A friend of the Ritter Academy asked me this morning to compare RitterMaps with checklists.  It is a good question after all, don't most people working on e-discovery projects already have their own checklists for getting things done?

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, the NYT bestseller by Atul Gawande, effectively shows the surprising power of the ordinary checklist at enabling surgeons and other professionals to manage the increasing complexity of doing their work. His engaging analysis emphasizes that any professional, despite effective training and practical experience, struggles to do everything right.

For surgeons, overlooking even routine tasks can have deadly consequences. The checklist, Gawande observes, enables a professional to avoid two categories of errors: errors of ignorance (not knowing a particular step or procedure is required) and errors of ineptitude (failing to perform a known step or procedure). Beginning with a 90-second checklist for a simple surgical room procedure that has reduced fatalities by 30%, Gawande examined a range of professional fields - disaster response, investment banking, skyscraper construction and business. He concluded that checklists not only drive the avoidance of errors, but they provoke the professional to focus on the times when the defined linear process needs to be varied in order to achieve the correct results.

Regardless of the professional discipline, Gawande concludes that the complexity of life, amplified by the impact of technology, requires the structure that a checklist can provide. "We may admit that errors and oversights occur–even devastating ones. But we [surgeons] believe our jobs are too complicated to reduce to a checklist." His direct approach–that a checklist helps us to "get the stupid stuff right"-- remains a compelling call to action for even the most educated professionals to think differently about how to implement tools that support them in performing their work.

But is a checklist the only tool that can enable professionals to manage complexity, exercise, discipline, and avoid errors of ineptitude?

I began working with mindmapping in 2004. It was immediately clear to me - a lawyer who had an enormous whiteboard on my office wall–that mapping worked even better as a professional tool. Mindmaps enabled me to see and unfold the increasing complexity of all of the legal and technology variables. These variables were confronting both me and my clients in building and managing information systems and complex processes (privacy compliance, e-commerce, website functionality, network security, and e-discovery). Even then, checklists – a very common project management tool for lawyers–were proving inadequate to meet both the needs of both me and my clients to see the full picture and enable the team to move ahead on the project working, quite literally, on the same page.

RitterMaps are content-rich, researched and designed mindmaps that enable the same results for our subscribers. Today we use them as the platform for Academy courses. But, in early 2012, we will begin licensing RitterMaps directly to subscribers as digital, interactive, visual tools that you can acquire and use for the same purposes as any professional making a checklist–to avoid errors of ignorance and errors of ineptitude. E-discovery is enormously complex and constantly dynamic (new technologies, new media, new discovery processing tools). For the lawyer or e-discovery professional–just like a surgeon–overlooking even the basic things can have catastrophic results. Surgeons call it "death"; lawyers call the adverse judicial rules "outcome determinative".

RitterMaps are checklists but they take the process to a new level. Here are seven reasons (and more to follow in future posts):

• RitterMaps enable you to identify and act on decision options that have multiple choices.

  Checklists force "yes/no", "armed /unarmed", "confirmed/non–confirmed" decisions. While that polar structure is important in linear process, RitterMaps enable you to provide multiple decision options that take account of other alternatives to consider. All you need to do is customize the map to reflect the options.

  Moreover, checklists, have limited branching or decision – tree functionality.  RitterMaps visually present the branches to consider. In e-discovery, investigation and assessment, as well as designing suitable processes, often require a more flexible approach.

• RitterMaps show context and structure, as well as the relationships among different variables and topics that must be included in a process.

  Checklists are linear, and every checklist presented on Gawande's website is textual. But RitterMaps visually present process, relationships, and structure that expand the functional utility of the content.

  Each of us, to varying degrees, remember and recall the information we learn and need to use in visual form. We routinely share information in visual form–if that was not the case, there would be no blackboards or whiteboards in classrooms or conference rooms. Presenting process information in visual format improves recall and our ability to communicate the information to others. After all, isn't that the reason we often draw solutions on the back of paper napkins or other scraps of paper? Being able to remember better and share and communicate better means fewer mistakes and fewer "outcome determinative" judicial orders.

