Law firms, like other professional services, are constantly looking to improve our knowledge-management strategies, i.e., to share and reuse valuable work product and leverage institutional knowledge. When properly executed, these programs translate into efficiency, higher quality work, happier clients, and more engaged employees.

"The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple."

White & Case, a global law firm with 41 offices in 29 countries, set out to do exactly this in 2014 when it decided to invest in its intranet as a key knowledge tool for the firm. It took more than two years of research, design and development but the Knowledge team produced an award-winning product that supports 5,000 lawyers and staff and gives White & Case a platform to continue innovating.

There were several factors critical to success.

Homepage of the new White & Case intranet

Knowledge Reputation

When taking on a high-risk project, it helps to have a reputation as an innovative department. The Knowledge Department was formed in 2008 to help collect, organize and connect people to the firm’s collective knowledge. By the time the intranet project came about, Knowledge had pioneered expanding a successful professional-support-lawyer function and instituted an enterprise search tool for the firm. Through the success of these programs, the department had built strong relationships with lawyer allies and become known for driving change.

Leadership Buy-In

The old intranet was known for being inflexible and difficult to navigate, which created big challenges but also opportunities. The project was not an intranet upgrade but a complete revitalization. Since this was a priority project, Chairman Hugh Verrier created a partner-led Steering Committee at the outset. This team of 10 partners and business leaders helped define a clear mandate: the new Connect had to win its audience back. It had to be trustworthy, reliable and intuitive—built around the user’s needs.

Broad Engagement

Early on, the Knowledge team realized the project also needed a broad group of colleagues to serve as a sounding board and test group for new ideas. The 400-person Sounding Community, a demographically representative group of White & Case colleagues, was established. At its inception, this community represented 10 percent of the firm and throughout the project answered surveys, gave feedback, and tested the product prior to launch. The project team made a point of following up after an outreach to let the full group know the results, which made for a more powerful engagement.

The Sounding Community used interactive software to conduct usability tests like this. 

By the time the new intranet launched, the Knowledge team had ready ambassadors in most local offices. Each member of the Sounding Community was given a branded mug, to visibly note that they were part of the intranet team. Their involvement made a global project resonate on a local level. 

Quality Product

None of the change-management processes would have made a difference if the new intranet did not deliver. With the strong partnership of the Steering Committee, Sounding Community and Knowledge team, the firm were able to produce a new intranet that was fast, easy to navigate, integrated with key firm systems, and mobile-friendly. It delivered on the Steering Committee’s vision. Shortly after launch, a survey of end users found a 97 percent satisfaction rate, as opposed to 53 percent with the old system.

One of the best innovations from the new intranet was an improved search experience.

The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple.

Whereas the enterprise search had been siloed from the old intranet—and built largely for advanced searchers—on the new intranet the Knowledge team simplified the point of entry into a single search bar for both intranet and enterprise search and kept users within the frame of the intranet when viewing results.

In addition, the team knew from interviews that many users preferred to search for intranet content rather than browse for it. In order to accommodate this, the search bar was built to serve as a navigation tool; after three keystrokes, it fills in the names of colleagues, sites and global tools as recommended results. 

Search bar showing predictive typing, and recommended results for sites and people.

Summary

White & Case was able to successfully bring the firm back to a new intranet, and begin using it as a valuable knowledge-management tool, by prioritizing the project at the highest levels and having a plan for broader engagement across the global platform. Now the challenge is to keep growing the product to help move the firm into a truly digital workspace. 

What is KM about?

It depends on who you ask and what their experience is with it. Some people/organisations focus on technology, some on people, some on process, a very few recognise that it needs to be a balance among the three, and for good measure also create a strategy to support their plans and ideas and to ensure alignment with the organisation.

But beyond that, what is knowledge management about? Why do we/our organisations do it? 

For many organisations and people the answer, has to do with learning, and being able to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. I always liked to say it’s about giving people the knowledge they need to do their jobs, whatever form that knowledge took. But, what if it’s not quite that easy, especially as jobs, like life, are becoming ever more complex?

It’s really not enough to give people a database or app or platform to share knowledge. It’s not enough to implement a lessons learned process, or communities of practice. All good and noble pursuits, but what if that’s not enough to deal with the complexity?

