TinkerX

Carolyn Elefant has written a really, really excellent article over at Law.com on how lawyers can more easily ask questions. Her article is predicated on the assumption that lawyers hate to be put in situations where they have to ask questions. I agree with her assumption, and am thrilled that she’s posted such a great piece on how to get past this issue in order to ask some basic questions, get answers more quickly, and get the job done without as much red-tape as usual.

Elefant also posits some thoughts on why lawyers hate to ask questions:

Arrogance and time pressures explain some of this reluctance, but it’s a deeper problem, rooted in legal training.  With its Socratic pedagogy and three-hour exams, law school conditions law students to equate the inability to answer questions with failure — often with disastrous consequences…

Law firms, too, discourage new associates from asking questions, preferring instead to have them spend long hours (presumably on the client’s dime) figuring out problems instead of asking for help.

I think those reasons are certainly part of the problem, but I don’t think they explain it all, or even the majority of the issue.

The best explanation I’ve ever come across for the "fear of asking questions" mentality is found in the Harvard Business Review article, "Teaching Smart People How to Learn." [Please note that this link is to a paid download; it's well worth the $6... trust me... and, no, I don't get a commission]

The main point of the HBR article is that smart people spend most of their young life being rewarded and praised for being just that — smart.  Our educational system rewards the results of intelligence (correct answers),  not necessarily the process of learning. In an average classroom full of students, therefore, the smartest kids are going to be the ones who have to work the least hard to achieve the correct answer. So the highest rewards (best grades) often go to the students who put in the least effort. This isn’t always the case — there are, of course, kids who work like mad to do well — but we are all very familiar with students who were simply very smart, and for whom school work came fairly easily.

The problem is, in the "real world" of work, there is often no "right" answer. If you are doing well, and making a good product and earning a good profit, that’s great. One might say you are doing things "right." But if your competition comes out with a better product at a lower cost… they’re doing things "better," aren’t they? And then it’s up to you to do an even "better" job than that. There is no "final exam." No "true-or-false." In the business world, you have to be ready to learn continuously from your experience. To reflect on how what you’ve done in the past might have fared poorly, and to imagine how you can make changes going forward.

And that’s something that "smart" people haven’t had much experience in. They’re used to getting the "right" answer the first time, getting a good grade, and then moving on to the next question/test/class/grade/school. Challenging them to think about making changes to current processes is, from a psychological standpoint, synonymous to accusing them of failure.

Which is one of the reasons marketing is such a tough sell at law firms. Because mature marketing systems require constant and cyclical change. Marketing is a learning function:

• Set a goal
• Determine measurements
• Do something to advance towards that goal
• Measure the results
• Reflect on the process
• Repeat

Marketing that does not learn is insane. I don’t mean that as a slam on the people involved, I mean it as a description of the marketing system itself. We’ve all heard that one definition of insanity is, "Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results." That’s especially true in marketing.

Carolyn Elefant is right on the money when she identifies a problem in the legal industry related to asking questions. It’s hard to ask questions when everyone around you has been conditioned to equate questions with weakness or ignorance. And it’s even harder to be a professional marketer in the legal industry when good, effective marketing requires that you constantly and consistently question your methods and results.

When marketing people ask questions, it’s because they need to learn as much as possible in order to do their jobs well. There seems to be a fundamental breakdown in communications at many firms between a "right answer" mentality on the part of lawyers, and the necessary role that learning must play in a good marketing program.  Unless/until that breakdown is mended, there will often be cause for disharmony.

Marketing is a learning function. Learning requires questions. Until you are comfortable with those conditions, your marketing will suffer.