Above and Beyond KM

So now that you’ve moved past the early infatuation stage, is LinkedIn working for you? I’ll freely admit that I’m thrilled that LinkedIn provides a way for others to update my rolodex. But past that, I’m not entirely sure where the value lies for a person like me.

It’s a different situation for folks in sales and marketing. The ones I talk to rave about the enormous, extensible list of contacts they can develop via LinkedIn. To be honest, that’s also why some friends of mine have locked down their contacts — they don’t want their vendor friends harassing their non-vendor friends.

And what about those 59 million LinkedIn groups? Have you joined any? What percentage of the proposed discussions are more than thinly veiled marketing ploys or pleas for social media contacts?

As you can see, I’m struggling to find a way to make LinkedIn really work for me. Do you have any advice? What’s working for you?

Paul Sloane has written a fantastic piece called How to Ruin a Brainstorming Session. If you take a closer look, you’ll realize that many of the elements that are fatal for brainstorming are also fatal for a knowledge management program.

Here are some of the practices Paul Sloane believes are deadly:

1. You have no clear objectives.
2. The group involved is too homogeneous.
3. Your boss is autocratic and doesn’t trust the creativity of his or her team.
4. You allow early criticism to smother creativity.
5. You settle for just a few ideas.
6. Your process lacks closure or follow through.

How many of these “worst practices” are present in your KM program?  What are you going to do about it?

[Photo Credit:  Jacob Botter]

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For an interesting view of the brainstorming process, see the following charts from Rick | Crinid:

Apparently almost anything can be downsized, including a traditional New Orleans Mardi Gras parade float. Thanks to “Mardi Gras Floats for Dummies,” you can find directions on how to scale down your ambitions from a typical float (which can exceed 50 feet in length) to a Radio Flyer wagon or even a shoebox.

The instructions for making these miniature floats contain some gems.  For those working with a shoebox:

The first step is picking a shoebox. Usually whatever is hanging around your house that isn’t holding bills or other random junk will work.

The options here are as endless as your imagination!

And, for those with a bit more scope, here’s how to tackle a wagon float:

First, dig your wagon out of the garage, and clean all the cobwebs and other assorted dead insects out of the inside. Scream as zombie spider comes alive as you are picking it up. Gather your senses. Back to cleaning.

Next, put your thinking cap on and create yet another theme for your float. Some more suggestions: “Little Mermaid”, “The Godfather”, “In the Garden of Eden”, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, or the classic “Throw Me Something, Mister!” The entire look of your float will be born out of your theme, and your requirements for materials will change as well.

There’s a metaphor here for our knowledge management work and for life. Even if circumstances dictate a change in scale, they need not result in the inability to participate or to generate something of beauty. And, as is often the case, when you strip things down to their bare essentials, you begin to see what’s important.  (See Creating A Great KM Department of One.)

The wagon float and shoebox float remind us that despite all the tough economic news, we can still do something of worth no matter what our resources, provided we have some creativity and focus.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

[Photo Credit:  Paul Mannix, Creative Commons license]

At a recent gathering of senior law firm knowledge management experts, an attendee asked two provocative questions:  If all the knowledge management personnel in your firm were to fall off the face of the earth today, would it result in a decline in firm profits?  And, if what we are doing does not have an impact on firm profits, why does it matter?

As with many provocative questions, it dazzles initially but doesn’t always hold up well under further analysis.  The reality is that KM, like many other support services within a firm, does help with the delivery of client services, but it isn’t always possible to draw a straight line between the KM activity and the benefit to the client or the firm.  In part, it’s because we simply have not been rigorous about the metrics or, in fairness, finding and tracking the right metrics has been difficult.  For example, let’s say you received a request from an associate who was trying to pull together a package of precedents for a new client engagement.  Of course, you would provide that lawyer with a full package, but would you be able to state with any certainty how much time and money you saved that client?  In order to do that, you’d need statistics on the amount of time lawyers usually spend trying to gather precedents or, worse still, how much time they waste working with the wrong precedents.  Do you have those statistics?  Most likely not.  Unless you are very lucky, it has been a long time since  decision makers within your firm analyzed how much and why billable time is spent unwisely.