The World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report, a summary of which you can read here, says we need to be life long learners. It also lists the top 3 skills that are growing in need/importance:

1. Analytical thinking, and innovation
2. Active learning, and learning strategies
3. Creativity, originality, and initiative

What struck me most about the #1 item on that list, is that is is both analytical and creative, it requires “both sides of your brain” (yes, I know that we have found that that’s not physically how the brain actually works, but I like the metaphor of it, so I’m using it anyway). But so for so many people their creativity was educated and socialised right out of them. They needed to get good marks in school, do well at their jobs, etc. and so in order to fit in they learned to regurgitate facts and think like everyone else.

However, in today’s world, and in the world that is quickly coming at us, regurgitating facts and doing what we’re told, isn’t enough, doing the “same old, same old” isn’t enough. It’s time to look at things differently, to learn new ways of doing things, to re-learn our lost creativity. KM programs should be supporting that, after-all they are about organisational learning, creating new knowledge (which is innovation, by the way).

And, one of the best things about focusing on creativity and innovation is, people understand what those terms mean, no one understands what knowledge management is. Another great thing about creativity and innovation, is that there is lots of research that supports its importance to people and the workplace, something that can’t be said about KM (mostly because KM can’t decide what it is, not that it’s not useful).

So, for all you KM people out there, don’t you want to take your KM activities to the next level of organisational learning? Help make your organisations innovative and creative? Help them meet the challenges of the age we live in?

Let’s talk about helping people re-learn their creativity!

Note: this was originally posted at https://www.realisation-of-potential.com/creativity/taking-your-km-program-to-the-next-level/

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KM Institute partner, Enterprise Knowledge, shares more insight on the application of Design Thinking in development of an organizational KM strategy. . . scroll to bottom of page for info on new course on this topic from KMI.

At EK, we are mindful that for any Knowledge and Information Management initiative to be effectively adopted within an organization we have to ask ourselves two questions: “who will have to do their jobs differently?” and “what new processes and practices need to be put in place to ensure those individuals are equipped to succeed?” Not answering these questions can lead to ignored technology systems, subverted processes, and painful organizational change.

That’s why when we’re developing a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy for a client, we are intent on understanding the organization within which they are operating. Our goal is to help build a more adaptable workforce that is prepared for change – whether it occurs in organization structure, process, or technology – and can sustain their KM strategy over time.

Design Thinking: An Approach and Mindset

Determining how we can support the underlying organization is no small feat. To do so, we often leverage Design Thinking to reimagine how people can work more effectively together. The value of Design Thinking lies in the fact that it is both an approach and a mindset. As an approach to problem solving, Design Thinking necessitates that we seek to understand our end users – those individuals for whom we are designing a KM strategy. We treat our end users as partners and co-creators, discovering what is meaningful to them so we can be sure that we are focusing on what matters. To start shifting behaviors within an organization, it’s critical that we meet them where they are, immerse ourselves in their perspectives, and co-create solutions. We want everyone to be aligned about the challenge we are solving and understand why things need to change.

As a mindset, Design Thinking is about being open-minded and curious. It’s about building empathy and setting aside any assumptions that we might have about the people for whom we are designing. And it’s about being comfortable generating and iteratively working through various possible solutions, knowing some won’t work, but trusting that some will.

Building a New Organizational Model

How do we enable employees to embrace and adopt new ways of working that support a proposed KM strategy? American architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller once said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” At EK, our approach to organization design recognizes that we have to create a future that is different from the present. We have to look at and reimagine various aspects of an organization. When we’re seeking to understand our client’s organization, we are looking to see where they fall on a spectrum of topics, including:

• Organizational Structure: Do employees have formal roles within a fixed hierarchy or is the organization comprised of self-managing teams, which support the creation of more fluid, natural hierarchies?
• Leadership Style: Do leaders manage by command-and-control or do they think of themselves as servant leaders?
• Information Flow and Knowledge Sharing: Does the company adopt practices of transparency, or is information considered power and provided on a need-to-know basis?
• Coordination: How do teams and departments work together? Do people typically work in silos? Alternatively, does the organization support cross-functional collaboration?
• Decision-Making: What guides decision-making – profit, growth, and market share, or values and organizational purpose? Are frontline workers given autonomy to make decisions?
• Mindset and Perspective: Do people in the organization follow established, stable processes (i.e., there is one right way of doing things)? Or is change viewed as an opportunity and, subsequently, people are rewarded for thinking innovatively?
• Performance Management: Does the organization operate as a meritocracy, with people advancing based on their individual talents, or is the focus on a team’s overall performance?

