Start with Why. Value storytelling is essential (series summarized here). But, as storytellers, we’re not experimenting with the form. We should tell simple, compelling stories with no mystery as to the What, How, and Why.

What is outputs. How is inputs/process. Why is purpose, outcomes, and value.

What, How, and Why all matter. But, for our business audience, legal’s What and How are inherently uninteresting. Always start with their Why.

Why is the subject of the previous post. Business value is the one true Why. The call to action. The hook. The propulsive force. But the framing of Why is context dependent. The way we talk about business value will often need to be calibrated to our subject matter and our target audience—identifying our target audience and understanding what messaging resonates with them is quintessential to mastering our own context.

The stories we tell must cohere with the stories our audience tells themselves about their own starring role in the business’s journey. We must present ourselves as allies in the same cause. Which we are. This sense of shared purpose is most crucial when we are engaged in productive disagreement and accountable for persuading our allies of unpalatable truths—whether seeking to rejigger their perspective on value preservation (e.g., refining their legal-risk/business-reward calculus) or recommending that finite resources be allocated to the legal function despite the very real opportunity costs. Continue Reading Start with Why – Value Storytelling (#4)

SERIES TO DATE

Lawyers Lagging Behind (#0)

Maybe, Don’t Be MacGyver (#1)

The Savings Trap (#2)

Defining Business Value (#3)

Start with Why (#4)

The Dept of Slow & No (#5)

Tech-First Failures (#6)

SUMMARY

Legal expertise is valuable to the enterprise. Demand is on steep upward trajectory. Budgets are failing to keep pace. We must optimize resource allocation and innovate—enhance productivity through process and tech. But, while innovation and optimization are key elements in our value story, we are still likely to need more money for the legal function to drive better business outcomes at scale and pace. Service levels are inextricably tied to resource levels—including the resources required to invest in innovation and optimization.

It is, literally, our job to ensure the legal aspects of business needs are met. Thus, it is also our job to secure sufficient resources for the legal function. Obtaining finite resources inside an enterprise carries substantial opportunity costs (other value the business could pursue with the same money) and therefore requires expert value storytelling, a learned skill in which few legal professionals are practiced.

The business defines “value.” Yet the number one complaint among the legal function’s business stakeholders is in-house lawyers “don’t understand my business.” Understanding—mastering our own context—is essential. We should be capable of framing our ask for incremental resources in the language and metrics of the business. Centering the creation, and preservation, of business value in our narrative is the core of value storytelling.

Business value is context-dependent, not unknowable. Conversations around the business value of, say, accelerating speed-to-revenue demand a different framing, and often has a different audience, than conversations around the business value of complying with new privacy regulations. We should know our audience and develop the attendant abilities to calibrate messaging for maximum resonance with specific sets of business stakeholders.

Being aligned with the business, however, does not spare us from making hard choices and engaging in hard conversations as to what constitutes value. Though it pains our service-loving souls, it incumbent upon us to prioritize activities by business impact and artfully say “no” when asked to handle deprioritized work. We should, however, capitalize on each “no” as an opportunity to build our story that additional legal resources are required to address unmet business needs.

Yet, instead of a more-with-more value proposition, we too often default to savings-centric tropes valorizing more-with-less heroics reliant on extraordinary effort and improvisational ingenuity to bridge resource gaps (excess MacGyverism). Stories about savings are easy because they are counterproductive—reinforcing the attractive fiction that the business can, and should, spend less on legal. Good value storytelling is anything but easy for the same reason it is necessary—the hallmark of successful advocacy is not a penchant for combative argumentation but, rather, our ability to persuade those who need persuading.

We are similarly inclined towards the attractive fiction of tech-first solutioning. It would be convenient if tech were the solution to every problem. But value storytelling is persuasive nonfiction and is therefore required to survive contact with reality. In reality, we often need to pay down considerable process and cultural debt to lay the groundwork for  necessary tech enablement.

Laying the groundwork starts with Why but needs to be supplemented with a compelling and coherent vision as to How business value should be delivered. We need an articulable, actionable approach that resonates with our business stakeholders. Target operating models. Technology roadmaps. Metrics. We have to be able to move upstream to address the business drivers of legal workloads, presenting a systems-oriented view of how legal supports better business outcomes. Doing this well requires work sorting because we are bandwidth constrained. We can only tackle so many projects, let alone programs, at once.

In addition to limited bandwidth, we are constrained by a fear of looking bad and a myopic perspective on risk. Legal is often labeled the Department of Slow or the Department of No, which undermines our value storytelling. We need to shift these perspectives among our stakeholders, in part, by understanding when and where they are grounded in some level of truth—candid self-assessments of being bottlenecks because of (i) bad processes or (ii) an acute focus on legal risk that ignores net business impact. This candor extends to our business case: fix what we can, admit where we are falling short, and request the resources we need to serve the business better.