Few challenges within sophisticated and far-flung law firms seem as
difficult to get right as Knowledge Management, and I’ve recently been
exploring some theories as to why this is so. After all, lawyers
of all people should excel at KM—information and expertise are
literally all we have to sell—and one would think that a cohort
that skews towards highly educated, left-brainy, articulate, and process-centric
could do KM in their sleep. Counter-intuitively, however, we know
that we can’t.
Pondering this from the 50,000 foot level, I’m prepared to propose a
theory: As social creatures distinguished from the rest of the
mammalian order primarily by our capacity for language (and with the
"invention" of civilization dependent foremost upon the invention of
writing), we have evolved with a powerful tendency to learn through close
associates in groups. This means that, within a law firm,
informal organizational networks should provide the most powerful—because
most natural—platform for "management" (creation, storage, distribution,
and re-use) of knowledge.
The problem arises when the informal networks do not map 1-to-1 to the
organizational chart, and they never do. Indeed, at Harvard Business
School’s "Working Knowledge," "How
Org Charts Lie" tells precisely such
a story:
"we are all dramatically affected by information flow and webs
of relationships within social networks. These networks often are not
depicted on any formal chart, but they are intricately intertwined with
an organization’s performance, the way it develops and executes strategy,
and its ability to innovate. For most of us, networks also have a great
deal to do with our personal productivity, learning, and career success."
What’s this got to do with KM, again? Start with first principles: The
goal of KM is not to curate and preserve "knowledge" for its
own sake, but to get your talented professionals communicating, collaborating,
and working together seamlessly, sharing assumptions about objectives
and the elements of the toolkit needed to get there.
But if the
actual, functioning network diverges from the formal hierarchy, exhortations
to collaborate better along the lines of the hierarchy will fall on deaf
ears. For example, if a senior associate has a reputation for knowing
more than anyone else about drafting acquisition papers, it’s far more
likely that other associates will go to him for assistance than that
they’ll go to the partner they’re actually working with on an acquisition. Again,
to quote:
"Most executives will tell you that effective collaboration
is critical to their organization’s strategic success. Most, in candid
moments, will also admit that they have invested a great deal of time
and money to promote collaboration, with few or no results. Often, managers
undertake such initiatives without understanding the inner workings of
a network, relying on an implicit philosophy that more communication
and collaboration are better. For example, managers
may implement collaborative technologies with the vague notion that they
will help employees interact more seamlessly and that this will
improve the quality of their work." [emphasis supplied]
Does this sound like any "failed" KM initiatives you’ve ever heard
of?
Now pretend you’ve accurately diagnosed the real networks-on-the-ground
that matter at your firm; you’re still not exactly home-free with KM.
KM at law firms is 95% a cultural issue and 5% a technology issue. The
technology platform is necessary, but by no stretch of the imagination
sufficient. The greatest impediment to success of KM is often
a culture of not-sharing, and if that’s really and truly descriptive
of your firm, you can stop reading now. I
wish you godspeed, because you’re going to need it.
For the rest of us, assuming your firm’s lawyers are willing to collaborate,
or at least to say out loud that they understand its value, the hardest
obstacle can simply be changing the way they work, if only in the slightest
increment. Since more or less the first time I ever thought of
the issue, I’ve assumed that if contributing to a KM initiative requires
a lawyer to spend as little as an extra five minutes at the end of a
matter "feeding" the system, the initiative is dead on arrival.
This
is not irrational behavior: To the contrary, the lawyer thinks
or assumes they’ve internalized all the knowledge worth having about
the matter, so a fortiori inputting it into the system will
never do them personally any good. Meanwhile, it’s not billable
time.
If you get to this point, you may be facing the challenge of altering
behavior, which is known in the literature as "change management." Daunting
as it may be, it has and can be done. McKinsey has lots to say
on this, as will I.