These are just some of the areas that we delve into through a combination of interviews, focus groups, and workshops as we think through how to help an organization successfully harness their knowledge. While every organization is different, we do see common elements in successful KM organizations. Organizations that are adaptable and promote openness and connectivity often have servant leaders, create channels to share information more broadly, empower teams (or departments) with responsibility, hold people accountable, and use a combination of centralized and decentralized decision-making practices. Ultimately, by looking holistically at the structures, processes, communication practices, tools, resources, and incentives that are in place, we can identify where change is most needed in order to help an organization achieve its Knowledge and Information Management goals.

Design Thinking and Organization Design

We approach organization design from a Design Thinking perspective, recognizing that if we want to create the conditions that change behavior, we have to understand our end users’ wants, needs, pain points, and goals, and the system within which they work. Our Design Thinking for Knowledge Management approach (DTKM) – Empathize, Define, Iterate, Prototype, and Test – allows us to do just that.

During the Empathize stage, we meet with people from across the organization of different job levels, tenures, and areas of expertise to look at the problem through their lens, surface pain points that they are facing, and discover unmet needs. Our objective is to understand why things are the way they are and to build a foundational partnership from which we can later co-create solutions.

Once we have a clear assessment of the organization’s current operating state, we move to the Definestage. It’s here that we analyze and synthesize the information collected during our interviews, focus groups, and workshops to identify the core organizational issues affecting the end users, and we visualize a target state for the organization that will support their KM initiatives. It is critical at this stage that we align leadership and staff around the vision for change, why change is needed, and what the risk of not changing is.

With our target state defined, we can start prioritizing where we need to focus – what areas of the organization need our attention the most to support their KM goals. That’s when we begin to Ideate. We work with our end users to explore new ideas and practices that will help nudge behavioral changes. We visualize new ways of working to see where, for example, we can simplify burdensome organizational processes.

Armed with possible solutions, we then move to the Prototype and Test stages. Since our focus is on people and processes and shifting behavior, our goal in this experimental phase is to start small and try out new ways of working through developing minimal viable “products.” From an organization design perspective, this could be testing different approaches to decision-making within a project team. It could also involve rolling out a KM training curriculum to a select group of end users to see whether it could be adopted enterprise-wide in the future. Ultimately, our goal is to see what works and what doesn’t, and iterate based on feedback.

Once we have a solution, it’s important to demonstrate quick wins and identify a KM leadership team and tribe that can commit to sustaining the change and ensure the new behaviors stick. People need to see tangible action that is delivering real value, and they need to see their leadership visibly and actively supporting the recommended efforts in order to participate themselves.

In Conclusion

Each KM strategy we develop and implement for our clients is unique. It is dependent on their needs, priorities, and goals, as well as the people, process, culture, and enabling technologies that comprise their organization. Similarly, there’s never a “one size fits all” approach to organization design. Our Design Thinking forKnowledge Management process is effective in keeping the focus on end users, learning about the context in which people work, and driving recommendations to the organizations that are practical, sustainable, and will enable new behaviors to stick.

This week two different people said to me: I do not know what you do. Fortunately, these were not coworkers or members of the KM community, but close friends. Answering that I work in “knowledge management” was not enough. By this time, they know this. Both of them had jokingly said at some point in our friendship that “I should manage their knowledge” which I am sure sounded very funny in their minds!

It dawned on me—what is it about KM that is so clear to KM workers but so elusive to others?

So when I overheard a group of people talking about building a ship while sailing it, my ears perked up. I love a good sailing metaphor! KM does sometimes feel like building a ship while also sailing in it. By this I don’t mean that I know how to build a ship. I do not. And if I were not on the ship, it would likely still be floating. In fact, the ship is full of highly educated and passionate people! So a floating ship, with smart and passionate people, who know what they are doing, and me—one person who doesn’t even know how to build a ship. What am I doing?

