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I tried to start my last post by stressing the importance of learning a broad set of basic skills to complement one or two deep skill-sets. Ultimately though I was reminded that there is simply too much to know for that approach to be feasible.

Nonetheless, there’s no sense ignoring useful tools when you find them, provided there is a simple way bring them into your toolbox. It is with this in mind that I’d like to mention another McKinsey Quartely article on the Industry Cost curve. How it’s useful to KM is not immediately obvious, but bear with me and I’ll explain why I feel it’s useful re: the deployment of KM resources within a firm.

If you’re going to read the rest of this post you really should read the McKinsey Article.

Welcome back.

The Industry Cost Curve is an analytical tool that is used in pricing and to assess just how profitable a line of business could be. Traditionally it is used to analyse commodities to determine whether or not to build a new plant and the price/margin a given commodity might be able to fetch.

With firms seemingly wed to a cost-based approach to pricing (1 hour of work costs $x and is billed at $y) and offering a arguably uniform level of quality, the Industry Cost Curve is relevant to KM in three ways:

• effective deployment of KM resource can help a firm improve its margin by executing deals in a less costly way;
• analysis of the various curves (by engagement type) can help a firm understand how it can best deploy its KM resource by identifying areas where the impact will be greatest; and
• at a more basic level, this can help identify the business case for a KM project, even if it’s a smaller, specific piece of work rather than a giant search, taxonomy or portal project.

Now, if you’re like me, you may struggle to conduct this analysis in on your own, but I imagine some boffin from your strategy or finance department might be able to help with some of the numbers. If your efforts prove successful, your hard work will help raise the profile of KM as a strategic tool in your practice; and if not, you’ve conducted an interesting piece of analysis which will increase your insight into the practice you support.

Before you go off piste with this, chat to your business manager to see if what tools they use to manage the practice and see whether there’s any other tools for you to adopt and adapt.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” – Alexander Pope

This post started out as a quick rant about how important it was to make it simple to learn the basic skills needed to function in your firm. Fortunately, as I was trying to finish it off, I realised how naive the post was. I’ve included my original below for a bit of fun and for some public introspection.

Being from an IT background and finding myself continually involved in some sort of IT project or another I am constantly amazed with how little other people know about IT projects. Frequently I think to myself “This is IT Projects 101!” when I come across others who don’t understand unit testing, user interface design or any number of commonplace issues in IT projects. Of course, it’s basic for me because of my experience and education, and I will be the first to admit that there is far more that I don’t know than what I do know.

In the North American vernacular, 100 level courses are synonymous with first-year university courses, 400 level courses for fourth year courses, with a 101 course being the very first in a subject area. 101 courses are simple stuff against the backdrop of the deep and complicated concepts to come. While the standard is not terribly difficult, there are a great many areas we’ve never even gained an understanding of the basics.

There is great undoubtedly a benefit to focusing on one or two niche skills, but it is important in business to understand at least enough to know where to look should something crop up. Budgets are a good example of this. Many are frightened by the annual numbers drill, and the process is made even more unpleasant when accompanied by a crippling lack of knowledge. One of our roles in knowledge management is to make it easy to get people up to a 101 standard.

Here’s a few you may choose to ask yourself in a quiet moment:

• What are the 101 skills people need at my firm? Can they get them?
  
• What 101 skills am I missing that hinder my performance at work? Is it worth gaining them or can others do them for me.
  
• What 101 skills to people need to work on my projects? Do I make it easy for them to attain them?
• What inexpensive ways can I find to help people gain these skills?

If you can’t even get the 100 level skills right, why bother with the 400 level skills?

Of course, our resources are not infinite and our ability to make available a basic level of training on every topic is constrained. Further, firms are more likely to be able to make the big money from complicated engagement (400 level skills). In the end I feel firms need to strike the right balance between:

• making 101 skills simple to obtain for those who need them;
• putting people on a path to build 400 level skills and beyond; and
• leveraging subject matters experts in other fields, internally or externally, when needed.

This one’s a quickie, but not quite succinct enough to fit into 140 characters.

I just came across an article in the April McKinsey Quartely (password required) which discusses how to tackle strategic issues considering the current climate. Granted, while some say that the economy is picking up, several of McKinsey’s suggestions struck me as being both useful and offering an opportunity for KM folk to offer value in ways they might not normally do.

Suggestion 1 – Increase Monitoring of key industry variables. The idea being that a firm is especially sensitive to changes in the environment just now and so, the firm should keep a closer eye on what’s going on. Where KM can contribute to monitoring is in the use of available tools and information sources and in helping to identify what those variables are. Tailored alerts from providers like Lexis and Factiva can help a firm keep a tighter reign on things. Used cleverly this information can be integrated into a firm’s Intranet or delivered to Blackberries via RSS or email alerts.

Suggestion Two – Look beyond the crisis. In actuality, the work is quite similar, but look to gather and share trends that a firm may either be forced to ignore while it struggles to cope with the current climate. Again, an astute approach to the collection and distribution of this data will be helpful to others in your firm. This might involve a PSL or Information Manager keeping an eye on practice/sector trends and then synthesise these into pieces of thought leadership articles for the practice and its clients. After all, when you’re in the trenches it can be hard to get a read of the entire battlefield.

