Law Firm KM Reality Check

It's hard not to feel a little hung over after a weekend binge that included Hurricane Ike, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the potential restructuring of AIG. As we return to our offices this morning and our safe debates about taxonomy and technology, web 1.0 vs web 2.0, mandatory participation in knowledge management efforts vs incentives for voluntary KM participation, it's a good time to remember why we do what we do: to ensure that the right information is in the right hands at the right time so that decision makers can make better decisions. After the past weekend's binge, it's hard not to wonder about the quality of decision making that preceded the debacle. It may be years before we learn (if we ever do) whether any of these firms or the government agencies involved (i.e., the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department) had viable knowledge management programs and what impact those programs had.

Law firms aren't immune from the hubris that seems to affect the financial sector and we certainly suffer the effects of the decisions made on Wall Street. In light of that reality, we should take a second look at our law firm knowledge management programs. To the extent we even can "manage knowledge," are we working with the right knowledge? Do the decision makers actually use our resources? If the answers to either of those questions is no, then you need to ask why. In times of turmoil, it's more important than ever to be relevant. If knowledge management isn't in the thick of things and making a difference, then why are we doing what we're doing?

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.

9/11 and Knowledge Management

It's cloudy today here in New York City. Even though the sky is not the bright, sparkling, optimistic blue it was early in the morning of September 11, 2001, there are plenty of other reminders of the events of that day.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we learned that the government in fact had much of the information that it needed to be aware of and counteract the 9/11 plot. However, some of that information was located in silos and protected by departmental rivalries. According to the 9/11 Commission's Report:

The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities.
...
The missed opportunities to thwart the 9/ 11 plot were also symptoms of a broader inability to adapt the way government manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. Action officers should have been able to draw on all available knowledge about al Qaeda in the government. Management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide. ... The U. S. government did not find a way of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the planning and assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving entities as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the agencies involved in homeland security.

If there was ever an instance in which knowledge sharing and collaboration could have made a difference, that's the one.

If we are fortunate, we'll never again have to face so grave a test of our government's knowledge management capabilities. If we are wise, we'll take the lessons to heart and do something to increase the culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing within the government and within our own enterprises.

Since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, some have spent time thinking about how to improve knowledge sharing and thereby improve our ability to respond to disasters and emergencies. David Bray, a doctoral candidate at Emory's business school, is one such person. On 9/11, he was the information technology chief for Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In that role, he saw first-hand the KM failures within the government. This experience deeply informs his research. Here is a glimpse at what he is studying, as reported in Knowledge @ Emory:

“I saw several instances where this workforce of 1.2 million government workers, not counting contractors—which is probably another 800,000—had significant disconnects. In fact that’s what the 9/11 report specifically comes out as saying: the United States did not connect the dots across multiple agencies,” explains Bray, currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “There were times with our program where we knew something at the trench level, tried to pass it up the hierarchy, but unfortunately it never got anywhere. Events like Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, anthrax, occur in part because organizational structures in which we trust, particularly for government—but also for most large businesses—aren’t built to respond quickly to turbulent environments,” contends Bray. “And now, in part because of globalization and also because of technology, things can change so quickly half a world away.”

In his paper “Exploration and Exploitation: Managing Knowledge in Turbulent Environments,” Bray, along with Goizueta co-author Michael J. Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management who also researches responses to disasters, develop a theoretical model about knowledge management in organizational hierarchies. Bray extends an existing model of exploration and exploitation to consider the context of multi-tier hierarchical firms faced with environmental turbulence, and then considers whether a knowledge management system that enhances knowledge exchanges across the organization alters the ability of the organization to match the conditions of a turbulent environment. Bray’s model considers different management approaches, such as a bottom-up cultivation strategy or a top-down command-and-control strategy.

“We wanted to explore whether having a top-down or bottom-up strategy would help or hurt organizational hierarchies when faced with environmental turbulence” says Bray. “We specifically were testing the idea that while top-down hierarchies may be great at command and control and maintaining internal control and reality, they’re bad at addressing a changing outside environment; a change in the marketplace, a change in competition, or an emerging national security threat.”

Bray’s research finds strong evidence that top-down hierarchies that stress command and control are ineffective in managing knowledge in turbulent environments because they decrease a hierarchical organization’s ability to maintain accuracy with its outside environment. [Emphasis added]

The work of David Bray and Michael Prietula suggests that bottom-up collaboration and knowledge sharing is the most effective way of keeping knowledge silos and human rivalries from hoarding critical information in times of change. And, because of the culture of collaboration, this sharing allows us to make better decisions and respond more effectively to the unexpected.

