Christmas Lessons and Carols

One of our favorite holiday traditions is to listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King's College Cambridge. It provides a glimpse of a useful knowledge management lesson -- in this case regarding innovation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the service of lessons and carols, it is a tradition that began in 1918. It tells the story of prophecy and fulfillment, drawing on sources in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The lessons read from the Bible each year are the same ones read in 1918. What changes from year to year are the carols chosen. After each lesson, the superb King's College choir sings two different carols that are thematically related to the lesson just read. These carols draw on centuries of Christmas music and always feature some golden oldies. However, every year the choir commissions one new carol to be premiered during the service. This year, the new carol is entitled "Mary" and was composed by Dominic Muldowney.

I've written before about the value of incremental change. Not every law firm needs a revolution in order to have a great knowledge management effort. However, every law firm will benefit from knowledge managers who are constantly focused on making incremental improvements to the KM program, especially if those changes result in improvements in the way the firm delivers superior service to its clients. The key incremental change offered by King's College is the newly-commissioned carol. Commissioning a new piece of music is not something you do on the fly. It requires planning, inspiration, effort and time. It also requires the consistent excellence in delivery for which the choir of King's College is famous.

Plan for constant incremental improvements. Cast your net widely to find your inspiration and then cull those ideas until you find something truly worth the effort and time required. Next, be sure that you have staff and systems that operate at a level of excellence. With all these elements in place, your KM program and your law firm will be able to reap the benefits of constant incremental improvement.

Merry Christmas!

Innovation is a Team Sport

A recent New York Times article touted the benefits of collaborating to innovate. Debunking the myth of the lone genius who creates in solitude, the article suggests that the best innovation comes about through collaboration -- where many people and perspectives intersect to create and refine ideas. However, it isn't enough just to put a group of people in a room and ask them to brainstorm. In fact, according to the article, brainstorming is not nearly as productive as we'd like to believe. Instead of asking folks to "solve a problem" or "devise a new strategy" (favorite brainstorming topics), the better path is "systematic inventive thinking" in which the participants are asked to identify products and processes that work, break those down into their components, and then think about how those components can be put to other productive uses.

When I read this description of systematic inventive thinking, I realized that it appeared to share some of the principles of appreciative inquiry, which encourages us to build on our strengths. What a difference from the traditional approach of focusing on what does not work! (In a prior post I talked about the benefits of asking What Went Right rather than What Went Wrong?) Further, when you ask a group to focus on what's good, you stand a better chance of avoiding some of the negative dynamics that emerge in problem-solving sessions such as refusing to speak up out of fear of failure or a desire to hoard ideas.

Whether you attempt innovation in solitary confinement or through a group process, research has shown that innovation isn't a flash in the pan. According to Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company .... Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.

So what would it take to build innovation into the culture of your company? Sawyer believes that even the lone genius is part of a wider web of ideas and people -- the people the genius talks to, the people who write the things the genius reads, etc. This suggests that a company that wants a robust innovation culture has to build robust social networks that facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas.

How can knowledge management help? KM knows all about social networks and social media tools. KM knows how to reduce information silos and enable information sharing. KM knows how to foster collaboration. We've often said that the whole point of knowledge management is innovation. With this focus on group genius, it's becoming clearer how the things that knowledge management does well can be deployed to build a vibrant culture of innovation within every company.

[Thanks to Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog for pointing out this article.]

Safe Mode

I spent some time this past weekend working through some problems I was having on my home computer with Mozilla Firefox. After doing a little research, I found the way through the problem by using the safe mode Mozilla provided. What a brilliant option!

We've talked often about the need to tolerate failure in order to maximize the opportunities for innovation. However, for many risk averse businesses, this prospect is too scary to contemplate much less implement. Dave Snowden draws the useful distinction between the fail-safe approach versus the safe-fail approach. The former is the favorite of anxious risk managers who don't want anything to go wrong -- ever. The latter is favored by managers who understand that innovation usually is the result of trial and error.

If we're serious about innovation, we should consider developing some safe modes of operating in which temporary changes can be tried without great risk. If we, like Mozilla, can find a way to reduce the downside of failure, then we open the door to innovation. Of course, sometimes the really great breakthroughs come about only when we take large gambles. However, until we're ready to really roll the dice, testing incremental improvements in safe mode may be a happy compromise. After all, innovation that results in improvements -- no matter how small -- moves your knowledge management program and your organization forward. The alternative is safe stagnation.

