As I approach the 800th article I will have published here on "Adam Smith, Esq." (for those of you keeping score at home, this will be #797), I realize some topics are evergreen. It may be because they’re just intrinsically fascinating, as Woodward and Bernstein famously characterized the Nixon White House tapes: "The gift that keeps on giving." Or it may be that they’re in something of a perpetual disequilibrium, oscillating on faster or slower cycles or being pushed and tugged as circumstances change from one antipode of the spectrum to the other (eat-what-you-kill vs. lockstep?). Or it may simply be that we’ve yet as a profession to arrive at a settled way of addressing them.
In that last category I nominate marketing of our firms, and knowledge management.
Which is why it’s instructive, and a bit of a closet relief, to look back at an article like Some Principles of Knowledge Management, published over ten years ago (fall 1996) in Booz-Allen’s "strategy+business." Assuming one can get one’s mind past the archaicisms (the "World Wide Web" appears in the third paragraph), many of the ten principles enunciated remain true—for better and worse—today.
Let’s take a quick tour back through the time machine.
1. KM is expensive (but so is stupidity).
Did you know that McKinsey’s objective is to spend 10% of its revenues on developing and managing intellectual capital? It may sound a truism today to say that knowledge is what we sell, but how many years (decades?) did it take American industry to learn that quality was not an expense—it was a feature? Ignorance and forgetting are costly in the same way that poor quality products and services are costly.
Last month I heard the keynote at ILTA 2007, delivered by Captain Jim Lovell, commander of the poxed Apollo 13 moon mission. Aside from telling the enthralling tale of nearly a week’s worth of nonstop improvisation by Houston Mission Control and the crew, using systems for purposes they were never designed for and relying on such high-tech tools as duct tape and an old sock to maintain their air supply, he dropped an aside that has stuck with me. Noting the tremendous majesty of the three-stage Saturn V rocket launching them on their way to the moon, he remarked that, "It was a far far better launch vehicle than the shuttle: More reliable, more powerful, more flexible, and even a smoother ride. But you know what? NASA couldn’t build a Saturn V today. We’ve forgotten how."
2. KM requires both people and technology.
I can’t resist, so permit me to start with this quote from the article:
"Computers that think are almost here," a Business Week article recently announced, adding that "the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence–human-like reasoning–is within reach."
And Brazil is, and always will be, the economy of the next decade.
We all know that computers are superb at capturing, copying, and distributing information. Just ask the RIAA. But people are unmatched, and probably will be as far as the eye can see, at synthesizing unstructured knowledge. As our KM tools within firms become more sophisticated, we’ve realized that one of the key functions has to be what the techies call "expertise locators," meaning the system has to be smart enough to point us towards our partners and colleagues who actually know something about what we’re trying to research. The system, in other words, has to have built in to it a function you want to use when the system fails.
3. KM is highly political.
This flows directly from the observation that knowledge is power, to which I would only add that in a law firm, knowledge can be revenue. It doesn’t get more political than that (in the wrong sort of environment, I mean, which of course is not remotely the case at your firm.)
The other dimension to the "political" component of KM is the economic one of free-riding. Why should I contribute to a knowledge base when, by hypothesis, the only material I can add is stuff I already know—which does me precisely no good.
4. KM requires knowledge managers.
The Brits, of course, have known this for a long time, in the form of "professional support lawyers," and I’m not sure what has taken us so long to admit they have a point. Interestingly, the author reports that even as of 1996 several companies had committed to establishing the post of Chief Knowledge Officer, and they’re name brand companies: Booz-Allen & Hamilton, McKinsey, Andersen Consulting, Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse, Hewlett Packard, and A.T. Kearney.
5. KM benefits more from maps than models, markets than hierarchies.
This I take as the author’s rather indirect way of saying (correctly) that one cannot anticipate in advance the rivers, streams, and byways through which knowledge will flow and it’s best not to try to straitjacket it into fixed categories in advance. Models and hierarchies tend to be brittle, whereas maps and markets are open-ended, flexible, and capable of evolution and even radical change. One of my favorite examples of this is the trusty old Dewey Decimal System where the "200’s" are devoted to religion.