An added problem is that with the worsening economy, business decisions are likely to be made on the basis of available metrics.  If the only metrics you have concern activity levels (e.g., time spent by KM personnel, number of tasks completed by KM personnel, etc.) rather than productivity levels (e.g., money saved, realization rates, etc.) you aren’t any further ahead than the knowledge manager providing the precedents in my earlier example.  You may be doing great work, but the decision makers need more than your word for it.  This is a case when tooting your own horn results, at best, in a hollow sound.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for some time now, and am working towards some answers.  However, I’d be very interested in your views on this issue.  If we can’t explain why and how knowledge management matters within the specific context of our own firms, how can we make a winning argument for the survival of our teams?

[Photo Credit:  woodleywonderworks, Creative Commons license]

LegalTech 2009 is over and we’re exhausted.  There’s something absolutely draining about all those inputs, all those people talking at you, and all those little plastic toys.  It’s enough to make even extroverts like me run screaming from the conference hotel.

It will, undoubtedly, take us a few days to process what we saw and what we learned.  We have the quick notes we tweeted from the various sessions to remind us, but we don’t yet know if they will prove to be  invaluable or completely ephemeral.  In addition, some hardier souls (like David Hobbie and Kelly Talcott) have already published their blogs on various sessions.  I’m in awe of their ability to synthesize information so quickly and grateful that we have the benefit of their views.

For me there is something about the learning process that requires a period of quiet reflection in order to consolidate the disparate bits of information I’ve picked up.  And when I’ve been drinking from an information firehose as I was at LegalTech, it takes even longer.  Starting tomorrow, I’m going to indulge in a little quiet reflection and when I emerge, I hope I’ll have something sensible to say about what I learned at LegalTech.

Before I hibernate, I would like to thank the good folks on the LegalTech Advisory Board and at Incisive Media for organizing a conference rich in possibilities and opportunities.  I was glad to have a chance to participate both as a speaker and a blogger.   Best of all, LegalTech provided a wonderful lab for demonstrating how we interact with and learn from each other.  The multi-layered interchanges that bounced between the conference rooms, the Twittersphere, the Blogosphere and the hallways  made for a very rich learning environment. Thank you to everyone in New York and online who made this possible.

[Photo Credit:  cobalt123, Creative Commons license]

You can’t make this stuff up!  We arrived at LegalTech 2009 yesterday ready for a full day of sessions on using Web 2.0 tools in a legal practice only to discover that WiFi was not available in the Web 2.0 conference room.  The irony of that situation did not escape participants, and the live bloggers were vocal on the subject.  Thankfully, the irony did not escape the conference organizers and Judy Kelly of Incisive Media quickly got WiFi access for the live bloggers in the room.  Unfortunately, the first session was already well underway by the time the WiFi was finally made available.  As a result, that first session was not fully reported on Twitter. Thankfully, the other two sessions were and you’ll be able to see the stream of Tweets by searching Twitter using the hashtag #LTNY.

The organizers of LegalTech did go out of their way to invite bloggers to “Live Blog” the sessions.  In fact, they treated us to breakfast on Tuesday morning and gave us an opportunity to introduce ourselves and our blogs.  Very nice.  It will be interesting to see what gets written in the daily blogs and once folks return to their own lives and have had chance to think further about what they saw and heard.

For me, the big surprise was Twitter.  I had gone to LegalTech fully expecting to write 3-4 paragraph blog posts at each session.  Instead, I discovered the power of tweeting the conference.  There was an immediacy and energy about Live Microblogging that was irresistible and effective.  We were getting the information out as quickly as we could cram it into 140 character packages.  And, we were getting responses back from other bloggers in the room, as well as tweeple around the world.  In fact, tweeple outside the conference tweeted their questions to us and we put them to the panelists.  Suddenly the sessions were relevant to far more than the hardy few who braved the bad weather in NYC to attend.

