system):

For me, she is very good at applying all the information that she has (and I don’t) about the road network (and some other points of interest) to help me get to the destination I specify. Occasionally I make a detour along the agreed route, but she is very amenable to finding a new way to get to the final destination. She also has an array of different ways to show the key information that I need, but she doesn’t force me to choose any particular one of them (I can even see two different views at once if I want). Ultimately, her goal and mine are the same — to reach the specified destination. Otherwise, she is happy to respect the decisions I make about the position of the steering wheel.

Sometimes, I need to change the intended destination. That is easily done, and all previous instructions are put aside without rancour. Her role, after all, is to support me in achieving my objectives.

Mary responded, “It sounds like your GPS ‘person’ is a bit more competent than the one I met in my friend’s car last weekend. After being presented with several unattractive route alternatives during the trip, my friend actually turned her GPS off in frustration.”

This conversation made me think about extending the metaphor in a slightly different direction. As lawyers, we can be compared to navigation assistance for clients. They are the ones who specify the ultimate destination, and lawyers (together with other advisors) suggest different routes to get there, and keep things on track if diversions are made (whether those diversions are necessary or frivolous). Within law firms, those supporting KM and other internal activities need to adopt a similar role. Admittedly, our advisory role can be very different from that of a GPS system — we can influence the decision about the destination itself as well as the route taken to get there — but ultimately we have to respect the client’s choice of destination. This means that our advice should not be tainted by regret that a different destination was not chosen or that the business prefers to use back-roads rather than pay the tolls on the autostrade.

Like all metaphors, this one shouldn’t be pushed too far, but at its heart I think there is an element of truth. It is also worth remembering when you find yourself in the position of being a client. To what extent are you being led to a destination that isn’t quite where you wanted to be, or taken along a route that is not really the way you wanted to go?

A glimpse into the abyss

Published 30 April 2009 KM , Lawyering , Management , Tradition 3 Comments

John Flood has published on his blog an article he co-wrote for The Lawyer. It is essentially a challenge to the traditional UK law-firm business model.

The context for the challenge is clearly the current economic crisis, coupled with the opportunities offered for different organisational structures by the Legal Services Act. In essence the suggestion is that law firms should stop ‘owning’ their stock (lawyers) and instead lease it as and when client demands dictate.

Although legal work has become more commoditised and an increasing proportion of it shipped offshore, it is perhaps lawyers themselves, both associates and partners, who are the commodities, traded and marketed by recruiters and head-hunters. New service models such as Axiom Legal, Rimon Law and Lawyers Direct are flourishing. One recruiter is now even advertising ‘pay as you go lawyers’. At the same time, the equity partnership prize is becoming ever harder to win, and even less sought after by today’s younger lawyers who are more mobile and happier than ever to migrate to newer opportunities.

Since a sufficiently large pool of high-quality and experienced lawyers is emerging from the crisis, why not rent lawyers for a specific period or task and then let them go again? The advantage of temporary resources is that they can be deployed as and when needed and released when not.

What would be the purpose of the firm in this model?

A smaller, tighter front-line team would oversee client relationships, supervise the work and manage the firm. Rather than constantly seeking merger partners, law firms could structure their growth in a more organic fashion which would build collegiality as well as returns.

I am not sure what this would look like. I think there are two (potentially competing) reasons why law firms are organised as they are. The first is that the current model has served private practice lawyers well so far. That is not to say that this will remain true. John Flood and his co-author, Peter Rouse, chief executive of 7 Bedford Row Chambers, have started to make a compelling case for change from this perspective. However, the current model has also grown up in response to client needs. It is at least arguable that clients play some part in designing law firms. There is compelling evidence (see Ron Friedmann and others, passim) that client pressure will define the law firm model to a much greater extent in years to come. The Flood/Rouse model may serve clients well, but it is not clear from the article how or why clients would prefer this approach to one of the many others on offer.

As they are currently organised, law firms can and should offer clients the security that individual lawyers are well-trained and -briefed so that they can apply more than basic legal knowledge. That is one of the functions of firms’ KM activities. How would that be replicated in a firm using the Flood/Rouse model? There is a real risk that clients would get little benefit from this approach. Yes, firms might find that their costs are lower and that this might translate into lower hourly rates (assuming that the billable hour still holds sway), but a poorly-briefed contract lawyer could take much longer to perform the tasks required to the standard required by the client. As a result, the client would see no financial benefit, and might even discern a distinct difference in the quality of the work done.

That is not to say that we should dismiss this approach. No organisation can assume that it will be allowed to remain in its current form forever. Likewise, those of us who work in a particular way because of the form of the organisation we support should also be mindful that change is inevitable and be constantly seeking ways of ensuring that the service we provide is still hitting the mark for our people and our clients.

If the Flood/Rouse model were pervasive, what would law firm KM and training look like?

Don’t overdo it

Published 6 April 2009 Design , KM , Technology 2 Comments

When we think about and plan our KM activities, it can be tempting to imagine a marvellous future wherein all our firm’s know-how is carefully nurtured, categorised, exposed for all to see, tagged, analysed, or whatever it is we think would be the best outcome. However, as the Bard of Ayrshire put it: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley.” Why is this?