And of course, it is wildly Christianity-centric. (A Scots Presbyterian, I can say this.) 201 through 289 are all related to Christianity (e.g., #232,"Jesus Christ and his family," and #254 "Parish government & administration"). Not until #290 do we reach "Other and comparative religions," and "Islam & religions originating in it" was deemed to have plenty of running room as it was assigned #297 all to itself.
6. Sharing and using knowledge are often unnatural acts.
This may be my favorite—and the author wasn’t even discussing lawyers. (His case study was Hewlett Packard.) I can’t really improve on his summary of the problem here, so I’ll let his words speak for themselves:
"If my knowledge is a valuable resource, why should I share it? If my job is to create knowledge, why should I put my job at risk by using your knowledge instead of mine? We sometimes act surprised when knowledge is not shared or used, but we would be better off assuming that the natural tendency is to hoard our own knowledge and look suspiciously on knowledge that comes from others. To enter our knowledge into a system and to seek out knowledge from others is not only threatening, but also requires much effort."
7. KM means improving knowledge work processes.
If this sounds a little too Delphic, recall that it’s a business school professor talking, but let’s try to unpack his meaning for a moment. Essentially, he’s saying that knowledge in firms is not created in a vacuum; it’s created for a purpose (drafting the brief, setting forth the terms of the acquisition, specifying covenants in a securitization indenture). In corporations, it’s things like market research, product design and development, and order configuration.
His point is that KM will be improved if the flow of "knowledge work processes" is improved. Does the first-year associate take a stab at the first draft of the brief, or the third-year? Who does edit #1? Edit #2? When does it go to the client? These actually are business processes, and you’re performing them today. You might pause and give a moment’s thought to whether they’re optimal or whether they’re "because we’ve always done it that way."
8. Access to knowledge is only the beginning.
Libraries are ubiquitous, but they’re not crowded. (Have you looked at your firm’s library lately? I predict it’s almost empty.)
What’s needed is what my friend John Alber calls "actionable knowledge;" knowledge you can use this very minute. This isn’t an academic exercise, after all; the goal is to get the work product out the door, having it reflect the impeccable quality your firm aspires to.
9. KM never ends.
Despite the risk this principle runs of sounding slightly revolting, I’ll just allude back to our Dewey Decimal System example and leave it at that. Knowledge is—assuming you’re any good—a moving target, with ever increasing ambition in terms of scope, subtlety, and complexity.
Did you ever think back to something you did 10 or 20 years ago and ask yourself how you could possibly have ever been so young and dumb? That’s the point.
10. KM requires a knowledge contract
I take issue with this. It’s irrelevant, and, as they say in the military, "OBE" (overtaken by events). What the author was referring to, or fearing, was the issue of whether the organization, the individual, or the client "owns" knowledge, and he fears that a proliferation of policies will be required to specify what is whose. He even offers this somewhat snarky remark: "Perhaps the greatest problem with increased KM is
the increased population of lawyers it will engender. Intellectual property law is already the fastest-growing legal field, and it will only grow faster."
Where does this leave us, back from our tour in the time machine?
Many of the challenges of KM are, indeed, timeless, lying, as they do, at the intersection of human nature, competitive dynamics, and the pressures of client service. Our technological tools have surely improved, by orders of magnitude, and our cultural predisposition to acknowledging the value of KM to our firms and our own individual careers has also surely improved, albeit not by orders of magnitude.
KM remains essential to us because knowledge is what we sell. It remains problematic because computers can’t do it alone (come on, admit it, you wish they could, don’t you?), and because the qualities that distinguish the competent journeyman from the counselor extraordinaire are ineffable.
Here’s hoping they always will be.
Update, 11 September: A reader from the UK, who has spent his career in knowledge management at name-brand firms, writes:
As ever Bruce a good article and some of the issues in KM are timeless.
However I believe that in a few years time in-house legal PSL’s may well become a dying breed. Over in the UK – I understand that a lot of the PSL recruiting is being done by the likes of Lexis-Nexis and Butterworths as they are steadily looking to do on line precedents for the law firms.
From my experience they aren’t there yet but in 2-4 years they will be. I think PSL’s will want to go and work there – maybe for a sense of a proper career structure – but also for work life balance which we hear so much about.I think that David Jabbari at A & O’s comments on PSLs and them developing a career structure but also getting more involved in Business Development will be the way for most of the major London law firms to go rather than just as legal researchers.
