Working out Loud in Data Governance

Season 3 Episode 10

Welcome to Season 3 of the Law Firm Data Governance podcast. I’m CJ Anderson, founder of Iron Carrot and I’m excited to share more of what I’ve learned in my 20-plus years of working with information and data in law firms.

In this third season: “be the best data governance lead you can be”, I move beyond the ‘what’ of season one and the ‘why’ of season two by introducing some of the ‘how’ and the ‘who’.

Over the 10 episodes in this season, I’ll share what I’ve learned about using a bottom-up approach to achieve your data governance deliverables. I will be talking you through the specific skills and knowledge that can help you be a successful law firm data governance lead.

In this episode, I talk about working out loud. What it means as a concept, how it works, and most importantly, how it helps you, the firm’s data governance lead, to achieve the steps in your data governance roadmap.

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Episode Transcript

In this episode, I’m going to talk about “Working Out Loud” what it means as a concept, how it works and most importantly, how it helps you, The firm’s data governance lead to achieve the steps in your data governance road map.

In recent years, the focus for law firms has been on achieving operational efficiency. Most law firms review each business service in turn, and any documented processes start and stop at the function’s borders.

But data doesn’t sit neatly in functional groupings. Strategic management of data focuses on activities necessary to ensure competitive positioning and takes a cross functional view of data and data management processes.

This operational focus on managing data in functional silos has the unintended consequence of minimising communication between teams. The lack of transparency means that no one understands the decision-making process behind operational data management decisions, even for data they’re interested in.

This lack has a massive impact on culture. Without transparency and communication, there can be no trust. So, what can you do as the data governance lead to improve the firm’s data by building transparency and communication to create that trust? You can Work Out Loud and encourage everyone in each of your data governance framework groups to do the same.

Let’s start by understanding exactly what Working Out Loud means. If you take the words literally, it’s easy to guess, but this phrase was coined in 2010 in a blog post by Bryce Williams of Eli Lilly, who defined it as a simple formula:

Working Out Loud = observable work + narrating your work.

Since then, John Stepper, a former Deutsche Bank employee, has developed it into a methodology, published a book, delivered a Ted talk, and set up a consultancy around helping organisations to work out loud. His vision of Working Out Loud is that it is a practice that combines conventional wisdom about relationships with modern ways to reach and engage people.

You’ll see conversations online, particularly on Twitter, with the hashtag #WorkingOutLoud. The five revised elements in John Stepper’s third iteration of Working Out Loud are: relationships, generosity, visible work, purposeful discovery, and a growth mindset, all of which adds up to become Working Out Loud.

So what does all this mean for you as your firm’s data governance lead and for the members of your data governance framework groups. For you, it’s the area where the communication and comms channels advice from Episode 3 and your influencing skills covered in Episode 4 can make the most impact on the education and behaviours of your data owners and data stewards.

You are trying to get the groups of owners and stewards to share what’s going on in their functions and have confidence in reaching out to their peers for ideas and support. Your focus in the early days of your data governance framework is in helping them to think about what they are trying to do, who can help them and how they can contribute to the group and deepen relationships.

Working Out Loud is the opposite of traditional law firm behaviour. You won’t be working privately through e-mail messages or in closed meetings.

As the data governance lead, your job is to help the data owners and data stewards move from these old ways of working to new and better ones. You can do this most effectively by modelling the behaviour you want to see and work openly and transparently yourself. All of the data governance Framework Group documentation, meeting minutes, working papers and so on, should be available to everyone in all of the framework groups.

Over time, as the data owners and data stewards get comfortable Working Out Loud, you can make these items available to the whole firm. You also need to help flatten out the hierarchy. Data owners and data stewards may be of different seniorities. But you should reinforce that when they are wearing their data hat, they have a group of peers who all have valid opinions and inputs, chair meetings to ensure that every voice is heard.

You also need to reinforce and build trust so that the group becomes comfortable with the answers and advice provided by others. They all need to be able to share information candidly and not be embarrassed to ask a question.

Another behaviour that it helps to model is of acknowledging the contributions and support of others so that people become keen to share what they know and support the group. It can be challenging for groups of people who don’t know each other well to see the benefits of Working Out Loud. So, in addition to modelling the behaviours you want to see, you have to explicitly and clearly set out the benefits for them as individuals as well as for the framework as a whole.

When lots of people need to know what’s going on, either by reading updates or contributing to the conversation, it can be hard to know who all of those people are. By sharing everything with everyone, those who would like to reply can do so, and everyone who wants to read the update gets to see everything from everyone.

This ensures that nothing gets lost in inboxes like forwarded emails or forked discussion threads, which often result in out-of-sync replies or key people missing out on key discussions because they were on the wrong thread.

In providing transparency of thinking, discussions, decisions and processes, everyone in the framework has an opportunity to receive inputs and provide feedback. SMEs are able to manage their time by self-selecting into the activities that directly affect them, or that they can best contribute to.

The public vetting of ideas also helps achieve consensus more easily. Working Out Loud enables the data governance framework to enable and exploit serendipity. The exchange of ideas and questions between SME’s and not-SMEs on a given topic allows for a different exploration of a problem, and sometimes the best solutions can come from the most unexpected places.

In addition, Working Out Loud allows you to keep a clear record of discussions by maintaining a single thread and making it open to all who have an interest.

This won’t always be to a chat forum or a blog page. It might be another collaboration space like OneNote, MS Teams, even a shared PowerPoint deck. As long as everyone can find it and it can be referred to in branch discussions, you’ll keep Working Out Loud.

So, Working Out Loud means sharing everything with everyone, encouraging data stewards and data owners to embrace a growth mindset and give it a go. No matter how uncomfortable or bumpy it feels at first.

This will have a significant impact on the cohesiveness of the data governance framework groups and their ability to deliver the firm’s data goals. Building trust rapidly between teams that aren’t used to working together is much easier when they’re all feeling the same way and can be encouraged to be open to sharing more in a safe space.

Working Out Loud is a behavioural and a communication change that leads to rapid success for your data owners and data stewards, making your job as data governance lead that much easier to do.

Thank you for joining me for this law firm Data Governance Podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please share, like, and review this episode so that more law firm leaders can learn about data governance.

This was the last episode of Season Three, which explored how to be your best data governance lead self, by using a bottom-up approach to data governance. I hope I’ve helped you feel more confident about engaging with the people, processes and conversations that will bring your firm along the data governance journey with you.

We’re working on Season Four, so make sure you never miss an episode by following Iron Carrot on social media if you’ve not already done so, and please get in touch if you’ve got questions or topic ideas for future episodes.