On the anniversary of September 11, 2001, it's good to know that we've actually learned something and are headed, albeit slowly and fitfully, in the right direction.

When KM is Supported by the Top Brass

Most knowledge management treatises and guides will tell you that it is hard to carry out an enterprise wide knowledge management program without the full support of senior management. Unfortunately, within a lot of enterprises the members of senior management are sometimes those least likely to understand or use a KM system. Therefore, their support can be theoretical and that gets communicated to the rank and file as a lukewarm endorsement. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess how the rank and file react to a mandate from above that doesn't seem to have any teeth.

With respect to law firm knowledge management the problem is widespread. The senior partners or administrative partners will certainly understand on paper the potential benefits of a knowledge management program. They may even remember back to the days when they were junior associates facing a new assignment without models or practice guides. However, they've come a long way since then and have platoons of associates under them who deal with those issues firsthand. And, with that distance comes a loss of urgency to pursue knowledge management.

Another problem that arises in law firm knowledge management occurs when senior lawyers have acted on their natural tendencies to create order out of chaos and have developed personal knowledge management systems that increase their own efficiency. Even when presented with a reasonably-effective firm wide knowledge management system, they are often reluctant to give up their own tried and true approach.

Finally, there's the culture of most law firms: an aggregation of people who are fiercely autonomous and largely introverted; people who wish to practice law, but don't always want the bother of running an efficient business. These folks cherish their independence and only grudgingly submit to community edicts and systems. It's hard to sell KM systems to these lawyers until you've answered adequately their fundamental question: what's in it for me?

I'm still working on effective solutions to all of these problems, but found it instructive to look at a case in which the "top brass" truly supports the KM program. The top brass I have in mind are senior managers in the US Army. In his article, Army Retools Knowledge Culture, Brian Robinson reports that the Army has taken a decisive move away from its 2001 position of focusing its knowledge management efforts on information technology. They have now decided they need to broaden their focus to encompass people and culture, process, and technology -- in that order. Further, they are taking the radical step of moving away from a culture that fiercely protects the security of information to a culture that emphasizes openness and information sharing:

The culture has historically protected information closely and released it on a must-know basis. Now, Army managers need to learn to see broad information sharing as a natural military skill.

“It’s all about increasing collaboration, and that has huge implications for warfighters,” said Bob Neilson, knowledge management adviser to the Army’s chief information officer. “It’s about not only sharing information but having the responsibility to provide knowledge across the enterprise.”

The 2008 knowledge management principles adopt the move to collaboration that is increasingly prevalent in society:

The creation of a collaborative culture is embedded throughout the list of 12 principles and was the major rationale for the expanded approach to knowledge management that Army Secretary Pete Geren and Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey offered in a memo they sent in July introducing the principles.

They firmly embrace an Army enterprise perspective, they wrote, and “will create an Army where good ideas are valued regardless of the source, the existing knowledge base is accessible without technological or structural barriers, and knowledge sharing is recognized and rewarded.”

All in all, this Army initiative contains a great deal that civilians could learn from and follow. Pay particular attention to the 12 principles articulated in their policy. They would be as apt in a law firm or any other enterprise. The only catch is that in the Army, senior management really appears to understand and endorse effective knowledge management. And, when the top brass speaks in the Army everyone listens. Those are benefits not all of us can claim.

Do You Have What it Takes to Collaborate?

Basic web 2.0 allows us transparency, a window into another's life. Multiplied over many people, web 2.0 helps them connect with each other and strengthen an existing or emerging social network. Providing these connections is helpful, but it isn't collaboration. True collaboration is more than just getting along. It's working together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, in this world of competitive achievers, it's hard to find someone who really knows how to collaborate.

Like many other things, collaboration is an orientation as well as a set of skills. Deciding to be more intentional about collaborating is a good first step, but it takes more than that. According to Shawn Callahan at Anecdote, there are seven critical personal skills necessary for effective collaboration:

1. "How to apologise
2. How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator's feelings
3. How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue
4. How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator
5. How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action
6. How to tell and elicit stories
7. How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration"

Based on this list, collaboration requires more than mere technical knowledge. It requires drawing on sometimes dormant interpersonal relationship skills -- listening, empathy, consideration, etc. These are skills that have been undervalued within businesses for far too long.

