Why People Resist Change

We're two-thirds of the way through the eating marathon composed of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's Eve. And, as surely as night follows day, many of us are considering our expanding waistlines and the necessity of a diet in the New Year. Just as predictably, many of us will fail in our quest to change our eating habits and keep that weight off permanently. Similarly, in these waning days of the year, our thoughts often turn to the resolutions we plan to make on January 1 regarding the changes we know we need and the great expectations we hope to realize. Unfortunately, we likely will be as unsuccessful next year as we were this year in making radical changes.

Why is change so hard? According to a recent article in Scientific American, from our mid-twenties until our late fifties, we tend to be less open to new experiences and this makes us more resistant to change. As we face the challenges and responsibilities of adult life, our brains seem to prefer the security of stability rather than the chaos that change represents. According to Gerhard Roth,

The brain is always trying to automate things and to create habits, which it imbues with feelings of pleasure. Holding to the tried and true gives us a feeling of security, safety, and competence while at the same time reducing our fear of the future and of failure.

The final nail in the coffin of change is our tendency to have unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved. This is known as the "false hope" syndrome in which we attempt more change than is wise or possible, and then fail. No wonder most of us find it so difficult to change.

So what happens when your knowledge management program requires a change in behavior on the part of the lawyers in your law firm? You should assume that you will meet passive if not active resistance. But that doesn't give us a free pass to avoid change. Since change often is necessary, we need to plan carefully to ensure that the proposed change can be achieved. This suggests that we set reasonable goals requiring incremental (rather than radical) change and that we frame the change in a way that is least threatening to the sense of stability and security of our users.

Incremental change rarely results in banner headlines, but given what we now know about human psychology, it may be the only kind of change that is viable.

Pay Attention to People

At the heart of every knowledge management effort has to be the people we hope will use and benefit from it. Yet far too often, they are not considered sufficiently in the design or implementation stage. Most of the time we plan based on our "impressions and preconceptions" of how our target audience will behave. These "impressions and preconceptions" are what we call experience, but they often block us from truly working with people as they are now, rather than how we thought they once were.

What's the corrective for this? Pay attention to people -- pay close attention. In a post about living artfully that is well worth reading as we approach the season of resolutions, Dustin Wax has the following observation about why paying attention to people pays off:

When we pay attention to people, really pay attention, it brings forth something in them that’s amazing. This is something I learned as an anthropologist – people love to tell their stories

. All they need is someone to really listen to them. And when people give you their stories, it enriches your own story.

It's those stories that allow us to match our KM program to the current needs or pain points experienced by the people we serve. It also helps prevent our deploying programs that miss the mark. Pay attention to the people first and then see how technology can help. You won't regret it.

Just the Way You Are

For those of my readers who were secretly hoping that I'd lose interest over the weekend in my current fascination with popular music and management, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I was getting ready to stop and then I discovered that Billy Joel is not only a philosopher, but a pragmatic one. His song, Just the Way You Are, is viewed by the more romantic among us as an extraordinary statement of the complete acceptance many hope to find in a relationship. For those of us more pragmatically minded, we realize that he is just stating the obvious: it's really hard to get a person to change -- so you might as well get along with what you've got.

While optimism and a deep belief in the perfectibility of humankind are an important part of the culture of the United States, it would be foolish to base a knowledge management department or KM program solely on the hope that folks will change. There are some fundamental elements of human nature that simply can't be undone, although they may be tweaked around the edges. For law firm knowledge managers, understanding the basic personality type of lawyers is an important prerequisite to organizing a law firm knowledge management program that has a prayer of succeeding. For all knowledge managers, understanding the patterns of behavior in your employees and users will allow you to be much more effective.

So, let's return to the prior discussions about the importance of recruiting the right people to your team, really knowing the people who work with you (their values, strengths and weaknesses), and then deploying them strategically so that they achieve their highest and best. If we take Billy Joel's song to heart, getting the recruiting right is critical. By hiring people who have the right values for your team and demonstrate the ability to think critically, work creatively, learn and grow, you free yourself to pursue an ambitious knowledge management program without having to waste precious time in the nearly futile task of trying to change their fundamentals.

Understand early who they are and then take them "just the way they are."

The Mysteries of Human Behavior

Let me introduce you to My Little Pony Scootaloo. According to the manufacturer, "SCOOTALOO pony loves to play games and be outside. She’s always on the go to meet and play outdoors with all her pony friends!" The suggested retail price for this toy is US$4.99.

To be honest, My Little Pony is not something I've spent any time thinking about before, but last Saturday night I couldn't avoid thinking about it as I watched a My Little Pony toy just like the one pictured get auctioned to the audience at the current Broadway revival of Equus. After the curtain call, the cast asked the audience to bid on the toy in order to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. By the time the bidding ended, they had raised US$800. That's impressive considering the prize normally sold for US$4.99.

What accounts for this incredible increase? You can find chapter and verse online about the psychology of auctions. Were the folks who bid on the toy completely irrational? Some (like Seth Godin) would say yes. However, that isn't the complete answer. What I observed that evening was an audience that got caught up in the excitement of the show, the unscripted interaction with the cast, and the perceived value of the prize. It should be noted that the perceived value likely had less to do with the great work Broadway Care/Equity Fights AIDS does and more to do with the fact that members of the cast (including Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame, Richard Griffiths (History Boys) and Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager)) had autographed the toy.

