How We're Assessing The Happy Lawyer Project
From the beginning, there was a big question mark in my plan for the Happy Lawyer Book. I was pretty confident in my ability to get interviews, glean data, find patterns, and create a model. I was also pretty confident in my ability to use the model to deliver transformations and eventually write the book based on those transformations.
But what I wasn’t totally sure about was how to TEST the model to figure out what is working and what isn’t working.
🤔
I’ve thought about it a lot and landed on this as the best approach:
Detailed Open-Ended Sessions With Participants. Schedule sessions with the participating lawyers and ask open ended questions.
Trust that they know what’s working (and not working) for them.
And if they don’t know what’s working, trust that we can figure it out together (that I’m perceptive enough and my intuition is honed enough that together we’ll be able to isolate the pieces and tweak what’s not working and retain what is).
Standardized Assessment. Create a standardized set of questions that I can send to participants before and after participating so that we can look at what’s changed and see what sort of progress has been made.
Additionally, I could disseminate it even more widely to get a broader knowledge-base and picture of the industry.
The idea of this Standardized Assessment is particularly seductive. We all love hard and fast data, and what could be more hard and fast than numbers? X% of participants improved their happiness by Y%. Great! 🙌 Except …
… how do you measure happiness?
Well, it’s not that simple. In fact, you can read all about our efforts here: the rationale behind the construction of The Happy Lawyer Happiness Assessment.
The bottom line though is that after much effort, we have a standardized assessment:
Is there a control group?
One discussion I’ve had is around whether there will be a control group.
A control group is a group of participants in a study who will not receive the intervention so that they can be compared with participants who do receive the intervention, so that the efficacy of the intervention can be assessed. This will hopefully account for the placebo effect (although I’d note that the placebo effect is not always bad).
Bottom line - there is no control group for this project.
Truthfully, I’m not even sure how a control group would work here. Maybe the control group is just the general population? After all, at some point this assessment is taken enough that it can become a baseline against which to measure the results of the intervention.
One last point - I’m not that worried about a control group. This project will live or die by the results that participants receive. From the beginning I’ve stated that I want this to be a practical, usable, method that will get people happier.
If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
And either way we’ll keep refining until it’s as consistent as possible and as fast as practicable.
The Assessment
Have you taken the assessment? If not, take it now. It’s even got a button for if you’re not a lawyer so that non-lawyers can participate without messing up the lawyer-specific data. Have you taken it a while ago? Maybe it’s time to take it again and see how your answers have changed.
Finally, once again, you can check out the rationale between the questions and the scoring here:
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