Does Technology Make You Complacent?

Is autopilot dangerous? The National Transportation Safety Board is holding a three-day conference in Washington, D.C. to discuss pilot and air traffic controller professionalism, including whether automation makes pilots complacent.  The New York Times reports:

Automation is generally considered a positive development in aviation safety because it reduces pilot workload and eliminates errors in calculation and navigation. “The introduction of automation did good things,” said Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors at NASA. But it changed the essential nature of the pilot’s role in the cockpit. “Now the pilot is a manager, which is good, and a monitor, which is not so good.”

...

Finding the balance between too much technology and too little is crucial, according to William B. Rouse, an engineering and computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Complacency is an issue, but designing the interaction between human and technical so the human has the right level of judgment when you need them is a design task in itself,” Mr. Rouse said. “When the person has no role in the task, there’s a much greater risk of complacency.”

Law offices certainly don't run themselves. But some functions are now automated, like document assembly, which utilizes software, templates, and the organization's knowledge base. There's no dispute this is a good development, reducing the time and expense of legal work and producing higher quality and more consistent work product.

Yet the danger of complacency exists. The technology makes it easy to produce good looking work product without dwelling on the details of the process. Professionals can be lulled into clicking buttons rather than thinking carefully.  They can overlook special circumstances or reasons for deviating from standard work.

Good countermeasures might include checklists to ensure people think through the issues. There should be a good review process to ensure final quality. And most importantly, as mentioned in the article, humans must maintain a role in the task -- important work shouldn't be completely automated.

Lean bonus: Discussing the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination, the article quotes Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the captain who famously landed the US Airways plane in the Hudson last summer, reminding us to look for root causes of problems rather than reflexively blaming technology:

“Something in the system allowed these well-trained, experienced, well-meaning, well-intentioned pilots not to notice where they were, and we need to find out what the root causes are,” he said. “Simply to blame individual practitioners is wrong and it doesn’t solve the underlying issues or prevent it from happening.”

Also see this post by Mark Graban on aviation, standardized work, and automation.

Is Legal Project Management Going Mainstream?

Jordon Furlong charts recent press on legal project management and thinks it's about to burst on center stage.  He writes:

The day of the haphazard lawyer, who pursues a solution by intuition, experience and the loosest possible timetable, is drawing to a close. In his place is emerging the process-driven lawyer: disciplined, procedural and systematic, who understands that madness lies not in method, but in its absence. Most of us don’t like that idea. We’d much prefer to maintain the image of the ingenious lawyer who triumphs by intellect rather than by procedural discipline. It confirms our belief in our innate intellectual advantage over non-lawyer competitors — and, frankly, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

....

The truth is, much of what lawyers do can be charted, diagrammed and proceduralized, and both the quality and the cost will be better for it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for smart, creative lawyers in the future. For one thing, systems don’t need to be straightforward and monotonous. More often than not, especially in the law, they’re complex and challenging, and they can easily be made elegant, precise, finely tuned, honed to a keen edge — the imagery of swordsmanship is intentional. And even within systems, a lawyer’s unique judgment, analysis and creativity can emerge.

I think this right and the whole post is worth reading.  And as I've written before, good processes and standardized work facilitate, rather than hinder, creative thinking.

Why Process Improvement Should Matter To All Lawyers

One thing is now clear: for serial litigants, developing efficient processes for handling e-discovery is critical. Joan Goodchild at Computerworld sings a common refrain heard at the The Sedona Conference Institute e-discovery conference I attended last week:

NBC Universal is one of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world. Chief Information Security Officer Jonathan Chow and his team manage information security for several business lines within NBCU, including its broadcast and cable television to film production, online ventures and its two theme parks in Hollywood, California and Orlando, Florida. Among one of the biggest challenges in the last few years has been the incredible explosion in demand for e-discovery services, according to Chow.

Since different legal teams handle the needs of each line of business, the workflows associated with managing electronic discovery vary as well, adding another layer of complexity. And because of the growing number of cases, and increases in both the amount of electronically stored information and hours spent supporting the process, demand for e-discovery services has increased 30 to 50 percent annually. The costs were spiraling out of control and this sent Chow looking for a way to manage the process internally.

Chow . . . tackled the costly and time-consuming process and turned it into a cost-effective and more efficient system that has seen a 40-45 percent gain efficiency since its implementation.

I spoke with several in-house teams who've done a remarkable job developing standardized workflow for handling e-discovery. In doing this, they've discovered how wasteful the processes were when handled by outside counsel.

But the lesson isn't that in-house teams are necessarily more cost effective than outside lawyers. Outside counsel can do this too. The lesson is that process matters. Efficient processes allow in-house teams to save money for their companies. And outside counsel can give their clients the service they deserve.

