Articles Posted in Thinking

My jaws clench when I hear the term “thought leadership.” Promiscuous, the term makes me think of grandiose, otiose and comatose.

Grandiose because we all stand on the shoulders of giants, everything has been thought of or said before, and modesty goes a long way. Otiose because thought leadership conveys ivory tower, sounds-great-but-will-it-work, hoary platitudes, and castles in the air. Comatose because we arel bombarded with such hyperbole? Does every consultant who pontificates, every vendor touting a “unique value proposition,” every software provider who offers a “revolutionary solution” deserve to prance around as a thought leader? It is a flagrant cliché.

Don’t misunderstand me, innovation makes the economy move. Good ideas, progressive thinking, and speaking out with insight stand in very short supply so it all sits well with us. If genuine and deserved. To be prominent and correctly ahead of the crowd deserves praise. It is the depreciation of that worthy and exceptional contribution that pains me.

Coffee, tea, or electricity?

From the Daily Stat by Harvard Business Rev., Feb. 22, 2011:

“Research subjects who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes of the brain were 3 times more likely to come up with the fresh insight needed to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than people in a control group, according to Richard Chi and Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney. The researchers say they envision a future when noninvasive brain stimulation is briefly employed for solving problems that have evaded traditional cognitive approaches.”

Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009) at 3, points out the pernicious recurrence in historical writing of teleology. When someone describes what a law department did over a period of years to change “we tell the tale of change as if everything that happened was somehow meant to bring about the outcome we observe at the end.” Teleology impli3w that the achievement was inevitable, the inexorable working out of events to the good conclusion.

Life isn’t teleological. Management changes in law departments partake of halting, groping efforts that stumble upon a solution and then – the transformative magic of teleology after the fact – smooth all that happened into an inevitable, visionary quest (See my post of Jan. 15, 2007 #4: Whig history and the march of progress; and Sept. 22, 2008: a myth of progress.). General counsel who embark on significant change face heavy seas, not the smooth sailing from Port A to Port B that a teleological reconstruction creates.

Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly 2007) at 7, attacks the myth that innovation has a methodology. One reason we can’t follow a recipe to be creative is that we can’t take an objective view. “The problem is that we’re biased by what we can’t see.” We rarely see, as general counsel, when other’s management efforts fail.

Put more generally, missteps happen when someone draws a conclusion too broad for the data set to support, such as when the data itself was pre-selected and partial. Unwittingly, we pay too much attention to winners and not enough to also-rans, we reason back only from the subset of successful examples, and therefore we succumb to survivor bias (See my post of April 2, 2005: the survivor bias; Jan. 14, 2007: Whig history; March 20 2007: poor statistical results if data drawn from a selective pool; and Sept. 1, 2008: we reason back from successful examples only.).

Survivor bias has analogies to trend-spotting, where one or two instances of publicized actions are magnified into a ground swell of change. Salience creates a variant of survivor bias in that we pay disproportionate attention to the departments profiled in adulatory trade journals.

New management practices can boost the pioneering law department or can hobble it. We tend to think that the first-mover gains a competitive advantage: if you are the first to pay firms by credit card or the first to beta test software or the first to do anything, that boldness and creatively brings rewards of differentiation, knowledge, reputation, and advantage. Sadly, all is not rosy. “Research has shown, however, that first mover firms in fact may be as likely to suffer from competitive disadvantages as to obtain competitive advantages” (emphasis in original, Acad. Mgt. J., Oct. 2010 at 1175).

Somewhat similarly, the less-well known “follower’s dilemma” applies to law departments. Whether to mimic a publicized success or to choose to bypass the innovation can be a tough call. For a general counsel, the decision comes from the heart of managerial decision-making.

In my consulting projects I usually urge law department clients to try something new, but monitor it closely, prepare to make mid-course changes, alter whatever seems to make the new way of working fit better with the department, and be ready to jettison if it goes off course. All common sense, you may say, but the advice is premised on exploring constantly for improvements.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1972, proved that no voting system can satisfy a limited set of rational and reasonable conditions. That’s sad, but, still, several methods to vote exist, flawed though they may be.

One is the preference intensity method, also known as proportional voting. If each of six in-house lawyers who are evaluating the proposals of firms for a panel can allocate up to six votes to a firm, that is proportional voting.