People don't always act rationally. However, people do tend to react predictably -- if you know enough about human nature. When implementing a knowledge management program don't assume that people will always do the right thing or even the sensible thing. People usually just do the thing they've always done. But they can be swayed by powerful countervailing forces. So while you're drawing up your neat, logical plans on paper, make sure you spend a little time thinking about human psychology, documented user behavior, and key elements of your law firm's organizational culture. That way you can plan for the way the very real people in your law firm are most likely to react. And, if a countervailing force is needed, you can dedicate the necessary time and effort to arranging it. To be clear, this is less about offering incentives (which according to many do not work), than it is a warning that perfect paper plans that assume rational user behavior rarely result in flawless implementations. Above all, you need to account for the messy and sometimes mysterious behavior of the users you are trying to help.

War Between Social Media and KM?

Connie Crosby pointed me to Ralph Poole's post, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management. In it he discusses Venkatesh Rao's assertion in the Enterprise 2.0 blog that there exists a generational war between the proponents of knowledge management and the proponents of social media. In Ralph's experience, this rings true:

I have seen it in the way Microsoft SharePoint, with minimum Web 2.0 capabilities, is embraced by IT departments while open source web 2.0 are shunned.

For Venkat, the combatants in this battle are the Boomers (born 1946-62) and the Millenials/Gen Y (born 1980 -). Here is how Venkat draws the battle lines:

Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. ...KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0.

Venkat sees top-down knowledge management as the product of the Boomer generation, while bottom-up social media is more reflective of Millenial values and aspirations. Caught in between are the Gen X folks (born 1963-79) who are not numerous enough to open a new front of their own, but may prove to be the perfect intermediaries between the opposing factions. According to Venkat, each of these generational groups approaches social media in different ways, which leads to the battles we're seeing in some workplaces regarding whether and how to adopt social media behind the firewall.

Venkat goes on to identify the 5 social dimensions of the war, and then the following 5 technological dimensions of the war:

1. Expertise locators are not social networks. For Venkat, expert idolatry is the fixation of Boomers who just love authority. By contrast, he finds that Gen Xers and Millenials believe in "situational" experts, a more transitional phenomenon.

2. Online communities are not USENET v3.0. Venkat draws the distinction between, for example, the Millenials' fondness for wide-open Facebook groups that nearly anyone can join vs GEn X LinkedIn groups that have gatekeepers.

3. RSS and Mash-ups are Gen X ideas. According to Venkat, they derive from the Gen X need "to reuse code and content to conquer overwhelming complexity."

4. SemWeb isn't Next Gen, it's Last Gen. In other words, SemWeb is the Boomers' revenge. For Venkat, "both KM and SemWeb set a lot of store by controlled vocabularies and ontologies as drivers of IT architecture." No more unconstrained folksonomies, thank you very much.

5. SOA and SaaS are Gen X; Clouds are Millenial. Venkat bases this assertion on his interpretation of the words used to explain these related concepts. For him Service-Oriented Architecture and Software as a Service are typically pragmatic (and, in his view, unimaginative and ugly) Gen X approaches to what Millenials describe more metaphorically (and imprecisely) as "clouds."

Venkat ends with the following prediction:

It takes no great genius to predict how the war will end. The Boomers will retire and the Millenials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution.

The problem with this approach is that it under-rates KM and, perhaps, overestimates SM. In the conversations I've heard lately regarding social media, the KM folks have been working hard to find points of intersection and common interest with social media. They are treating this as an evolution rather than a revolution. Some have even gone so far as to say that social media is just the new marketing spin for KM. That assertion is likely to send Millenials running for the Maalox, but it appears that KM isn't ready to be declared dead quite yet. Rather, it's trying to transform itself from a purely archival discipline to a more dynamic and informal approach that puts people in direct touch with each other, without the obvious intermediation of a knowledge manager.

[Full disclosure: I'm a Gen Xer as far as Venkat is concerned. The previous paragraph could be read to confirm his contention that Gen Xers tend to pragmatism and compromise.]

Nonetheless, it's useful to be reminded from time to time that our preferences are shaped by more than our intellect or experience. Sometimes an accident of birth can dictate how you respond to complexity and innovation. For Venkat the Boomers, Gen Xers and Millenials have distinct and different approaches to technology, information and community. Think hard about how you fit into this generational view before you make your next decision about social media.

Update (12 Oct 08): Take a look at Mark Gould's thoughtful related post -- Oh good grief. He tackles the "generational" straw man relied on from time to time by advocates of the next new thing.

Putting Blinders on to Enhance Productivity

Do you remember the conversations we had within law firms when we began to consider permitting desktop access to the Internet? Everyone focused on the potential loss of productivity. To be fair, that can be a problem. You don't have to walk far in any office to find someone surfing the net. Equally, you don't have to walk far to find someone using e-mail or the telephone for personal business during business hours. Regardless of the type of technology tool (e.g., the web, e-mail or the phone), people can always find non-business ways of using that tool.

Nonetheless, withholding technology for fear of productivity losses is a little like trying to put blinders on your people to keep them focused on work. The problem is that while this strategy works with horses, it's considerably less successful with people. Never underestimate the creativity of a person determined not to work.

As various enterprises now consider bringing the benefits of social media tools within their firewalls, they can be overly-concerned with the negative aspects of social networking and fail to appreciate the potential productivity gains. As reported by Atul Rai in IBM and Social Networking, while IBM had some initial qualms about productivity losses resulting from new social media tools, the powers-that-be decided that the risk was no greater than the normal tendency to have conversations over the water cooler or in the hallway about nonwork-related topics. Now that IBM has deployed social media tools to wide acclaim, they've discovered that the tools don't interfere with an employee's ability to meet work goals. In fact, the tools have provided significant productivity benefits.

This seems like a good point to suggest that instead of withholding tools in an attempt to force employees to focus on work, we should take a closer look at what really allows people to work well.

