Above and Beyond KM

In an interview with National Public Radio, Nigella Lawson provided the following secret for creating new recipes: try one new frightening thing every day.  The examples she gave might not appeal to every palate (e.g., lemon risotto morphing into lemon with linguine, and  Ham in Cider moving through Ham in Coca-Cola to become Ham in Cherry Coke), but they do provide insight into a useful approach to innovation.  She started with the insight that the best way to find out what works is by experimenting.  The changes she tried were not out of left field.  They were within the realm of possibility, provided you looked beyond the immediate and well-known.  For the excessively timid who live life in a recipe-bound, rules-bound, precedent-bound fashion, Nigella Lawson provided the following comforting reminder:

The worst that can happen is that you don’t have the best supper of your life. And the best that can happen is that you feel thrilled and excited and gratified by the fact that it’s worked.

This is a great example of the value of setting perspective in order to enable innovation.  By pointing out that all that was at stake was the quality of the supper, she creates a “safe-fail” environment, which is key to innovation.  In this instance, the downside is not dire, so what do you really have to lose by trying something new?  And, if your experiment doesn’t work, what real harm is done?

What are some equivalent opportunities in your organization?  Are there areas where you’ve been been recipe-bound for lack of willingness to take the comparatively small risk that supper might only be edible rather than delicious tonight?

[Photo Credit:  Rosie Greenway]

Our firm has several great Canadian partners, counsel and associates. However, our firm’s favorite Canadian is more popular than all those wonderful folks combined. What’s the name of our favorite Canadian?  Blackberry.

In a few short years, the Blackberry has become a critical business tool for most law firms as well as businesses in other industries. Despite its ubiquity, can anyone tell me of an instance where the Blackberry was used to advance law firm knowledge management efforts? Does it allow users access to KM systems? Is its display of your RSS feeds so attractive that lawyers are happy to read those feeds on their Blackberries? Does it provide the ability to use your social media tools (e.g., your internal wikis, blogs, etc.) remotely? What about your enterprise search engine — can you run a search via your Blackberry?

In fairness, the Blackberry is not a portable computer and, therefore,  we should not expect to replicate the functionality of our office desktops on our Blackberries. However, this fact does leave a question for law firm knowledge managers: if the most popular tool in the firm provides 24/7 access to lawyers, but handles only e-mail well, do we need to tailor our KM systems to work via e-mail? Or is this a gross distortion of good business process? Alternatively, if your KM systems aren’t accessible via Blackberry, are you, your KM systems and your team a luxury only available in the office? Does that make sense when your lawyers have to work around the clock and around the world?

If the Blackberry is going to be a fixture in our enterprises (at least in the short term), doesn’t it make sense to confront our favorite Canadian and figure out how the Blackberry can be used to advance knowledge management?

Happy Canada Day!

[Photo Credit:  michael40001]