Above and Beyond KM

How much does your firm value knowledge?  It’s not a complicated question, but the answer can be illuminating.  The extent to which your firm values knowledge should be reflected in a proportionate investment in knowledge creation, capture and reuse.  The extent to which the firm understands the economic benefits of knowledge should be reflected in its organization and business processes.

In the hype about web 2.0 and social networking, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all you needed to do was purchase the perfect silver bullet (i.e., whatever technology the vendor of the day is hawking) and your organization would be transformed into a hip, reflexively-collaborative, effortless knowledge sharing, 21st century knowledge management heaven.

But what if your organization happens to be a law firm???

In Neil Jordan’s 1992 film, The Crying Game, we hear the story about the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion wished to cross the stream, but had no obvious means of doing so himself. So he asked the frog if the frog would swim across the stream, carrying the scorpion on his back. The very pragmatic frog declined because he couldn’t be sure that the scorpion would not sting him. When the scorpion reasonably pointed out that to sting the frog was to risk the death by drowning of both the frog and the scorpion on his back, the frog relented and agreed to carry the scorpion across the stream. Just before they reached the other side of the stream, the frog felt a sharp pain and realized the scorpion had stung him. When the frog asked the scorpion why he had behaved so badly when they both knew that the scorpion’s action would cause the two of them to drown, the scorpion replied, “I can’t help it, it’s in my nature.”

Is it in the nature of lawyers to be collaborative? By collaborative, I mean more than simply working with others to get a job done. By collaborative, I mean a mindset or tendency that favors sharing intellectual resources with others over individual hoarding, that understands that the work of a group can be so much more powerful than the work of an individual, that prefers to work through problems with others in the belief that this process leads to better solutions. Does this sound like many lawyers you know?

Ronda Muir, a senior consultant with Robin Rolfe Resources, specializes in “the organizational and personal dynamics issues that are unique to law firms and law departments.” In her article, The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers, she discusses the personal style, personality attributes, emotional intelligence and conflict resolution strategies of lawyers, as revealed by psychological testing. These results bear consideration in the context of knowledge management.

Among her findings are the following:

* The psychological profile of lawyers is “strikingly different” from that of the general US population.

* While over 70% of the US population are Extraverts, the majority of lawyers are Introverts, according to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. This means that lawyers prefer to work things out for themselves rather than to work through things with others. Further, since people tend to distrust those with a different personality style, “Extraverts tend to be suspicious of people who are not as instantly forthcoming with their thinking as they are, whereas Introverts may find off-the-cuff brainstorming dangerous and unprofessional.”

* According to Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of the school of Positive Psychology, optimism is a critical attribute for success and happiness. His testing regarding the correlation between personality attributes (such as optimism) and career success revealed that only lawyering exhibited a high correlation. And that correlation was between success and … pessimism!

* In the Caliper Personality Profile, the highest scoring personality trait for lawyers is skepticism, with a score of 90 as compared to the general population’s score of 50. And, since people tend to use their highest scoring traits in other areas of their lives, lawyers have a hard time suppressing their natural skepticism in interactions that rely on trust and collaboration (e.g., personal relationships, team relationships, partnership relationships).

* Lawyers score high in a sense of urgency (which may be expressed as impatience) and they relish autonomy/independence.

* On the emotional intelligence front, lawyers are badly handicapped, scoring below the national average in the Mayer Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test.

* As for conflict resolution, lawyers “have strong preferences for competing and avoiding, the two least cooperative of the strategies” outlined in the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode. According to Ronda Muir: “The upshot of this preference is that lawyers tend to either engage in an all-out war over divisive matters, with the intent of `winning,’ or they walk away. “

Taken together, these attributes create a person who prefers autonomy and thinking things through privately rather than working things out with others, brings a high level of pessimism and skepticism (and a low level of trust and collaboration) to every facet of their life, finds “off-the-cuff brainstorming dangerous and unprofessional,” and has a strong preference for competition and conflict avoidance, which are the two conflict resolution strategies least compatible with collaboration.

