A Better Way to Evaluate Ideas for (Legal) Change

The stereotype: Lawyers Love to Shoot Down Ideas. Whether it’s evaluating startup pitches, internal suggestions for how things could be different, propositions at conferences or in blogs — lawyers take relish in the bloodsport of figuring out why things will fail, and justifying why it’s not worth taking a chance on them.

I know this does in fact happen. I’ve been on the other end of it many times.

But increasingly I see professionals in law firms, courts, and corporate legal departments who are hungry for new, breakthrough ways to solve the long-standing problems that their organizations are grappling with. Often it’s people in the highest reaches of the organizations who are tasked with being ‘innovative’ (or who have set forth an internal innovation effort themselves) and now are scouting out potential initiatives to bring in from the outside or to develop in-house, to get to positive change.

But one of the challenges, it turns out, is how to evaluate whether an idea for a new product, service, or organizational change is worth pursuing.

Coming up with ideas is easy (or easy-ish, especially if you’re following the structure of a design process). Choosing which ideas to devote time, money, and resources to is tough. It costs money and institutional capital. Especially if you’re working to bring more support on board to a young ‘innovation initiative’, if you pilot ideas that turn out not to catch on, you’re giving both doubters and potential supporters reasons not to support further work on innovation.

Wharton professor Adam Grant’s book Originals explores this question — of how to better evaluate ideas for changes and innovation, to make better assessments about what to choose to move forward. He relies on case studies and formal academic studies to see how investors, managers, and other decision-makers can make smarter evaluations of new ideas.

There are two streams of points he makes that can be particularly useful to people in legal organizations (and otherwise) who are thinking about this question of how to choose good innovative ideas to move forward:

1. Who you should be including as decision-makers on your ideas-evaluation team
2. How to get this evaluation team to make the best possible decisions

First, lessons from Originals on who should be on your ‘evaluating team’:

• They need to have enough (but not too much) domain expertise. Certainly they can’t be total novices, or their intuition will be off. But if they are very ‘expert’, they tend to be so entrenched in the system itself that they can’t imagine how things can be different. That means including people who are young or mid-level in their career as decision-makers, along with more senior people who are open-minded and ‘creators’ in their own right.
• They aren’t too inherently negative or egotistical — they’re able to recognize that others might have good ideas that they’ve never thought about before, and give
• Find people who have insider-outsider status, who have spent time working in other countries and types of organizations. They’re able to see beyond your given organization/system’s status quo’s.

Second, what you can do to increase your evaluating team’s capacity to decide well:

• Before they embark on hearing pitches for new ideas, have them do a 6-minute creative exercise in which they themselves try to come up with new ideas for similar challenges. This will put them into ‘creator’ mode, and make them less likely to be over-dismissive in ‘manager’ mode. Grant finds research that simply asking people to do a short sprint of coming up with ideas on their own makes them more able to pick ideas with actual promise, and not be overly dismissive.
• Beware evaluation schematics that are too dependent on ‘what has already worked’. The temptation is to judge new ideas based on past successes or failure, but this metric (or the way it’s used) tends to prevent good, breakthrough ideas from getting recognition.
• Try to separate the idea from the idea-haver. It’s too easy to dismiss ideas from people with low status in your organization, and to over-bias towards the established, successful, and charismatic. Good ideas come from lots of different places and people, but when they come from people without ‘power’, the default is to dismiss them.

Hopefully all these points are both practical and inspiring — please comment and write back about what strategies work for you as an idea-haver or as an idea-evaluator.

This is a topic we’re studying at Legal Design Lab, and we want to hear more from organizations, particularly in the legal system, about how they’re developing new org models for innovation.