Dialog, Documents and Human Memory, a Legal Perspective
Can Technology Empower Leadership to Perform Concurrent
Discovery?
By Rod Welch
Table of Contents
..
I. Introduction
Two Ideas from the Law Help Technology Form
a Better Partnership with Leadership:
Traceability and Leadership Aide...........................1
II. Concurrent Discovery
How to Accomplish PMBOK Requirement
for Leadership to Align Communications.....................2
.. III. Truth is a Moving Target
on the Information Highway of Too
Many Meetings, Calls, and Email............................3
IV. Leadership Communication
Requires More Than Meetings, Calls and Email;
Alignment Means "Metrics" And This Requires
Traceability to Original Sources...........................4
.. V. Law is a "Knowledge Space"
Positioning Management "Details" in Relation to
Time (Chronology), Causation, Objectives, Requirements.....7
VI. Write and Link What is Important to
Objectives, Commitments, and Requirements
Be Complete, Clear, Concise...............................10
.. VII. Concurrent Discovery to Measure Communications
is Shown to Be Essential in the Literature................11
VIII. Information Highway is a New Reality
of Business environment that Requires a
New Work Role For Communication "Metrics" Similar to
Accounting, Cost and Schedule Engineering.................13
.. IX. Conclusion
Technology and a New Work Role Applying
Lessons from Construction and the Law Form a
Stronger Partnership for Leadership in the 21st Century...17
..
I. Introduction
Two Ideas from the Law Help Technology Form
a Better Partnership with Leadership:
Traceability and Leadership Aide
This year, Asilomar explores how technology that brings
.. constant information causes misunderstandings, conflict and
disputes, and what can be done to make technology more useful to
leadership. Lawyers solve disputes using a "metric" methodology
of tracing understandings to original sources as a means to
.. discover the true facts and determine the proper remedy. Lead
.. attorneys use aides called "para legals" or Associate Attorneys
to check communications through research and analysis. These
legal practices suggest two strategies to improve the
.. leadership/technology equation: (1) Can our friends in
technology empower leaders to use the metric of "traceability" to
align communications while work is underway so that misunderstandings
are avoided on the Information Highway that otherwise leads to
.. losses and lawsuits? (2) Can the "leadership aide" model be used
more widely to analyse information for better decision support
using emerging technology being produced by Intel and others? ..
II. Concurrent Discovery
How to Accomplish PMBOK Requirement
for Leadership to Align Communications
For simplicity lets call these ideas "concurrent
discovery." It would be analogous to "concurrent engineering"
.. which aims to avoid conflicts in design details by cross-checking
between engineering disciplines as design progresses, rather than
the common sequential practice of performing all of one design
discipline, then handing off a completed design to the next
.. design group. Similarly, the "metric" methodology of the law
can be used to discover the "truth" while work is underway,
rather than wait for errors and losses to cause an actual
dispute, then hand off the entire project record to a lawyer.
.. Using "metrics" to support leadership is gaining currency in
.. management guides. PMI's Guide to the PMBOK in fact describes
"leadership" as aligning people through communication. (see
section 2.4.1) "Aligning" entails measuring or a "metric" of
.. accuracy. That is what lawyers do when documents and testimony
are compared with what was written and said previously. The
PMBOK suggests that leaders should be doing this alignment
concurrently because otherwise people drift off course. The
.. Information Highway compounds this drift because it overwhelms
human memory, as set out in the Asilomar Conference thesis.
Clearly, truth needs an ally in the modern era; hence,
"concurrent discovery" offers a new direction to make technology
.. a useful ally for leadership.
..
III. Truth is a Moving Target
on the Information Highway of Too
Many Meetings, Calls, and Email
The drift of human memory when flooded by documents and
dialog from constant meetings, calls and email is revealed during
.. the "discovery" process used in the law. When an executive is
shown a document that the executive wrote and which conflicts
with the executive's testimony, or even a previous document
written by the same person, there is enormous frustration.