So take a close look at this list of necessary skills and then take a closer look at yourself. Do you have what it takes to collaborate?

[My thanks to John Tropea's Delicious links for alerting me to Shawn's blogpost.]

So You Think You Should "Command and Control"?

For too many years, law firm knowledge management has focused on centralized efforts to capture and disseminate "knowledge." Under this approach, knowledge is a thing, an object that must be found and corralled. And once you've found and organized all those knowledge things, you then tackle the daunting task of wresting tacit knowledge out of the heads of your colleagues and into your databases.

David Jabbari at Allen & Overy describes this effort in the following way in a recent issue of Law Practice Today:

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

That's the job too many law firms have assigned to their knowledge management team. If you're a practice support lawyer (PSL) in such a firm, how's it working for you? David Jabbari describes this approach as "command and control":

"The command and control approach to law firm KM focuses on the systems and management structures needed to capture and publish knowledge. In this approach, knowledge is often created in a very centralized way, using techniques such as commissioning, or forming ‘project groups’, and then publishing the output in centralized content stores. The fact that no more than 25 per cent of material stored in databases is ever accessed does not seem to deter people from thinking that placing material in a central store constitutes a success of some type."

It sounds like a futile exercise, yet it is standard operating procedure in far too many law firms. In fact, there are regular conversations among many PSLs I know about the difficulties inherent in creating or finding materials for centralized databases, or the struggle involved in getting client-facing lawyers to take the time to create, review or share useful materials for the KM system. For these PSLs and for their law firms, success is measured by the number of documents created and centrally stored. The metrics give a comforting sense of doing something, but don't establish definitively that they are doing something useful.

With the emergence of web 2.0 and social computing, many of us have come to understand both the power of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing, as well as the ultimate futility of trying to capture the explicit and tacit knowledge within the firm. David Jabbari suggests that this move from control to collaboration allows us to focus on more productive goals:

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

Allen & Overy is enjoying tremendous success pursuing collaboration rather than control. How does your firm compare?

[Thanks to Mohamed Amine Chatti for pointing out this article.]

True Leaders Value Mistakes

It's a natural human tendency to run from failure. In our understandable need to avoid pain, we try to put it behind us and move on. (The more cynical would say, we sweep it under the carpet, shrug, and move on.) While I'd be the last one to recommend that we should wallow in misery, it is useful to remember from time to time that the main point of experience is to learn and grow. And, it is hard to learn and grow without a little reflection and analysis. Reflecting on your successes may give your ego a brief boost, but that in and of itself doesn't always equip you for the next challenge. Reflecting on your mistakes can, if you're careful about how you uncover, analyze and handle the information.

Nancy White at Full Circle Associates makes this point in her post, Learning from our mistakes, in which she reports on the remarkable after action review undertaken at Amazon after an embarrassing technical failure. What comes through her report is the integrity and decency inherent in the way Amazon handled what could have been an opportunity for upset, abuse and unhappiness in the hands of less skillful managers and a less mature organization. Their object wasn't to find fault, but to learn. As Nancy White observes:

"Pulling our mistakes out and looking with them, alone and with the aid of colleagues, is a simple and effective learning practice. But it takes both a personal commitment to productively looking at our warts (rather than simple self-flagellation or guilt) and an organizational culture that values learning along with success. And we all know it… we learn more from our failures than our successes."

I can't stress enough the importance of leadership in this exercise. Every child knows how to deflect blame and finger point. That isn't an effective after action review. That's an exercise in avoiding responsibility. In Amazon's case, the participants appear to have assumed responsibility and then taken the next vital step: they understood that this responsibility required them to learn from the event sufficiently to avoid repeating their mistakes. Very few of us do this without the right leadership. I don't know who at Amazon led this effort, but I do commend them.

Leaders help us rise above our natural tendencies and move us along the path to doing the right thing for ourselves and for our organizations. However, this isn't a isolated action. Well before the mistake occurs, a good leader will have put in place an organizational culture that emphasizes the importance of innovating, going out of our comfort zone, and taking reasonable risks. Above all, a good leader understands that innovation inevitably involves mistakes. A great leader knows how to use those mistakes to yield the maximum advantage (in terms of lessons learned and growth) for their team and their enterprise.