In a recent series of posts, Daniel Pink reported on an interview he did with Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, authors of the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. In their book they propose a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). According to Pink, key features of a ROWE are: "people show up to the office when they want, meetings are optional, and nobody’s watching the clock." (This is a far cry from most offices.) The bottom line is that "each person in an office environment is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. " [emphasis added]

One common worry raised by critics is that employees won't be able to handle a ROWE (i.e., they aren't grown up enough to be responsible for their own time and performance). Here's how the authors respond to that criticism:

... how do you know that some people can’t handle ROWE? Don’t assume what you don’t know. If you and your employees work on the clear expectations that are expected in order for them to keep their job, then set them free to reach their outcomes. Worrying that some people can’t handle ROWE is a waste of time. It’s paternalistic thinking that just doesn’t have a place in the 21^st century. We’ve found that there is so much productivity being left on the table in companies because managers are orchestrating everything according to their liking. Unleash the untapped potential around you – it’s waiting to come out!

In a law firm that charges by the billable hour, there is a natural fixation on time and how that time is spent. Further, many law firms tend to be populated by inherently conservative people who have a hard time thinking about radical changes to their work style or work environment. However, if we could look past the billable hour for a moment, we'd realize that in a ROWE it doesn't matter if a wonderful tech tool also provides a handy distraction since it's ultimately up to the individual employee to meet their performance goals in a timely manner. Therefore, as long as the firm provides useful tools, it's the employee's responsibility to use those tools wisely -- or not. In this way, the employer gives up the nanny role and gets to spend more time setting strategy, hiring good people, and then letting those people loose to meet strategic goals.

This should be the new mantra for law firm knowledge management and information technology specialists: instead of micromanaging employees to make them work, just articulate clear expectations and performance goals, provide great tools, and then set them free to work as they see fit. Don't shy away from web 2.0 technology simply because you are concerned about the social aspects of the tools. When you try to put blinders on your people, you fail. Instead of hampering their ability to goof off, you hamper their ability to work. In effect, instead of blinders, you're putting handcuffs on them. Now how is that conducive to work?

The More Things Change

From time to time, this blog discusses various constant elements of human nature. Usually, we focus on the unwillingness of folks to do what they don't want to do and why this affects the adoption of new technology tools or knowledge management systems. The last few days and weeks have reminded us that there are other aspects of human nature that don't ever seem to change. If you're not sure about this, take a look at the following excerpt from a congressional report:

“During the post­war decade some 50 billions of new securities were floated in the United States. Fully half or $25,000,000,000 worth of securities floated during this period have been proved to be worthless. These cold figures spell tragedy in the lives of thousands of individuals who invested their life savings, accumulated after years of effort, in these worthless securities. The flotation of such a mass of essentially fraudulent securities was made possible because of the complete abandonment by many underwriters and dealers in securities of those standards of fair, honest and prudent dealing that should be basic to the encouragement of investment in any enterprise. Alluring promises of vast wealth were freely made with little or no attempt to bring to the investor’s attention those facts essential to estimating the worth of any security. High­pressure salesmanship rather than careful counsel was the rule in this most dangerous of enterprises.” **

This report wasn't written this week -- it was written during the Great Depression. Nonetheless, it resonates in a week where we've seen large financial institutions fail and unimaginable turmoil in the capital markets.

One of the functions of KM 1.0 is to capture and make available for reuse helpful information objects. Consider this post my knowledge management contribution to the inevitable post-mortem report that is yet to be written. Congress can entitle the report, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

[** Source: H.R. Rep. No. 85, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1933).]

How Leadership Makes a Difference

If you've got a generous budget and an appropriately-sized, energetic, motivated and productive staff, you can stop reading now. Clearly you've got more assets than most knowledge managers and must, as a result, be achieving great things in the world of knowledge management. If, however, you aren't so fortunate, you might want to read further.

In this political season (or as one of the presidential candidates called it, this "silly season"), there's a lot of talk about leadership. Unsurprisingly, much of that discussion is superficial. When you look back at some great leaders in this country, you realize that some of the talents they brought to the table are innate and simply cannot be purchased or developed. For example, George Washington was universally known as a great leader and, undoubtedly, that reputation was due to more than the mere fact that he was often the tallest man in the room. However, while having an imposing physical size was not sufficient, it certainly was helpful. Unfortunately, that's exactly the sort of asset that is hard to purchase or develop. A different kind of asset is the moral compass Abraham Lincoln had or the personal courage Theodore Roosevelt had. While they may have been flawed men in many ways, they also had enormous strengths that ultimately made a huge difference in how they led and what they accomplished for this country.

For the purposes of this discussion, however, it's useful to put Franklin Roosevelt front and center in your mind. The manner in which he led involved methods that can be developed in adult life. Furthermore, we are learning now that some of these methods are critical to good leadership in modern enterprises. Here are a few of these methods for your consideration:

How you deliver the message matters as much as the message itself

In day to day leadership, one of the most critical things you do is communicate what's important and how it is to be accomplished. What isn't always understood is that the way you communicate matters as much as (if not more, sometimes, than) the message itself. Looking back at FDR, he was very careful in his public appearances to project vitality, strength and optimism. But this was not just for show. Most of us, after all, have fairly good personal radar for detecting insincerity. Rather, he was able to project these things successfully because he believed them himself, truly embodied them, and had great faith in his overriding purpose.

Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq. reports on a study that compared the results of communicating a positive performance review accompanied by negative body language (e.g., frowns, narrowed eyes, flat voice, etc.) with communicating a negative performance review accompanied by positive body language (e.g., smiles, nods, good eye contact, open hand gestures, etc.) What the study found is striking: people who received positive reviews delivered with negative body language felt worse about their performance than people who received negative reviews delivered with positive body language. The latter felt encouraged and capable of making improvements. This study puts a premium on intentionality and clarity in leadership. You need to be sure that you are coherent and consistent in what you say AND how you say it.

