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Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore. Lucille Ball was told by her drama school instructors to try something other than acting. And because he didn’t speak much, Albert Einstein was not thought to be very smart. What each of these individuals had in common was that they persisted, refusing to give up on what they wanted to do.
It’s truly inspirational to hear about the underdog that achieves against all odds — and in addition to making great stories, there are lessons that can be learned from them as well. Of course, not every project has a happy ending, and not every story of persistence works out in the end. Businesses encounter failures all the time, and law firms are not exempt.
So how should legal professionals think about the pursuit of innovation, and when does it make sense to try again (and again) to achieve positive results?
Here are four tips to help organizations decide when to persist, particularly after a failed attempt.
Listen
The first step in understanding is to listen. What innovator hasn’t heard the words uttered, “Yeah, we already tried that. It didn’t work.” As someone working to drive a new project forward, pull that thread and try to understand what worked and what didn’t work. More importantly, organizations with strong cultures will tend to conduct post-mortems on projects and provide forums for open and honest feedback. Here, a strong dose of intellectual curiosity helps. Don’t be satisfied with the first answer. Be willing to dig deeper, to ask “why” and search for the root cause. For example, a perceived lack of funding to build out the project correctly could actually be the result of a lack of communication to management about the short cuts being taken. For a project that is really important to management, a full feedback loop might prevent decisions from being made that undermine the success of a project.
Assess What Has Changed
The world we live in is dynamic. After 2020, nobody needs to be convinced of that! Perhaps a dynamic that made success elusive in the past has changed. Has the market shifted? Have your customers’ needs evolved? Is there a new technology that can be applied to a particular problem?
Rather than start over, can you build upon what was done in the past? Most people who were around when Microsoft Windows was getting traction may recall that the version that was successful wasn’t Windows 1.0 or even Windows 2.0. It was Windows 3.1. Don’t be afraid to try a second or even a third time. Just be sure that you are changing a variable so you can reasonably expect to achieve a different outcome.
Create A Culture Of Innovation
Participants in the Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer survey from 2020 identified lack of management support as one of the key gaps in becoming future ready. Innovators (and senior management if you are reading this), need to purposefully create a culture of innovation. Here are some questions to identify areas where this can be meaningfully addressed:
- Is the default decision for your organization to say “no” to projects or “yes”? Encouraging and rewarding thoughtful ideas with permission to conduct research or experiments can help your organization develop more intellectual curiosity and develop a can-do culture where “yes” is the default instead of “no,” and where it is OK to try and try again.
- Is it safe to try and then fail? Or is failure not tolerated? Encouraging teams to break projects down into small and digestible chunks can help project teams “fail” in a small part of a project, which should be OK, without causing an entire project to fail. It can also help determine if a project needs to pivot. Mapping out key assumptions and developing ways to test those assumptions can help create a culture of innovation. Any subproject that can be positioned as experimentation can remove the stigma of failure too. Experiments never fail. But they may provide results that we didn’t desire.
- Does your organization encourage open and honest feedback? What people say isn’t always what they are thinking. Does a staff member or associate have permission to provide essential feedback that can be acted upon by managing partners? Providing forums for safe (and perhaps anonymous) communication can help management better understand the risks and issues that are perhaps understood but not always communicated to decision makers.
By considering ways to be thoughtfully persistent when approaching innovation, legal professionals can find new ways to drive productivity and efficiency. At a time when the industry is continuing to transform so rapidly, it’s a worthwhile exercise to seek out opportunities for growth and change.
Ken Crutchfield is Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Ken has more than three decades of experience as a leader in information and software solutions across industries. He can be reached at [email protected].
