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]

If you are a traditionalist you’ll know that January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany in the Western Church, is the day for giving up and giving away. It is the day to give up your Christmas finery, packing it away until next December. It also is the Day of the Three Kings, when people give away gifts to commemorate the gifts offered by the kings. In Louisiana, today is the beginning of the Mardi Gras season — a time of fun and frivolity before the somberness of Lent.

A favorite food during this period of celebration in Louisiana is the King Cake.  For those of you who haven’t sampled this delicacy before, Wikipedia provides the following description:

In southern U.S.A., the tradition was brought to the area by colonists from France and Spain. King cake parties in New Orleans are documented back to the eighteenth century.It has become customary in the New Orleans culture that whoever finds the trinket must provide the next king cake.The king cake of the New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition comes in a number of styles. The most simple, said to be the most traditional, is a ring of twisted bread similar to that used in brioche topped with icing or sugar, usually colored purple, green, and gold (the traditional Carnival colors) with food coloring. Some varieties have filling inside, the most common being cream cheese followed by praline. Popular bakeries such as Gambino’s, Haydel, and Randazzo, feature original recipes and types of king cakes.

The King Cake is a wonderful metaphor for pragmatic knowledge management.  Just yesterday I thanked a colleague for his contribution to one of our knowledge management systems and in response he told me that his team had been able to complete their project in record time because another colleague had made an earlier helpful contribution to the same knowledge management system.  In other words, the first contribution was the trinket in the King Cake.  The lawyer who found it then stepped up to make a contribution of his own.  When things work this way, knowledge sharing increases exponentially and knowledge managers have to spend less time helping skeptical lawyers understand “what’s in it for me.”

Best wishes for a great season of Epiphany.  I hope you and your colleagues enter into the generous spirit of the season.

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]

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]

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]

How good is your knowledge management department at surfing?

The constant bad news about the recession and its impact on law firms has been sobering.  The headlines about retrenchment, reductions, right-sizing could lead one to believe that all we have is monolithic doom and gloom.  However, have you taken the time to look behind those headlines to see how your firm is really doing?  Is every single practice out of work?  Doubtful.  Are all your clients retrenching? I suspect not. So, how have you adjusted your knowledge management strategy to address the new realities within your law firm?  Have you ramped up efforts for your bankruptcy practice?  Are you providing up to the minute support for regulatory practices that seem to be changing daily?  Are you spending more time recruiting lawyers in slower practices to use their new found time to update existing practice resources?

If the recession has had a varying impact on the different parts of your firm, is that reflected in your law firm knowledge management program?  If not, why not?  It does no good to stay on the shore and complain about changing weather conditions.  If you want to keep surfing, you have to find the next wave.

[Photo Credit:  Michael Dawes]