Why conversations?

I asked one of my daughters to look at the final draft of my last post.

With rather too much honesty, she emailed me,

"Also perhaps a little too much use of 'conversation': why not consider substituting 'communication' or 'discussion' in some cases?"

Well, that is not quite all she said, but, for the purposes of this post, all I need to tell you. 

Did I use the word 'conversation' too much? I don't think so. As I explained to her, conversation is what it is all about.

Conversation, true conversation, is not just talking, nor is it telling someone, or being told, what to do. And it isn't simply a means of giving or receiving information - though that is often part of conversation.

It involves trust and respect. For participating in a conversation is to be open to the possibility of being wrong, of having your ideas changed, or of changing someone else's ideas. And so it involves proper interaction: listening, reflecting, responding, asking and answering questions, adjusting your position if necessary. There is a purpose to conversation - and a conversation requires work and, as often as not, preparation.

And it may neither be easy nor comfortable.

A last word from Theodore Zeldin, interviewed* by Matthew Taylor in the last RSA Journal

"There is no genuine conversation when people speak but ignore or misunderstand what others say."

*Tomorrow's Work, RSA Journal Issue 3, 2014

Variations on a theme

My time and attention has been on family, not work, the past few months. After some 40 years of it being the other way round, this has been both instructive and novel. Whether I had wanted to or not, I have stood back from the day job. Instead my priority has been settling my frail uncle safely in to a nursing home and getting to grips with his affairs - his bank accounts, tax return, subscriptions, bills, receipts, direct debits, standing orders, council tax, community alarm, flat, neighbours, the rest of the family.

And I have found myself standing on the edge of his life and that of my aunt, now dead some 10 years. Going through their papers (my uncle has kept everything) I found a cutting from The Guardian, a short piece, Little boxes of past lives, by Peter Preston - about how the memorabilia stored in our garages and lofts will mean little to those who one day clear them.

My uncle is still alive, but clearing his - their - flat, I have been doing just what Peter Preston and his siblings and step-siblings did when his stepmother died. And as I have gone through my uncle's brown cardboard boxes, files of papers, treasures and bric-a-brac I have travelled the years of their lives, 40 before marriage, 40 married, and my uncle's last lonely 10. And I keep thinking not just about my uncle's prescience in keeping that article, but that his plunge into dementia has robbed me of the opportunity to have the conversations we might otherwise have had - not just to fill the gaps in his life but in those of his wife's. For it is just the bare bones of those two lives in the boxes; the remainder - their real lives and the life they lived together - is now for ever locked up in his head.

So, conversations.

When I set out on 1 August, my aim was to help lawyers and marketers understand each other. To bridge a gap that I experienced first hand in my two years as a Director of Marketing. 

But time with and for my uncle has allowed me space to reflect on the challenges that law firms, law firm leaders, and lawyers have to meet - and the need for honest conversations about them. For sure conversations are held in law firms, but for all those that are, there are as many that aren't. Worse, there are those worthless conversations which convince us we have had them, when we haven't.

And in all of them it is as much about what is not said as what is.

Over the next few weeks this website will change, to reflect a widening of the focus. No longer just conversation about where lawyers and marketing meet, it will be much more about how best to have that much wider range of conversations - and in particular the ones lawyers would prefer to avoid.

Not quite starting again - I already have three projects on the go, each at various stages. Listening to clients, to learn what they are really thinking; a project to find out why law firm leaders and partners avoid discussing what may happen next; and a project to look at why, even now, we don't feel able to talk about mental heath and wellbeing in law firms.

But a change of direction.

The hall of mirrors

As a child, one of my favourite fairground attractions was the Hall of Mirrors (for those of you too young to have found yourselves in this distorted reality, Apple's Photo Booth app is similar). Why I so enjoyed the Hall of Mirrors, and why my children like Photo Booth, is that it allows us to play with our image, to make and remake ourselves. The everyday looking glass is subverted but we remain in control. 

