Law Firm Marketing

Five Factors that Influence the Development of Strategic Thinking at a Law Firm

Strategic thinking involves both the rational and the emotional functions of the brain. When an attorney makes plans, solves problems, or makes decisions in either his personal or professional life, he relies on both aspects of thought. Most often, we do not realize we are thinking emotionally or rationally; we just know that we make good decisions, that we plan well, or that we are great problem solvers.

There are five factors that influence the thinking of strategic attorneys: time, control, experience, the unknown, and outcome finality. None of these factors specifically address the personal stake the individual has in the outcome. This is because every plan, every decision or every problem you work on is personal. You are emotionally invested in the outcome of the situation. There are different degrees of emotional investment, which may make some decisions appear more personal than other. It is impossible to remove emotion from your life. So you must move forward with the knowledge that everything is personal to some degree – that all situations have an emotional aspect to them. Any belief to the contrary is simply denial.

When making a decision, a top performing lawyer’s first step is to acknowledge the factor that most influences the process. When telling a story about a critical decision or a well-developed plan, he will say something like, “We knew we had limited time,” or “We knew we could not control the competitor’s response” or “We had little experience in this area so we felt like were flying blind” or “There was so much at stake that I was careful in how I made my decision.”

Failing to acknowledge that an external factor may have an influence on a situation will almost always result in an unwelcome surprise.

Below are the five factors that influence the development of strategic thinking at your law firm: 

Time

The first question asked by a strategic thinker is, “How much time do I have to develop this plan, make this decision, or solve this problem?” This is the factor that will have the most influence on how you will proceed. Almost every other aspect of solution generation is dependent upon time constraints.

When time is limited, the strategic thinker is often forced to compromise his investigation into the underlying causes of an issue. Understanding the root cause of a problem is critical to offering effective solutions. In time sensitive situations, you may be forced to rely on experience to determine the ultimate cause for the current dilemma. The value of the solution becomes dependent upon your ability to diagnose the problem quickly. Time pressure makes this process very subjective.

Time pressure also limits your ability to try out your hypothesis or theory. A top performer almost always employs an iterative decision making process. He tests out a solution and makes adjustments and improvements to ascertain that the final answer is the most effective alternative. Severely limiting the amount of time he has to work on a problem will stifle this iterative process and will result in the need for making more changes “on the fly” once the solution is deployed.

This process plays out in real time whenever products are sold to consumers, such as in the case of a farmer’s market. A vendor selling fruit must continuously evaluate the demand for the fruit based upon the time left before it spoils. As the window of time decreases, the vendor reduces the price to stimulate demand. However, if the flow of traffic through his stand is strong, the vendor may decide to hold firm on his price, only reducing it if the buyers show resistance.
Having too much time can also be an issue. In situations where time is unlimited people often try to capture too much information. Because it is almost impossible to complete truly exhaustive research on any topic, these attempts at boiling the ocean result in analysis paralysis.

Control

As a successful strategic thinker you must immediately assesses how much of the situation is within your control and how much is not. Once you break the problem down along those lines, you can immediately formulate your plan of attack.

It’s important to note that, when a critical element of a situation is out of his control, a strategic thinker always looks for ways to influence that aspect of the decision. Often, he may be able to affect it in an indirect way. It is this creativity that is the hallmark of strategic thinking.

In a perfect scenario, a strategic thinker will have control over all aspects of a situation or problem. When this happens, he often produces amazingly creative results that no one ever dreamed were possible. This is particularly true when a strategic thinker is involved in formulating plans for a future endeavor.

Unfortunately, even perfect scenarios sometimes produce fiascos. I often hear publishers lament the poor sales of a well-written book. They go on and on about how it just did not sell up to expectations in the first 90 days.

Strategic thinking is often underutilized in the book publishing industry, even though virtually every aspect of the decision-making process related to a book is within the publisher’s control. The publisher controls the price at which the book sells, the dollars attached to its marketing campaign, the release date, the content of the book, and the packaging. Further, the publisher controls the time period used to evaluate the success of the book’s sales.
If a book were marketed like a consumer product – given a sales evaluation period of one year, given a marketing budget that represented a percentage of the per unit retail price, and packaged and released in conjunction with timely events (cookbooks during the holidays) – the results might be quite different.

Experience

Experience is a true double-edged sword for the strategic thinker. Having too much experience can limit creativity in generating alternatives. Having little or no experience will increase the time needed to solve the problem or create a plan.
Most strategic thinkers prefer to have the experience available and use it as a resource, but make a concerted effort to keep an open mind when it comes to the status quo. They realize that many problems are created due to the hidebound thought, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

Experience can be a great teacher. It can also be a conniving and deceitful mistress and lure you down the path of ill repute. Strategic thinkers are very careful in their use of experience. Their goal is to understand history and learn from it, not necessarily to repeat it.

Retail stores always look at past history when evaluating holiday sales. They base inventory decisions at least partially upon how certain products have historically sold. Their goal is to understand what did not sell well and why so that they do not place large orders for similar items in the future.

The Unknown

At every step in the strategic thinking process, you must ask yourself the question, “What don’t I know?” In the early stages of problem solving, this question is critical to formulating a research plan. In the later stages, you must reconcile which unknowns you can live with against those you can’t and make a decision. In most cases, it will be impossible to explore all of the unknown factors that go into a plan or a decision. You must be comfortable with the ambiguity that remains. The best decision-makers set up contingency plans for the results of ambiguous situations.

Every plan that a strategic thinker devises has a list of unknowns. In a workgroup situation, these items are often listed along with the factors that will resolve the ambiguity. Not surprisingly, other strategic thinking factors play a large part in resolving the unknown. Having more time, more experience (or historical information), or more control often help clear the fog of the unknown. Although there will always be a set of facts that are unknown, the decision-maker must make his decision and be confident that he is prepared for all the contingencies.

For example, the chef in a restaurant is never certain exactly how many people will eat dinner in your establishment each evening. Yet, he needs to be prepared for the possibility that, if no one comes, he will need to store your perishable products for another day, and that if the number of diners is double that which he expected, he will need to send someone to the store for more supplies.

Outcome Finality

Is this situation life and death? Does it matter which decision you make? Outcome finality plays a huge role in the strategic mindset. If there is no possibility of recovery from a poor decision, the potential for emotional investment in that decision is far greater than a situation that easily lends itself to trial and error. In most cases, for example, quitting a job is a decision that has enormous finality. While you may be able to return to work for your former employer, you may not be able to return to that exact position.

Those top performers in any field – particularly the law –often make decisions that weigh heavily on their minds. It is almost always the finality of the outcome that creates this weight. Even if the other decision-making factors are favorable, outcome finality (or perceived outcome finality) can create enormous emotional consequences for the decision-maker.

Strategic planning and decision-making is not only an advantage for a sharp attorney, it is a necessity.  Emotional detachment and an objective approach will always help smart lawyers face the future.

Trackbacks:

Comments: