A Blueprint for Change - Part 2

In part one of this series, we reviewed potential impacts of GenAI in the legal industry, the psychology of attorneys and how that informs change management, and three steps to achieve strategic change. In the final part of this series below, we will detail each of these three steps, using the six elements of an organization as lenses to understand how your firm/department works today, what gets in the way, and what it must look like in the future to achieve the organization’s strategic goals.

Step 1: What the Place Looks Like Now – Pain Points & Obstacles

In this first step, the change team will openly discuss the things that get in the way of achieving success. The team should consider the strategy that has been set at the executive level, the market conditions surrounding that strategy, and the common goals they have identified between them. It is important that the moderator of this session have a particular skill for keeping things centered on factual / actionable pain points and progressing Here the group should call out paint points they have in getting their jobs done, from their own team’s point of view and from the perspective of the partners / firm / clients.

As this develops, you will begin to identify themes for problems to solve, which will become your initiatives and projects in step 2. Collecting pain points from the perspective of diverse groups will also help drill into root causes of symptoms that lie on the surface. For example, if partners complain that they don’t have enough precedents and playbooks in their knowledge management database. The Knowledge Management (KM) team might say we can never get the time of associates to contribute to and sign off on their work. Keep in mind that initial issues may be surface level. It’s helpful for the moderator to keep the “5 Why’s” in their mind during this exercise in order to identify root causes. 

Here is an illustration:

The presenting problem: Partners don’t have enough templates and playbooks, and it is hurting work quality and profitability.

1.  Why don’t we have enough?
   
   • Associates don’t have the right support and tools to contribute to the process.
2. Why don’t we have the right tools and support?
   
   •  Due to budget constraints, we reduced our footprint in KM professionals and tooling, and determined that the associates were in the best position to build out our libraries of precedents and playbooks.
3. Why aren’t the associates contributing more?
   
   • Associates are measured predominantly on their billable contributions to the firm, and the firm has a policy that it does not extend billable credit for KM initiatives.
4. Why can’t we just hire more experienced attorneys in KM to do more of this work?
   
   • We’ve tried this before, and while it can have a near-term boost in content, lawyers who leave practice grow less connected to trends and client demands, and our repositories become outdated.
5. Why can’t we just have a seasonal strategy for more experienced KM attorneys?
   • In the past, this has led to a net increase in our budget and decreased the consistency of our product between ramp up and transition periods.
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A solution: Dedicate a budget of billable credit for contributions to strategic programs like KM and equip the KM team with the right tooling that helps them surface the most relevant work product based on client demand, wherein the associate can start from packaged first drafts. Have partners celebrate these behaviors of commitment to quality and knowledge, as much as they celebrate other contributions. Recognize the contributors as heroes to ensure that the same behaviors are reinforced and modeled in others.

From here, step through the six elements of an organization and map what the place looks like today. How are we structured, what are our practice areas? Do we have sub-specialties that live within those practice areas? Do those specialties reside in the same countries? When we add new groups, how do they get integrated into this structure, and how are rights for approvals of work / policy distributed across them?

For Systems & Processes, what core systems do our groups use? Are they connected, do all groups have to use the same systems centrally vs. regionally? How consistent are our processes across groups and regions? What is our process for standardization, how do we make decisions for how work gets completed, and how are responsibilities allocated?

Rewards are one of the most essential elements of this organizational model. What gets rewarded, gets done. Here we are articulating the way people are measured for their jobs and get promoted (formal metrics), and how people gain status / prominence in the organization (informal credit). In the above example, we illustrated a formal reward of billable hours, and informal rewards of what leaders celebrate in public, inclusive of how employees gain recognition. Often, informal rewards are the signals that teams attain from leaders to determine who might be in the best position for advancement, and in this way, they are a strong driver of behaviors and outcomes.

The final two elements are People and Culture. Pro tip: Look at your rewards system when you see a disparity between your culture as it is described, and the themes you see in identified pain points / obstacles. On the people side of things, carefully consider your selection, interview process, and training programs. How well are you setting people up for success? Are there skill gaps, and how are they connected to capability gaps from a tooling perspective? Company culture sits at the center of everything you do. It is the stories that get retold about what people consistently do beyond their day jobs – not because they have to, but because they want to. It is the strongest organizational glue there is, and each element of an organization must reinforce that truth.

Now, take a break! You’ve earned it! 