While the wonderful success of web 2.o and social networking may be entirely consistent with the psychological profile of the general US population, I wonder if they will ever enjoy the same level of success with the lawyer population. To achieve similar levels of collaboration, lawyers would have to act in ways that are contrary to their natures. If the tale of the frog and the scorpion is true, this will never happen.

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

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

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

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

In the inimitable words of Yogi Berra, it was “déjà vu all over again” as I read Andrew Gent’s discussion of The Four Paradoxes of KM in his blog, Incredibly Dull. (Gotta love that name.)

According to Gent, you cannot avoid confronting these paradoxes at one point or another in your knowledge management program, regardless of the system you implement. In fact, these pesky paradoxes have a way of surfacing time and time again. Here’s how he sets the stage:

These are problems without a solution. They trigger intense philosophical debates when they arise and can lead to quite heated, sometimes personal, attacks on one position or another. The professional careers of a number of consultants in the field are based on advocating one side or the other of the debate.

Why? Why must it be one or the other? Why can’t there be a middle ground? The reality is that any given KM program has only so much time, money, or attention to spend and must tactically select what problems to attack and how, thereby staking a position on each issue. And when you do, there will be advocates within management, among your professional peers, and in your audience base who will argue — loudly — for the alternative.

In brief, these Four Paradoxes are:

1. Tacit vs Explicit: Are you going to chase documents, best practices guides, etc., and then manage them using a comprehensive taxonomy and powerful search engine, or are you going to tease out elusive tacit knowledge by forming communities of practice, encouraging storytelling, and providing blogs and wikis to catch these heretofore unwritten pearls of wisdom?

2. Local vs Global: What are the geographic limits to knowledge sharing within your KM system? Are you going to support the natural tendency for communities of practice to be confined to local areas, or are you going to fight the institutional battles necessary to create communities that span geographic boundaries and force participants out of their cozy local groups into bigger gatherings?

3. Open vs Closed: This issue goes to the security of the knowledge within your KM system. The tension here lies between the understanding that information is most useful when it is shared widely, and the fear that some information is so confidential (or proprietary) that it cannot be disclosed. Of course, the problem with this is the tendency to be unnecessarily protective of the information within the system.

4. Quantity vs Quality: This paradox concerns the preference to either limit the content in the KM system to a few excellent examples (for the sake of efficiency), or to cram the system full of as much content as possible (for the sake of completeness).

If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve tangled with these questions many times. In fact, you may have argued with yourself about each of these and come out on different sides of the issue at different times. They are that confounding.

Gent takes an ultimately pragmatic view when he says that these paradoxes are insoluble as long as we persist in discussing them in the abstract. By contrast, when faced with a concrete business example, he believes that most of us can find the practical solution — regardless of the high-minded stance we assumed in the earlier abstract discussion. However, while these ad hoc practical decisions taken on a case by case basis may move you past the Gordian knot of these paradoxes, the cumulative effect may be the creation of a knowledge management system that is neither fish nor fowl — with limited collections of high-quality explicit knowledge in one place and snatches of tacit knowledge scattered through blogs and wikis elsewhere. Even if this schizophrenic approach may be completely defensible, it certainly does pose some management challenges for KM staff. On the other hand, if the knowledge gathered is of the type and in the form requested by the users within a specific community of practice, who are we to argue? Perhaps it’s time we gave up our pretensions of actually being able to control all of this in a “father knows best” way.

In a recent letter to his customers about the eBook reader Kindle, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos discussed the current tendency to engage in “information snacking”:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. 

Wikipedia’s article on Information Foraging, which appears to draw on the work of Peter Pirolli and Jakob Nielsen, notes that once users have been trained by search engines to go to a variety of sites to gather information, they will be reluctant to invest much time on a single site. Instead they make quick strategic raids to collect specific information and then leave the site.

