Above and Beyond KM

The history of medicine is filled with all sorts of interesting lessons for lawyers and law firms.  Consider the science of blood transfusions.  According to the Wikipedia article on blood transfusions, the first recorded transfusion allegedly occurred in 1492 when an innovative (or perhaps desperate) physician suggesting reviving a comatose Pope Innocent VIII by giving him the blood of three young boys.  Since this was in the days before the circulatory system and intravenous access had been discovered, the blood was administered through the patient’s mouth.  The pope died, as did the three boys.  In this case, the delivery mechanism proved to be not just ineffective, but fatal.

Fast forward to the late 17th century when Richard Lower performed the first human transfusion in Britain by introducing the blood of a sheep into the arm of one Arthur Coga.  (Mr. Coga was described as “the subject of a harmless form of insanity.”)  According to the Wikipedia article,

Sheep’s blood was used because of speculation about the value of blood exchange between species; it had been suggested that blood from a gentle lamb might quiet the tempestuous spirit of an agitated person and that the shy might be made outgoing by blood from more sociable creatures.

Blood changing personality? This is yet another flawed theory that has proven to be completely false.  Today, not only do we not try cross-species transfusions, but medical science has taught us the dangers of trying to transfuse across blood types:

It was not until 1901, when the Austrian Karl Landsteiner discovered human blood groups, that blood transfusions became safer. Mixing blood from two incompatible individuals can lead to an immune response, and the destruction of red blood cells releases free hemoglobin into the bloodstream, which can have fatal consequences. Karl Landsteiner discovered that when incompatible types are mixed, the red blood cells clump, and that this immunological reaction occurs when the receiver of a blood transfusion has antibodies against the donor blood cells. His work made it possible to determine blood type and allowed a way for blood transfusions to be carried out much more safely. For this discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1930, and many other blood groups have been discovered since.

To recap, not only does the delivery mechanism need to work properly, but you also need to be sure that the blood you are transferring matches perfectly with the blood of the recipient.

So what does this have to do with law firms and their clients?  Consider the various types of work product that law firms push at their clients. Legal alerts, current awareness, research memoranda, draft documents, billing statements — the list is endless.  Now, imagine that each is a blood product.  How do law firms ensure that these products match the blood type (or preferences or working style) of their clients?  Do they ask clients beforehand what their preferences are? Or do lawyers imagine that a cross-species transfusion from law firm to client will work better for them than the history of medicine indicates?

Consider also the delivery mechanism — email blasts, law firm websites, extranets or the occasional tweet.  Are clients even paying attention? Wouldn’t it make more sense to deliver these materials in a way that fits neatly with the technology platform and information flow of the client? Clients have figured this out.  That’s why some are demanding that billing information, for example, be delivered via an electronic platform chosen by the client. And yet too many law firms persist in the old-fashioned blast or broadcast method of marketing and client communications.

Sending out an alert memo via email to a client who doesn’t have a reliable system to store, retrieve and share it for later use is as pointless as trying to do a blood transfusion via someone’s mouth.  Imagine how much better it would be if your memo were seamlessly received by and stored in the client’s knowledge base, together with clear contact instructions so that the client could reach you when a related issue arises.  As I wrote in a post entitled Dino, Dodo, Extranet,

We’ve heard in-house counsel express the desire for law firm content without having to hunt for it. They would like it in an environment of their own choosing and design. So instead of providing content access tools like extranets, should law firms be thinking harder about better content delivery tools?

Imagine a virtual umbilical cord stretching from a law firm to its client’s knowledge management system, providing a regular supply of helpful resources? Imagine being an in-house lawyer who doesn’t have to go to a thousand places on the internet to find information, but rather can simply surf a single familiar internal platform? Imagine that in-house lawyer’s delight when they can find easily the information appropriate to the decision at hand, and can identify and follow-up with the lawyer and firm that made the retrieval so pain free? Imagine the impact of these experiences on the relationship between that law firm and its client?

Now that’s the type of transfusion that actually promotes better health for the client and the law firm.

[Photo Credit: CarynNL]

We were enjoying a leisurely lunch with some retired friends when the conversation turned to the indignities of aging.  The older folks around the table complained about how hard it was now to remember the things that they had in their younger days retrieved effortlessly.  One proudly spoke of the many poems he had memorized as a boy.  Another had committed significant portions of the Bible to memory.  Half joking, I said that the only things I memorized nowadays were … passwords.

What a sad commentary on modern life!