I still also believe that law firms don’t fully understand knowledge management and are looking for an IT solution as much as possible so that they don’t have to deal with the people based issues.
They also I think want closure and have something solved and put to bed – they don’t want it to be an on going process – so maybe that is why they dislike KM.
Sharing knowledge is an unnatural act – but as I have mentioned before people do share knowledge for a variety of reasons – but primarily in my view they do it based on reciprocal altruism – or as I call it the Godfather approach -i.e.they expect the person who has received the knowledge to return it at some time in the future when asked for it.
They also need to look at the way that they appraise their staff – although they may say that they appraise people on a range of issues – effectively and this is borne out by my own research the culture of the firm usually drives it to have its lawyers appraised on how many billable hours they achieved and that they didn’t have too many black marks against their name.
A lot of partners are not very good at being coaches of growth and learning – but perhaps the short term view that a lot of partners have by being rated on their PEP figures in a league table doesn’t help to look to developing the future.
I’d also like to add that I think that good knowledge sharing in a firm can also help a firm to innovate. I spoke about this at a conference in April about the barriers that firms put up that stop knowledge sharing are the ones that also are a barrier to innovation.
I thank readers for writing most sincerely; do not think this remotely smacks of a throw-away line. Indeed, reader feedback is one of the most professionally rewarding aspects of life here at "Adam Smith, Esq." So if any of you have had a thought and hesitated or sat on it without writing me, "snap out of it." (Yes, the immortal line delivered by Cher in Moonstruck.)
Update: 13 September.
Another regular reader from the UK writes:
I have been mulling over your article on KM for the past few days, but was brought up short by the comment you added from a reader yesterday.
One of my current projects is to take a long hard look at our PSL group. Not because there is a perception that they are not useful, but because they, like everyone else in the firm, need to deliver better value year on year. The firm’s expectations are not constant. The PSL role here will, I think, be different in 18 months time, just as the roles of associates and partners have already altered to fit the needs of more demanding clients in a tighter market. However, I think it is a leap to say, as your commenter does, that the PSL is dying out. Rather, the role is evolving away from providing generic know-how towards activities that add more value to the firm. This is healthy.
Some of his other comments about law firm KM suggest either that my firm is more enlightened than I thought, or that your reader has only been exposed to very traditional (and hide-bound) attitudes in other firms. I have always found it difficult to reconcile the widely-held view that "lawyers don’t share" with my experience of people who are dedicated to client service. That dedication is not always reflected just in the work-for-fees relationship. Sometimes it is altruistic. I also regularly see altruism between colleagues — sharing pieces of critical market or legal knowledge in order to allow someone else to improve their client relationship or work quality. That is one reason why we work in firms, rather than as sole practitioners. (If you haven’t already read it, John Roberts’s book on The Modern Firm makes this point much better that I could.)
On the IT point, I have noticed that in firms that are dominated by IT lawyers tend to identify KM with IT, rather than being a question of personal engagement. Again, I suspect that attitude is changing, as is the notion that KM should be a closed process. However, if firms do take that view, they are significantly out of step with KM thinking elsewhere. There is a long and dishonourable history of lawyers (in practice and academia) being too inward-looking and ignoring critical developments in other areas, but my impression is that we are getting better at seeing value in what other professions do.
Coming back to your reader, I think the behaviour he describes would find no favour with Adam Smith. Surely firms that turn against better KM behaviour (effective sharing of know-how and practice experience, sensible focusing of staff on value-bearing activities, humane management of elevator assets) will generate more value for themselves and for the wider economy in the medium and long term?
And here we are with another update on 14 September:
Great post Bruce, probably should be required reading for law firms everywhere.
I’d like to add that from my own experience, I think that most law firms have fallen into the same failure patterns as the rest of the corporate world. Closing the knowledge gaps then closes performance gaps and improves processes. Lack of knowledge strategies designed to close knowledge gaps results in lack of any real successes in KM. And that’s why for example, with some of the most expensive search appliances in place, law firms still struggle with basic problems like finding the right document.
Dr. Dan Kirsch
COO & Board Member
Knowledge Management Professional Society (KMPro)