4 Reasons To Use A Checklist

Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto has arrived, and sits in my kitchen until I get my first free moment to enjoy it. I hope to read it, fittingly, on my upcoming cross-country flight. I meant to post about this earlier, but Dr. Gawande was on the The Daily Show back in February. From the interview, here's four reasons to use a checklist:

1. Complexity. The complexity of our work has skyrocketed.  Aviators implemented checklists because airplanes became too complicated to fly safely otherwise. One of the best test pilots in the world crashed the B-52 on its inaugural flight because he forgot a simple yet critical detail in the pre-flight procedure. For many of us, we've reached a B-52 level of complexity with our work.
2. Forget your pride. Pilots embrace them, despite thousands of hours of training and having rehearsed routine procedures many times. Increasingly, surgical teams use them. So should you in your work.
3. People like them.  Most people actually enjoy using checklists. It eliminates that nagging feeling you're forgetting something and lets you concentrate on doing the work well.
4. They're useful. Almost all medical providers who have tried using checklists say they would want their doctor to use one, were they the patient.

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Toyoda's Testimony

Today, I watched some of the Congressional testimony of Akio Toyoda, President of Toyota, and Yoshimi Inaba, chief operating officer for North America.

First off, as to how to respond to the Toyota recall from a Lean perspective, I'm essentially in agreement with Mark Graban over at Lean Blog, who pithily says what needs to be said. Here's his post regarding today's testimony. And obviously, my sympathy goes out to those hurt in vehicle accidents and their families. But I trust our tort system will do a fair job of compensating any victims and punishing any wrongdoers. For purposes of assessing fault, these hearings seemed premature.

Instead, the most fascinating thing for me is the chance to see inside Toyota as an organization. If Toyota failed to get things right -- and the executives seem to have admitted as much -- we have the opportunity to learn why -- really why, and not just hear spin from various factions or carefully crafted press releases.

Just given the incredibly public nature of this inquiry, we are likely to learn a lot. But more importantly, unlike many organizations, Toyota has clearly articulated standards, making deviations from the standard more apparent. With a solid basis for comparison -- a theoretical ideal serving as a control -- we stand to gain real insight.

D. Mark Jackson

Checklists: Get Consensus and Follow Up

Matthew May just finished Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, a book high up on my own reading list. Matt discusses two criteria for checklists:

• Clarity. Assume an untrained eye will read it. Make it bullet-proof, specific, and complete, to capture the knowledge. Make it concrete and representative of the real world. Describe with precision the what, where, and how. That way, there’s no question of what constitutes a deviation or problem.
• Consensus. Everyone who will employ the standard must agree on it. That forces a shared investigation to ensure that the standard represents the best known method or practice at that specific point in time. The activity in turn facilitates understanding.

The consensus part is where most organizations fall short. This is resource intensive. But to get it right, managers must practice genchi genbutsu -- that is, they need to go see for themselves how the work is being done. This takes time and may be perceived as a distraction from "real" work (like putting out fires started because of the lack of good standard processes!).

May suggests three basic steps for deploying a checklist:

1. Establish a Best Practice. Make sure it’s the best-known method. Get input and feedback from those doing the work. Get agreement on it.
2. Make it Visible. Accessibility is key. Hiding it in a drawer won’t work. Post it or publish it so everyone will constantly be aware of it.
3. Communicate. Inform everyone. Prepare and train people. Test it out. Monitor effectiveness and usage.

Step three also takes more time than some managers wish to invest. Training is expensive. It's also difficult to summon the energy after training for follow up. Folks are happy just to be done.

But I'm a huge believer in the power of checklists for lawyers. My experience is that a good checklist pays for itself almost immediately in saved time and reduced errors, sometimes recouping its production costs the first time it is deployed.

D. Mark Jackson

Free Your Mind (and the rest will follow)

David Allen recently wrote (no link available):

I'm lazy and I don't want to think about anything more than it deserves. So my quest became to find the best and most efficient ways to think about things as little as possible. What I found was that by asking a few clarifying questions, and putting the answers in a trusted system, I was able to use my mind more creatively and more strategically for the kind of stuff that really did deserve my mental horsepower.

Using a good system for capturing standard processes allows you to delegate routine thinking to your system, thus freeing up your mind for hard thinking. Contrary to popular belief, a good organizational system enhances creativity.

Most people use a calendar this way. They put appointments and deadlines on their schedule, rather than trying to keep it all in their head. Instead of thinking about when a meeting is scheduled, for example, they focus on preparing for the meeting, or doing something else entirely. By getting the basic information about their schedule on the calendar, it frees them up to think about more important things.

But most people don't appreciate that this method works just as well with tasks. By taking the list of next actions out of your head -- which is usually an impossible thing to keep in your head anyway -- you free up mental RAM for something else. This is particularly true with routine and standardized tasks, which may require little mental energy to do, but tremendous mental energy to keep straight in your head.

And getting tasks into your system minimizes waste. Managing tasks mentally adds little value, and does so at the expense of higher value thinking.  It's like searching for a tool versus using the tool to make something.

D. Mark Jackson