Above and Beyond KM

Today is Groundhog Day. I have no idea whether Phil the groundhog will see his shadow, but I try never to forget what happened to Bill. Who’s Bill? Bill Murray in the movie, Groundhog Day. Because he resisted growing up and moving forward, he was condemned to repeat Groundhog Day until he did something to break the cycle.

Law firm knowledge management (and perhaps KM generally) seems to be in a Bill Murray repeat mode in many places.  We’ve all found some things that work (or worked at one time), so we repeat them.  We’ve also been asked to do some things that we know don’t work, but cannot overcome the pressure to meet these low expectations, so we repeat them.  Continue like this, and you run the risk of running KM into the ground.

So how do you break free?  Don’t look to new technology.   Technology won’t work well unless you have a clear vision of its uses and limits.  A tool implemented blindly won’t provide the forward momentum a firm sunk in KM Groundhog gloom needs.  The better approach is to start thinking strategically about your KM program.  Given the upheaval of the last couple of years, what does KM need to do in your firm to help it respond to economic pressures?  Have the practices of your firm changed?  Has your KM program kept pace?  Is there an opportunity to embed KM in a practice group or client team?

Everyday is KM Groundhog Day and everyday is an opportunity to to break the cycle.  Just think strategically.

[Photo Credit:  Jimmy Wayne]

There’s something quite comforting in the voice that reminds me to “mind the gap” when I travel the London Underground. That recorded message has saved me from many a misstep. It’s a pity we knowledge managers don’t hear a similar recorded message before we communicate with senior management or front line workers. There is a knowledge gap between us and our non-KM colleagues that can make good communication challenging.  There are things we know about facilitating collaboration and expediting the flow of information that they may never think about.  Equally, there may be things about their work that are not obvious to us, even as we work to provide them with knowledge management support.  Under these conditions, it’s painfully easy to talk past each other.  And that can be fatal.

Before you go to “sell” a knowledge management project to senior management or front line workers, think about it from their perspective.  What do they care about?  What do they want to know?  What do they need to hear to better understand how your solution addresses their problem?  Once you are able to approach things from the perspective of the people your KM system is supposed to serve, then you’ll go some distance in eliminating the risk of miscommunication.  Until then, mind the gap.

There have been some recent high profile investigations of bribery in the business world. Has anyone checked the knowledge management world? I’ve heard reports of cash rewards, gift cards and coveted electronics offered by various KM departments to induce knowledge workers to participate in KM systems. In what way are these not bribes?

Here’s the sad part, while greasing the palm of a corrupt official may win a piece of business, bribing a knowledge worker to do anything except rote work rarely works.  I’ve linked below to a David Gurteen video on KM Incentives and a Daniel Pink video on Motivation, both of which explain some of the problems with offering incentives.  According to Dan Pink, knowledge workers find that extrinsic motivators (like cash rewards and gifts) tend to narrow their focus, limit their creativity and increase the pressure.  Rewards discourage risk taking.  In other words, extrinsic motivators create precisely the kind of conditions least conducive for creative, expansive, innovative work.  David Gurteen raises some additional issues relating to incentives for KM participation:

• By offering an incentive for KM work, you imply that this work is a burden — an extra chore that no sane person would undertake without coercion or incentive.  Is this really the message you wish to convey?  Or, worse still, is this the reality of your KM program?
• KM incentives change human behavior, training people to participate in a KM system only when bribed, rather than participating because it is the right thing to do.  He cites Alfie Kohn (author of Punished by Rewards) who believes that rewards can destroy the intrinsic motivation to do a job well or to do the right thing.  (See summary by Justin Podur.)
• External motivators tend to encourage people to game the system.  Since they are being asked to do something they don’t really want to do, sensible people will try to do as little of it as possible for the maximum gain.  This leads to participation peaks near the deadline for tallying credit or forming alliances to rig the outcomes.

If KM incentives have little more than short-term value, then what should a wise knowledge manager focus on?  Focus on the elephant that has been standing quietly in the corner during this whole discussion:  you have to prove the value of your KM system.  If knowledge workers don’t believe that a system is valuable, then they will have little internal motivation to participate, and any external motivators offered will produce only grudging cooperation.  At the end of the day, effective people don’t really want to waste time.  If we can’t prove the value of our KM systems, then we are asking them to waste their time.  Under these conditions, offering an incentive is little more than providing a tranquilizer to ease the pain.