There was a time when I took great delight in finding whimsical passwords as the spirit moved.  However, that casual approach often won’t fly any longer. When every password has to have a particular combination of upper and lower case letters, plus at least one number and one character (and you aren’t allowed to repeat passwords too frequently), the hunt for an acceptable password becomes even more challenging.  Now, it requires careful planning. (Having a slightly twisted mind doesn’t hurt either.)

Even if you’re tempted to ignore the recent security breaches, chances are that your employer is insisting that you use more discipline and care in choosing passwords.  For that matter, your online bank, your email service, your preferred shopping websites and your favorite social media platforms probably require stronger passwords too.

If you’d rather memorize poetry than passwords, consider turning to Leet to help you devise passwords that pass muster.  Jesse Friedman’s recent post, Leet Speaking Passwords, helps explain how to use this technique.  By swapping some of the letters in your password for similar numbers and characters, you can create a unique and memorable password that is strong enough to make a hacker cry. For example, using leet the name “Jesse” becomes “J3$$3.”

So if you’d rather spend your precious grey matter on poetry instead of passwords, consider adopting Friedman’s leet speaking approach.  I can promise you that the poetry you read will bring far more joy than any list of passwords.

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For additional advice on passwords, see my earlier post Safe Passwords.

[Photo Credit: Vintage Cat]

A lack of vision has tripped up presidents and business leaders.  President George H.W. Bush famously dismissed “that vision thing” as something not worth investing in.  As he soon discovered, however, the electorate did not agree with him.  His official biography on the US Senate website contains the following sad commentary:

Bush also suffered from his lack of what he called “the vision thing,” a clarity of ideas and principles that could shape public opinion and influence Congress. “He does not say why he wants to be there,” complained columnist George Will, “so the public does not know why it should care if he gets his way.”

In my post, The Purpose-Driven Organization, I discussed how important it was that an organization know WHY it exists and WHY it does what it does. Simon Sinek believes that it is the job of the leader of an organization to master that vision thing — to see a better world — and then to communicate it in such clear and compelling terms that others volunteer to work above and beyond the call of duty to make that shared vision a reality.  But all the goodwill in the world may not be sufficient to reach that goal.

In fact if you look carefully, you’ll undoubtedly find that there are examples in your life and in your organization of the proposition that good intentions often come to naught without supporting structures. Steve Denning wrote recently in a Forbes blog of the challenges of making changes in an organization without tackling its underlying corporate culture.  Using the World Bank as his case study, he noted frequent mistakes made by senior management in an attempt to change organizational culture:

• Overuse of the power tools of coercion and underuse of leadership tools.
• Beginning with a vision or story, but failing to put in place the management tools that will cement the behavioral changes in place.
• Beginning with power tools even before a clear vision or story of the future is in place. [emphasis added]

The big exception he found was Robert McNamara, who had a profound and lasting impact on the mission and activities of the World Bank.  According to Denning, the key to McNamara’s success was to create a support structure to underpin the vision he had for the World Bank:

McNamara … arrived with a clear vision for the organization: it was to be a lending organization that was lending a great deal more money. He had a clear idea of the management he wanted introduced: hierarchical bureaucracy. He introduced systems and processes that focused everyone’s attention on his vision of the World Bank as a rapidly growing lending organization and the type of management required. Those systems are still largely in place today and still guide management action.

Now let’s move from the arena of large organizations to our personal lives.  Every New Year’s Day, people all over the world articulate a personal vision — usually in the form of a New Year’s resolution.  And, for many, those resolution are abandoned within the first few days of the new year.  Why?  In How to Stay Focused on the Important Things, Peter Bregman suggests that it’s because we fail to restructure our personal environments (our lives) in such a way as to improve our chances of accomplishing our new priorities:

In other words, it’s great to learn new habits, but if we want to sustain them, we need to change our environment, and then maintain that new environment, for as long as we want to maintain our change.

Coming back to knowledge management, as Denning so rightly points out, it’s not sufficient to launch a brilliant KM system or technology.  Rather, you’re going to have to tackle and change the underlying structure of the organization that makes knowledge sharing less likely.  Unfortunately this work is both necessary and hard.  And, it cannot be done overnight.  The good news, however, is that Robert McNamara has shown us that when you put the right supporting structures in place, the desired behaviors will continue — despite changes in leadership, fashion or vision.

So go ahead and dream your dreams — identify your compelling vision for your organization.  But don’t forget to do the hard work of creating an environment that makes it possible to achieve that vision.

[Photo Credit: Trochim]