For me, being a KM worker has entailed figuring out where I can bring value to the shipbuilding and sailing process—across a complex system, with competent stakeholders, and amidst organizational ebbs and flows and finite resources. I’m part of a community of shipbuilders and sailors, but I help my fellow shipbuilders do what they are doing or co-create ways to do it better one step at a time. I help connect people from the bow with others at the stern. I can gather insights from one side of the ship and bring them to another. I help welcome the newcomer, while also sharing the wisdom of oldtimers. I can work with the crew to be attentive to our interconnections, relationships, and boundaries. And I can share with the crew just how they are working—how many connections they have, how many lessons they have learned, how much they have generated, captured, and shared with each other. I can also reflect with the crew about the kind of crew that we are.

Along our voyage together, I (and other KM workers) must shift what we bring to the shipbuilding or sailing process to meet new needs and forge across uncharted waters. Maybe I am taking this too far!

It seems like everyday at sea is new day with new and exciting opportunities. And doing this as part of a global community of shipbuilders and sailors—whether that is with fellows at IBP or GHKC or with members from our internal MSH Technical Exchange Networks (recently highlighted in KM World)—is what I truly value as a KM worker.

I am not sure if KM workers as both part of a cadre of shipbuilders and sailors makes sense, but I like it!

What’s the likelihood that KM solutions “stick” without a KM leadership team? Pretty slim. When you take the time to develop leaders who understand the value of knowledge management and are empowered to be creative and try new ways to solve tough organizational challenges, you create a culture of knowledge sharing, team collaboration, and personal and professional growth.

The make-up of this KM leadership team looks different in every organization because every organization is different. A KM leadership team that is designed to create positive change within their team, department, or organization’s culture has some common elements. 

Here are the top three ways to shape the KM leadership where you work by thinking about it in terms of tribes:

1. Build your tribes

Seth Godin defines a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” Tribes need leaders and members who share a vision that they’re willing to create together. 

In KM, that might be:

• A workplace that’s fun, engaging, innovative, and bustling with smart people sharing their expertise and ideas with one another
• Easy access to all tribal knowledge so that every tribe member can focus on the service they provide to the community, rather than wasting time looking for informational resources
• Leveraging technology that enables the tribe to communicate more effectively about the topics and issues that matter within their community

In essence, individuals make up tribes, tribes make up a community, and a community defines its own culture.

2. Make sure tribe leaders and members know their roles

When you start developing your KM leadership team, you should focus on selecting committed tribe leaders who will serve your tribe members. Look for individuals of varying seniority and tenure who are willing to join the tribe and help support the other tribe leaders. These leaders should attract their tribe members rather than coerce them to join the tribe so it’s important for these leaders to be able to articulate and bring energy to their tribes shared vision.

Once you’ve identified your tribe leaders, provide them with the learning opportunities that they need in order to develop into servant leaders. Then, it’s important that the tribes and community overall recognize who they are and what their role entails. Communication is key because a tribe that doesn’t recognize or understand who is leading the way will go in every which direction.

Here’s what this tribe model might look like within an organization that understands how knowledge management can enable employees to  flourish and thrive:

Tribe Leader (Head Servant Leader): This individual has formal power and influence within the organization. They are the ultimate champion for KM and they’re willing to invest in it and endorse the efforts to build KM into their operations and strategy.

Tribe Supporters (Servant Leaders): These are the individuals who lead departments, teams, and practices within an organization. They may lead one facet of KM, such as content strategy, taxonomy design, or collaboration tool implementation.

Tribe Members: These are the “users” in user-centric design. They are the focus of the KM solutions that the Tribal Leaders are designing because they are the ones who are most impacted by the change.

Tribe Council: This is the group within the tribe that is responsible for the rules that the tribe follows. The council weighs in on the changes to the KM solutions once they’ve been implemented.

Tribe Specialists:  Lastly, these are the individuals within the tribe who are the true experts within a certain KM realm. This would be like the equivalent of a shaman who provides medicine and healing for the tribe members. In KM, this might be someone who is an expert in user experience, change management agile, methodologies, or semantic web tools.

3. Gauge the healthiness and maturity of your tribes

It’s not enough to simply choose and train leaders before you send them off on their own. You also have to set up ways to measure and evaluate their effectiveness in reaching their tribe’s objectives.

Be on the lookout for these signs of a healthy, thriving tribe and community:

• People are happy to be there and feel a part of something larger than themselves
• People are productive and work hard to build and innovate
• People are knowledgeable and share their knowledge with others

Individual growth is tied to the growth of the tribe, which results in the growth of the entire community. Individuals who belong to tribes and have a community-centric mindset will work together to create the culture that they envision. That’s how change happens.