Articles Posted in Thinking

The ten most important management concepts chief legal officers should understand were unveiled earlier (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, risk, quality, productivity, talent and then structure, information flow, decisions, value and objectivity). Here, in order of priority, are the next ten on the important-management-concepts list.

1. Delegation (See my post of Aug. 28, 2008: delegation within a law department with 14 references.).

2. Knowledge management This blog has an entire category for posts related to storing and distributing explicit knowledge and work product (See my post of Aug. 28, 2008: work product with 10 references.).

If you want to know which of your lawyers will be content to modify existing practices and which will propose to overthrow those practices for something new, have them take the Kirton Adaption-Innovation (KAI) Inventory. Additional background on the KAI is at a website.

After your lawyers respond to 33 statements with answers from very easy to very hard, a certified KAI facilitator will characterize the person’s cognitive style. This is further described in David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, and Neil DeCarlo, The Innovator’s Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth (Wiley 2009) at 54. (See my post of Nov. 9, 2007: psychometric tests with 17 references.).

The book suggests that teams be created of people with similar KAI scores, assigned to develop solutions to a specific problem, and then you and they can compare the two styles and approaches: tinkerers and revolutionaries.

Landscapes set out plants; hardscapes array stonework; so an “ideascape” describes how we organize our mental verbal resources. An ideascape for general counsel is one of my blog ambitions. This blog can help to organize and refine how managers of corporate legal groups describe their task.

The words they use, the concepts and tools important to them, the descriptive terminology for practices and procedures are all scruffy, sloppily used and in need of sharper and more shared common language and framework. To start the long path toward more semantic clarity, I have written to this point all manner of posts. A series of posts over the next couple of weeks will attempt to bring them together and synthesize them.

As I try to rationalize terminology on management for general counsel, I am also on the lookout for gaps in my coverage on this blog, for topics that need more expansive treatment, thought or links to related topics. Thus, this proto-dictionary of law department management terms aims to move us slightly farther and help us think more clearly, express ourselves more precisely, and understand more broadly. The posts will discuss words, concepts, practices, models and tools.

Depressing as it may be, I keep finding examples of how homo sapiens has less sapiens than we might hope. In the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 62, the authors trot out two more cerebral slip-ups (See my post of March 15, 2009: cognitive traps with 21 references.).

“Pattern recognition is a complex process that integrates information from as many as 30 different parts of the brain.” Faced with a new situation, experienced lawyers may think they see how the current situation is similar to a previous situation and then lock in to that pattern. But the brain’s unconscious matching of the new to the old may be wrong, and it is very difficult to unseat.

The second cognitive distortion the article refers to as “emotional tagging.” It is “the process by which emotional information attaches itself to the thoughts and experiences stored in our memories. This emotional information tells us whether to pay attention to something or not, and it tells us what sort of action we should be contemplating (immediate or postponed, fight or flight).” Emotional tags on memories can a general counsel reach a sensible decision, or they can hinder objective thinking.

Grid Analysis (also known as Decision Matrix Analysis, Pugh Matrix Analysis or MAUT, which stands for Multi-Attribute Utility Theory) is a useful technique to use for making a decision. I have paraphrased the following description from the excellent MindTools website. Grid analysis is particularly powerful where you have a number of good alternatives to choose from, and many different factors to take into account. A law department might use it when choosing a matter management system or as part of a competitive bidding process for outside counsel.

The technique starts by you listing your options as rows on a table, and the factors you need consider as columns. You then score each option/factor combination, weight this score, and add these scores up to give an overall score for the option.

1. List all of your options as the row labels on a spreadsheet, and list the factors that you need to consider as the column headings.

I paraphrased this method to generate and ponder ideas comes from the MindTools site. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_89.htm Managers in law departments could find many circumstances in which to use it.

Step 1: Before convening as a group, tell the members about the task or problem. Give everyone sufficient time to think about what needs to be done and to form their own opinions on how to best accomplish the task or solve the problem.

Step 2: Start with two members of the team and have them discuss the problem.

