Knowledge – past and future

Knowledge working as a concept has been around for decades, and firms need to revisit its definition when reinventing their processes for the future, says Jack Shepherd, legal practice lead, iManage.

Knowledge work is not a new phenomenon. Peter Drucker coined the phrase ‘knowledge workers’ way back in 1959 in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow. It was created to distinguish manual work and ‘knowledge work’, the latter as work that primarily involves the use of knowledge and creativity to solve problems and create value.

64 years later, does that definition of knowledge work still stack up?

Despite massive change and innovation, the goals of knowledge work should remain true. Though, I can’t help but feel the added weight of expectation for the modern knowledge worker. Legal professionals are now expected to actively share their knowledge and expertise with their colleagues in order to contribute to a collective knowledge that benefits the entire firm. We’re team players, but getting knowledge workers to share knowledge can be like getting blood out of a stone.

Is personal knowledge management the missing link?

While we rely on the omniscient knowledge of the internet at our fingertips more than we’d like to admit, it’s how and what is stored in our brains that might be the missing link in the knowledge economy.

Muhammad Mustafa Monowar, an EMBA Student at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, writes in The Business Standard that to solve big problems, organisations need savvy employees that may benefit from adopting an approach called personal knowledge management (PKM). By doing so, individuals create habits that could lead to an “exponential accumulation of expertise over one’s lifetime” making these individuals highly productive and intellectual.

Monowar says that this approach could be the missing link we require to integrate ourselves with new sources of information and to help harness the flow of information through a culture of learning and knowledge sharing. This is a strategy knowledge work organisations would be wise to consider. Let people build up knowledge for their own purposes, then skim the best off the top. Law firms often call this a ‘freedom to play’ strategy.

The role of employees is changing

Knowledge work now spans a spectrum of job roles that would have previously been purely manual work says Bastian Maiworm Co-Founder of AmberSearch. Consider the example of a mechanic. Previously, diagnosing a mechanical problem relied on sensory inputs such as sound and sight to gauge mechanical performance and detect the fault. That process has largely now it has been replaced by software diagnosis.

That’s an extreme example compared to the changes that law firm employees have undertaken, an obvious example being forced remote working. But even remote working has given us a unique opportunity to redesign how knowledge sharing works withing our firms. There’s no incidental, in-person knowledge sharing at the office coffee machine. A meeting now requires more structure which may result in better archiving of knowledge, and that could be beneficial for everyone. Hybrid working conditions have presented challenges for knowledge sharing, but huge opportunities for people to almost start with a blank sheet of paper, and actually design workflows.

Chasing productivity

“It’s an unusual notion in the history of large-scale economic organisations, this idea that we leave it up to the individual to figure out how to organize their work,” notes Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown University.

Armed to the teeth with messaging apps, email platforms and project management tools, aren’t we supposed to be more productive than ever? I regularly speak to people chasing the next “legal innovation” in the pursuit of increased productivity. I’m not a fan of the phrase.

Legal innovation makes it sound like the only change that can come has to be in some way innovative, and that’s far from the truth. Of course, there’s a huge amount of amazing new tech that helps, but you shouldn’t do so at the expense of considering older or more established things too. In fact, you should probably start with what already exists because you can improve things with zero cost, in familiar interfaces in tools people already use.

Now, how’s that for productive.

Read more about how you can activate your organization’s expertise in the Knowledge Unlocked datasheet free download (https://imanage.com/solutions/knowledge-unlocked/).