Articles
Why guessing the direction of technology is not so important
Too many firms and companies are so obsessed trying to pick technology winners that they ignore the development of sustainable business strategies that could deliver ongoing success, writes Leticia Mooney.
Law firm managers can find themselves asking a series of questions about technology. Where is it going? Which technology should we embrace? Which technology will ensure that our firm is going to be valid in the future?
In this article I am going to challenge you with the notion that guessing the direction of technology is not that important. Instead, I would like to propose that the most significant thing you can do for your law firm is to get your strategic house in order. Once you do that, the technology you ought to adopt becomes a no-brainer.
Strategy oversight
At the small end of town, particularly, it is uncommon to find a law firm that has a clear business strategy, much less one that is documented and being applied. Medium-sized and larger firms may be able to point to their strategy-planning days and their processes as proof they are taking action and they are certainly more likely to understand where they are going and roughly how they intend to get there.
The question that firms of all sizes should be asking is clear: how does technology fit into the strategic equation? Don’t we need to understand the market, the shifts, the disruption? Surely, if we don’t do this, following the market becomes impossible. However, the truth is that technology moves too quickly for anyone to be able to predict it with any clarity.
Technology feels like it’s the next thing you need to get right…
When it comes to running any firm or company, technology is an important element to consider. If you are a forward-thinking executive, there is a good chance that you spend a considerable portion of your time thinking about where the technology is going to go next. When we examine some of the popular industry press, the articles and coverage appear to encourage this thinking. A brief review of Lawyers Weekly, for example, shows us that in June and July 2017 alone there were roughly:
- 50 articles that mentioned technology;
- 11 articles that mentioned or focused on disruption;
- 8 articles that mentioned or talked about artificial intelligence; and
- 3 articles that mentioned or talked about big data.
To be fair, it is possible that the disruption articles were also about business strategy, but it is unlikely given the world’s current obsession with technological disruption.
… And we try to plan for change, but often fail
Many businesses around the world fail to achieve their strategic targets, often because of a failure to execute. Not only do leaders need to do the strategic thinking; they also need to integrate that thinking into operations and make sure the business is aligned and can communicate it effectively.1. Part of the reason is because strategic planning is a comfort trap.2 Instead of thinking strategically and creating actionable pathways, the word ‘strategic’ is often paired with the word ‘plan’, so there is never any action tied to it.
As Roger L. Martin points out in The Big Lie of Strategic Planning3, these plans too often have the same shape, and they are followed by cost-based thinking and self-referential frameworks. The latter factors two cause problems because the future is only ever seen in relation to what the business has done in the past and concerns over what it can afford. It becomes a stranglehold on the company and prevents real innovation.
Between these three comfort traps – plans, cost-based thinking and self-referential frameworks – the strategic process lies broken. If your firm is going to deal with emerging change, focusing just on what you can control is not going to help. Instead, you need to be able to see the entire picture, including how you will respond to things that you don’t (and can’t) control. This is particularly the case when it comes to technological strategy or transformation. Rather than trying to predict what is coming next, or attempting to keep up with the other firms in your market, you need to find a different way of addressing technological change.
Great companies think differently about technology
Jim Collins studied the application and thinking about approaches to technology and published them in his seminal work, Good to Great4. Collins pointed out that technological change has always been with us; it is not new. Perhaps the pace of change is new, but technological disruption itself is not. In Collins’ book, he outlines all of the companies that met his ‘great’ objectives: those that created a definitive divergence from the market and then outperformed the market significantly for more than 15 years, and continued to do so. Each one became renowned as being technologically advanced, but none of them described technology as being a key part of their change. They didn’t become enamoured with the idea of technology, or try to guess where it was going and then follow a fading trail.
Use technology as an accelerator, not a tool to find your breakthrough
Each of the companies that met Jim Collins’s criteria was also disciplined when it came to technology. The Hedgehog Concept5 that each one created enabled it to assess swiftly whether a technology was appropriate for their strategic direction, and supported what it was trying to achieve.
If the technology didn’t fit their three strategic circles (what they are deeply passionate about; what they can be the best in the world at; and what drives their economic engines), they ignored the hype. They kept going until they found the technology that fits. If this sounds simple to you, it’s because it is. “Technology without a clear Hedgehog Concept, and without the discipline to stay within the three circles, cannot make a company great,” Collins argues. He goes on to say that when talking with the CEO of Nucor (a major American steel-maker) about the company’s transition from good to great, technology didn’t even rank. “The primary factors,” Ken Iverson said, “were the consistency of the company, and our ability to project its philosophies throughout the whole organisation, enabled by our lack of layers and bureaucracy.”
Mediocrity, Collins found, “results first and foremost from management failure, not from technological failure”. Instead, once the management was sorted out, and the direction and vision were clear, the technology enabled acceleration through and beyond transition and breakthrough. Once this had been achieved, these companies found that they were darlings of the business press, hailed as technological innovators. “Technology,” Collins wrote, “cannot turn a good enterprise into a great one, nor by itself prevent disaster.”
Where to from here?
If technology doesn’t create a great company, and if it doesn’t inspire the destruction of a good company, where does it fit? It is a tool that you can use to forge your already known path, provided it supports your intention, economics and capability.
To become a sustainable company that can ride through technological hype and still make a splash, the most important things to ascertain are your capabilities, what drives your economic and resource engines, and what you can be the best at. Beyond this, creating alignment inside the company and removing barriers to adoption (including unnecessary bureaucracy) will enable you to assess what is really going to help.
If you were to dive into technology before clearing the decks, you are more likely to struggle to gain traction, and more likely to fail to execute your strategy. Once you know where you’re going, the direction of the technology becomes unimportant. The hype doesn’t matter to you because what is truly important is whether the tools serve you, rather than you jumping on a bandwagon that may not help you in the long run.
Leticia Mooney is a content strategist for the legal profession and the director of content-strategy firm, Brutal Pixie. She can be contacted on email at leticia@brutalpixie.com.
References
1 Kaplan, Robert S. and Norton, David P. The Office of Strategy Management, in Harvard Business Review. 2005. https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management
2 Martin, Robert L., The Big Lie of Strategic Planning, in Harvard Business Review. 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/01/the-big-lie-of-strategic-planning
3 Ibid
4 Collins, Jim, Good to Great, 2001. HarperCollins: New York.
5 Hedgehog Concept, at Jim Collins Concepts, online: http://www.jimcollins.com/concepts.html