.. Lawyers are accused of asking trick questions and blowing things
out of proportion.
.. Yet, the real culprit is the fragility of human memory in
relation to time. The same executive who cries out from the
witness stand that there wasn't enough time to check the
contract, the letter, the PMBOK and so they had to go with what
.. seemed right at the time, is also quick to accuse others of not
telling the truth. Trial work over many years discloses that
humans innately form different versions of "truth." This
indicates that truth is a moving target, particularly on the
.. Information Highway. We can settle on a best guess at what
actually occurred, after-the-fact, as in a trial, only by hearing
from a lot of witnesses and looking at all of the documents, then
making the most agreeable alignment. This does not suggest that
.. everybody is a liar, deliberately "not telling the truth." It
means that human memory is constantly evolving, drifting under a
torrent of information, making all of us a jumble of
misconceptions as time marches on. PMI's Guide to the PMBOK
.. gives leadership the central role in maintaining this alignment,
because it is a hard job that is crucial to success.
Striking out at others is a common sense reaction when
we discover at an inopportune time that people are not aligned.
.. The only solution is to move the process of discovering the truth
forward in time. Don't wait for a mistake to cause a loss that
causes a lawsuit to cause a lawyer to discover a conflict in
understandings, i.e., that truth has drifted away. Align
.. people's understandings as events unfold, so there is shared
meaning of a common truth.
Concurrent discovery then is a process of constantly
checking for deviations from original understandings with respect
.. to objectives, commitments (e.g., contracts), meetings, calls and
documents, so they can be fixed before they cause mistakes,
losses and disputes. Only technology can make this practical.
..
IV. Leadership Communication
Requires More Than Meetings, Calls and Email;
Alignment Means "Metrics" And This Requires
Traceability to Original Sources
"Communication" requires more than simply conveying
.. information through a phone call, email or meeting. "Aligning
people" requires checking to ensure common understandings that
maintain shared meaning. People do this automatically when they
correct a colleague who seems to misspeak: we remember events
.. differently and offer a correction. This is the value of dialog
where "two heads are better than one." Lawyers tell their
clients to "document" critical understandings to help resolve
conflicting memories when people later disagree about particular
.. matters. Documents also help resolve confusion in our own mind
when we are unsure about what transpired or was understood
previously.
But, since the Information Highway of more documents and
.. dialog causes human understandings to drift off course, what can
executives and managers do besides hold another meeting, make
another call or send another email to align people? What does
"alignment" mean? What should leaders be doing differently to
.. accomplish it, and how can technology help? Let's look again at
the construction industry.
We can align the location of a door, a hinge and a
threshold using numbers and equations. This, in turn, aligns the
.. carpenter to ensure that the door is properly constructed. Thus,
carefully measured construction "details" are drawn and checked
by specialists called "architects" and "engineers" in the case of
computer chips and other industrial elements. Good technology
.. has emerged to help capture and organize the details of spatial
objects, using CAD/CAM tools. So far, however, humans have only
devised a system of language to align management work. This
redounds to the fundamental proposition that language is the
.. means by which "management details" are captured; so leaders use
language to go about their daily work of "aligning people." Over
hundreds of years specialists evolved, as the level of work
dictated, to align the details for carpenters and plumbers.
.. Maybe today the Information Highway constitutes a
new reality that requires new tools, a new specialist and work
practices to align daily management details for leaders and
managers. Professional writers ply their trade in books,
.. articles and newspapers. Can a combination of writing skills,
legal skills and new technology maintain alignment of "management
details" for leadership the way a carpenter lays out the work
each day from the plans and specs? Can we add value to existing
.. positions in order to accomplish this task? In the construction
industry, estimators, project engineers, assistant project
managers, claims managers, cost and schedule engineers have some
of these skills. Other industries, who are new to project
.. management, have not yet defined these roles, so they may need an
entirely new role to align management details under Concurrent
Discovery.