Rothko and KM

Those of you who follow the art scene will know that the Tate Modern in London is hosting a celebrated exhibition of Mark Rothko paintings. Thanks to the BBC, those of us outside London can have a taste of the exhibit via a brief video tour by the sculptor, Anish Kapoor, and Sarah Montague.

The conversation and controversy surrounding this exhibit provide interesting lessons that can be applied to knowledge management. First, consider the description by Anish Kapoor of the "restricted vocabulary" with which Rothko worked. That vocabulary contained only color, a field and a foreground. In Kapoor's view, Rothko worked successfully within the constraints of that limited vocabulary to "draw on deep human emotional realities." For those of us who tend to spend our time protesting our constraints, there is an important lesson here in using our contraints to move ourselves to richer insights and more creative output. For those of us thinking about KM budgets during an economic downturn, it's worth thinking harder about how financial and staffing limitations might provide opportunities for new and innovative work. When you consider what Rothko was able to do with some black paint, you realize that we don't always push ourselves to make the best use of what we have.

The second lesson relates to the dispute as to whether some of these Rothko paintings were hung incorrectly. Critics have charged that two of the paintings in Rothko's Black on Maroon series should have been hung horizontally rather than vertically. Nonetheless, the curator and gallery are sticking by their decision to display the paintings vertically. The discussion about the "right way" to hang the paintings was a salutary reminder to me that sometimes breaking with tradition or convention can provide fresh perspective and insight. As knowledge managers, we can get caught up in the role of librarian or guardian of the canon. In fact, our primary function is not archival; rather it is to provide the resources necessary to facilitate innovation and growth. Key to that function is offering a new perspective on what our organizations know. If that means turning things on their head from time to time, so be it. The purists may protest, but if you've facilitated insight and innovation, it's worth it.

Coming full circle, if you find yourself working with severely limited resources, consider whether trying a different angle on an old KM program or resource might provide the opening you need to achieve something new or useful. Now is not the time to play it safe. Otherwise, you'll find your programs and impact shrinking faster than your budget.

Scary Times for IT

In honor of Halloween, I thought we might take this opportunity to scare our information technology colleagues, as well as those knowledge management folks who have been unable to rise above and beyond technology. Let's start with an interesting piece by Susan Cramm entitled IT Project Funding: Less is More. In it she confronts the reality that IT budgets are likely to be slashed during the downturn, and proposes a new way of working in face of this reality. She suggests that the old "boil the ocean" approach of grand projects based on years of painful analysis is not going to cut it any more -- especially in light of her assertion that while "only 1/3 of IT-enabled business initiatives deliver as planned, project success declines dramatically as project size increases."

Continuing with her theme that bigger is not necessarily better, she recommends the following alternative approach:

Given that only about 20% of applications functionality is typically used (and which 20% is unpredictable), it's impossible to figure it all out in advance. The key to bringing the future forward is getting tools in the hands of the users as quickly as possible. If they use them, you are on the right track. If they don't, find out why and give it another go.

This stumbling and bumbling, learn-by-doing approach may seem a little chaotic, but it's reflective of how organizations, and people, change and grow. Mistakes will be made, but it's better to make a series of small mistakes and mid-course corrections, than it is to make one huge, multi-million dollar mistake from which there is no way to recover.

Without a doubt, this approach will be infinitely more successful if you have the kind of corporate culture I described yesterday in my post When Failure is Fine. However, even if you don't yet have that culture, take advantage of the constraints imposed by the economy to manage and change the expectations of your users. Since your law firm is unlikely to set aside unlimited funds for a large technology or knowledge management project, dial down expectations and ask your users to join you in a journey through the land of perpetual beta. They trade the possibility of perfection (which rarely is realized) for the actuality of functional and timely technology. Even the most demanding users will come to realize that having the technology in use is better than having unfulfilled paper plans.

Being a kind and generous person, let me offer a treat to offset the trickiness of the fast-delivery approach advocated by Cramm. She recommends that you have the following in place if you wish to maximize your chances of delivering the right technology quickly:

Executive leadership: Don't confuse sponsorship with leadership. Sponsors show up at steering committee meetings when invited, leaders demonstrate passion and commitment by showing up in cubicles and conference rooms uninvited

Clear definition of success: Use process measurements that impact financial performance and baseline them at the start of the project

Predefined kill switch: Take the emotion out of the decision making process by defining what defines failure, so that the project can fail fast and be restarted when conditions are more favorable

Small, experienced team: Wait to start your project until you have a seasoned project manager supported by a small team (less than 12) of full time, subject matter experts

Laser sharp focus on critical requirements: Avoid defining requirements by committee by using the success measurements to manage scope

Respect for the future and the past: Factor in the implications of existing business and technology plans while accelerating progress by leveraging legacy systems and existing infrastructure

There you have it -- a cautionary tale for Halloween. Scary times are ahead, but a willingness to adapt (together with some nimble footwork) should allow you to make useful advances with respect to your firm's technology despite the economy. In the process, you'll shed the tendency for bloated IT and knowledge management projects, and adopt a sleeker, streamlined approach that is more in keeping with the times.

