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I was still traveling so I missed the AALL announcement about this artificial intelligence (AI) keyword glossary (members only). It was a project I had worked on, so of course, I was glad to see it get shared publicly. But it had also been a great collaboration, which is not something I’ve always been open to.
Before I get into the post, I want to give a huge shout out to Lisa Lee at O’Melveny & Myers. I don’t normally call people out by name in my blog (and I checked with her in advance) but the glossary is her creation too. I had not met Lisa before this project even though we were both on the same coast and only a couple of hours apart. She and I drafted the glossary and Lisa is the sort of person who makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. If you ever get a chance to work with her, don’t sleep on the opportunity.
Group Work, Group Think
We were both on the AALL AI and Legal Information Special Committee and the group was going to work on a number of outputs. I’d volunteered for the glossary and initially thought that it was just me working on it. That would have suited me fine, because group projects can be a mixed bag. As this article at Fast Company points out, peer-based collaborations can be made more challenging because it’s not always clear what value people are expected to bring and accountability can be murky when it comes to completing objectives or resolving conflict.
It’s strange that there isn’t a tried and true way to avoid this or, if there is, it isn’t always deployed. When you are in an organization, there is usually a hierarchy on which you can hang some collaborations. People higher in the hierarchy may be looked to for decisions (and that may be their role, outside of subject matter expertise) and the people lower in the hierarchy may bring the skills or experience in the knowledge domain.
Even that can be tenuous, though. If the hierarchy remains present, then people may defer to someone based on rank or prestige and not based on skill or knowledge. If the decision-maker is difficult to work with, their participation may dull the output of the collaboration if people go along to get along.
There is nothing wrong with consensus decision-making in many cases. Compromise can be a necessary outcome and may strengthen a team without having a measurable impact on the outcome. But there can be a risk of avoiding challenges or missing opportunities if the hierarchy overwhelms the people who can add value.
Peer collaborations can be more challenging because they lack any hierarchy. Someone needs to be in charge, but not too in charge. It doesn’t have to always be the same someone and it can vary based on the value being brought. If you’ve ever paddled a canoe with someone else, you may have a sense of what I mean. Everyone wants to paddle the same direction but someone can steer, and they probably need the longer paddle and the back seat. But the person in the front has to watch for dead heads and needs to be able to paddle hard in difficult circumstances. Even in a collaboration, there are roles to fulfill so that everyone isn’t doing everything.
I actually enjoyed the spin up of the collaboration on this project almost as much as I enjoyed the work itself. If you approach it with deliberation, you can see things like communication style and meeting preferences starting to blend as each person in the collaboration re-calibrates to find common ground.
It was interesting to see our communication shift from being tentative and a bit careful to being much more straightforward as we built trust. We only had about 8 weeks to pull this off so I wasn’t really sure what was possible within the time frame. In hindsight, the time frame may have helped because having a deadline can bring clarity of thinking.
Cold Calls, Warm Answers
I’ve been working with legal technology for a long time. But I do not consider myself an expert on AI. It’s a little bit like photography for me. Sure, I can take photos and my photos have gotten better over the years. But I’m not a photographer and I like to think I am a pretty good judge of what knowledge and skills I have, and where greater expertise is needed.
One task I undertook for the project was to reach out to people who I thought might be able to help us validate the terms we chose for the glossary, people closer to the technology but further away from librarianship. I think, if you looked at the arc of our work, you’d see that most of the terms we ended up with were also in our starting terminology lists. But it also seemed like a good thing to get more input if time allowed. This was, after all, going to be a resource for a broad audience.
These people were not all people who I knew or who knew me. I think that can be a positive, although, depending on the request, there may be more willingness with people who are familiar. For me, a cold call (or email, in my case) is a way of creating new network links and strengthening or rekindling old ones.
So a shout out too to Colin Lachance and Sarah Glassmeyer, both of whom came through in response to our request for input. In essence, we sent them our combined list and said, “we are generating a term list for a librarian new to AI: what are we missing, and how would you rank these in importance”. Not a lot of work for people with their expertise, but still not something they’d signed up for. I was grateful for their time and we added back in terms and re-prioritized others.
I would encourage you, if you are asked by a colleague or someone else, to respond. I emailed a couple of other people, well known in our community, and didn’t hear anything back. I completely get that the timeline was short and that the work may not have been something they were interested in contributing too. But a “no” would have been preferable to silence.
It may be unprofessional of me but I have a long memory for folks that may not be good to work with. Sometimes it’s just a bad vibe you get in a meeting or event. Others, it’s things like not responding to an email for help. I think that words like collegiality get trotted out when people want something but the two-way, relational aspect sometimes gets ignored.
Stick the Landing
We hit our mark. We did our work, got feedback, compiled our result, and got it to AALL staff on time. It was a good outcome.
This was one of those places where working with people you know can make things smoother. I felt as though Lisa and I speed ran the trust side of this, so that gave me the confidence to take on another task, which was to communicate our incoming project to AALL staff.
We never experienced this (or if we did, I’ve forgotten it). But particularly when you have a two-person collaboration, and there’s no hierarchy, it can be like two people trying to go through the same door from opposite sides: “No, you first.” “No, please, after you.” And you both stand there and progress isn’t made.
This can come across in a small group as whether to just do something, with the expectation people will be fine with it, or to communicate to everyone that you’re doing it and are they fine with it? When you know your colleagues, you may know whether they have spare cycles to do something or not, and if they don’t and you do, then to just go ahead.
I have a pretty hard “no surprises” rule that I operate with in work, generally. No surprises for the boss or governance board. No surprises around HR. The only way I know to achieve that is to communicate early and often. I felt like I was a bit over-communicative on this project because the deadline was tight and completion wasn’t something we could execute on the volunteer side. But AALL has great staff and if they felt I was over-sharing, they were kind about it.