As I was writing my earlier posts recounting Dave Snowden’s concept of “fragmented knowledge” and Fred Nikols’ strong recommendation that we focus knowledge management on human interactions and development rather than structured content, I must admit that I experienced mild anxiety about the implications of this for law firm knowledge management.

For years we’ve been chasing the Holy Grail of model documents and precedents, practice guides and practice notes (best practice materials), checklists and timetables, and the like. These are all examples of structured knowledge that is difficult and expensive to capture, but is so highly valued within a law firm. I imagined having to tell our management committee that rather than working on a record number of model documents this year, I’d be spending my time collecting anecdotes from lawyers. Next, I worried about whether storytelling lawyers actually existed. And then it struck me, if lawyers are humans and if Snowden and Nikols are right about knowledge and human behavior, then even lawyers must engage in storytelling to exchange knowledge. Based on this very narrow view of human beings (or homo narrans, as Snowden refers to them) and some further reflection, I’m happy to report that lawyers are human (really) and do tell stories.

And when do they tell their stories? At practice group meetings, when lawyers provide an oral debriefing on the highlights, challenges and lessons learned of recent or current matters. In formal continuing legal education sessions, when more experienced lawyers use their stories to illustrate the legal points they need to convey in order to help their colleagues master new developments in the law. When lawyers do pitches, they share with prospective clients the stories of their successes with similarly-situated clients. It’s these stories that help the prospective client envision being a client of the storytelling lawyer.

Each week, Stan Garfield puts the following question to a different KM thought leader: “If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?” This week’s answer in The Weekly Knowledge Management Blog is from Fred Nickols, Toolmaker to Knowledge Workers.

It seems to me that KM, like lots of other things (e.g., reengineering, change management, and communities of practice to name three) has been hijacked by the information technology (IT) folks. Abraham Maslow is often credited with saying that “If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.” To paraphrase him, when your only tool is a computer, then every problem reduces to the bits and bytes of data. For me, people should be front and center in any true KM effort and, as far as I can tell, they are not. As a consequence, neither is the most important form of knowledge: the kind that resides in human beings.

Nickols goes on to identify the three types of knowledge (i.e., explicit, tacit and implicit), and points out that current technology deals best with explicit knowledge while largely ignoring tacit and implicit forms of knowledge. In his view, this leads to the following sad state of affairs: “we have huge databases and huge piles of documented practices, etc., etc., but we are no closer to being able to manage knowledge (i.e., concentrate and channel the capability for action along productive lines) than when the KM movement began. Many others will no doubt argue otherwise, but they have a huge investment to protect and I don’t.”

For Nickols, the “true focal point” of knowledge management should be “managing human capability for effective action.” This suggests less attention paid to structured content and more attention paid to storytelling, mentoring, training, communities of practice, etc. A shift away from technology towards people and how they interact with and learn from each other. This is tough stuff. It almost makes one long for the seemingly simple off-the-shelf solutions technology vendors claim they can provide. If only it were so.

In many parts of the world, May 1 is the day on which they commemorate efforts to limit the working day to eight hours. They celebrate by taking the day off. For my colleagues in US law firms, an eight-hour work day may seem Utopian, and May 1st this year most definitely is a work day. But things are even worse for those sad souls who have caught the blogging bug — we put in a day at the office and then compulsively burn the midnight oil blogging. Having tried in April to pick up the pace on my blogging, I must admit that I am in awe of blawgers who manage to blog almost daily. That requires a level of stamina and creativity that seems beyond most mortals.

Well, today is the start of a brand new month. It’s another opportunity for balance and restraint. Or will it be a month for cramming as much work and blogging as possible into 31 days?

In honor of a less frenzied time in my life when it almost seemed to make sense to stay up all night to hear the Magdalen College choir greet the dawn on May 1st, here are links to two YouTube clips of Oxford on May Day. Enjoy!

Magdalen College Choir on May Day 2007

Morris Dancers