Over the next few days, I will do some blogging on the sessions I attended.  Above all, Lee Bryant and I will be posting notes and slides from our session yesterday (which, unfortunately, was the one for which we did not have full WiFi access).  Until then, do take a look at the Twitter stream.  It gave a remarkably accurate snapshot of the flow of conversation and key quotes from the sessions.  For my money, Live Microblogging via Twitter was definitely the way to go.

[Photo Credit:  kopp0041, Creative Commons license]

It was a generous invitation — free passes to all bloggers who wanted to attend LegalTech 2009.  And an offer of reserved seating at the front of the room (with outlets) so we could live blog the sessions.  I accepted the invitation, came armed with my netbook, and was looking forward to participating.

Unfortunately, we soon discovered that there was no WiFi in the room.  (I was later told that the only room with WiFi initially was the ballroom.)  As a result,  I took my notes offline and will move them to a blog post when I get the chance.  No live blogging for me.

By contrast, some bloggers attended the Twitter session at LegalTech (in a ballroom with WiFi)and decided to tweet the various presentations.  What a blast!  Although readers around the world were getting multiple 140 character sound bites in duplicate (and triplicate) and were slightly reeling from the impact, I do think the medium somehow conveyed the energy of the session in a way that a blog simply cannot.  We were frantic and frenetic, and we were clearly having a great time.  A quick look at the feedback received shows that our friends online enjoyed the tweets and participated via Twitter by commenting and posting their questions.

In a single day we got to experience two different ways of communicating information and dealing with technology.   Social media tools like blogging and micromessaging via Twitter are wonderful and powerful.   Several of my readers said they had so much fun reading our updates that they wished they had been in the room with us.  That said, they acknowledged we’d delivered the next best thing.  If they can, they’ll find the cash to come to LegalTech next year.  I’ve got to believe this is something the conference organizers would like to encourage.

So, about that WiFi…

[Photo Credit:  vkdir, Creative Commons license]

The tire jack is a great symbol for knowledge management.  With the right amount of leverage, you can lift and support something much bigger than your KM effort.  In the context of law firm knowledge management, one way of testing your KM leverage is to ask:  for every hour I spend on KM, how many lawyer hours are saved?  If you can’t answer that question, you need to check your metrics.  Are you measuring the right things?  If you are, are your results commensurate with the effort expended?

Asking questions like these help you understand part of the value proposition for your KM effort.  It also helps you understand what your priorities should be.  Presumably, you need to focus on the activities that provide the greatest leverage.

The next question to ask is this:  is my current level of KM leverage sustainable without additions to headcount?  The answer to that better be yes since additions to headcount in this economy are likely to be close to impossible this year in most law firms.  If the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?

At LegalTech 2009, Lee Bryant and I will be leading a discussion on using Web 2.0 tools to create and sustain meaningful leverage for your KM program.  The session is on Tuesday at 10:30am in the Sutton Parlor South.  I do hope you’ll join us.

[Photo Credit:  Tamaki, Creative Commons license]

A person stuck in KM1.0 spends much of their time maintaining their various content repositories.  Unfortunately, it can be hard to keep up with those maintenance tasks.  And if you fall behind, it becomes increasingly difficult to retrieve your content — even if that content is pure gold.  If you have dross mixed in with the gold and you’re not a diligent housekeeper, then you have a real mess on your hands.

If you spend too much time with database-loving people, it becomes far too easy to think of those repositories in clinical terms, as if they were pristine, properly structured and well-maintained.  However, that doesn’t reflect reality and it doesn’t reflect how most of us interact with information.  So I thought I might provide three alternative views of your content organizational scheme:
The Junk Yard:

[Photo Credit:  sigma, Creative Commons license]

The Junk Shop:

[Photo Credit:  hortulus, Creative Commons license]

Vintage Chic:

[Photo Credit:  Tammy Manet, Creative Commons license]

Which is your reality?  Do you need to do anything about it?

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]