Leadership is about more than achieving personal acclaim

By the time he became president, FDR had already been governor of a great state and had all the benefits of having grown up in one of the country's leading families. He really didn't need to burnish his résumé. Unfortunately, too many business "leaders" are in it for the glory and not as many have a cause truly worth fighting for. FDR had several Herculean tasks, including bringing the country out of the Great Depression and curtailing fascism. Are you working for anything more than your ego and your résumé?

Leadership means developing the best in others

One of the hallmarks of FDR's leadership was that he understood that historic times required historic efforts. To that end, he called on the people of the United States to give more than the they thought they could give and be more than they thought they could be. History tells us that they answered that call.

FDR clearly understood that at the end of the day, leadership is not about you, it's about the people you serve and lead. We now know that there are also some compelling business reasons for focusing on them rather than on yourself. An exhaustive study at Bell Laboratories followed the career trajectories of engineers in an attempt to identify the traits of star performers and determine how to recruit and retain the best engineers. In his paper, "Are We Selling Results or Résumés?: The Underexplored Linkage between Human Resource Strategies and Firm-Specific Capital," William D. Henderson reports that what they found was striking:

- researchers found no relationship between performance and various social, psychological, and cognitive abilities, such as I.Q
- higher productivity among knowledge workers was attributable to several distinctive work strategies that were teachable
- controlled experiments showed large and persistent productivity gains for engineers who completed the training program, with women and minority workers posting the largest increases [emphasis added]

What this suggests is that building a great team depends less on recruiting stars, and more on how you develop the people who work with you. A great leader will take the time and make the effort to ensure their team learns the "distinctive work strategies" for success that the researchers at Bell Labs found were "teachable."

In knowledge management, as in politics or any other discipline, good leadership is a rare asset. Those of us who have it will be ahead of the pack. The good news is that even members of that pack can develop some of the attributes of good leadership. And, when they do, we'll all be much better off.

Lipstick

We learned last night on prime time TV that the only difference between a "hockey mom" and a pit bull is ... lipstick.

Tenacity. Perseverance. Toughness. Fighting spirit. These are some of the characteristics typically associated with pit bulls. Of course, there's also meanness and deadliness, but since this blog is NOT about politics, we won't go there.

All of this talk of groups of people and animals got me thinking about the characteristics knowledge management experts share. We need the tenacity, perseverance, toughness and fighting spirit of pit bulls. But, equally, we need empathy, intuition, ingenuity and the ability to put others at ease as we encourage them to do things they would not otherwise do. So, to be effective at knowledge management, we need to be a cross between pit bulls and ... what?

Perhaps we should look to the patron saint of animals, St. Francis of Assisi. He was a troubadour and poet, a soldier, a teacher, an evangelist, a person capable of changing how others lived, the founder of a major institution, a person who accomplished great things despite poverty, someone who was completely attuned to his environment. We could do much worse.

Use Gender Advantage: Recruit Women

In an earlier post, Building a Great Knowledge Management Team, I discussed key factors in recruiting and retaining a KM team that consistently outperforms the competition. One of the cautions emerging from the study I cited was that it wasn't enough to simply recruit "stars" since many stars are incapable of reproducing their success in new work situations. One key reason for this is that their success is inextricably tied up with their support network at work. If they change jobs and don't bring their colleagues with them, these stars will have to recreate a comparable network in their new organization in order to replicate their earlier success. While it isn't impossible to design a new support network, it does take time. Unfortunately, time is a rare commodity.

The authors of the study I cited now offer a new strategy for managers who are determined to recruit stars in order to boost quickly the performace of their knowledge management team. According to Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda and Nitin Nohria, recruiting female stars can provide a distinct advantage:

Star women ... maintained their shine even after switching companies. Unlike their male peers, they thrived in new work environments. ... Analyzing the data further revealed that there are gender differences in how well stars do after they jump ship. In fact, the decline in performance was pronounced only for star men. Star women who switched firms exhibit no decline in performance.

Their explanation of why women retain their performance levels after changing firms is instructive:

Women tend to do better after a move for two reasons.

One is that they are more invested in external than in in-house relationships. There are four main reasons why star women maintain external focus: uneasy in-house relationships, poor mentorship, neglect by colleagues, and a vulnerable position in the labor market. External focus makes them more "portable" in terms of making a positive move, but can cause problems if they want to progress within their own organization, because you need a solid internal network and good political capital to get things done in organizations. Anyone who focuses mostly on external relationships will not have that.

The other reason is that women do far more due diligence when they receive a job offer than men do, because women need to ensure that the company is good for women and that they won't be treated as token females. In the process of due diligence, star women learn a lot of valuable information about the company that helps them make good strategic decisions. They scrutinize prospective employers on receptivity to women, managerial support, latitude and flexibility, and performance measurement. There's no downside to that strategy—it is one that men could benefit from just as well.

This suggests that if a manager is successful in recruiting a female star, that star is more likely to retain a high level of performance and more likely to stay. Viewed in these terms, recruiting male stars seems like a foolhardy exercise.

There's one other piece of advice for managers wrapped up in the advice the study's authors give male stars:

Don't let yourself be blinded by the money! A company that is willing to double your current salary, but will not invest in your long-term success, is not a good choice. Investigate a firm's management, its culture, its resources, the commitment it is willing to make to you. These are the things that will ultimately make you a star—and keep you one.

