Forget Gen Y! Focus on the Disappearing Boomers.

While we've been whipping ourselves into a frenzy over the possible (but as of yet undefined) impact of Generation Y on our comfortable ways of doing things, we've been disregarding the real crisis occurring right under our noses.  Valuable knowledge is walking out the door with every retiring baby boomer.  

Dr. Jay Liebowitz has been examining what he calls this "human capital crisis" and his findings are sobering.  He defines human capital as the knowledge, experience and judgment accumulated over a lifetime of work.  In his 2003 book, Addressing the Human Capital Crisis in the Federal Government, he noted that by 2008 over 50% of all federal civil servants would be eligible for retirement and of that group, 71% are senior executives.  Their retirement represents a huge loss of human capital.

Liebowitz points to several strategies for stemming (or at least slowing) the rate of loss.  Key among these are knowledge management programs that intentionally seek to ensure the effective capture of the knowledge these retirees have accumulated during their work lives.  It's the only sure means of transferring mission critical knowledge between generations.

If you're still not convinced, think about the combined impact on your business of disappearing boomers and under-engaged (or otherwise engaged) Gen Y new employees and you'll begin to see the scope of the problem.  We're facing rapid knowledge loss combined with a slower rate of knowledge creation.  All of this adds up to a manager's nightmare.  

For the knowledge manager, the answers to the human capital crisis are fairly straightforward:

1.  Capture the expertise of retirees and distill it into "knowledge nuggets" that can be stored and then quickly retrieved for on demand training.  

2.  Ensure that the format of these nuggets is both video and text so that you cater to the preferences of the Gen X and Gen Y users who will have to put that knowledge into action.  

3.  Move as quickly as you can to accomplish 1 and 2.  This is a race against the clock, as exhausted Boomers gleefully count the days until they can waltz out the door clutching their gold watches.  

While it might be fun to think about the havoc that could be wrought on your workplace  by incoming counter-cultural Gen Y employees, don't lose sight of the fact that a far bigger disruption will occur if we let baby boomers slip out of our organizations without first ensuring that their intellectual capital is available for the next generation of managers.  Here (finally) is an urgent, mission critical business case for knowledge management.  Make good use of it!

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!"

Enterprise 2.0 Meets Reality

Doug Cornelius is one of the lucky ones who is attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  Luckily for the rest of us, Doug has been liveblogging from the conference.  Yesterday Doug reported on a panel focused on how and why the grand vision of Enterprise 2.0 hasn't taken hold in corporate America.  In his post Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check, Doug records some of the responses to the following question:  Why has Enterprise 2.0 not taken over your organization? Panelists from a wide-range of organizations (e.g., the CIA, Pfizer, SONY, Wachovia) all pointed to the same challenge:  It's the people in an organization that have been slowing down adoption of Enterprise 2.0.   Some of the issues are generational, some of the issues are about fear and control.  One panelist conceded that while there may be web 2.0 success (and hype) in the leisure/consumer space, that hasn't translated easily into the work space.  Apparently, we're prepared to live more transparently and collaboratively outside the office than inside the office.

In many ways, the challenges faced by Enterprise 2.0 are frighteningly similar to the challenges we've been facing for years in knowledge management.  And, if one of the panelists is to be believed, those challenges pale in comparison to the challenges faced by those of us brave enough to tackle law firm knowledge management.  According to this panelist, working with lawyers is "not a collaborative experience."

So, as I said in my very first post, it isn't enough to merely implement technology.  In some ways, that's the easy part and won't ensure success in your knowledge management or Enterprise 2.0 effort.  Much harder is the part that goes "above and beyond" technology.  It's when you have the whole-hearted support of your colleagues at work that knowledge management takes off.  Until they vote with their feet (and their mice), it doesn't really matter.  That's the reality facing knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0.

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.

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.

E-Mail Triage

I used the telephone the other day.

Of course, using the phone isn't exactly a radical thing to do, except that my reason for using the phone was important:  I picked up the phone to short-circuit an e-mail mess.  What was the e-mail mess?  My colleague and I were e-mailing each other to make some practical arrangements, however, our e-mails seemed to be out of sync.  Perhaps it started with one of us not reading and understanding the original note in its entirety because we were skimming it quickly on our blackberry.  This led to a number of e-mails back and forth, trying to explain the original message and trying to correct misunderstandings.  Finally, as I was about to push the send button on yet another explanatory message, I realized that we were "talking past each other" and needed to find a way to ensure we actually connected and finalized the arrangements.  So I picked up the telephone.  

It took all of two minutes to sort out the mess and confirm the arrangements by telephone.  You do the math:  two telephone minutes versus the time required to read and write five (or more) frustrating e-mails.

E-mail is the primary mode of communication within most businesses, including law firms.  Yet, despite all the practice we get, few of us have really mastered e-mail.  It's a rare person who uses e-mail appropriately and efficiently.  And it's a rarer person who can write an e-mail message that is a model of clarity despite the fact that e-mail cannot convey with any degree of precision the affect most of us rely on in personal interchanges to communicate and interpret the emotional content of a message.

For those of us who would like to brush up on our e-mail communication skills, here are some tips from Seth Godin's E-Mail Checklist that are worth reading and implementing.  They may not provide a complete answer to e-mail triage, but they will make a difference.

Serenity and the Knowledge Manager

Around the time of WWII, US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a prayer that has become known as the "Serenity Prayer":

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

According to the Wikipedia article on this prayer, it became widely known after it was circulated by the World Council of Churches, the US armed forces and various Twelve-Step programs, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous.

It might be wise to post this prayer in the office of every knowledge manager. Given the constant struggles with technology, the glacial rate of change in user behavior, and the concentrated long-term effort required to achieve even a small modification in organizational culture, it is a challenge to attain serenity. Much of the problem lies in the fact that there are limited areas in which knowledge managers are given a free hand and actually have the ability to affect the organization in a meaningful way. In the quest for relevance and serenity, perhaps our task is to be very clear-eyed about where our efforts can really make a difference and then apply ourselves accordingly. Not every interesting project is worth doing.

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?

Collaboration and Equity

In his recent discussion of Charles Heckscher's book, The Collaborative Enterprise, Larry Prusak notes that while collaboration may be the latest buzzword (with all the attendant shallow writing and commentary that regularly accompanies business fads), Hecksher's book is a material improvement over most of the other available analysis of collaboration. One striking observation is reported by Prusak in the following way:

[Heckscher] knows well that collaboration depends on trust, and trust depends on a sense of shared equity within the organization. In situations of gross disparities of power and compensation how can one expect collaboration? The real class conflict that exists within most organizations strongly inhibits real collaboration.

These notions of "shared equity" and the perils of "class conflict" raise some interesting issues for law firms, which tend to be highly hierarchical and often lack a sense of shared equity between the partners and their employees (including associates and the non-lawyer staff). If Prusak and Heckscher are correct, will it ever be possible for law firms to develop a true culture of collaboration?