Communities of Practice
C ommunities of practice are
becoming an ordinary part of many companies. Rather than operating outside of or parallel to the formal organization, they are becoming integrated into organizations, with goals, deliverables, resources, accountability and assigned membership, similar to teams, task forces and other organizational forms.
| articles: community toolkit: |
| What are Communities of Practice? | |
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A community of practice is a group of people who share
knowledge about a topic, connect with each other, and create common approaches
to the way they do their work. All organizations contain informal networks of
people who share ideas and help each other with everyday work problems.
Sometimes these networks congeal around a topic and form spontaneously into a
community of practice. The topic could be a discipline, such as geology,
biochemistry, social work, or civil engineering. Or it could cross several
disciplines, such as a type of oil field, people who serve a particular
customer or an emerging technology. These spontaneous learning communities
spring from people’s natural need to learn from and help each other. Community
members typically help each other solve problems, offer their advice, and
develop new approaches or tools for their field. Over time, members of a
community of practice can form a strong sense of common identity. As they share
ideas about how they work and solve problems, they naturally develop a set of
common practices. Sometimes they formalize these in guidelines and standards,
but often they simply remain “what everybody knows” about good practice. In a
long-lived community, members’ contact with each other can become deep and rich
enough that many of them develop an intimate knowledge of how each other
practices their craft. - From Richard McDermott, Encyclopedia of Distributed
Learning
Evolution of the concept of communities of practice
When we first described communities of practice, we thought that the informality of communities was part of what distinguishes them from other organizational structures, such as teams and taskforces. Surprisingly, we found that healthy, more mature communities frequently have goals, a strong sense of accomplishment, and are fairly well integrated into their host organizations. They operate much less informally than we originally conceived See Articles.Cultivating Communities. While many healthy communities have annual goals, the community’s life and purpose extend far beyond those goals to develop their domain as long as the topic is relevant to the organization. Peers As they mature, healthy communities become more integrated into planning, budgeting and operations. And as they become more integrated into the organization, they grow more like teams and taskforces. What distinguishes them from these other organizational structures is that they are a group of peers ultimately responsible for developing and maintaining a body of knowledge. As a group of peers connected by their common knowledge and practice, expertise, rather than status, determines the influence of members on each other. While better integrated into the organization, healthy communities still rely on influence, rather than authority, to insure their recommendations are adopted by operating teams and business units. Active members of healthy communities gain experience in influencing through knowledge. See Articles. How to avoid a mid-life crisis in your communities. |
| Building Communities | |
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Given our sense that communities of practice were necessarily
informal and that membership was voluntary, we thought there was little you
could do to build communities except seed them with ideas and enthusiastic
people. Now we know there is much you can do; help them identify what they will
do to develop their domain, establish a schedule of regular meetings, track
accomplishments and create expectations among managers for the value they
deliver to the organization. Knowledge about community building, like knowledge
in many other parts of the business world, is becoming less of an art and more
of a science. See Articles. Services
712 Allen Drive, Longmont, Colorado 80503 USA phone/fax 303-545-6030 e-mail Richard@McDermottConsulting.com |