Above and Beyond KM

“Women love drama!”  I overheard this pearl of wisdom on the street the other day. If I hadn’t been racing to a meeting, I might have stopped to engage with the two “gentlemen” who were pontificating about women on a busy street corner in Manhattan. Perhaps it’s just as well that I was in a rush. After all, how do you begin to address a hopeless generalization like “women love drama”? Somehow I doubt that creating my own drama on that corner would have helped the cause of women.

As I walked away, I wondered how often we make generalizations in our lives and thereby avoid the need to analyze closely what’s really going on around us. For example, in law firm knowledge management circles I often hear statements that begin with the words: “THE LAWYERS…” As a lawyer and a knowledge manager, I know that I’m not part of a monolithic indistinguishable mass. In fact, I know lots of quirky people who act in unexpected ways — even though they are lawyers.  Therefore, building a knowledge management system around someone’s personal generalization of an entire group of people makes no sense at all.  However, it does happen.

What’s the antidote?  Start by being honest about your sample size.  How many lawyers have you spoken to or observed with respect to a particular generalization? Then, look outside your experience of your firm to the experience of other firms.  Does your generalization hold up?  If not, is it because you’re working with a truly unique group of lawyers or are you working with a flawed view of lawyers?

If we can’t safely rely on personal generalizations, what other shortcuts can we reliably use in planning, deploying and maintaining KM systems? There are by now many studies (backed by lots of data) regarding human behavior and usability preferences.  Make sure you stay aware of this literature.  And, if you’re working with a good vendor, you should be able to take advantage of their experience of deploying their product in a variety of environments and with a range of users.

At the end of the day, don’t assume that all users are like the handful you actually know.  Failure to follow this rule could lead to a great deal of unwelcome drama that is a whole lot more substantial than the female drama some think they’ve experienced!

[Photo Credit:  Schroedinger's Cat]

Jonah Lehrer has written a thought-provoking piece on why we too often miss the great opportunities presented by failure. In Accept Defeat:  The Neuroscience of Screwing Up, he explains how our brains purport to “help” us by screening out information that doesn’t fit with what we believe we know.  Here’s how he describes it:

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Ignoring failure can occasionally be a sanity-preserving, efficiency-enhancing approach to life.  However, when we ignore repeated failure, we may in fact be ignoring the only feasible explanation on the horizon.  Realizing this and acting on it requires strength of mind, openness, and a certain measure of humility.  It requires a true empiricist’s approach to life.

So how do we turn perceived failure around?  How do we find an epiphany amongst the rubble of unwanted test results?  Jonah Lehrer has the the following advice:

Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

When it comes to implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools, there’s no substitute for constant experimentation.  And, there’s no way to avoid disappointments as you struggle to find what works best in your organization.  That said, don’t be too quick to discard your apparent failures.  When viewed with an open mind, they may point the way to success.  By following Jonah Lehrer’s advice, you may be able to find a breakthrough — an Epiphany.

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Here is some additional reading on Failure:

• Host a Failure Party
• Do You Need a Failure Target?
• The Upside of Failure
• When Failure is Fine
• Safe Mode

[Hat tip to Dan Pink for pointing out this article.]

[Photo Credit: wenzday01]

I’m about to do something foolish — I’m going to allow a soundbite (regarding a discipline in which I have virtually no training) to inspire a blog post.  Nonetheless, I’m persisting in my foolishness because today’s announcement of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom included references to concepts that rang social media and knowledge management bells for me.

Ostrom has studied how people use, and govern the use of, shared resources. Here’s how The New York Times describes her work:

Ms. Ostrom’s work focuses on the commons, such as how pools of users manage natural resources as common property. The traditional view is that common ownership results in excessive exploitation of resources — the so-called tragedy of the commons that occurs when fishermen overfish a common pond, for example. The proposed solution is usually to make users bear the external costs of their utilization by privatizing the resource or imposing government regulations such as taxes or quotas.

Ms. Ostrom’s empirical research has shown that this explanation is “overly simplistic,” the prize committee says: There are many cases around the world in which common property is “surprisingly well-managed.” In these cases commons users “create and enforce rules that mitigate overexploitation” without having to resort to privatization and government regulation (which can both pose their own practical difficulties).

