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Do you know where you’re going to?

Published 16 December 2008 Lawyering , Rationality , Web2.0 2 Comments

Via James Mullan, here are “35 tips for getting started with social media.” The list is positioned thus:

If you are going to start using social media, you should at least have an understanding of what it’s about. Social media is not about the tools, the tools are only a facilitator.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. Actually, this is an interesting list, but it is not particularly coherent. Anyone facing the world of social media needs to answer a simple question for themselves: “why am I doing this?” There are many possible answers:

  • To find out more about the world of Web 2.0
  • To connect with people I already know
  • To connect with people I don’t yet know who have a common interest
  • To position myself or my business in this new market
  • To make money
  • To contribute information and knowledge

…and so on.

Some of these aims are honourable, some less so. That’s fine — the whole gamut of relationships can be facilitated by these tools. But you need to know what you want from them. Before working through this list of 35 tips, you need to be able to judge whether any one of them will help you serve your vision of what you want from social media. You also need to be aware that the authors of lists like these may have a different vision from yours.

The same is true for shorter lists. Kevin O’Keefe has named his top three social media tools for law firms. They are blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn. That may be true for those firms (and their clients and potential clients) that are comfortable with those tools. If they are just a me-too choice, that will be glaringly obvious to others. That is because the main goal of these tools is connection. If you or your firm feels more comfortable connecting in a different way (whether that is Web 2.0 or not), do that instead. Those you connect with will respect you for it.

And if you do follow Kevin’s advice, connect properly. Clients find it irritating enough when law firms stop producing traditional briefings. Imagine their discontent when you are no longer connecting with them via a blog that they have come to know and respect.

So what do you want from your social media? What will success look like? Can you sustain your interest in it for the long term? Once you have answered those questions, you are ready to think about the tools you need and a strategy for deploying them.

Yes — you do need a strategy. Think about e-mail. That is just a tool. It facilitates connections. But it has become a monster for many people because we didn’t think properly about how we intended to use it and the limits we should put on it. All the social media tools that look today like fluffy kittens also have the potential to become monsters as scary as e-mail. If we bear that in mind when giving them house-room, we might be able to cope better when they start to grow.

(Hat tips to Mary Abraham and Doug Cornelius for the link to Kevin’s post.)

Prescriptivity and appropriateness

Published 30 September 2008 Knowledge , Language , Lawyering , Learning , Rationality , Tradition 2 Comments

One of the links in my blogroll is to Language Log, which is home to some of the most rigorous blogging on the internet. As its name indicates, it deals with language and linguistics, but in the broadest possible sense. So its authors have taken on sex differences and biological determinism, science journalism, lolcats, and legal language. However, one of the best posting categories is “Prescriptivist Poppycock.” When you need a break from pedants whingeing about split infinitives and dangling prepositions, this is where to come.

David Crystal’s book, The Fight for English (subtitled “How language pundits ate, shot, and left”) is also an attack on prescriptivist poppycock. In it, he describes how language pedantry developed during the eighteenth century, and outlines how an understanding of appropriate language can help people to understand grammar and language generally. (A point completely lost on this Amazon reviewer.) This is why appropriateness matters:

One of the aims of education, whether by parents or teachers, is to instil appropriate behaviour. If we behave inappropriately, we risk social sanctions. Language is a form of social behaviour, and it is subject to these sanctions as is everything else. The main aim of language education has thus to be the instilling into children of a sense of linguistic appropriateness — when to use one variety or style rather than another, and when to appreciate the way in which other people have used one variety or style rather than another. This is what the eighteenth-century prescriptive approach patently did not do.

When he turns to the history of grammar teaching in the UK, Crystal’s reduces his argument to a simple analogy. (Until the mid-1960s, English language teaching in the UK depended heavily on prescriptive texts. After that point, virtually no grammar was taught as part of the school syllabus. From the 1990s, following a period of intense academic study of English language and grammar, the National Curriculum for English incorporated language teaching that (a) balanced the study of language structure and the study of language use, and (b) aimed to instil a sense of language awareness in children.) The balance is important:

The basic problem [with historic English teaching] was that there was no means of relating the analytical skills involved in doing grammar to the practical skills involved in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The grammarians argued that there just had to be a connection — that any child who learned to parse would inevitably end up being a better user of its language. But there was nothing at all inevitable about it. And there was an obvious counter-argument, best summed up in an analogy. I have a friend who is a wonderful car mechanic, but he is a terrible driver.

The analogy is worth developing. To be a good driver takes a lot more than knowledge of how a car engine works. All kinds of fresh sensitivities and awarenesses are involved. Indeed, most of us learned to drive with next to no understanding of what goes on inside the bonnet. It is the same with language. …[S]omething else has to happen if children are to use a knowledge of grammar in order to become better speakers, listeners, readers, or writers. A connection has to be made — and, more to the point, demonstrated.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of something else I read today. In the Anecdote blog, Shawn Callahan quotes a passage from John Medina’s book, Brain Rules. Here are the first couple of sentences:

Any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts [our ability to memorise things] or only the improvisatory instincts [our ability to imagine things] ignores one half of our ability. It is doomed to fail.