Daniel Pink’s Video

David Gurteen’s Video

[Photo Credit: jessicafm -- using candy and toys to induce cooperation during a haircut]

How often do you hear someone say after a disaster, “if we only knew about the warning signs…”? And then you discover that the warnings were there all along, but we missed them. In other words, the information was available, but the right people did not find it and were unable to act on it.  We heard these words in the aftermath of 9/11.  And now we’re hearing it in the aftermath of the Fort Hood tragedy.

Today’s news included a report on a supervisor’s assessment of Maj. Nidal Hasan:

Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan’s incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing.  [...]

Officials at Walter Reed sent that memo to Fort Hood this year when Hasan was transferred there.

Nevertheless, commanders still assigned Hasan — accused of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood on Nov. 5 — to work with some of the Army’s most troubled and vulnerable soldiers.

We may discover that the supervisors at Fort Hood saw and ignored this letter.  Presumably, there will be legal consequences for that behavior.  But what if they never saw the information?  That’s a classic case of inadequate knowledge management.

If the only thing knowledge managers do right is to set up systems that help get the important information before the decisionmakers, we’ll have done a great deal.  It’s critical to focus on this issue every day — otherwise you may end up with incomplete information leading to bad decisions and horrible human consequences.

[Photo Credit:  Flags lowered at Fort Hood, The U.S. Army)

What’s one thing that will doom your law firm knowledge management program? Your knowledge manager’s inability to question premises. (To be honest, this can be a problem with most disciplines, but I don’t presume to speak to any other areas of expertise.)

For example, lawyers (being people who value precedent) have historically placed a high premium on document collections.  Consequently, it was natural for early law firm knowledge managers to assume that their first priority was to create and manage document collections for lawyers.  Is this the way it should be?  Does this fondness for collections make sense any more?  In fact, as the rate of information production grows exponentially, is it even practical to think we can create and maintain a collection that is either comprehensive or current?  Or, should we be thinking more about search and retrieval? Check your premises.

Here’s another example:  lawyers (being people who write professionally) have historically placed a high premium on model documents.  (For those of you outside the legal profession, these are contracts that do not contain client-specific information, but generally do collect the firm’s knowledge of that type of contract by providing annotations containing drafting advice and negotiation guidance.) Most lawyers would love to have a model document for every kind of contract they typically prepare for their clients.  To be honest, some lawyers dream of a fill-in-the-blanks model that they can just pull off the shelf and use.  In reality, however, model documents can be extremely time-consuming and expensive to produce.  And, they can be a bear to maintain.  In short, they are an expensive undertaking.  Nonetheless, many law firm knowledge managers have assumed that a top priority should be creating a comprehensive set of model documents.  But does your firm have the human commitment and financial resources necessary to provide properly maintained model documents?  And, even if it does, is this a good use of its resources?  Check your premises.

Knowledge managers should lead by example when it comes to finding creative solutions to practical problems.  The first step along this path is to question our premises.  When we fail to do this, we pursue outdated goals and methods, thereby relegating our KM programs to an increasingly irrelevant position within the firm.

***Update, 26 Oct 2009 ***

If you’re willing to take a radical, critical look at the things you do and the way you work, the following reading might help:

• Mike Figliuolo, How Blowing Up Your Business Can Drive Innovation
• From the Above and Beyond KM Archives:
  • Are You Obsolete or Mission Critical?
  • Life After KM
  • Are You Clinging to the Wrong Business?
  • Will They Miss You When You’re Gone?
  • Leaving Your Octagonal Outhouse

[Photo Credit:  oberazzi]

One of the thorniest problems we’ve faced in knowledge management has been how to explain what we do. Ray Sims set out to determine if there was a definition of knowledge management that could help with this. What he discovered was not one or two, but rather 62 definitions of KM. That’s more than one for every week of the year!

Into this murky mess steps Dave Snowden. Although he has nothing to prove, his recent post, Defining KM, demonstrated yet again why he is considered one of the foremost KM experts in the world. Here’s how he defines KM:

The purpose of knowledge management is to provide support for improved decision making and innovation throughout the organization. This is achieved through the effective management of human intuition and experience augmented by the provision of information, processes and technology together with training and mentoring programmes.

The following guiding principles will be applied

• All projects will be clearly linked to operational and strategic goals
• As far as possible the approach adopted will be to stimulate local activity rather than impose central solutions
• Co-ordination and distribution of learning will focus on allowing adaptation of good practice to the local context
• Management of the KM function will be based on a small centralized core, with a wider distributed network

There’s a lot to chew on in this definition.  I heartily agree with his assertion that the point of KM is to support “improved decision making and innovation.” If this isn’t why you’re involved in KM, what are you doing?  It also raises an interesting question for people engaged in KM 1.0.  What proof do you have for your operating premise that larger document repositories improve decision making and innovation?