Step 2 - Changes We Need to Make to Get Where We Need to Be, Achieve Our Goals

For step 2, this is where the change team starts to connect the dots, typically on the second day. For instance, if a pain point is that it takes too long to get new policies approved. We see in the org structure that decision authority is given to all members of a practice group and subgroup heads, regardless of the subject matter of the policy. We also see that groups operate on differing systems, with correlative practice data sitting in silos. This creates a manual process of collecting information from subgroup to subgroup, further adding to delays and frustrations. A solution might be the creation of a data lake to ease access, enable harmonization, and facilitate reporting, along with allocating decision authority to only those with applicable subject matter responsibility, while informing subgroup heads in parallel with centralized information that is easy to digest. Two things that come out of this may be a data project, as well as a decision rights project. Each of these projects will then fall under overarching themes of Data and Decision Processes, as an example.

As you walk through other pain points of each theme, you are identifying each of the changes that must take place in order to achieve the new org design. Examples of projects that might be identified could include system rationalization and technology simplification, or a process standards group assigned to each functional department. As you continue, consider your root cause analysis above and how solutions are connected to changed behaviors that ultimately achieve outcomes.

Once this is complete, the change team will then prioritize which initiatives happen over an 18+ month period, in three phases. What comes first should be items that are less complicated or costly (i.e., low hanging fruit). Policy changes and process improvements are (typically) free, whereas systems and people cost money. Moreover, identify where in-flight initiatives can be built upon. The more you can shrink the perception of the near-term change, the better. The end result will leave you with a high-level roadmap. The final task here is to test your strategic plan. Have you addressed all the identified pain points and obstacles that stand in the way of achieving your goals? Do the outcomes of your plan reinforce one another – in other words, do the activities that will happen between rewards, people, systems and processes, and organization structure propel one another?

Step 3 - A PRoMT Plan for Change

In step 3, the change leadership team is setting priorities of what will happen, how it will get done, and when. You need to consider only the first 3-6 months for purposes of this design. Subsequent detailed project planning will take place during the remainder of your roadmap. Be deliberate in the staging of what you roll out, what you and your leadership team communicate, and what the full team works on in stages.

In many cases, experienced employees have seen this movie before. It’s a new strategy, a new direction, we can do it!  To overcome this, the leadership team typically has 90 days after announcing this new strategy to show tangible change around each of the six elements of the organizational model. For this reason, it is important not to think of the initiatives that will take place over the coming ninety days as tactical changes that happen in isolation. Each of your initiatives are perfectly aligned moves that will harmonize with one another. The PRoMT plan for strategic planning has been defined below. This is where you will map your initiatives over the first 3-6 months, where the leadership of change begins. The moves you make are what people witness to believe in the change, and the remainder is the work the team must do to make it happen.

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PRoMT

• Persuasion – It is important to think of this effort as a multi-channel campaign. Communication alone is not enough; this is much bigger. This must be evangelized and sold. Every communication that gets put forth must answer these questions:
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  1. Why do we have to change?
  2. Why is this the right change?
     • What am I going to do with all this time you are saving me?
     • How will this make my job easier, and will I still add value?
  3. What makes you think we can achieve this?
  4. What will you do to help me action the change?
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• Resources – Change is not free and invariably involves a short-term hit. Be very disciplined about what resources get allocated but dedicate funds to make the change happen. Select teams of known stars, the players that will do a job and a quarter. Change is a team sport, and make sure to take care of your “winning” lineup.
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• Moves – Shine a light on all the supporting initiatives, celebrating the behaviors of champion employees that are embodying the change. Make it big!
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• Politics – This work is about identifying your cheerleaders and naysayers. Unite your cheerleaders and give them a megaphone. Invite known naysayers into the process, but don’t give them the megaphone. The goal is to overcome the known obstacles that naysayers might throw down.
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• Timing – Remember, 90 days to change, but stack the deck with early quick wins! Also remember that this is a marathon, considering way station breaks at the six-month mark. Be humane with stragglers, they are humans too, This is to be expected, but don’t set your pace there, keep enabling change.

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How to Get Started

You will invariably identify broken processes, insufficient systems, structural issues, hiring needs, and so on, as a part of this exercise. Remember that rules, policies, and process improvements are free. Systems simply hold the decisions you make, so make sure you get free things right first before moving on to bigger items. Consider one or two highly visible processes that cut across your organization as a starting point.

This will organically provide opportunities for each element of the organizational model to be reinforced, new training, new reward/metric structures, new process and team roles, new rules for how decision authority is allocated across the organization, and new stories to tell about the great people that are emblematic of the behaviors you need to see across your organization in order to achieve the desired outcomes. 

This is the process for building new organizational muscles, so begin that journey with lighter weights to reinforce memory. The job of communicating the change, including the answers to the four big questions above, is constant. People may hate change, but they love progress. Your job as a change leader is to give that change purpose and meaning. Fear of change is the absence of leadership, and resistance to change is the absence of involving people affected by change in the plan.

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