When Failure is Fine

Every so often, we're fortunate enough to hear about an organization that has mastered the art of innovation. In the arena of social media, Best Buy is getting a reputation for innovation and success. This week I learned about an extraordinary feature of Best Buy's corporate culture when I read Cam Gross' blog post regarding their implementation of Mix, which he described as "a start-up offering a mashup of email, SMS and Twitter-like functionality. " When I wrote about Mix in an earlier post, I was impressed by their repeated attempts to broaden the conversation among Best Buy's employees. Given their success with Blue Shirt Nation, I assumed that they ultimately would be successful with Mix. (Blame the lawyer in me for relying excessively on precedent.) What I didn't fully understand was that, apart from their prior achievements, they had one of the most critical ingredients necessary for success. Here's how Cam Gross describes it:

We have had almost zero conversation about Mix outside of the development group. When the article by Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) came out ... word traveled inside Best Buy Corporate. A couple of departments have already raised their hands anxious to test/sample Mix. You just can't beat having an environment where people want to try and are OK with "fail" as long as something is learned. [emphasis added]

Now, be honest. When was the last time you heard someone say that about your company?

We talked earlier about the value of mistakes when pursuing growth and innovation, and Dave Snowden has included in his Seven KM Principles the truth that we learn more from failure than from success. But have we ever gone so far as to say in our workplaces that it's okay to fail as long as something is learned? Rather, don't we circumscribe our actions and ambitions in order to avoid failure at all cost? Admittedly, if we do find ourselves staring failure in the eye, we're usually willing to attempt to redeem that failure by looking for a nugget of learning. But I'd suggest that the Best Buy attitude goes further than that. It sounds like they don't circumscribe actions and ambitions for fear of failure, but rather choose to risk doing something new -- knowing that they can learn from it. With that orientation to innovation, they are bound to succeed.

The Art of Creating Possibilities

The whole point of KM is Innovation. We aren't putting people in conversation with each other, soliciting their stories or helping them exchange their learning just because it makes for a nicer workplace. We're also doing this because it's precisely that cross-pollination of ideas and experience that helps birth new ideas and new ways of doing things. Knowledge management done right helps create an environment that fosters healthy change.

The "science" of knowledge management pushes us to find better, less intrusive, more effective and efficient ways to ensure that the essential information is exchanged, and exchanged in a manner that permits easy and accurate understanding. This isn't about knowledge extraction and capture or centralized control. It's about KM getting out of the way so that just in time exchanges of information can occur in context. Unless you've been living off the grid for the last few years, you probably have already realized that this approach to KM undercuts the old KM 1.0 drive towards creating and maintaining repositories and databases. KM 1.0 is based on an outdated notion of knowledge manager as archivist.

The "art" of knowledge management is by its nature a little harder to get your hands around. It's about an orientation, an approach to work and life. Good KM is closely attuned to and respectful of organizational culture. Good and effective KM ultimately helps shift that organizational culture toward more openness, more collaboration, more innovation. This view of KM is based on a notion of knowledge manager as facilitator.

If we are true to the demands of the "art" of knowledge management, we knowledge managers have to embody and demonstrate that orientation toward collaboration and innovation. This means finding new ways to engage in productive conversations that expand understanding and don't reduce every interaction to a zero-sum game. This isn't necessarily how we've been taught to behave in the corporate world, so it can be a significant challenge for a lot of us. Further, it's an approach that assumes a certain level of personal maturity and goodwill.

Innovation rarely results from the occasional brainstorming sessions. It comes from applying what you're learning to what you know, taking information from one domain and mixing it with experience in another domain to see what results. It's life as a lab. It's indulging your sense of curiosity, tempered only by the constant question: how does this make things better?

Since far too many of us push through life with our heads down, shoulders forward -- simply trying to get things done -- we often don't remember to take the time required to be open to possibility. A bent to innovation requires some under-used muscles. Chandni Kapur at Anecdote, provides a humorous reminder of one way to find and exercise those muscles in her post Practising the art of creating possibilities:

People respond so differently to new ideas. While some people jump with excitement at the thought of new possibilities and irrational ideas, unfamiliarity can [make] others uncomfortable, give up, or find it safe to be a skeptic. This is so well illustrated in this conversation between Alice and the queen in Through the Looking Glass.

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Being able to rise above the restrictions of what is, to imagine what might be, and then to create the map that moves your organization to that potential requires vision and leadership, a marriage of both the art and science of knowledge management. A little bit more queen and a little less of Alice.

Failing by Default

J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter, is a great proponent of failure. In fact, she entitled her recent commencement address at Harvard "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination." Her experience has taught her that it is through failure that we strip away the inessential, discover what we truly value in life, learn how resilient we are and, in the process, gain a necessary measure of humility and humanity. Above all, when we survive failure we begin to cure ourselves of the fear of failure, thereby freeing ourselves to try new things, to dare more.

As far as J.K. Rowling is concerned, the one thing worse than trying and failing is failing to try. She calls this "failing by default:"

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

In reading her remarks, I found myself wondering how many knowledge managers are failing by default. To fail by default in knowledge management is to be content with simply keeping the home fires burning rather than venturing out into new territory. It means tinkering around the edges of KM systems rather than working on the next paradigm shift. Mere maintenance rather than innovation.

Given the myriad challenges involved in actually conceiving and implementing new KM systems, it isn't irrational to be tempted to avoid innovation all together. However, therein lies the path to irrelevance, which is the equivalent of professional suicide. A KM system that isn't relevant isn't worth the time and effort expended on it.

If you need more incentive to brave the risk of failure, read The Competitive Advantage of Failing. Then, go out there and try something new.

Innovators Must be Omnivores and Thieves

When I say that innovators must be omnivores, what I really mean is that they must be both omnivorous readers (not eaters) and people who seek out a wide-range of experience. This is one of the several things I learned at a fascinating lecture by Columbia University Business School professor, William Duggan. Duggan has written Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, in which he explores how the brain achieves insight by combining knowledge and experience in new ways. The central question of Duggan's work is how do people get really good actionable ideas?

These actionable ideas begin in a flash of insight. Duggan is interested in how the brain achieves that flash of insight. As he pointed out in his lecture, insight most often happens when you least expect it. And, insight rarely occurs on command. Above all, it cannot happen in the absence of certain prerequisites:

1. Knowledge and Experience: If you want to be an innovator, you need to arm yourself with a wide range of knowledge and experience. Furthermore, you need to master at least one discipline. It's when you apply knowledge or experience from a far-flung field to your own area of expertise that you are more likely to achieve breakthroughs. Duggan was adamant that these required inputs are just as effective when obtained through study as through experience, and gave the example of the 24-year old Napoleon who had an impressive insight into successful military strategic when he was newly-graduated from the military college and lacking in combat experience.

2. A Calm Mind: Insight rarely occurs when you are focused on trying to achieve it. You are more likely to have a flash of insight when you've cleared your mind of distractions or are perfectly relaxed. This explains why insights more often than not happen in the shower or during recreational activity rather than in an official brainstorming meeting at work. However, for those truly interested in innovation, Duggan believes that you can increase the opportunities for insight by training in the martial arts, yoga or meditation, because they teach the practitioner the discipline necessary to empty the mind of distractions.

Once you have the flash of insight, the next critical step in the process of innovation is what Duggan called Resolution, in which you have a complete picture of what needs to be done to put your insight into action and then you do it. This, of course, is where many a good idea dies a premature death. Either you haven't fully grasped all that is necessary to put your insight into action or you lack the requisite discipline to act.

As with many things in life, persistence pays here. Giving the example of the founders of Google, Duggan pointed out that while they had an important early insight that formed the foundation of what we know today as Google, it wasn't until later (after many iterations and some dead ends) that Sergey Brinn and Larry Page made the breakthrough that transformed Google from another cool search engine into a truly innovative license to print money.

Duggan's approach is consistent with that of earlier thinkers (and innovators) such as Louis Pasteur who once famously said "Chance favors the prepared mind." But Duggan goes one step further: he explicitly says that innovators are thieves. They steal from others, combining what they take in new and different ways to achieve a breakthrough. Citing T.S. Eliot* and using examples as varied as Pablo Picasso, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Napoleon Bonaparte and Brinn & Page, Duggan explains how they "stole" ideas from others and created something new through their unusual combination of existing elements.

In other words, think of insight as the mashup your brain does that leads to innovation. Best of all, this requires no expensive technology whatsoever.

*For the literary-minded among my readers, here's the background on the reference to T.S. Eliot, taken from The Sacred Wood:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Error + Flexibility = Innovation

Error + Flexibility = Innovation is a formula few of us were taught in school.  Even fewer of us were told about this during our orientation at our law firms.  Law firms, like most businesses, spend time thinking about the right way of doing things.  This results in business processes that are hardwired into the firm's systems or "best practices" that are documented and distributed.  Then, all of us are encouraged (or required) to agree to never stray from the chosen path.  

An organization's motivation for hardwiring recommended business processes and  demanding conformity arguably is laudable.  The organization is trying to increase predictability, reduce risk, and strengthen central control.  From the perspective of a senior manager, what's not to like about this?

However this drive for control and predictability may be choking the life out of the innovators in our midst.  And a huge corporate emphasis on risk avoidance may result in the stillbirth of many potential innovators.  

Innovation thrives in an environment that permits flexibility for front line folks who are closest to the clients and their problems.  Innovation also requires a culture that, while demanding excellence, understands that errors are a necessary part of learning and, without learning, there can be no innovation.  Thus, innovation results from flexibility in processes and systems, and a culture that permits (and even encourages) constructive errors.

In his post On Process, Technology and Work Design, Jon Husband talks about the organizational drive to standardize work processes, the resulting "rigidities" and the impact of this on the ability of front line folks to use their experience with clients to improve the way the firm delivers services.  He also optimistically points to new web 2.0 tools such as wikis or purpose-designed blogs that have the potential of allowing the front line folks to interact with each other and their client challenges, create and document new ways of doing things as they work, and thus affect the official systems.  Or as he puts it, these tools allow us "to integrate social process into more static and more clearly defined work processes."

Meanwhile, Dave Snowden sounds a warning to all in his post, The Context of Error, when he says,

Innovation happens when people use things in unexpected ways, or come up against intractable problems.  We learn from tolerated failure, without [which] the world is sterile and dies.  Systems that eliminate failure, eliminate innovation.

Think about the knowledge management systems at your firm.  Are they rigid?  Do they contain a level of flexibility sufficient to permit innovation -- even by people outside [gasp!] your KM department?  And, what about the organizational culture of your law firm?  Is it so focused on eliminating error that it completely squelches any incipient tendencies toward innovation?  Law firm knowledge management needs innovation to stay current and relevant.  Does your approach to KM include flexibility for others and support for constructive error?

If your answer to the previous question is no, it's time for you to go back to the drawing board.  Remember, The Point of KM is Innovation.

Error + Flexibility = Innovation.  It's that simple.

The Point of KM is Innovation

If you've ever had one of those days when you've wondered why you bother to chase down yet another after action review from a reluctant content contributor or wrestle with a difficult node in your taxonomy, take heart. There is a reason for this work, and that reason is Innovation. Innovation is the goal knowledge management serves; it's why our organizations need KM (and why they need knowledge managers like us). For manufacturers and the service industry alike, innovation leads to growth (by creating new or improved products or services), efficiency (by creating new or improved processes), and profits.

So what does it take to create an environment that fosters innovation? One key component is having ready access to the available knowledge. This reduces the danger of reinventing the wheel and provides a solid foundation on which innovation may be built. Another component is knowing what knowledge is lacking within your organization. It has been argued that knowing what you don't know is in fact critical to achieving that state of open-mindedness in which you are willing and able to entertain a new idea. Both of these elements are by-products of an effective knowledge management system.

Of course, knowledge management by itself will not turn your organization into a wildly creative place. You also need people who are willing to absorb this knowledge, think about it differently, and then take risks with it. In addition, you need an organizational culture that (i) encourages experimentation, (ii) understands that innovation is a numbers game (i.e., you need to produce a lot of ideas before you will find one worth pursuing), (iii) seeks to turn failed experiments into positive learning opportunities, and (iv) generously rewards success.

For an introduction to the ways in which knowledge management can promote and support innovation, see Knowledge Management and Innovation: An Initial Exploration, which is an Ernst & Young Working Paper written in 1997 by Rudy Ruggles and Ross Little. For a more recent and very thoughtful guide to innovation, see Mark Gould's blog post Ceci n'est pas une pipe.