In our daily lives, the looking glass is how we see ourselves, and we invariably assume that what we are seeing (albeit with a mirror image) is how others see us. But, and this is sometimes a problem, our perception of who we are and what we look like may not always be the same as other people's.

The same is true of law firms.

All too often how law firms and their partners see (and therefore want to present) themselves, and how their clients, their prospects, their suppliers, their influencers, and their employees see them, are different. This disconnect in perception is a real challenge for law firms - for how can you properly engage without an understanding of those perceptions.

So where should law firms start to gain that understanding? The answer is surprisingly simple: ask the question.

My experience is that lawyers are often professionally reluctant to ask questions to which they don't know the answer (at least in part). They need to put that reluctance aside. They also, like many of us, believe they know the answer without first asking the question. They need to be open to the possibility of being wrong. As part of a rebranding, I approached an influencer to invite him to take part in a survey on perceptions. "You are very brave, " he remarked. "I don't know many law firms who are prepared to do this. What if you get the wrong answers?" My reply was that there are no wrong answers. The problem is simply failing to listen to or act on those answers, however unwelcome they may be.

So if you want to ask the question, call me to discuss the how, the what, and the where.

Where it starts

In case you may be thinking that these conversations are a little one way, and that I am somewhat critical of lawyers, this post looks at it from a somewhat different perspective.

When I was a lawyer, I always tried to understand, so far as I was able, what it was that my clients did. It wasn't necessarily that easy. In the latter part of the 1980s I had two very demanding clients. The first was a large book manufacturer. Understanding their processes and business wasn't that difficult, although I still puzzle my children when I refer to books being case bound. The other was a software house, writing bespoke programs for main frames. This was much more of a challenge. I had learnt some coding in the late 1960s (don't ask), but that had long left me and I struggled to make sense of what exactly they did. They remained a client, but not mine. 

Understanding what a client does, how their business operates, what their challenges and their opportunities are - essentially what makes them tick - is for most lawyers an integral part of acting for that client. And if it isn't, it should be.

And so it must be for marketers acting for or employed in law firms. For without that understanding, how can you market the firm and its services? 

And yet I have come across people in marketing and communications, both working inside and outside law firms, who don't have this understanding, and who remain incurious about the firm - they will learn about the service offering but leave it at that.

I don't think that that is enough. One of the reasons for starting my consultancy is to help lawyers and marketers understand each other - and the place to start from is what makes them tick.

And I couldn't resist this photo. One of my daughters is Marketing Lead at a large London hospital - and here she is, in scrubs, getting to understand what makes cardiac surgeons tick.

The rearview mirror

Why am I not surprised that lawyers prefer to stick to what they have done before? A lot of people do: it's a known quantity, it requires less time, and it costs less. Lawyers are comfortable with precedent, and that is what it is all about.

And at one level that's OK. Why reinvent the wheel?

But there is a caveat.

For all their talk of innovation (one of the most used words on law firm websites) lawyers aren't very good at "the new". For a number it simply means finding a slightly different way to bill you. And as for marketing? Lawyers shrink at the thought of anything too novel. At one of the firms I worked for, a partner told me, "The last thing we want to be is first", adding, "and anyway, why do we need to change anything? What we had was fine by me."

I left Ashfords LLP as Director of Marketing late yesterday afternoon. My P45 was in the post - the last time I had one of these was nearly 30 years ago. Today I go out on my own as George Wilkinson Consultancy.

And on what is for now, although I hope not for long, a rather clear desk, I have this quote,

We  should spend more time thinking about the future and postulating possible outcomes, rather than relying on the past.

History is important for all sorts of reasons but, as my team became very tired of hearing, the future is not going to be more of the same. That will be as true of law as it is for all the professions, and how law is sold and marketed is going to change.

All I know is that this is going to be an exciting time. 

Note: the quote is by Karl Sternberg from his review in Christ Church Matters of Jerome Booth's Emerging Markets in an Upside Down World.