In an interview I heard today, Elinor Ostrom talked about various failed attempts by central authorities to dictate the sensible use and sustainability of shared resources.  She then contrasted this with the success of people on the front lines in cooperating to manage these resources by adapting rules to local conditions, something the central authorities often have trouble doing.  These themes are echoed by the Nobel prize committee:

The lesson is not that user-management is always preferable to all other solutions. … Rather, the main lesson is that common property is often managed on the basis of rules and procedures that have evolved over long periods of time. As a result they are more adequate and subtle than outsiders – both politicians and social scientists – have tended to realize. Beyond showing that self-governance can be feasible and successful, Ostrom also elucidates the key features of successful governance. One instance is that active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules appears to be essential. Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated. Likewise, monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by outsiders. These principles are in stark contrast to the common view that monitoring and sanctioning are the responsibility of the state and should be conducted by public employees. [emphasis added]

Freely admitting that I have never studied Elinor Ostrom’s work, I find myself wondering whether her research regarding the importance of the active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules could be transferred to the modern enterprise and its quest to control the uses of social media. If people can be trusted to manage precious natural and man-made resources, is it a huge leap to allow them to manage a shared resource like a social media platform?  If centralized authorities have trouble adapting to local conditions with respect to certain resources, why should it be different with resources within an enterprise.  Are some things better left in the hands of the people on the front lines?

I do hope someone with training in economics takes another look at Elinor Ostrom’s work, with a view to determining its applicability to knowledge management and shared online resources.  In the meantime, however, I’m going to think some more about why our drive for safety leads us to command-and-control structures that often are futile and ultimately undermine the safety we seek.

[Photo Credit:  Indiana University via Getty Images]

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]

At the Enterprise 2.0 workshop I attended yesterday, someone asked Livio Hughes of Headshift the following question:  What’s the worst mistake we can make with respect to law firm technology? His answer was interesting:  Don’t fall into the habit of thinking that problems can be solved only by launching a massive multi-year IT infrastructure project.  In other words, don’t assume that big technology is the answer to every question.

Livio told the story of a client that had invited Headshift to help revamp some technology systems.  Once they were engaged and were able to inspect “under the hood of the car,” they discovered that the real question to be answered was not the one the client had identified and that the right answer had very little to do with technology.  Based on this and other experiences, Livio’s advice was to take the time to analyze properly what was really going on in your firm from a process, behavior and cultural perspective.  Next, identify a range of possible solutions and see if there aren’t grassroots, low-key, tiny spend ways of testing some of these solutions in a variety of safe-fail pilots. Then, finally, make your choice.  Obviously, once you’re talking about grassroots, low-key, tiny spend solutions, you’re not heading down the path of the big ticket “total enterprise solution” that the vendor is desperate to sell to you.  Rather, you’re more likely to try Enterprise 2.0 tools, which tend to be much easier, cheaper and faster to deploy than those mega solutions.

Do you have an inadequate document management system?  Don’t assume the answer to that problem is the latest model DMS.  You may be able to side-step the pain of DMS replacement and go straight to a really robust search tool.  Or, have you considered a wiki that allows users to surface useful documents in context.  Or, internal microblogging/ tagging/ social bookmarking applications that use social signals to help high quality content rise to the top.  After all, we rarely need to find and reuse every item in the DMS.  We’re usually just looking for “something good” and would be glad to accept a document recommended by a trusted source in our network.

This is just one example of a key area of law firm knowledge management and technology that could be re-imagined in creative, economical and effective ways.  So, before you leap to the conclusion that a particular big ticket technology “solution” is the answer, make sure you really understand the question.

[Disclosure:  I had the pleasure of working with Livio's colleagues,  Lee Bryant and Christoph Schmaltz, in February when Lee and I presented an introduction to Web 2.0 at LegalTech New York.]

[Photo Credit:  Leo Reynolds]

Our society has made a fetish of linear thinking. We’ve been trained to expect that A will lead to B, which in turn will lead to C. We breathe a sigh of relief whenever we experience what Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English describes as a “step-by-step progression where a response to a step must be elicited before another step is taken.”  All of this is deeply comforting — even when it is not entirely appropriate.