When you're dealing with an organization that faces liability if it doesn't reach the right result every time in a predictable, controlled fashion, mistakes take on an even greater importance. Consequently, there can be a tendency to sacrifice innovation and growth for predictability and control. In that environment, mistakes are barely tolerated and rarely encouraged. The problem is that an organization without mistakes is an organization without innovation and growth.

In our drive to avoid mistakes, we don't always spend enough time learning how to react to mistakes in a manner that is productive. Therefore, when we do respond, it is often in an ad hoc way that doesn't take advantage of the tremendous opportunity for growth presented by mistakes. The good news is that response patterns to mistakes are learned responses and can be improved -- provided participants know they won't become scapegoats or pariahs. Looking to cases like the Amazon after action review can provide some guidance on a better way to learn from mistakes, grow, and achieve greater success.

You Haven't Missed the Train -- Yet

With all the flurry in the blogosphere and blawgosphere about web 2.0 and social media tools, it's easy to believe that you are the last Luddite left standing without a Facebook friend, LinkedIn connection or personal blog. Fear not -- you have lots of company. According to a recent global survey by Synovate, 58% of the population is clueless about social networking. Steve Garton, Synovate's global head of media research reports:

"We spoke with over 13,000 respondents aged 18-65 years in 17 markets around the world to find out who's connected and who's not, as well as attitudes and online behaviours. Some of what we found surprised us... like more than a third of social networkers say they are losing interest in social media. And how many people do not even know what it is."

That said, if they had interviewed only 18-35 year olds, they would have seen a different picture. However, the demographic they covered reflects the demographic in many enterprises and should not be ignored.

Interestingly, there also appear to be geographical differences in awareness of social networking:

"The Dutch were most likely to know the term with 89% answering 'yes', followed by Japan at 71% and Americans with 70% answering in the affirmative. Still, that leaves three in every ten Americans (the home of social networking) outside the world of digital friends and relationships."

...

"Overall, 26% across the markets surveyed are members of social networking sites. This peaked with the Netherlands at 49%, United Arab Emirates (UAE) at 46%, Canada at 44% and the US at 40% (though keep in mind that's 40% of a huge population)."

This suggests that a social networking strategy within a firm may have more success if targeted at workers within specific countries. Clearly one size does not fit all.

In the context of law firm knowledge management, it's time we stopped complaining about how hard it is to convince lawyers to use social media tools. We shouldn't be surprised at how slowly social media tools are being adopted within our firms since the data provided by Synovate appear to indicate that the rate of adoption outside the enterprise is not as broad and high as the hype in the popular press would suggest.

The good news is that you can stop hyperventilating. There is still time to implement a social media program at your firm without falling hopelessly behind your competitors. And, it is worth the effort to do so. These tools are a rich resource for law firms willing to use them creatively. But don't dally unnecessarily. While the social networking train has not left the station yet, it's only a matter of time.

[Thanks to HeadShift for the link to the Synovate survey report.]

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.

Why Worry About Law Firm KM ROI?

From time to time, law firm knowledge management junkies twist themselves into knots trying to determine the best way of calculating the return on investment (ROI) of knowledge management efforts. I'm as guilty as the rest for engaging in this exercise. A few have suggested that thinking about ROI is not helpful to KM since knowledge management done properly should create client work product more efficiently, thereby reducing the number of billable hours required and the size of the bill presented to the client. For these folks, that's reason enough not to talk too loudly about ROI.

Jordan Furlong has a better approach. In his post, Never mind the billables, he points out that we shouldn't be conflating the cost to the client with the cost to the firm. The client will pay what the client is willing to pay. Therefore, the best way for the firm to protect itself is to reduce its own cost. Then, as the client imposes more constraints on the amount the law firm may charge, the firm can maintain or increase its profit margin by carefully containing its own costs. This is where knowledge management can help. Here's how he describes this:

Every time you reduce your costs, you create an equivalent opportunity in your profit column, because the amount you spend to render a service to your clients has no effect on the value of that service to the client. (It never has.) Your client doesn’t care how much profit you make for yourself; the client only cares that you delivered excellent value in a cost-effective (to the client) manner. How you bill your services is between you and your client; how much it costs you to deliver those services has to be your number-one business priority.

So let's take another look at knowledge management ROI in this context. Granted, for firms that can't think beyond the billable hour, this may seem premature. But for firms with foresight, separating (at least for planning purposes) client cost from firm cost should help open a competitive advantage.