I had intended to write about this anyway, because it struck me that an approach to legal education (and, by extension, KM) that focuses on things like transaction processes and prescribed documents (held in databases) does not help to develop the creative and improvisatory instinct in lawyers. I have a feeling that many lawyers find improvisation difficult (please excuse the generalisation), and so they are happiest with KM that creates know-how databases and precedent banks. Such an approach does not actually serve them as well as they think it does.

As for the legal education point: a story from my wife. She is a corporate partner, with 20 years experience. A couple of years ago she was leading a very complex transaction, but the other side was represented by a much more inexperienced lawyer. More significantly, it was clear that this lawyer had been taught some standard transaction processes and had not developed enough imagination to see that the clients’ goals could be more readily met by diverging from the standard. Because of this, my wife and both sets of clients were frustrated until the other lawyer finally gave up on her approach and caved in. At this point, I am not privy to the details, but my guess is that the result of this change of heart was not particularly beneficial her client. At the very least, her intransigence will have prolonged the deal and increased its cost to both parties.

Prescriptivism may be dying out in the British educational system, but it is alive and well in law firms. In the current climate, how long will clients stand for it? And what are we doing to connect lawyers’ database instincts with their improvisory instincts in order to give them the understanding to become better advisors?

Motivation

Published 25 July 2008 KM , Rationality Leave a Comment

Here’s an odd press release:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dilemmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining KM

Published 1 April 2008 KM , Rationality 2 Comments

In an earlier post, I mentioned Joe Firestone’s insistence that we define knowledge management. The ‘defining KM’ meme is currently a hot topic. This is partly due to Joe’s article, and partly a result of Ray Sims’s listing of 43 (now 54) knowledge management definitions. When I read that list, I was disturbed by the wide variety of aims illustrated by the definitions. I thought that this was probably a reflection of the different contexts in which the definitions were originally created. Some were abstract and academic, drawing on epistemology and philosophy. Some were concrete and managerial: clearly driven by the need to sate an internal organisational need.

Today, however, I have discovered that this is not the only reason. I am tempted to buy The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. (At more than £100, I am very unsure that I need it.) The first two chapters are available as samples of the greater work, so I have been leafing through them. I came across this in the first chapter (in section 4.4 “Defining grammatical concepts”.)

It is useful to begin by considering the kind of definition familiar from dictionaries and traditional school grammars, which are known as notional definitions, i.e. they are based on the meaning of the expressions being classified, not on their grammatical properties…. To determine whether a word is a noun, for example, one asks what it means or denotes; to determine the tense of a verb one asks in what time period it locates the action or state expressed by the verb; and so on.

Such definitions have long been criticised by linguists. Indeed, it takes only a moment or two’s reflection to see that they do not provide satisfactory criteria for determining the correct classification of words or verb-forms or clauses.

…

The problem with notional definitions is that they do not refer to the kinds of property that motivate the use in the grammar of the theoretical concepts being defined.

…

A satisfactory definition or explanation of concepts like noun, preterite, and imperative clause must therefore identify the grammatical properties that distinguish them from the concepts with which they contrast.

The definitions of knowledge management that disturbed me most in Ray Sims’s list are, I now understand, notional definitions. Worse than that, they are in some cases wishful notional definitions: they describe something that someone wants to be knowledge management, whereas someone else may equally justifiably call it something else.

Examples of wishful KM thinking abound. For instance, consider Doug Cornelius’s short series of blog posts on Household Knowledge Management. It is not clear to me that the very interesting systems that Doug has identified as potentially improving the management of his family’s domestic affairs are necessarily KM-related. They could equally well be time management or process management tools. (This is a bit unfair, because I want to use one of Doug’s posts more constructively as the basis for another blog post of mine, but I hope he will forgive me.)

The crux of finding a good (or even just a working) definition of KM, for me, is for it to distinguish what is unique about KM from general good management or business practices. If KM is a distinct activity (and there is a strong view that it is not), then it needs to be able to do more than say, rather weakly, that KM is “the way a company stores, organizes and accesses internal and external information” or “consciously managing knowledge as a resource and using it in a targeted manner within the company.”

Recognition and understanding

Published 18 March 2008 Irrationality , Rationality , Science , Tradition 3 Comments

It is important to us that people listen to our needs, understand them and adapt to them. We know this about ourselves, but very few of us can naturally empathise with others. One reason for this, I think, is that human beings are almost infinitely complex and yet our brains cannot cope with this variety.