Turner Construction will set out how communication
.. requirements in the PMBOK and other sources (e.g., ISO) are
applied by contractors.
.. Communication methods in construction have evolved for
such a long period that much of it has been formalized in case
law and is therefore specified in contracts. Individual employees
from the CEO, to the President, the Project Manager, Engineer,
.. Superintendent, Foreman need NOT be well versed in communication
methods in order to succeed, because their contract
specifications spell out what they should do in order to succeed.
Additionally, many established firms have company manuals that
.. have been handed down and refined over decades to clarify how
careful communication methods should be performed. So the
culture of the construction industry inherently guides
individuals in what steps need to be taken to align people. The
.. legal profession works similarly.
Like contractors, lawyers do not need lessons in
communication theory because the practice of law, its culture,
guides them to accomplish important steps of discovery. When
.. lawyers take a deposition, formulate interrogatories, review a
document, elicit testimony at trial, they discover that
understanding of facts varies between individuals and within a
particular individual over time. Lawyers have a single highly
.. focused goal: to discover what caused the outcome, called
"causation." Once we discover what happened, the law imposes an
adjustment, if warranted. So the whole process is called
"adjudication." This makes the law a "metric" to adjust conduct
.. that is found to have drifted off course.
..
V. Law is a "Knowledge Space"
Positioning Management "Details" in Relation to
Time (Chronology), Causation, Objectives, Requirements
The "metric" of the law is like a microscope that
focuses on only a very few, often seemingly innocuous, issues in
.. a larger mosaic. It magnifies small details to isolate the cause
of difficulties which are alleged to have resulted in harm. This
"metric," or microscope, uses language to describe correlations
between a standard of conduct, such as a law, regulation,
.. contract provision, or company policy, and what actually
transpired. The result is a work product called a legal "brief,"
and ultimately a legal decision called a "judgement" at the trial
level. Judgements can be appealed to reverse errors by the
.. judge, and this can result in a published decision. Such
decisions are called "case law" and comprise a body of human
experience intended to guide community conduct by setting
precedent for deciding future disputes on comparable
.. circumstances. So "case law" is like a "case study" encountered
at management seminars that illustrates principles to guide
future action.
.. At each step in the legal process, pre-trial discovery,
the trial and appeals that yield case law, lawyers are writing a
"story" of what happened. Lawyers "prove" their story by linking
key facts to evidence introduced under rules at trial, and they
.. support the result (i.e., judgement, decision, damages) they want
by linking to prior case law. These links, called "citations,"
accomplish the traceability to original sources that is similar
to the PMBOK requirement to align communications for effective
.. leadership. Here then is a nexus between the law, leadership and
technology.
.. Since the human mind cannot remember sequence, leaders
and managers can improve the decisions they make by writing down
their understandings and linking them to prior work, such as
meetings, phone calls, letters and email. We have described this
.. as "Concurrent Discovery" to find those little deviations that
cause truth to drift off course. This produces a body of
.. "knowledge," i.e., understandings linked to original sources. In
legal jargon we call this the "record." The term "Cyberspace"
has arisen to describe information on the Internet. It intends
to extend the more common sense notion of the architect's use of
.. three (3) dimensional spatial relationships of length, width and
height to identify the position of physical objects. Another way
to think of the legal record of linked information and
chronology is as a "Knowledge Space" that combines time and
.. information to create linkages of meaning in relation to
objectives and requirements. Perhaps the energy and vision that
enable technology to produce "Cyberspace," can be focused to
support "Knowledge Space" in the not too distant future. How
.. does "knowledge space" work now in the legal arena?
..