This advice makes it clear that a key to success for managers is to create an organizational culture that makes a commitment to invest in its employees and their success. With this commitment in place, it should be possible to create and retain a stellar knowledge management team.

Managing Social Media

One of my favorite 40-somethings told me yesterday that he had created a Facebook page for himself. Upon further questioning, I learned that the page actually had been created by the teenage summer intern working in his office. (Nonetheless, I gave the 40-something full credit for finding a low tech way of dealing with what for other Baby Boomers/Generation Xers can seem like an impossible barrier to entry to new technology.) When I asked why he decided to take the plunge, he told me that he felt he had to since the organization he led had an affinity group on Facebook and he, as CEO, needed to be there as well.

And then came the interesting part: he told me that he was going to keep it "strictly professional."

"What happens when a high school or college buddy finds you on Facebook and wants to friend you?" I asked. "I'll accept, of course, but they'll have to `friend' me in a `strictly professional' way," he responded. I was silent, but made a mental note to myself to check back in a few months to see if it actually worked the way he anticipated.

He then told me that the helpful teenage intern no longer had a Facebook page himself. When I asked why, I was told that the intern felt he had no choice when his mother "friended" him and the intern then realized that his mother would be able to see what he was up to with his other friends on Facebook.

Strangely, this gave me heart. Even Generation Y has a hard time managing the consequences of human action and connection with social media tools.

The Credible Alternative to Work

Sitting on my desk is a mug with the inscription: "Meetings -- The Credible Alternative to Work."

We've all had the experience of being trapped in a never-ending meeting that doesn't appear to be accomplishing anything useful. Meetings can be hijacked by poor preparation, inadequate leadership, reluctant participants and bad conference room food, among other things. It is possible to have productive meetings, but that requires meeting leaders and participants to change the way they interact in these sessions. On the theory that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, take a look at 5 Alternatives to Time-Wasting Meetings. In this post, Dustin Wax suggests the following ways to use technology to reduce the number of bad meetings:

- Instant Messaging
- Teleconferencing
- Wikis
- E-mail Lists/Groups
- Collaboration Apps

Admittedly, each of these tools has its own hazards. However, when used properly, these tools allow you to reserve face-to-face meetings for those rare occasions when it is important for everyone to be in the same room in order to make a decision. And, while you're waiting for those rare occasions to arise, perhaps you can put your new-found time to good use by teaching an old dog some new technology tricks.

Good Fences and Good Neighbors

Good fences make good neighbors. That's what Boomers were taught as children. But does that still hold true in a Web 2.0/Gen Y world where the public and the private seem to be constantly converging?

For example, at a recent meeting of law firm knowledge managers in New York City I asked how people were handling the public/private, professional/personal divide when it came to things like accepting and issuing invitations to LinkedIn. Some said that they accepted all invitations regardless of whether they came from an office colleague, a vendor or their Aunt Millie. Others said that they were confining LinkedIn to business colleagues who really didn't need to know about or be in touch with Aunt Millie.

Doug Cornelius has written about the difficulties of finding the dividing line between personal and professional contacts. (Nonetheless, through his enthusiastic adoption of social media, he seems to be advocating the benefits of fewer fences in order to share information across the various social media systems.) David Mullen, on the other hand, carefully maintains his professional contacts in LinkedIn and his personal contacts via Facebook. Taking this one step further, Paul Blunden's advice is direct and to the point: Don't mix friends, family and business contacts.

And then there is Twitter. Do you Twitter about your personal life, your professional life, both, neither? And, even if you try to maintain fences regarding your contacts, how do you feel about work colleagues seeing your beach photos on Flickr?

But there's more than just contacts, Twitter and Flickr -- there's the rest of your life. And, that's where things get even more complicated. In a post entitled 7 Things to Look Past When Managing Gen Y, Ryan Healy makes the point that for Gen Y there is no divide between the public and the private, the personal and the professional. In fact, you're given the impression that Gen Y actually doesn't see the utility in maintaining good fences between neighbors or between their various spheres of life. Here's what he has to say on this subject:

When you were an entry level worker, maybe you wouldn’t have dreamed of calling your girlfriend to say hello right after lunch or dialing up your mechanic to schedule a time to drop your car off for service. But work and life are no longer two distinct entities and this goes for both the office and at home.

Look past the fact that it’s not business for everyone all the time at the office. Because just as I have no problem making personal calls at the office, I also have no problem making a business call or sending an email during my “personal” hours in front of the TV. Life happens 24 hours a day and now, so does work. So look past the personal phone calls at the office and enjoy how your Gen Y worker will use the whole day to get those results you need for the business.

The implications of this "blended life" are not inconsequential. For example, most lawyers work under the rule of the billable hour. How on earth do you accurately track your billable time if you're drifting in and out of client work 24/7? Given how hard it is to track accurately the work done via Blackberry "after regular office hours," for example, why do we think we'll do a good job of starting the clock when we deal with a client matter or of stopping the clock when we deal with personal business when we no longer have a firm sense of business time and personal time?

So what's right? Fences or convergence? Or is the better question, which approach works best for you?

Unsociable Uses of Social Media

There's been lots of negative reaction here and elsewhere in the blogosphere to the notion of mandatory blogging. (See the comments from Patrick Lambe and Doug Cornelius to my earlier posts, Knowledge Management Made Easier and Knowledge Management Made Mandatory. Also see Doug's post, Making Blogging Mandatory for Knowledge Management.) And, I'm not without sympathy. Nonetheless, I feel strangely compelled to play devil's advocate a little longer.

We're already seeing the mandatory use of social media tools within enterprises. For example, project leaders have begun insisting that team members provide project status reports via a wiki. Members of their project team don't have a choice -- they have to use the wiki to record the pertinent information. Similarly, there have been determined efforts to replace most e-mail communication within a group by the mandatory use of a wiki.