• RitterMaps enable the individual checklists of all of your team members to be viewed together–and filtered, split up and delivered to each team member when appropriate.

  Checklists--in linear, text-based, polar-decision orientation–enable only consensus action. A pilot and co-pilot must both agree a task is completed; a surgeon and a nurse must both confirm a clamp is properly presented; etc. However, checklists become unwieldy when the projects involve more individuals, or tasks running in parallel.

  RitterMaps allow you to develop views of the entire project, and then instantly divide the full picture into individual or team components that work like specific checklists. The difference is that you can do this so much faster and visually–indeed, every RitterMap is built on a database structure that adds amazing flexibility to e-discovery team-oriented projects.

• RitterMaps engage a full portfolio of visual tools that enable the map to be a shared project resource.

  Each RitterMap takes full advantage of the power of Mindjet's Mindmanager Professional 2012 software to use shapes, color, font size, font color, images, icons, markers and filters to achieve a visually effective resource. Even a basic checklist comes alive when presented as a RitterMap with color, context and priorities labeled.

  The result is that all of the stakeholders in your project simply engage differently with one another and the project–I see it in every meeting when the first RitterMap is presented. People focus, they examine, they test the relationships among different topics on a RitterMap. In doing so, they subtly begin to jointly own the content and offer corrections, enhancements, additions, and suggest changes. That outcome is better than any checklist!

• RitterMaps unfold complexity to the level appropriate for the audience or user.

  On any e-discovery project, different participants and stakeholders have different views. Senior management may only require a "global view"–the 20,000 foot fly-over of the planned process. The working force needs the detailed lists to assure the process is properly executed at each task.

  Nearly every checklist I have seen for a complex project does not enable you to provide different views. Admittedly, process management tools allow you to scale detail by "rolling-up" dates and deadlines, but even then, the visual presentation is largely linear, textual and challenging to comprehend.

• RitterMaps reveal "why" a process, task, or question is important to be considered.

  Each new generation of RitterMaps includes more and more pointers (or annotations) to the underlying legal rules, technology standards, or best practices that explain the "why". In doing so, RitterMaps give the professional the control to question specific steps, perhaps make adaptations or other changes. After all, this is what the training and experience of a professional represents–the ability to change direction intelligently. Checklists demand compliance, and rarely, if ever, explain the "why".

• RitterMaps enable users to dynamically capture performance related data and evidence.

  RitterMaps will be licensed as live data files (similar to a model text document). Once you open a file, RitterMaps enable you to input notes, findings, highlight inconsistencies, create reminders, and capture facts with a variety of editing tools. If you can type, you can create and edit RitterMaps. All of your work can then be exported into other formats and resources, such as text documents and spreadsheets with merely a simple click. Checklists tend to only record that the act described has, or has not, been performed. RitterMaps can be the platform for all of your project management.

  As Gawande conducted the research for his book, and field–tested the notion that checklists helped surgeons be better doctors, he met resistance from the surgeons who believed, as experienced professionals, they did not need checklists to "get the stupid stuff right." There is no question that trial lawyers, as well as the other professional roles engaged in e–discovery, may resist the change that RitterMaps or checklists represent. Just like surgeons, trial lawyers usually believe they already have all the training and experience they need to know what they are doing.

  But there is one survey result that gives our team optimism that the functionality, utility, and benefits of RitterMaps – tools which I believe are superior to checklists – will become powerful tools for how e–discovery and other legal/technology projects are managed. After using Gawande's checklists, 20% of the surgeons reported they did not find them easy to use nor did they feel the checklists improved patient safety. But, when asked if they would want a surgeon to use a checklist when going under the knife themselves, 93% of the participating checklist users said, "Yes"!

  Perhaps the value of RitterMaps will only be demonstrated when a trial lawyer, faced with a malpractice lawsuit for his or her own e-discovery negligence, asks their counsel, "Could you draw me a picture and show me the tasks required to find the evidence of my innocence?" We look forward to launching the RitterMaps licensing program in early 2012 and sharing with you that "We have a RitterMap for that!"