For those who are KM empire builders, his guiding principles will give pause.  He is clearly favoring local, grassroots solutions rather than centralized, large-scale solutions.  This will require placing people close to the frontline who are knowledgeable enough about KM to provide some light guidance to the knowledge workers who have the most immediate need of KM systems.  Better still, to my mind it encourages every knowledge worker to be an effective knowledge manager.  In this context, a global KM Czar is going to be superfluous and unwelcome.

In separate correspondence with Dave Snowden, I’ve asked if he can elaborate on his notion of “effective management of human intuition and experience.”  It’s not clear to me exactly how one manages either intuition or experience.  It will be interesting to what additional guidance he can provide.

In the meantime, stayed tuned.  By offering this definition, he’s given us an opportunity to define ourselves and our work again.  Let’s see how far we get this time.

[Photo Credit:  jovike]

Navel gazing is a distressingly popular activity among knowledge managers. (To be honest, even I have indulged in it from time to time.) I’m not sure exactly what drives this tendency, although I expect it may have something to do with the fact that we aren’t always able to explain succinctly what it is we do for a living and why we do it.

In the meantime, we expend a great deal of energy discussing the lofty goals of knowledge management and worrying about the difficulties of proving the ROI of KM activities.

In light of this, I found it refreshing to read Infovark’s post, The Promise of Information Management.  The post begins by asking what information management tools and technology are really designed for and answers the question with the Maslow-like diagram below that shows the hierarchy of IM needs:

Risk mitigation, compliance and security; cost savings and efficiency; improved knowledge and innovation.  Those sound like worthy — and rather familiar — goals.  But isn’t that what Knowledge Management (or at least KM 1.0) claims for itself as well?

So, would someone please tell me:  If the information managers have all of this well in hand, what exactly does knowledge management accomplish?  Does KM add anything?  Is it a distinct discipline or just information management with a fancy title?

[Photo Credit:  Vasta]

As a self-confessed pack rat, I’ve had a morbid fascination for folks who preach and practice the virtues of minimalism and a clutter-free existence.  Call it a form of self-abuse, but I just can’t help reading their propaganda.  And then, I come every workday to a business that never has a shortage of stuff to organize.  No matter how much we try to move away from the old KM 1.0 chores of building, organizing, maintaining and searching data repositories, the reality is that as long as we work in a document-intensive business, law firm knowledge management will always include a significant portion of KM 1.0 work. Vendors promise silver bullets in the form of super search and auto-profiling to help us manage all this data, but even still we hear stories of people spending hours searching fruitlessly.

Recently Kathleen Hogan reported that studies show that managers and executives spend 6 weeks each year just looking for stuff. My initial reaction was what a waste of time! Can’t they get a better search engine? And then, I had a radical thought — what if we really aren’t supposed to save and organize all this stuff? What if there really is too much to organize effectively? What if there’s no reasonable way to stay on top of it all? Are our taxonomies and search engines designed to cope comfortably with our exploding data collections? What if they can’t?

If you take a look at all the anti-clutter propaganda I’ve been saving for a rainy day, you’ll soon discover that the first step to organizing stuff is — get rid of what you don’t need.  By so doing, you reduce the amount of material you actually have to organize and maintain.  I know we think we need to organize all the data in our firms, but do we really?  Does it all matter?  Does it all need to be saved and organized for posterity?  Or, is some of it truly ephemeral?

Greg Lambert suggests that law firms have been saving all this stuff for all the wrong reasons:

There are certain things we should legally and/or ethically keep for a specific period of time. But, most of the data that we handle does not fall under these requirements. In fact, I’d wager that 90% of the emails, electronic documents, or paper documents we keep, we do because we are implementing the “CYA” rule.

Folks who drink the super search kool-aid will say that the cost of saving and searching data is becoming increasingly trivial, so why spend any time at all trying to weed the collection?  Rather, save it all and then try Filtering on the Way Out.  On the other hand, look at the search engine so many of us envy — Google.  It indexes and searches enormous amounts of data, but even Google doesn’t try to do it all.  Google doesn’t tackle the Deep Web.

So why are we trying to do it all?