This is the thin edge of the wedge. Social media provides useful tools and businesses are going to want to promote the use of these tools for the sake of efficiency within the organization. And, given the nature of bureaucracies within most organizations, if the social media tools are being used for mission critical purposes, that use will be mandatory rather than optional. This is where business use parts company with the extra-curricular use of social media tools.

While it would be lovely to have the use of these tools be perfectly voluntary, how do you get the level of participation you need to meet business goals? What if you're dealing with a mission critical matter? Are you willing to rely solely on the input of volunteers? What if the folks with the relevant information aren't inclined to participate?

Years ago, the Doonesbury cartoon strip portrayed President George H.W. Bush as an ineffectual invisible entity who had an active "evil twin" named Skippy. It may well be that the purely voluntary form of social media also has an "evil twin" (at least as far as social computing purists are concerned), and that twin is the particular form of social media deployed within enterprises. We may not like all the ways that businesses put these tools to work, but at least they are beginning to use the tools. And, if they get anxious enough about their investment in these tools they will make use of the tools mandatory. This is how it ever has been and ever will be.

There, I think I've nearly exhausted my compulsion to play devil's advocate on this topic.

So now, let me end by observing that when this conversation started heating up in the blogosphere, I was under the impression that my major crime was that I had unwittingly gored a sacred cow. What I seemed to be hearing at the outset was that while the mandatory use of wikis within an organization was acceptable, the mandatory use of blogs was not. This puzzled me. Was it just that bloggers were extra protective of their particular social media tool?

As the conversation evolved, however, it became clearer that the better basis for objecting was not the mandatory use of these tools per se, but rather the placement of these tools outside the regular work flow. (For an extremely helpful explanation of this concept, see Mark Gould's post, Going with the flow, and the accompanying comments.) So, to riff on Tim Leberecht's proposal, if blogs were used by a project team to capture written conversations among themselves on a specific theme in an organized fashion, most of the blogging naysayers should concede that this is an acceptable form of mandatory blogging because it is "in-the-flow." However, if blogs were used as diaries to be filled out at the end of each day, for example, this would be an unacceptable form of mandatory blogging because it is "above-the-flow" and is, therefore, an added burden that does violence to social computing principles.

For knowledge managers, the key is to deploy these tools initially so that they are in-the-flow. This should allow a rich repository of information to grow organically without any additional effort on the part of the knowledge workers. However, the contrarian in me says that there is still a place for social media tools above-the-flow. As Mark Gould observed, that's where users step back from their day-to-day tasks to reflect and codify what they have learned. With that reflection comes an even richer source of information that is so valuable within a KM system.

Social media nirvana is one where each of us is free to choose our respective level of engagement. That type of freedom rarely exists within any organized structures. Why did we think it would be different when social media entered the workplace?

Knowledge Management Made Mandatory?

In my earlier post, Knowledge Management Made Easier, I reported on Tim Leberecht's proposal that we use widespread blogging within organizations to make tacit knowledge explicit. I was very taken with the idea of providing everyone with an easy way to capture and share their learning, and even imagined, for a moment, what it would be like to have a vibrant organizational culture in which people felt comfortable with this level of transparency.

Since then, others have weighed in on this issue. Take, for example, Dave Snowden whose post, Oh When Will They Ever Learn, trenchantly argues that making blogging mandatory violates the very nature of social computing. For him, social computing is intended to make collaboration and sharing possible for those who wish to participate. Or, as he puts it:

Aside from the perpetuation of the myth of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion ..., the idea of compulsion flies in the face of all theory and practice in social computing. Its a classic; find something which is working, then ruin it by compulsion.

In a similar vein, Patrick Lambe's comment on my prior post directed me to the wisdom of Dr. David Vaine on the subject of Forced Corporate Blogging (a.k.a. "Flogging"). Dr. Vaine clearly does not believe that compulsory blogging is either useful or wise.

While I understand and sympathize with their objections, I'm mindful of another approach. For years, authors such as Julia Cameron have recommended that people who wish to increase their personal creativity engage in the practice of keeping a daily journal. While this isn't mandatory (in that there isn't any external enforcer), making a good faith attempt to meet the challenge actually does improve one's writing and expands creativity. I might say the same for those of us who try to blog regularly. The more we exercise the blogging muscle, the better we get and the more rewarding it is.

Although mandatory blogging may seem like a contradiction in terms or an exercise in futility for proponents of a purely voluntary system, it could also provide an opportunity to participate for people who wouldn't otherwise think of trying this. Given that businesses need access to the learning of all their employees (and not just those who choose to share), there might be merit in finding a middle path between the mandatory approach and the completely voluntary approach.

Is there a better way that achieves higher levels of participation reasonably quickly without doing violence to the nature of social computing? The answer to this question could transform your KM program and your organization.

Building a Great Knowledge Management Team

When hiring we sometimes focus too much on the individual, and not enough on how they will fit in with the existing staff. An extreme version of this is to hunt and low for a "star." Each us of may define "star" slightly differently depending on the context. For example, in the law firm context, a star may be a lawyer with a great book of portable business and a track record for attracting and keeping clients. What we don't often consider is what goes into making and supporting that star, and how many people that star depends on to achieve stardom.

Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge reports on a new study that demonstrates that while past performance may be a reasonable indicator of future performance, "the quality of colleagues in his or her organization also has a significant impact on the [star's] ability to maintain the highest quality output." In other words, hiring a star without the supporting team will greatly diminish your chances of replicating or exceeding past performance.