So what do we do? We create archetypes. We categorise. There are even people who classify themselves (and others) according to whether they were a first, second or third child (fourth children fall into the same category as the first-born). I wonder whether this is because in small communities (with close genetic links) such generalisations are likely to be accurate. As our circles of acquaintance become larger, their weaknesses become more obvious, but as we also struggle to do without them we depend more heavily on them.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I read Graham Durant-Law’s recent blog post, and remembered Dave Snowden’s short rant against Myers-Briggs. They both point to the complete absence of scientific evidence for summing people up in a small number of categories. Graham also poses a number of questions:

Why do these modern archetypes have credibility and how do these they help us? Why are they any better than Jung’s original archetypes? Where are they best used and what problems do they solve?

I can’t answer any of these, but I am interested in the way in which we think they might help us. Going back to my starting point, we want to be able to understand people (whether our managers, our team, our clients and customers, or our families) in order to work better with or for them, or to get along with them as well as possible. Doing that well is excessively hard. However, by referring to archetypes or categories we can make a reasonable attempt at empathy (especially for the relationships where a ‘quick fix’ will do).

We are fooling ourselves. If any of these relationships is worth pursuing, it must be worth the real effort that it takes to recognise someone as an individual with unique needs, desires, concerns, preoccupations and quirks. Archetypes and categories only conceal that reality.

Critical thinking about KM

Published 12 March 2008 Culture , KM , Rationality , Technology 2 Comments

Three thought-provoking KM-related articles have recently come to my attention, so I thought it might be useful to bring them together. Two of them embody a critical approach to the discipline, whilst the third is more mainstream (but can be read in a different way).

Those who participate in the actKM mailing list will know that Joe Firestone has strongly-held and coherent views about the definition of knowledge management. He argues passionately that there should be a definition and that the definition should be based on the philosophy of Karl Popper.

I have found that Joe’s writing has become clearer the more I read of it. I am not sure if this is because I understand his ideas better or because his expression of those ideas has improved. If it is the latter (which is admittedly less likely), then I highly recommend his latest article, “On doing knowledge management” in the current issue of the journal Knowledge Management Research & Practice. It is available to download for a limited time.

The article takes as its starting point a dispute on the ActKM list about the meaning of knowledge management. More specifically, it is driven by Joe’s frustration at the lack of agreement on what KM is:

The problem of lack of agreement on what KM is, suggests four possibilities:

  • people can be doing KM and calling it KM;
  • people can be doing KM and calling it something else;
  • people can be doing non-KM and calling it KM; or
  • people can be doing non-KM and calling it non-KM.

These possibilities exist from whatever point of view KM is defined. The first and fourth represent no problem if one wants to evaluate KM, but clearly, without agreement on what KM is, the second and third introduce serious problems in any evaluation of KM’s impact or effectiveness. And the more frequently these possibilities occur, the greater the error introduced into KM’s track record, regardless of the truth of impact models developed to assess the impact of instances of the first possibility.

How frequently do the second and third possibilities occur? Clearly, the more there is disagreement about what KM is, the more second and third possibilities exist, and the more any track record evaluating KM, either formal or informal, will be distorted and misleading in telling us what percentage of KM efforts are successes.

The three-tier modelJoe goes on to explain his view of KM, which is that it is the top tier in a three-tier model of business processes. (The diagram here should help in understanding these, and there is another article by Joe and Mark McElroy that explains them in more detail.) The three tiers are operational business processes (the basic work done to create the outputs we expect of the business), knowledge processes (which seeks to fill epistemic gaps preventing effective participation in operational business processes), and knowledge management (which aims to fill the systemic gaps that obstruct effective knowledge processing. More succinctly, Joe defines knowledge management as “the set of activities and/or processes that seeks to change the organization’s present pattern of knowledge processing to enhance both it and its knowledge outcomes.”

The article goes on to define and give examples of two different approaches to knowledge management. Joe argues that all KM interventions can be classified into these two types. Once we understand this, he claims, it is easier to determine which interventions are successful and which are not. I am still grappling with this aspect of his work, but I have found the three-tier model very useful in explaining to my colleagues (in the KM team and elsewhere) exactly what it is that we do (and, just as importantly, what everyone’s responsibilities are).

In the same edition of Knowledge Management Research and Practice, there is an article by Daniel G. Andriessen: “Stuff or love? How metaphors direct our efforts
to manage knowledge in organisations“. This sets out to examine how our understanding of some basic concepts is moulded by assumptions we make about the context in which we think of those concepts. (There is also a conference paper on his website covering the same ground in more detail.)

When one uses abstract concepts without giving examples or stories to illustrate what one means, people will impose their own understanding of the concepts and so misunderstandings can arise. We deal on a daily basis with abstract (and contested) nouns like “knowledge”, “learning”, “information” and “development”, so what we do is always open to misunderstanding.