I’d like to include my own suggestion for good measure:

Be on the lookout for these requests within your firms. It can be very simple to meet a narrow request for information with a specific and narrow response. Imagine a Partner ringing you up and asks:

“Could I please have a Factiva alert on Transfer Pricing?”

The straightforward answer is ‘Yes’, whereby you login to Factiva, setup the alert and the Partner’s request has been met. However, consider what is actually being asked for and whether there might be an underlying need. Alternatively it might just be that there are other sources for that information or others in the practice who may also benefit from tracking the issue in question. As a service provider to the practice you’ll be well placed to spot trends in the behaviour of your lawyers that they may not be in a position to notice.

Several weeks ago Mark Gould blogged about whether we learned better from instances of failure or instances of success. The post is interesting and I suggest you give it a read.

I don’t have any specific comments on what Mark has written beyond saying that I mostly agree with what he wrote; instead I would like to share some  thoughts stemming from my own experience and views.

Bottom line, I’m of the view that failure is a better source of learning than success. Here’s an example which typifies my position.

Mrs. Knowledgethoughts and I are expecting our first child. As part of the process, every old wives’ tale and theory comes out of the woodwork. One of my favourites is that the severeness of morning sickness is indicative of the baby’s sex. The thinking goes that if there is morning sickness the child is more likely to be a girl, if there isn’t, a boy. A quick squiz on various baby forums shows this theory to be false and also shows cognitive fallacy at play.

“It’s true for me, so it must be true”

Which works for about two posts until contrary evidence is presented.

Correlation does not imply causation, and learning only from success often stems from correlation, the same type of learning that led us into the credit crisis (these CDSs make money now so they must do so in the future). It is just as easy to find examples of failure should you only look so far, and a single instance of failure proves the theory incorrect. Success can attributed to any number of variables, and that attribution may or may not be correct. Failure forces us to confront our Cognitive Bias, our tendency to make errors in judgement based upon cognitive factors. Failure forces an adjustment of our mental model.

Our adjustments won’t necessarily be correct, but in the process we have gained two valuable pieces of knowledge:

• our mental model is not correct… yet; and
• our understanding of the situation is not perfect

The first is obviously important, because you are required to either alter your view or bury your head in the sand. Should you chose the former, you will be better off in the future. Lawyers engage in this type of thinking whenever they construct an argument. Rather than accept raw ideas, they examine ideas for flaws, seeing how they stand up to changes in circumstance.

The second point is even more important because it shocks us into the unavoidable conclusion that our belief was mistaken and that future beliefs may also be incorrect and will require more rigorous conception.

I’ll close this post by sharing an example from my programming past:

When writing software, my first pass at coding is full of holes and flaws. I usually focus on implementing the perfect scenario. The user types the right thing, hits the right button and gets the right answer.

Perfect, but all I really know is that my software can handle correct input. I could run the software 100 times and get a right answer, but I haven’t learned anything about what’s wrong with it.

Fortunately I know from hundreds of previous bugs that my limited success is insufficient, and set about seeing how my system copes with unexpected inputs; users entering dates in the wrong format, missing out fields or clicking “submit” 50 times. The system will then fail time after time after time, whereby I refine the code (the model) and over time it becomes more robust, a process only becomes possible by intentionally seeking failure.

Ever come across a piece of software that didn’t work?

Don’t you wish the developer responsible had failed just one more time?

Earlier today I received my Google Wave invite along with many thousands (millions?) of others. For those who don’t know, a Wave is synonymous with a real-time email/Twitter conversation amongst an ad-hoc group.

Even at this early stage, what seems clear to me, is that Wave will influence how email works in future, setting aside the numerous risk & implementation issues with Google’s version. Once you get into the swing of things, it’s a more effective than the context-less approach of Email1.0.

In getting my feet wet, I first shared some invites with people I know in the KM community. I have 5 left and will happily share them provided you’ve an an obvious interest in legal KM type. Just leave a comment to this post and I’ll get in touch.

Creating a Wave is as simple as creating an email. You only need to hit “New Wave” and you’ll get a conversion for one. You can get a better idea of functionality by watching watch this video.

Having activated my Wave account, I noticed via Twitter that several people I knew were already on Wave (Doug Cornelius and Mary Abraham) and added them to a Wave I had created. It’s slightly ironic that in order to add & find others I had to contact them via Twitter.

I have to say that currently the interface needs work, but also, I need a better understanding of how it might be used. Doug, Mary and I have already started getting our feet wet with chats on privacy and possible uses. If you’ve got Wave account and want to participate in our initial foray into KM Waviness, then add neil.richards@googlewave.com as a contact and I’ll add you in.

Some questions I have yet to answer:

• How do I share a link to a Wave?
• Is a Wave public? How would I make it so?
• How do I control the privacy of a Wave?

There’s a lot more to be said about Wave, but you really need to read / see it for yourself. Watch a couple of the vids to get a better idea as to what it’s all about.