The study's authors, Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee, have some interesting things to say about knowledge workers:

Some have pointed out that the main difference between knowledge workers and, say, manual workers, is that knowledge workers own the means of production. That means they carry the knowledge, information, and skills in their heads and can take it with them. As the basis of competition shifts to superior knowledge and information, organizations have naturally become increasingly concerned that they attract, leverage, and retain the best knowledge workers.

In addition, our culture is very enamored of stars and with the idea that extraordinary talent accounts for individuals' extraordinary performance. The business media likes to treat star knowledge workers, such as top analysts, bankers, lawyers, and CEOs, as if they are star athletes. There is an assumption that these star knowledge workers, like star athletes, actually "own" everything they need to perform at the top level and can take that knowledge and skill anywhere. They are treated as free agents who can take their top performance to work for the highest bidder.

Our study [of financial analysts] debunks that myth. Star analysts rely a lot on the quality of the colleagues that their organization provides to sustain top performance. They cannot simply replicate their top performance in any organizational context.

Since knowledge managers are in many ways the ultimate knowledge workers, it's worth thinking about the implications of this study for hiring and keeping knowledge managers. It would appear that a focus on the credentials or track record of an individual is insufficient to ensure high quality performance. Having a law firm knowledge management team comprised only of graduates from Ivy League law schools, for example, is both unnecessary and possibly useless. What counts is building a well-integrated, properly supported team in which everyone works to their full capability and has the opportunity to perform like a star.

It's a relatively easy thing to eyeball a resume and check off the great educational institutions mentioned there or the world-class organizations that have employed the candidate you are considering for a new job. It's a much harder thing to assess the extent to which this candidate is a team player (which is a good thing) and needs the support of the right team to perform at a high level (which is much more challenging). And, it is an even harder thing to be able to assess honestly the extent to which your existing staff is (or can become) a strong team, able to work effectively with this candidate.

More than anything, this study underscores the vital role managers play in hiring and deploying the members of their staff.

For managers, it is imperative to understand that stars are not self-contained silos. Producing top-quality knowledge work requires collaboration and flows of information among a network of top performers. That means any one decision on hiring and retention can have a real impact on the performance of top employees in an entirely different part of the firm. It also means that it is not enough to have a few star performers here and there within the organization. If these stars lack high-quality support and information-sharing with other star colleagues, they will have a harder time maintaining their star performance.

Firms that already have a large stable of high-performing individuals might have built a competitive advantage. Their stars make it more likely for each other to sustain top performance. Firms that lack this advantage fight an uphill battle. They can hire or cultivate stars. But if there are only a few stars, these individuals will tend to have a tougher time sustaining top performance.

What does your knowledge management staff look like? A group of under-engaged disaffected individuals? A collection of motivated but unsupported stars? A team of diverse people that consistently produces high quality work product? The secret of success in this is in how you manage and support the team, not how many stars you hire.

Working with the Smartest Lawyers in the World

Where do the smartest lawyers in the world work?  If Seth Godin is to be believed, each law firm knowledge manager could say "the smartest lawyers in the world work at my firm."  In his post, All customers are smarter than average, he reports that people regularly rate themselves as "less racist than average, smarter than average, more generous than average."  He goes further and posits that if asked, each company's customers would consider themselves "righter than average."

Even if you believe that the reports he cites are just another instance of "lies, damned lies and statistics," how do you respond to the information that the folks you work with consider themselves smarter than the average bear?  What if they compound their enviable omniscience with a claim to being more infallible than everyone else -- including you?  If this is how humans behave time and time again, then you'd be crazy to take at face value internal surveys in which the users of your knowledge management system self-report on their abilities and expectations.  After all, it appears that either we don't know ourselves very well or we're not willing to let anyone else know that there may be some foundation to our insecurities.  In light of these human tendencies, a knowledge manager would be wise to seek more objective confirmation of the self-reporting.  For example, reviewing search queries can tell you a lot about what people are looking for and how good they are at searching.  Reviewing help desk requests lets you know when and where users find themselves in trouble.  Similarly, usage metrics can tell you whether lawyers actually are trying to use your KM system and which content items seem to be used the most.  

These human tendencies of self-delusion can also have an impact on how we plan new knowledge management tools.  For example, if we take at face value what we're told about the lawyers in our firm being smarter than the average lawyer, then we might make the mistake of creating a system that requires a user with greater technical facility (or tolerance) than the average user.  And, given that those lawyers (like most customers) think they are "righter than average," any advice you get from them regarding how a KM system should operate would need to be cross-checked before using that guidance in your planning and implementation.  Finally, given what we are learning about the unreliability of self-reporting, we'd be wise not to fall into the trap of getting so caught up in planning the perfect knowledge management system in terms of user functionality that we forget to bake into that proposed system objective means of monitoring the actual (as opposed to reported) use and usefulness of the system.  

But as I write this, I can hear each of you saying to yourselves, "Of course, all of her comments apply to her firm and not mine -- since the smartest lawyers in the world really do work at my firm!"

Finding Effective Incentives for Collaboration and Contribution of Content

What can law firm knowledge management learn from the war on terror?

Fred Burton, former deputy chief of the counterterrorism division of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and author of Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, told Leonard Lopate in a recent public radio interview that counterterrorism experts have a proven set of tools for convincing an informant to collaborate with the US authorities. They use mice.

MICE????

M: Money
I: Ideology
C: Compromise
E: Ego

Their experience has shown that one or more of money, ideology, compromise and ego will be sufficient incentive to cause an enemy informant to become a double agent in service to the US.