In the June 2009 issue of KMWorld Magazine, Dave Snowden recounts an experience from the beginning of his career in which he elected to design a new system in a manner that didn’t fit well within established design methods.  He was creating something that had never existed before and decided early on that IT’s usual linear approach wasn’t going to work.  In fairness, it sounds like he initially did try to conform.  However, once he set about to gather requirements he quickly discovered that

…few if any of the users had any idea of the capabilities of software.  As a result, if you asked them what they wanted, they told you what they currently did, or asked for automation of existing processes.  To use an adage of that time, `Users say they know what they want until they get it, and then they want something different.‘

Instead of IT’s traditional linear approach, he adopted an iterative method whereby he and his clients engaged in a more curvaceous  “co-evolutionary process” to develop the new system.  Drawing on his own substantive experience of the work his clients were trying to do, he approached the design effort in the following way:

…I could talk with the users in their own language; go away and develop a module with real data; and create reports, monitoring screens and other processes based on a synthesis of my knowledge, the stated needs of the client and my knowledge of the technology.  The application would work in novel ways, users would find new ways of working, and modifications would be agreed upon.  Over the course of a year, a powerful application emerged that was very different from anything that either the user or I could have defined.

In many ways, this is a textbook description of how to implement social media tools within the enterprise.  Work iteratively with your users, create opportunities to learn from each other and from the tool using a series of “safe-fail” experiments, stay in beta for as long as it takes to reflect user reality in your tool, and don’t be afraid to step off the straight and narrow path of linear thinking.  To be clear, this is not a recommendation that you abandon all logic in your design and implementation.  Rather, it is a reminder that there can be great beauty and greater rewards in following a more circuitous route.

[Photo Credit:  Headsqueeze]

We know that failure is necessary for innovation.  In fact, experience shows that repeated failure usually precedes a major breakthrough.  So then, why do we constantly run from failure when we should be planning for it?  According to Scott Anthony, it’s because the cost of failure is perceived to be so high that we don’t believe we can afford it.  As a result, most of us focus hard on trying to ensure complete success even though we know that in most cases this is impossible without some preliminary failures.  Unfortunately, when you’re caught in the bind of trying to avoid failure at all costs, all you really manage to avoid is innovation.

If you’re serious about innovation, you should consider an alternative approach:

Make Failure Cheap. Give up the old method of creating do-or-die projects in which you tightly control development, foreclose alternative approaches, roll-out a fully-baked product and then hope it works.  Instead, institute a series of small experiments beginning early in the life of the project and allow the results of those experiments to determine the course of your project.  These experiments are not intended to be earth-shattering, but they are intended to provide a controlled means by which to test a concept or approach before too much has been committed.  In other words, these experiments come fast and cheap.

Make Failure Safe. Create a culture in which failure is not only accepted but welcomed, provided that it leads to learning.  And conduct your experiments in a manner that minimizes the collateral damage of failure.  Taken together, this organizational culture and controlled experimentation constitute a “safe-fail” approach to innovation.

Make Failure A Goal. The idea behind this is not to promote sub-par performance, but rather, to institutionalize an attitude of deliberate, calibrated risk-taking for the sake of learning and innovation.  Since this fundamentally different approach won’t be adopted without endorsement at the highest levels, consider having management set annual Failure Targets.  Scott Anthony suggests including in each employee’s annual review an evaluation of whether they met their Failure Target by achieving deliberate low-risk failures designed to promote innovation.  When employees are rewarded rather than castigated for taking sensible risks, you move closer to creating a culture that truly fosters innovation.

So, how high a Failure Target do you dare to set?

One of the tricks to moving past the paralysis of choice is to get a better sense of what’s really at stake.  You could focus on how much is to be gained by the contemplated action or — more likely — you worry about how much harm can befall you if the steps you take are ill-advised.  Of course, the more you think about the downside, the more you “catastrophize.”  And the more you catastrophize the more likely you are to remain stuck in indecision.

In the course of my blog move I’ve had ample opportunity to catastrophize.  You would think I was considering neurosurgery rather than merely upgrading a blog.  To be fair, much of the worry came from the fact that I am not a programmer and, therefore, assumed that the whole house of cards would come tumbling down if I didn’t treat the blog coding with great respect.  However, this process of experimentation in public as I slowly upgrade my blog has taught me that it isn’t quite as fragile as I feared.  In fact, this experience has reminded me that very few things in life merit the warning displayed in the picture above.