Having laid out in prior posts ten ways our thinking fall short of rational objectivity, I was interested by seven more in Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press 2008) at 345 (See my post of Jan. 18, 2009: two traps — availability of data and dramatic past events; and Feb. 5, 2009: eight traps — selective attention, cognitive dissonance, overconfidence, information salience, confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy, risk aversion, and peer pressure.).

Hindsight bias, which causes us to attach higher probabilities to events after they have happened (ex post) than we did before they happened (ex ante).” “I told you we should have settled since we had no chance of winning!” betrays this trap, as does the canard, “Hindsight is 20/20.”

The problem of induction, “which leads us to formulate general rules on the basis of insufficient information” (See my post of Aug. 22, 2206: the fallacy of induction.). A head of litigation who predicts a rise in lawsuits because three similar ones arrive in two weeks may fall into this trap.

Memory Loss & the Brain, Vol. 8, Winter 2007 at 4, points out that “some studies suggest that you can improve your own learning abilities by 20 to 30 percent, just by choosing the right time to do your learning.” When you feel most wide-awake and alert, tackle your tough project or your knotty problem.

I previously wrote about metabolic ups and downs (See my post of Dec. 5, 2007: Circadian sensitivity.) in terms of tolerance of others’ daily rhythms, but the point here is that we each have customary surges of energy and ebbs of enervation. Our abilities to focus, absorb and create wax and wane with those flows. Accept them and shape your work day around them.

Or, mainline caffeine. “[S]elf-declared morning people, who would normally show a decline in their memory performance during the afternoon, can avoid this decline by ingesting caffeinated coffee” and presumably other caffeine-containing products like tea, soda and chocolate (See my post of Dec. 19, 2007: grounds for insight; April 22, 2008: caffeine and adenosine; and July 13, 2008 #1: coffee slows mental decline.).

An in-house mind is a terrible thing to waste. On this I cogitated, ergo I blog (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006 about the half-life of law department knowledge; and (Sept. 22, 2006: factors that erode the rationale choice of a law firm.)

Attorneys who work for corporations start with a mix of inherited and develop intelligences (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: IQ with 16 references.)

so they vary in their cognitive styles (See my post of Jan. 20, 2006: cognitive style diversity more important than demographic diversity.). Ultimately, thinking results from a dimly understood confluence of electrical and chemical processes in the brain (See my post of June 22, 2008: neuroscience with 32 references.).

“Humans have biases that underlie how information is filtered, interpreted and often bolstered.” That summary, from an article in the MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 43, provides a three-part framework for my posts about cognitive distortions we all face. For general counsel and indeed all lawyers, these cognitive traps mean an unconscious tendency to frame complex or ambiguous issues in a certain way – without fully appreciating other possible perspectives – and then become overconfident about our particular view.

We filter out much of what impinges on us. What we pay attention to is very much influenced by what we expect or want to see (See my post of May 14, 2006: fundamental attribution error; July 10, 2007: fundamental attribution bias; and Nov. 21, 2008: value attribution that distorts perceptions.). Cognitive bias researchers refer to filtering as “selective attention.” Whereas selective attention draws us to what makes us feel correct, cognitive dissonance drives us away from thoughts that cause conflict and uncertainty (See my post of April 5, 2007: cognitive dissonance; and Nov. 21, 2008: cognitive dissonance and law firms we like.).

Even if we had no filters and perceived accurately, we still suffer from all kinds of distorted interpretations (See my post of April 8, 2008: overconfidence, salience and confirmation biases; Jan. 18, 2008 #4: fallacy of misplace concreteness; and April 5, 2007: diagnosis momentum.). We certainly can’t trust much-vaunted intuition (See my post of May 1, 2005: two limits of intuition; March 18, 2005: decision-making partakes of cerebral rationalizing as well as genetic hardwiring, chemical reactions, and bodily signals that guide us faster than thought; Sept. 4, 2005: lawyers over-rate their intuitive judgment and should use metrics more; and Dec. 3, 2007 #3: intuition and emotional intelligence.). Then, too, we listen selectively to advice (See my post of April 4, 2006: we over-value advice if problem is hard, undervalue it if the problem seems easy.).