So how might we use MICE to assist law firm knowledge management? Perhaps as incentives for collaboration and contribution of content. Let's start with Money. Some firms have offered outright monetary awards or something similar (e.g., Starbucks cards or gift certificates from other vendors) to induce lawyers to participate in their firm's knowledge management effort. At one point or another, almost every firm relies on Ego to prod a lawyer into sharing valuable content. As for Ideology, we see this in the law firm context as an individual lawyer's belief that contributing and collaborating are the right thing to do -- that lawyers have a professional responsibility to participate and invest in the institutional knowledge of the firm. Ideology also shows up in the guise of firm culture. It's a little harder to find a law firm analog for Compromise, but undoubtedly a little further thought would reveal it.

Of these various incentives, I find that Ego and Ideology are the most effective in law firms. In busy times and in economic slowdowns, it's the lawyers that believe in contributing and collaborating who always find the time to participate in knowledge management initiatives. It takes very little effort on the part of knowledge managers to involve them. Similarly, Ego is a constant. The folks motivated by their ego needs to participate will do so regardless of the business cycle because they get enormous psychic satisfaction from having their names and work product prominently displayed. As for monetary awards, they might spur a little short-term participation, but I doubt they actually lead to long-term collaboration and contribution. (For an earlier discussion of incentives, see Chocolates and Roses.)

Whether dealing with enemy informants or busy lawyers, there are some incentives that have been proven to be effective with all human beings. Perhaps it's time to put some MICE to work in your knowledge management system.

Gen Y's Delayed Impact on Big Law

My post last week on Generation Y versus Big Law and its impact on law firm knowledge management generated a great deal of traffic and some interesting discussion.  Among the commentators was Anna Ivey, who is an expert in law school admissions.  In her post Gen Y, Meet Big Law, she suggested that Gen Y will not have a revolutionary impact on Big Law, at least not initially, because the lure of large salaries (and the reality of mountains of educational debt) will cause them to refrain from making demands that result in material changes in the way Big Law does business.

I agree that Gen Y most likely will not have an immediate impact on big law firms, but my reasons are a little different.  While there are shared tendencies that characterize a particular generation, each generation undoubtedly has within it a reasonably wide range of personalities and experience.  Within that range, there will be people in Generation Y who are bit more like their Gen X and Boomer predecessors and others that are on the extreme far side of Gen Y behavior.  I'd be willing to bet that law firms will tend to recruit from the quasi-Gen X/Boomer end of the range rather than the extreme Gen Y end of the range.  As long as this recruitment is successful, we shouldn't expect to see many meaningful changes in the way law firms are managed or law firm knowledge management is carried out.  However, once that pool of potential lawyers runs dry, things will get interesting.  Big Law is built on the assumptions of the fungibility and high attrition of associates.  If there are not enough Gen X/Boomer types to feed the Big Law recruiting beast, then the beast will have to adjust its diet.   Along with that adjustment in diet will come changes in how law firms are managed as they struggle to accommodate (finally) Gen Y.  

With respect to law firm knowledge management, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for all those cool web 2.0 tools to be adopted by firms merely on the threat of an influx of Gen Y lawyers.  Remember, we've been trying to sell that line to Boomer and Gen X managers, who are basically unsympathetic to the Gen Y perspective on life.  There is, however, a silver lining to this dark cloud.  As increasing numbers of Gen Y lawyers enter firms, they will be able to demonstrate in a more compelling way what we Boomer and Gen X knowledge managers have been trying to explain:  namely, that they live, work, socialize, dream and problem-solve using social media.  Therefore, if they are to be productive within law firms, it would be more efficient to give them the social media tools they already know and love rather than demanding that they use our tools (which must seem like quill pens to them).  The reason that the Gen Y lawyers will be more successful in championing web 2.0 is that their claims are more authentic.  They actually use the stuff.  By contrast, relatively few Gen X or Boomer lawyers or law firm managers are even familiar with the benefits of social media.  Therefore, most of our arguments are based on hearsay, hype and fear of the impending threat of Gen Y, rather than a belief (grounded in deep experience) in the practical merits of social media.

So, instead of building web 2.0 castles in the air, what should law firm knowledge managers focus on until there is a critical mass of Gen Y lawyers within their firms willing to fight for social media?

The Key to an Effective Knowledge Management System

Is the key to an effective knowledge management system a "non-optional mindset"? This is an attitude that says that a certain activity (e.g., contributing content or collaborating) is a necessity and must be done. It cannot be avoided, evaded, delayed or ignored.  Therefore, it takes precedence over all optional activities.

In his provocative post, How to Create a Non-Optional Mindset, Craig Harper discusses why most people would never think about skipping their daily shower, but will think about skipping a daily workout. For him, it is simply because these folks have decided for themselves that showering is an absolute necessity, but that a workout is optional. And they come to this decision despite all the research and advice that clearly demonstrate that regular exercise is critical for good health!

Turning back to knowledge management, there is lots of evidence about the usefulness of knowledge management activities such as creating, contributing or capturing content; organizing and distributing content; facilitating collaboration, etc. In fact, some have argued that success in these activities is critical to the ongoing health of most organizations. Yet, KM often is treated like daily exercise -- an optional activity.

One way to change this approach is to work on an individual basis to convert each lawyer in a law firm to the personal belief that their participation in law firm knowledge management is non-optional. But this is an undertaking that requires years of effort and, given the rate of attrition from most big law firms, may ultimately be doomed to failure. Another approach is to have management mandate that participation in KM is non-optional. But, as long as there is non-optional client billable work to do, will management ever make KM non-optional? An intermediate approach is to find cohesive, disciplined practice groups within your firm and have them make a commitment to mandatory knowledge management.

Is there a better way to achieve an non-optional mindset with respect to knowledge management? While you're thinking about that, I'm going to the gym.