One way in which people manage abstract concepts is to liken them to other things — either physical objects or other abstractions that are more familiar and easier to comprehend. The choices they make at the outset will determine some of the conclusions that they come to. Andriessen’s article outlines a small piece of research into the use of different metaphors for knowledge, and the impact those metaphors have on people’s views of valuable knowledge activities.

In the research, a group was asked to think of knowledge as water, and then as love. Using each of the metaphors, they were guided through a set of exercises designed to extract their views on what their organisation should do about knowledge. The end result was striking.

I asked the participants to identify a number of problems related to KM in their organisation and think of a number of solutions. However, I asked them to do this using a particular metaphor for knowledge. First I asked them to do this using the KNOWLEDGE AS WATER metaphor. This resulted in a number of problems and solutions…. [M]ost of these are in line with [a] mechanistic approach to KM….

Then I asked them to do the same, but this time using a metaphor that is much more in line with an Eastern view of knowledge. I asked them to discuss problems and solutions regarding knowledge while thinking of KNOWLEDGE AS LOVE. What happened was quite remarkable. The topic of conversations changed completely. Suddenly their conversations were about relationships within the organisation, trust, passion in work, the gap between their tasks and their personal aspirations, etc.

The third article, “Putting Ideas to Work” by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak, and Bruce Strong was published as an insert to the Wall Street Journal earlier this week and is also available from the MIT Sloan Management Review. It highlights that KM is not a single thread of activity — it has to encompass knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge dissemination — and that it needs to depend more on solutions that are not based technology. As Ron Friedmann points out, this is not particularly controversial in the KM community (although it might come as news to organisations who think that KM is done when the know-how database is installed). However, Ron also points to a more subtle conclusion:

I’ve frequently written about legal KM morphing into practice support. As I read this article, it suggests that corporate KM is being absorbed by the building blocks of other functions. Sounds like a similar theme to me, only one that is not articulated.

This is an interesting theme, and I hope to be able to dwell on it at some point in the future, perhaps building on some of the insights in the other two articles.

Nobody expects…

Published 3 March 2008 Irrationality , Rationality Leave a Comment

There is an interesting article in the NY Times last week: The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors, which looks at the work of Dan Ariely on decision-making. Ariely has just published a book, Predictably Irrational, and he has a website with the same name. The NYT article focuses on a particular aspect of his work — what happens when we try to keep our options open.

It is a natural human characteristic to invest effort in maintaining a number of different alternative courses of action. Inevitably this costs time and money (and encourages disappointment — as I mentioned in an earlier post, the more we know about something the harder it is to be satisfied with a choice against it). Lawyers often benefit from this — part of a client’s investment in indecision is represented by our fees. This behaviour is predictable, but irrational. According to Ariely, unpredictable rationality can help us make better decisions earlier. We would also avoid wasting our limited resources on options that we will never actually choose.

I have recent experience of this. We are in the process of choosing between two options that are extremely closely matched. Neither choice would be wrong. Either would be entirely defensible. The longer I think about the options and balance the different pros and cons, the more difficult it will be to find the time to implement whichever choice I make. It is time to stop dithering and be rational — just choose one.

 Via Kottke.

Projects, choice and satisfaction

Published 6 February 2008 Irrationality , Management , Projects , Rationality 1 Comment

Patrick Lambe points to an article in the Des Moines Register reporting on research done at the University of Iowa.

The team’s paper, “The Blissful Ignorance Effect,” shows that people who have only a little information about a product are happier with their purchases than people who have more information, the U of I reported. The paper will be published in an issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

“We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, there’s a kind of wishful thinking that happens and they want to like what they’ve bought,” Nayakankuppam said in a prepared statement. “The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking. The more information you have, the harder it is to kid yourself.”

This is not a surprising conclusion to anyone who has read Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, or seen the video of his presentation at TED in 2005.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

There is a resonance in this for me. When we do projects, we spend a long time ruminating over a massive range of choices: which supplier should we go with; whose solution fits our needs better; how should we customise the system; how can we meet the (conflicting) expectations of people in the firm; and so on. The issues identified by Schwartz and by the Iowa researchers are magnified when we have to make choices on behalf of the firm. We, making choices, are less likely to be happy that we have done the right thing in the end than if we were choosing a solution just for ourselves. People in the firm, for whom the choice is made, are much more likely to challenge the result than if they had been involved or had been choosing for themselves.

In understanding our psychology better, Schwartz offers us a hope of satisfaction. If we recognise that too many choices undermine our happiness, we may become happier with our selection: we would have been as unhappy with any other choice that we might have made. Likewise, in managing projects, we can be more resolute in the decisions that we make by recognising that any choice will make some people unhappy, and that the least happiness will result from trying to please everyone.

The only challenge after that is to persuade people that the outcome is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

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