The legal record of a case is organized by a structure
to facilitate access, so that participants can find relationships
and correlations quickly. This is essential for efficient
.. decision making because often the case record is thousands of
pages of information. It includes pictures, drawings and objects
such as a bolt, ceramic tile, paint samples, etc. All of these
objects are, reduced to a narrative description for the purpose
..
of making a decision. Since leadership decisions that occur on
.. the job each day are also reduced to language, our Concurrent
Discovery model needs to include the means by which the law
organizes "Knowledge Space," similar to the way an architect
positions a door on a drawing, e.g., 11 feet 6 inches from the
.. corner of the room and 6 feet 8 inches from the floor. The legal
record is organized by sequentially numbered pages that reflect
the chronology of testimony, and identifies the lines on each
page with a number. This allows anyone to uniquely identify the
.. location of information in the "Knowledge Space," and understand
immediately the chronology that is otherwise so overwhelming to
decision making.
Of course executives are not lawyers. They work
.. differently; so, to usefully apply technology, we need to
consider the executive mindset in order to fashion an effective
"Knowledge Space" of management details. The paper Reengineering
to Win in a Global Economy: New Needs, New Roles, New Tools,
.. for Effective Leadership, addresses design parameters for
"Knowledge Space."
..
VI. Write and Link What is Important to
Objectives, Commitments, and Requirements
Be Complete, Clear, Concise
Some leaders complain they don't have enough time to
write everything down. In fact, some lawyers tell their clients
.. not to write anything; they worry discovery will uncover
conflicts. This is a circular argument. If there are conflicts
to be discovered, isn't the goal to discover them in time to
avoid the harm they cause, rather than worry about somebody else
.. discovering them after harm has occurred? Such is the aim of
"Concurrent Discovery."
The solution is to use judgement: don't write
everything down. Use the legal briefing model: be complete,
.. clear and concise. What is the guide that says what to write?
Lawyers are guided by the law. They write the facts and the
correlation with the controlling standard for the result they
seek. Leaders can do the same. Write what was done in relation
.. to commitments, obligations, requirements, contracts, law,
regulations, policies. Use the word "because" to show linkages
between cause and effect, again, "causation." This mode of
writing reflects Stephen Covey's idea to "Begin with the end in
.. mind." As well, when Covey says keeping a journal or diary of
daily events and thoughts, sharpens mental acuity, his charge is
supported by thousands of years of legal practice applying case
law that empowers the larger community to remember the chronology
.. and reasoning that controls the outcome by writing decisions
down as we go along. That is what most leaders are aiming to do:
control the outcome.
Use headings and summaries to enable decision makers to
.. find information groupings quickly. Leaders need summary that is
connected to details. When a judge is considering a decision, at
one time the focus is on one issue and later it is on another; so
legal briefs are organized by headnotes that, taken by
.. themselves, if accepted, lead to the decision. It is a critical
extension of how headlines are used in a newspaper, or chapter
headings in a book (an example is this paper). Leaders need
these summaries as mental pointers to the details of their
.. decisions, otherwise they become disconnected from what is truly
going on, decisions are flawed, losses ensue and lawyers are
.. called. Of course being complete, clear and concise, takes
practice. Therefore, a new specialist may help form a better
partnership between leadership and the new technology needed to
make the Information Highway useful.
..
VII. Concurrent Discovery to Measure Communications
is Shown to Be Essential in the Literature
Seeking the "truth" on a daily basis is a big job.
Currently, contractors use manual methods that require a staff to
.. capture this record. But the pace of information flow makes it
harder and harder to accomplish, so we need technology to empower
leadership by providing a means to quickly track the chronology
of cause and effect, i.e., traceability to original sources, and
.. create and access the linkages that makes Concurrent Discovery
.. practical. Technology and specialists who can "pilot" the
technology to give leadership better command of the daily record,
can form a better partnership which the Asilomar Conference seeks
to promote.
.. Some contractors fight their contract and complain the
law places requirements that slow the work. They don't budget
for the staff needed for effective communication control, hoping
to submit a lower bid. Yet, contractors who take short cuts on
.. things like document logs, daily reports, CPM schedules,
submittals and notice of potential claims wind up in trouble.