Another group of methods, collectively referred to as rank-order voting, has at least five variations to determine the winner. (1) Most first place votes; (2) runoff between the top-two first-place vote getters; (3) survivors, where you drop the firm with the fewest first place votes and then reexamine and reallocate the votes to the remaining firms. A vote for a dropped firm goes to the next choice of that voter; (4) numerical total, where for example each voter’s first place firm gets 5 points, second place gets 4 points and so on and you add up each firm’s points; and (5) head-to-head matchups, where each firm goes against each other firm and the one with the most victories is the winner.

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 110 to 123, discusses five ways to make more fertile your intuitive, serendipitous inventiveness. Go for a walk, he suggests, or more generally relax and direct your mind to something in the foreground you enjoy while your brain crunches away in the background. Read widely, so that you stock of images and concepts remains full, ready to weave together ideas from different genre.

He urges people to keep track of ideas: write them down (See my post of Dec. 14, 2010: commonplace books for in-house lawyers.). Johnson goes beyond – curate your accumulated ideas, by which he means reread them, annotate them, connect them, and keep them as Aces up your mental sleeve.

Fourth, Johnson recommends that you look up what interests you. Lawyers can find out about anything on the Web, which fertilizes their innovation thinking. Finally, I will add one technique: explain your quandary, your efforts, your thoughts to date to someone who listens well and asks good questions. The very effort to pull together your thoughts helps and the objective feedback will spur more creativity.

In mathematics and logic, a set is a collection of items. RFPs [r], for example, are a member of the set of outside counsel management methods [M], so we could write in set notation r ∈ M. Dotted line reporting [d], another management idea, is not a member of the set of outside counsel management methods, so we would write d ∉ M.

If we think about competitive bids [c] and RFPs, they share attributes, so we can write r ∩ c to describe the overlap of those two ideas. If a selection process uses both RFPs and competitive bids, then the union of the two ideas appears as r ∪ c. Venn diagrams depict such intersections and combinations (See my post of Jan. 3, 2007: Venn diagrams; and March 9, 2007: book on history of Venn diagrams.).

Another notation describes sets as being the collection of elements with a specific property. For example, all the management initiatives that require a capital expenditure (i) would be written as set C where C = {i: i requires a capital expense} and the colon is read as “such that.” These notational grammars from set theory let us describe and think about concepts tersely and rigorously.

A trade-off appears to exist: as you become more expert in a knowledge area (such as tax law) you become less flexible. An article dubs this “cognitive entrenchment,” and to explain the phenomenon grounds it in schemas of knowledge (Acad. Mgt. Rev. 2010, at 579).

Schemas resemble networks of knowledge. Scholars proposes that people organize their domain knowledge in schemas, which are networks of facts, concepts, relationships, and memories. Experts’ schemas tend to be relatively larger than novices’ schemas. Expert schemas tend to have more inter-relationships than novice schemas. As a consequence of their more detailed and accurate network of knowledge, experts make decisions more quickly, remember domain information better, spot patterns more easily, and solve problems more effectively (often in a forward-oriented direction).

The downside, however, of such an enriched cognitive architecture is that the knowledge schemas of very experienced lawyers can become more stable and resistant to modification. Acquisition of domain expertise can lead to this cognitive entrenchment.

When you want new solutions to a problem, you should realize some researchers believe that traditional brainstorming posits an old-fashioned view of creativity. It divorces inspiration from analysis, which is far from the way the brain operates. According to strategy + bus., 2010, Issue 61 at 24, “There is no left brain; there is no right. There is only learning and recall, in various combinations, throughout the entire brain.”

Creativity flows most effectively from (1) minds full of examples of problems and solutions from the past, (2) presence of mind – a conscious effort to clear your brain of all expectations regarding, (3) flashes of unbidden insight where the pieces, or some of them, come together; and (4) resolution, the will to act on the idea despite obstacles.

The article describes a process developed by General Electric to help problem solvers harness this technique. Under a draft description of the problem to be solved – draft because the framing of the situation may change – a team lists rows of “actions you think you might need to take to succeed in the situation.” In columns you try to identify possible sources of the all-important question for each action: “Has anyone else in the world ever made progress on any piece of this puzzle?”