Canadian Lawyer

18 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m Those of us in KM are looking for content that is re-usable, and for process- es that are repeatable, to then standardize them for the benefit of the whole firm. We are looking for ways to avoid the pain of re-inventing the proverbial wheel over and over again, and to reduce the wasted time in repeating history rather than building on and improving that which has gone before. The knowledge collections at our firms, however, regardless of size, are in fact only the tip of the iceberg. It is the untapped tacit knowledge of the iceberg sitting below the surface of the water that represents the true distinctive value of our firms. Tacit knowledge is the personal experiences and deliberate practice by individuals built up over their 10,000 hours on the knowledge ladder of expertise. This experience-based wis- dom is also known as the "Deep Smarts" of our firms. It's the stuff that's hard to explain to others, and often we respond with a "Let me show you instead." It's the "know-how" of being a brilliant lawyer. "We can know more than we can tell" as Michael Polanyi described it. Excel- lent salespeople or comedians would both say that it is inherently difficult to "teach" sales or "teach" someone a sense of humour. We often refer to them as "naturals" instead. Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, who authored a book on the subject (Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom, HBR Press, 2005) describe these people, whose intuition, judgment and knowl- edge are stored in their heads, as the core differentiator between the firms we inhabit. Their knowledge is essential. KM professionals have been working on methods to extract this tacit knowledge for decades. (Slightly more unsettling meth- ods of extraction are a recurring theme in sci-fi, such as the "mind uploading" from RoboCop to Skynet or the disturbing "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror where minds are copied on to "cookies" for full brain emulation.) You'll be glad to know that the KM folks are less drastic in their hope to turn the tacit into the explicit. And as we understand more about how knowl- edge is best transferred between people and how people optimally learn from oth- ers, organizational strategies for developing deep smarts are getting better, too. Passive learning in the form of lectures or self-directed learning through books or annotated models are just the tip of the ice- berg for creating smarter, faster, better law- yers. The Deep Smarts book recommends four active learning approaches that need to be in place for transferring deep smarts: practice, observation, problem-solving and experimentation. The idea is to create so- called "learning receptors" by providing frameworks and tools (or mental models) on to which experience and context may then be tied. Guided practice Made famous by Malcolm Gladwell's Outli- ers book, this is Anders Ericsson's thesis that "deliberate practice" over the course of 10,000 hours is what creates experts. But, as both the book and the thesis make clear: That is not the same as mindless repetition of a task. Deliberate or guided practice requires reflection and commit- ment to improvement as well as with an expert who can provide performance feed- back throughout the learning process. To properly practise drafting, it is not enough to just write. There must be some element L E G A L I N N O VAT I O N N O W O P I N I O N t a recent legal technology innovation event, one of the startups intro- duced its new technology as targeting the Final Frontier of Knowl- edge Management: turning the tacit into the explicit. The Star Trek reference had me imagining my team and I in shiny Federation uniforms stepping boldly into the new and as yet unexplored world of KM beyond our borders. The reality is a little more mundane, however, and in fact should be more accurately described as an iceberg than any strange new worlds. Explicit knowledge is usually described as the part of the ice- berg that you can see sitting above the water. It is the "Know What" of our firms — the documented checklists, best practices and precedents that have been codified (turned into paper or bits and bytes). It is what traditional KM initiatives focus on: how to turn the knowledge in the heads of our partners and associates into a collection of manageable assets that can be passed around the firm and collectively learned from. A Knowledge Management is entering a new phase to boldly go beyond mapping what lawyers know to exploring how lawyers know By Kate Simpson @k8simpson Deep smarts: the next generation

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