Trying to "save time" by expediting communications results in
mistakes and lawsuits. The reason is clear: effective
.. communication entails more than sending a message, writing a
letter, having a meeting--it requires accurate understanding of
the connections between information and time, i.e., the
chronology that shows "causation." It takes time to check
.. sources and write down the connections. Contractors and leaders
in other fields, who feel they don't have enough time, are
gambling by assuming correct understandings have occurred. More
and more the tendency is to rely on conversation, hoping that
.. more meetings and email are adequate, because they seem fast and
easy at the moment. Recent articles in PMI's publications point
in a different direction.
The article in the December 1995 issue of the Project
.. Management Journal (p. 5) entitled "The Role of Project Risk in
Determining Project Management Approach" reports findings from a
field study that key factors of project success are
"communication, understanding, and problem handling." Another
.. article in PMNETwork (April 1996, p. 6) by Joan Knutson cites the
importance of checking the accuracy of communications, not once,
not twice, but THREE TIMES! More recently the May issue of
PMNETwork (New World Order Needs Old Time Religion, p. 36) posed
.. the prospect that a new management science called "Communication
Metrics" might be supported by technology and new skills to help
leaders ensure the accuracy of their communications. The
literature is clear: yes, we should check our communications.
.. But who has the time these days? Maybe technology and a new work
role can help.
..
VIII. Information Highway is a New Reality
of the Business environment that Requires a
New Work Role For Communication "Metrics" Similar to
Accounting, Cost and Schedule Engineering
The culture of construction has gotten used to applying
.. metrics to cost and schedule, but not to communication. When
people leave a meeting or complete a phone call, they feel they
know what was said and what it means and how it relates to the
contract, the budget and the schedule. PMI's strong voice
.. through its publications and events like Asilomar offer the
membership the opportunity to consider whether the new business
.. environment of the Information Highway warrants treating
communication, like cost and schedule, by assigning someone to
look after it and developing skills and tools to help. Project
management has pioneered in tools and roles and so may be the
.. place to start.
.. Accounting is a well establish metric of project
success. When the job is over if the numbers don't add up,
contractors call their lawyer to apply the metric of the law to
adjust the outcome in their favor. Contractors historically had
.. a "Clerk of the Works." These people did the payroll and other
"paperwork." At some point it was decided to track costs for
various parts of the work, as a means to show causation on
particular claims in litigation. Lawyers told their clients that
.. you can't just say that because the job lost money, then a
particular subcontractor was at fault. You have to show the loss
was caused by the sub. (There is that word again "causation.")
The effort to track costs according to work item led to a new
.. role called "cost engineer" and ideas like Work Breakdown
Structure called out in PMI's PMBOK. This turned out to empower
leaders to see deviations from budgets during the course of the
work, so that efforts could be made to correct work practices
.. which caused unit prices to exceed budgets. Scheduling has a
similar history. Over the past 50 years or so courts have
recognized that CPM is a method that indicates "causation" in
construction, since it reflects the order of the work, i.e., the
.. chronology. However, for many years contractors would only use
CPM if the owner specified it because it was new, foreign,
untried and seemed like extra work. If CPM was not specified,
contractors feared that, if they budgeted for it, their bid would
.. be too high and they would lose the job. For many years,
experienced, successful contractors denied CPM was needed, just
as cost control had been resisted in an earlier era.
Two things changed this perspective. (1) Projects
.. became more complex, so over many years contractors began to see
that the money saved by not using CPM was lost in a morass of
errors performing the work; then, when they went to court to try
and recover, their lawyer told them they needed a CPM to show
.. causation, just as they needed an accountant and cost engineer to
show there had been a loss. (2) Technology has made the creation
and maintenance of both CPM scheduling and cost control easier
and faster, i.e., less costly. So the combination of reduced cost
.. through technology and experience reflected by legal case law has
led the construction industry to recognize that cost and schedule
metrics actually save time and money. Today, most projects of
any size and risk use cost and schedule control, even when not
.. mandated by contract, just as they budget for an engineer or
accountant. They rightly conclude that if CPM is going to be
used in the end to determine our fate, why not use it in the
beginning to control our destiny?