Gigha boatscape

One good reason is pointed out in Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

I am indebted to John Gruber for the pointer to this formulation. He uses it to explain how to understand Apple’s strategy with regard to the iPhone.

If there’s a formula to Apple’s success over the past 10 years, that’s it. Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it, steadily over time. Evolve it.

The iPhone exemplifies this strategy. There’s a long list of features many experts and pundits claimed the original 1.0 iPhone needed but lacked. Ends up it didn’t need any of them. Nice to have is not the same thing as necessary. But things the iPhone did have, which other phones lacked, truly were necessary in terms of providing the sort of great leap forward in the overall experience that Apple was shooting for.

At this point, it is worth noting an essential qualifier to Gall’s Law: “A simple system may or may not work.” In the case of the iPhone it clearly did work. In other cases, Apple decided that it did not work.

What Gruber brings over and above a simple assertion of Gall’s Law is an insight about how to choose the original simple system: “It’s not enough just to start simple, you have to start simple with a framework designed for future evolution and growth.” When the iPhone was first launched, it was not particularly full-featured as a phone: it was not 3G; it did not support MMS. It even fell short on the music front, as it cost significantly more per gigabyte than any of the iPod range. However, as Gruber points out:

Apple started instead with the idea of a general-purpose pocket-sized networked computer. It no more has a single main purpose than a desktop PC has a single main purpose. Telephony is simply one feature among many, whereas on most other phones, the features are attached to the side of the telephone. They sold 30 million iPhone OS devices in the first 18 months after 29 June 2007, but 13 million of those were non-phone iPod Touches — proving that the platform is clearly appealing even when the “phone” is entirely removed. (Consider too that the iPhone’s two strongest competitors are BlackBerry and Android, neither of which started as phones.)

…

The iPhone was not conceived merely as a single device or a one-time creation. It’s a platform. A framework engineered for the long-run. The iPhone didn’t and doesn’t need MMS or a better camera or a video camera or more storage or cut/copy/paste or GPS mapping or note syncing, because the framework was in place so that Apple could add these things, and much more, later — either through software updates or through new hardware designs. The way to build a complex device with all the features you want is not to start by trying to build a device with all those features, but rather to start with the fundamentals, and then iterate and evolve.

We should learn the same lesson with our knowledge systems. Not to try and predict all the features that might be useful in the future — that way lies excessive complexity coupled with early obsolescence and failure. Instead we should imagine and create the best platform for future possibilities — as simple as possible, but as open to development as necessary.

Star-shaped workers

Published 2 April 2009 KM , Work 5 Comments

Jason Plant drew my attention today to an old HBR article: “Introducing T-Shaped Managers: Knowledge Management’s Next Generation“. The article, by Morten T. Hansen and Bolko von Oetinger, dates from 2001 and shows how much our views on KM have changed over the past eight years. It starts by asserting that centralised knowledge management efforts and those depending on technology have not been especially successful. The alternative, it is suggested, depends on people behaving differently.

We suggest another approach, one that requires managers to change their behavior and the way they spend their time. The approach is novel but, when properly implemented, quite powerful.

We call the approach T-shaped management. It relies on a new kind of executive, one who breaks out of the traditional corporate hierarchy to share knowledge freely across the organization (the horizontal part of the “T”) while remaining fiercely committed to individual business unit performance (the vertical part). The successful T-shaped manager must learn to live with, and ultimately thrive within, the tension created by this dual responsibility.

The question the authors pose next remains an interesting one, but for different reasons. “Why rely so heavily on managers to share knowledge?” The alternative they pose is a knowledge management system.

The trouble is that, while those systems are good at transferring explicit knowledge—for example, the template needed to perform a complicated but routine task—direct personal contact is typically needed to effectively transfer implicit knowledge—the kind that must be creatively applied to particular business problems or opportunities and is crucial to the success of innovation-driven companies. Furthermore, merely moving documents around can never engender the degree of collaboration that’s needed to generate new insights. For that, companies really have to bring people together to brainstorm.

But why concentrate on managers to do this brainstorming and collaboration? The article (or at least the excerpt available online) does not appear to admit the possibility that workers at a lower level might have a responsibility to share knowledge, or that they would even be able to reach outside their silos to people at a similar level in different business units.

Eight years later, it is clear that what we actually need is not T-shaped managers, but *-shaped workers. That is, people who can share knowledge effectively within their business unit (with junior and senior co-workers): | , with colleagues at the same level in different business units: — , and even others at different levels in other areas of the business: / and \ .

Adding all these pieces together: | — / \ we get a star shape or asterisk: * . I think that is a reasonable goal for people in modern businesses: to share knowledge freely, without respect for organisational boundaries or hierarchy. Any business that relies on T-shaped managers is likely to miss the benefits offered by wider knowledge sharing. Organisations with star-shaped workers will make the most of their knowledge.

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.

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