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For information on searching the Deep Web:

• A guide by Robert J. Lackie
• UC Berkeley – Teaching Library Internet Workshops, Invisible or Deep Web:  What it is, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity
• Michael K. Bergman, The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value

From my deep stores of anti-clutter information:

• Julie Morgenstern, When Organizing Isn’t Enough:  SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life
• Zenhabits – Zen Mind:  How to Declutter
• Zenhabits – The Minimalist’s Guide to Fighting (and Beating) Clutter Entropy

[Photo Credit:  Jason Rust]

Given the state of the economy, it’s wise to ask yourself from time to time if you are closer to obsolete than mission critical.  As you think about your answer to that question, I’d recommend that you take a look at Rick Mans’ post, Should Knowledge Managers Look for a New Job, and the accompanying comments.  The message that comes through is that in an Enterprise 2.0 world there won’t be much of a need for knowledge managers who act as gatekeepers (i.e., deciding what information is worthy of collecting or sharing) or archivists (i.e., collecting and organizing information in a central repository in accordance with a strict taxonomy).  Rather, knowledge managers who wish to remain employed will need to morph into facilitators who help people work with new collaboration tools, comply with community-derived tagging guidelines, and share information.  While I agree with the general thrust of Rick’s post and the accompanying comments, I fear that the implied time horizon is too short.

Why too short?  I suspect that in the long-term organizations are going to be increasingly reluctant to fund large groups of knowledge managers to do work that should be done by front line knowledge workers.  Instead, employers are going to expect that every knowledge worker has at least minimum competence in personal knowledge management.  Accordingly, knowledge managers will move into personal knowledge management coaching.  These shifts make economic and practical sense.  For too long, knowledge workers have been outsourcing their KM responsibilities to centralized KM departments.  The distance between the KM department and the front line often results in central data repositories that tend to reflect management’s view of what’s important rather than the shifting concerns and interests of front line knowledge workers who actually have to use the information collected.  Unfortunately, as Dave Pollard aptly points out, management itself is often too far removed from the front line to understand what the front line knowledge worker truly needs.  The problem is compounded if the knowledge managers don’t have subject matter expertise.  Without the experience of walking in the shoes of the front line workers they are supposed to be supporting, their decisions about what’s important to collect and how to organize it or what collaborative tools to provide will largely be based on hearsay.

Further, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to information management has disregarded the fact that our centralized collections rarely fit many.  Research reported by the Wharton School of Business found that a focus on knowledge capture didn’t always yield the desired benefits and sometimes incurred some painful costs:

We find that using codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task, but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients, whereas in contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signaled competence, but did not save time….  This is interesting because managers often believe that capturing and sharing knowledge via document databases can substitute for getting personal advice, and that sharing advice through personal networks can save time.

Partly in response to this research, Harold Jarche has suggested that it’s past time that we moved beyond “central digital repositories.”  Instead, we should focus on enabling what he calls a “parallel system” to support knowledge workers in those many instances in which the central repository proves inadequate.  What would that parallel system look like?  Here are his suggestions:

• Develop measures that can help experienced knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge. [This is personal KM.]
• Support the sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using personalized knowledge management methods & tools.
• Keep only essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers, in the organizational knowledge base – keep it simple.

So what might a future knowledge manager spend their time doing?  Primarily, coaching individual knowledge workers to become effective personal knowledge managers and online collaborators. Secondarily, creating systems that facilitate collaboration and allow passive sharing of the results of these individual personal KM efforts.  This mission critical approach puts knowledge management where it belongs — on the front lines and in the hands of the the knowledge workers who can use the information shared to strengthen networks and produce revenue.

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Here are some additional resources if you’re interested in learning more about Personal Knowledge Management and the possible future direction of KM:

• KM 0.0 – Simply Enabling Trusted Context-Rich Conversations Among Communities That Care (Dave Pollard)
• Managing the Fire Hose (Mary Abraham)
• Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) – An Update (Dave Pollard)
• Personal Toolkit: Three thousand communities of practice (Steve Barth)
• Sense-Making with PKM (Harold Jarche)
• What’s Next After Knowledge Management?  A Scenario (Dave Pollard)
• Your say: Personal knowledge management (Sandra Higgison)

[Photo Credit:  Kimberly Faye]

In knowledge management as in life, folks often come in one of two flavors: the mixologists and the bartenders. Not sure about the distinction? According to Jim Meehan (a bartender at PDT, an East Village speakeasy in New York City):

Mixologists serve drinks. Bartenders serve people.

The KM mixologists believe in their systems and theories.  They are more likely to ask the user to bend to the system than adapt the system to the user.  KM mixologists often honestly believe they know what’s best for their client, regardless of what the client says.

A KM bartender is completely unpretentious — just trying to help the customer get along, but always on the customer’s terms.  This means mixing good service with liberal doses of sympathy, listening attentively to what the customer isn’t always able to articulate, and knowing when to stop pouring.

[h/t to to lawyer and culinary/cultural critic, Jeffrey Steingarten, who reported the distinction between a mixologist and a bartender.]

[Photo Credit:  Tomas Fano]