.. Curiously, however, the study reported by PMI's Project
Management Journal (ibid) found that on high risk work, like
construction, communication is the larger determinant of success.
This suggests a path similar to that which has occurred in cost
.. and schedule control over the past 100 years may be useful for
communications in the era of the Information Highway. Technology
that empowers leadership to understand a more complex information
environment by capturing and aligning communications through
.. traceability to original sources may be needed in the emerging
.. world of the 21st century. As well, a new role that ensures this
work is consistently performed, like accounting, cost and
schedule control, may save time and money by avoiding the mistakes
and extra cost that result from misunderstandings that occur each
.. day and are compounded by technology that transmits information
instantly, e.g., fax, cell phones, email. When information moves
fast, being correct becomes more critical. The article in the
May PMNETwork on "Communication Metrics" (ibid) suggests it could
.. be more useful than cost and schedule control, to discover and
correct errors and misunderstandings that otherwise lead to
schedule and cost problems. The only other way to align
communications is the legal process, and it is slow, expensive
.. and takes place long after-the-fact when there is no opportunity
to make corrections that avoid problems. Improving leadership by
applying a metric to communication is not limited to
construction.
.. The December 1995 issue of Byte magazine (p. 49) has an
article on the information technology field. The author says:
"Most programmers don't like to write documentation. [But]
...good notes on the basic internal systems design are valuable
.. when it's time to update. Reliability will result if development
team leaders make sure programmers write the documentation and
keep it up to date. ...memories fade quickly when programmers
move on to a new task." How can leadership make sure this is
.. done when time is short? Can technology help?
The February 4, 1996 article by the Associated Press
reports managers are wasting up to 70% of the day in endless
meetings because people are not prepared, there is no agenda, key
.. people are missing and so the purpose of building shared meaning
through common understanding is lost, and there is no follow up
on action items. How can leaders empower managers to prepare for
meetings, develop an agenda, maintain shared meaning and follow
.. up on Action Items? Can technology help?
Robert MacNamera's book, "In Retrospect," published in
1995, recalls that leadership in the Kennedy/Johnson
Administrations was flawed because events moved too fast to
.. permit adequate analysis. Dr. Henry Kissinger notes in his book,
"Diplomacy," published in 1994, that the overwhelming challenge
of leadership is the pressure of time to perform analysis for
decision support. He has cited an "Alice in Wonderland"
.. environment of fast moving information where people have strong
feelings, but do not know why. Johanna Neuman's new book,
"Lights, Camera, War," on the relationship between leadership and
technology, says on page 24 that each new communication
.. technology unleashes a dilemma calling on leaders to "...change
their habits, to adjust to a new speed or a new imperative, to
hurry their decisions... But technology has also been a gift to
those who learned to exploit its blessings..."
..
IX. Conclusion
Technology and a New Work Role Applying
Lessons from Construction and the Law Form a
Stronger Partnership for Leadership in the 21st Century
PMI's effort at the Asilomar Conference to make the
.. Information Highway a blessing is timely and compelling. The
conference shows that practices from construction and the law,
which have been worked out over thousands of years, provide
communication methods that ensure common understanding, but, in
.. the modern era, there is not enough time to use them. Leaders
"fall off the wagon" hurrying to the next meeting, plane trip, or
phone call. They expect "staff" to take care of the paperwork,
but as Robert MacNamera and Henry Kissinger report, these days
.. "staff" doesn't have enough time either with downsizing and the
volume of communications going up each day from fax and email.
Can technology and a new work role help leaders meet
this challenge using lessons from the law to align people through
.. communication, as called out by the PMBOK? Can we integrate
time and information using traceability to original sources to
capture the truth as we go along, link causation, and link
summary to details, so everyone can know the truth and maintain
.. shared meaning? If so, there will be be a happier truth to tell,
making it easier for everyone to tell the "truth."