So what’s the better approach?  When you find yourself imagining the parade of horribles that could result from your proposed action, stop to consider whether that action is likely to inflict irreparable harm.  If the answer is yes, cease and desist until you’ve completed a thorough analysis.  If the answer is no, proceed.  In my case, I’d been obsessing about WordPress themes for days, but seemed incapable of actually making a choice and moving forward.  However, once I took a realistic look at what was at stake and  learned that any choice I made could be undone with little fuss, then I was able to move forward.  As a result, my blog now has a new look.

If we are serious about innovation,  and we understand that our innovation must be timely and cost-effective, then we’ll have to find ways to move past paralysis and catastrophizing towards “safe-fail” methods of learning and growing.  In other words, our bias should be towards action, provided we do no irreparable harm.

[Photo credit:  tankgrrl, Creative Commons license]

It’s amazing how long a person can agonize about making a change — stumbling around in the dark, trying to find the path forward.  For me, it literally took months.  Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I tried polling my friends on  Twitter.  The question was simple:  Should I stay or should I go?  Within minutes, the answers came flying back and they were nearly unanimous — Go!

Go where?  To WordPress.  (And you thought I was agonizing over something truly earth shattering, right?  But think about it for a minute.  My question is just a proxy for a lot of tough decisions we face daily.  It’s the process of working through the question that I want to focus on here.)  The reality is that when you’ve made an investment in something, it’s hard to turn your back on your sunk costs and start over again.  In fact, the real question for me was:  Do I stay where I’m comfortable or do I take a risk and move?

As you can see, I’ve moved.  But the thing that tipped the balance for me was identifying the issues that were holding me back:  fear of the unknown and fear of failure.  Once I named them, I literally was blinded by the light.  I’ve been writing for some time about the importance of change and, especially, about the importance of feeling free to fail in order to learn and grow.  In fact, I’m on record for saying that failure is a critical prerequisite of innovation.  So now, having seen the light, I have to put on my sunglasses and walk the walk.

I’m up to my eyebrows in change and just a hair’s breadth away from disaster.  But as I work through this particular set of experiments and changes, I’ll be documenting my lessons as they become clear to me.  After all, as long as we’re learning,  we can’t call the experience a loss.  And, we certainly can’t call it failure.

(Photo Credit:  Little Ricky, Creative Commons License)

We’re two-thirds of the way through the eating marathon composed of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. And, as surely as night follows day, many of us are considering our expanding waistlines and the necessity of a diet in the New Year. Just as predictably, many of us will fail in our quest to change our eating habits and keep that weight off permanently. Similarly, in these waning days of the year, our thoughts often turn to the resolutions we plan to make on January 1 regarding the changes we know we need and the great expectations we hope to realize. Unfortunately, we likely will be as unsuccessful next year as we were this year in making radical changes.

Why is change so hard? According to a recent article in Scientific American, from our mid-twenties until our late fifties, we tend to be less open to new experiences and this makes us more resistant to change. As we face the challenges and responsibilities of adult life, our brains seem to prefer the security of stability rather than the chaos that change represents. According to Gerhard Roth,

The brain is always trying to automate things and to create habits, which it imbues with feelings of pleasure. Holding to the tried and true gives us a feeling of security, safety, and competence while at the same time reducing our fear of the future and of failure.

The final nail in the coffin of change is our tendency to have unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved. This is known as the “false hope” syndrome in which we attempt more change than is wise or possible, and then fail. No wonder most of us find it so difficult to change.

So what happens when your knowledge management program requires a change in behavior on the part of the lawyers in your law firm? You should assume that you will meet passive if not active resistance. But that doesn’t give us a free pass to avoid change. Since change often is necessary, we need to plan carefully to ensure that the proposed change can be achieved. This suggests that we set reasonable goals requiring incremental (rather than radical) change and that we frame the change in a way that is least threatening to the sense of stability and security of our users.

Incremental change rarely results in banner headlines, but given what we now know about human psychology, it may be the only kind of change that is viable.