Thomas Eriksson’s marvellous and revealing NY Times bestseller Surrounded by idiots describes in an entertaining way how the four behaviour-psychological archetypes live, think and act.
DISC and the colours of psychology
Red people are strong leaders, results-oriented, usually with a short attention span. Yellow people are entrepreneurial, extravert, engaging and embrace a can-do mentality. In this DISC model, green people are the glue between everyone; they are relationship-driven introverts seeking consensus and, if necessary, lying to maintain the peace. And lawyers: blue.
Lawyers: Yves Klein Blue
Blue people are task oriented, risk-avoidant, not necessarily relationship-driven, reliable, precise, rule-abiding, with an impeccable eye for detail. Being careful, blue people weigh all aspects of a new project, try to oversee it from start-to-finish, anticipate problems and pitfalls, and spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid them.
Yes, there is variety: some are Ukraine-brave bright blue, others patented ‘YKB’.
Rainbow in the team
Aim at watertight contracts and blue people will be your best bet for success. Try to get the deal done and you want your representatives to be red or yellow. If contract negotiations or obligation performance ran into trouble, see if there is some green in the team. The best team is a well-balanced mix of all four colours.
Unfortunately, lawyers are often risk-avoidant by design; somewhat blue in the way they live, think and act. That is good for risk management; not necessarily for rolling out a CLM successfully.
Successful change
Now that we are working closely together with Gartner, we learn a lot about (and are gearing Weagree entirely towards) the market best practices of customer tech implementation journeys, end-user adoption of new technologies, ‘messaging’ and customer success.
No surprise that we dig into the best know-how one can possibly think of. A key aspect in successfully implementing legal technology is excellence in communication.
Communicating in blue
Effective communication means that legal leadership informs every individual CLM end-user adequately. Since every colour has its own way of considering, deciding, acting and embracing a change, it is crucial to communicate adequately.
While we highly recommend Thomas Eriksson’s Surrounded by idiots; at Gartner, the Myers-Briggs model of personalities was taken as a reference to define technology-adoption best practices. In the end, it does not really matter which of the two behaviour-psychological models you use. What matters is that ‘one-size-fits-all’ communication does not work, and what helps is that you understand how every colour personality or Myers-Briggs archetype lives, thinks and acts.
6 tips for communicating successfully
It is vital (and your challenge is) that you get your message across clearly. Gartner gave us tips and best practice guides. Of course, this is all provided that your CLM or contract automation application is user-friendly and fit for the contracting jobs (now and in the future).
Without elaborating on how to achieve this exactly, here are a few summary-tips:
- Don’t share too much at once – it can overwhelm people: share small, digestible chunks of information, for example a ‘mini-series’ that builds and reinforces your story step by step.
- Avoid language that some don’t understand – it alienates. Using the right language (and what that is and how it must be structured, is something Gartner tells us in insightful research) maximises the impact.
- Avoid thoughtless or vague wording such as “everything is changing” as there are probably counterproductive.
- Tell team members what will remain the same (it is fascinating to learn from Gartner what it is). It creates comfort, instills confidence and mitigates the uncertainty.
- Adjust the communication approach if to-be CLM users start acting inconsistently (Gartner’s suggestions are remarkable).
- Recognise what already exists and remind of what the team has achieved, their contributions, the challenges they’ve overcome and how.
There is abundant evidence that with adequate communication, the success rate of adopting technology increases exponentially. Make rolling out Weagree motivational, inspiring and non-threatening.
What not to do
Undoing your CLM solution from powerful features or reducing an implementation to basics (as such) is not usually what you should do. It may hide benefits that you do not believe are there, while your team members do. Or it removes process optimisations that can only be discovered in hindsight as part of the adoption journey.
Do not remove (accessibility of) the hidden benefits available in your legal tech. Rather, focus on your messaging style: to the blue people, your yellow team members and the green and (if any) the red ones.
Ask us
If you would like to discuss your implementation approach, your internal messaging in connection with your roadmap into legal tech:
