Demystifying Communities of Practice as levers of growth

What’s common between Hewlett Packard (HP), World Bank, American Management System (AMS) and Shell Oil?

Well, they all have successfully adopted Communities of Practice (CoPs) for their organizational growth and success!

“Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly -Etienne Wenger

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Felt nostalgic about group discussions at staircase or in cafeteria with your friends in college on topics of mathematics, where, you along with other students were discussing about approaches to solve complex problems. Or, take an example of a college band where music enthusiasts gather each day to discuss and play some music, talk about musical instruments and refine their skills. Each one of us were part of one or more CoPs even when we were not formally introduced to this concept. Fast-forward to corporate life, forums where you regularly discuss about Machine Learning, Robotics, DevOps, Cloud, Test Automation, Digital Marketing, Branding, Six Sigma, Employee Engagement and other best practices etc. are all CoPs in some fashion.

Cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger christened the term “community of practice” when studying apprenticeships as a learning model

From a more formal and organized stand-point, for any forum to qualify as a CoP, it should have 3 essential ingredients/elements/pillars:

Pillars of CoP

• Domain, which is an interest area that serves as a common ground for interactions; e.g.: Java as a programming language
• Community, which act a social fabric for enabling collective learning, sharing, problem solving and relationship building; e.g.: a bunch of java developers in an organization coming together to discuss every week
• Practice, community members act as practitioners in the domain and build a shared repository for reuse of learnings; e.g.: stored artifacts on Java best practices arrived at as a result of community interactions which are leveraged for solving challenges in day-to-day business.

For any organization, profit oriented or social, CoP broadly serves following critical functions (as suggested by Wenger), some with enthusiasm of the members and some with support of the leadership team:

Critical Functions of CoP

• Educate by collecting and sharing information on topics of interest
• Support by organizing interactions and collaboration among community members
• Cultivate by assisting groups to start and sustain their learning
• Encourage by promoting the work of members through discussion and sharing
• Integrate by encouraging members to use their new knowledge for real change.

On the basis of formation, CoPs could be classified as Strategic (formulated top-down to achieve some specific organizational goals) or Emergent (natural and organically formed by members). On the basis of objectives that they intend to serve, we can classify CoPs as; Best practice communities, Innovation communities, Knowledge sharing communities or Helper communities. Some CoPs may serve more than one objective and hence there could be some overlap in classification.

Communities of Practice can help your organization in myriad of ways such as breaking the silos, driving the strategy, solving complex problems, promoting a culture of learning, sharing and reusability, spreading of best practices, developing people’s professional skills, engaging employees, containing attrition and many more.

As per an article from HBR “The world bank’s decision to fund communities of practice, for example, led to a significant increase in the number of organization wide communities — it’s now over 100 — and in the intensity of participation.

Chrysler’s leaders feared they would lose functional expertise and the ability to keep up with leading-edge change. To address those concerns, senior managers and engineers formed communities of practice known as “tech clubs,” which were composed of experts from different car platforms. The clubs helped the company successfully make the move to platforms, a change that cut R&D costs and car-development cycle times by more than half.

At IBM, communities of practice hold their own conferences, both in person and on-line. Presentations, hallway conversations, dinners, and chat rooms are opportunities for members to exchange ideas, build skills, and develop networks.

American Management Systems has found that communities of practice help the company win the war (or at least some of the battles) for talent. Thus, a consultant who was planning to leave the company decided to stay after peers at a community forum found project opportunities for her that were tailor-made to her interests and expertise.”

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

For your organization, consider CoP as a missing piece of the success puzzle. Having now being made aware about what CoP is, the benefits it can entail and manner it can shape the future of your organization, it’s time to set up your own! Million-dollar question, How?

CoP Roadmap: 4-point approach

Following a structured approach to Communities of Practice (CoP) can do wonders for your organization. Go through the simple yet powerful pointers which I have outlined below.

Image Design by Rahul Ladha

Initiate

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe — Abraham Lincoln

• Create a single organization-wide approach to CoPs. All CoPs can get benefitted with the commonality of approach
• At the onset, you can setup one community for each of the areas you want to create/increase impact in line with your strategic objectives and culture. For eg: An organization looking to project itself as analytics champion can setup a CoP on data analytics and bring people together to innovate products and solutions
• Each CoP should have clear objectives and focus areas
• Each CoP should have a moderator/expert who can set course of direction and mentor fellow members
• Enlist and engage members in line with their interest, experience and keenness to contribute
• Define the broad governance mechanism and allow CoPs to setup their own governance and principles. For e.g.: Monthly CoP meeting covering all CoP groups where experts from each group represent to share about the progress done/support needed in their respective CoPs.

Foster

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel — Maya Angelou

• Help create a safe, encouraging, and transparent environment for CoPs to thrive
• Provide the infrastructure (time, platform, support, budget etc.) needed by communities to function efficiently and be productive
• Stay away from throwing unnecessary pressure to perform
• Encourage CoPs to initiate regular activities such as webinars, summits, or meetings etc. Events can take place virtually or face to face as the situation may be
• Create avenues for codification of the knowledge. This is extremely crucial as you want the knowledge gained and shared to be available for others to reuse. Provide them with an online platform where they can store artifacts such as meeting minutes, documentations, emails, data and videos etc.
• Recognize and reward members who are going above and beyond and contributing. You may give them badges, certificates, mementos, cash rewards or anything that aligns with your broader organizational policy
• Involve CoPs (through their community leaders or experts) in decision-making thereby empowering them.

Monitor

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it — Moliere

• Monitor (at not so frequent intervals) the progress made by each of the CoPs in line with the predefined objectives and benchmarks in the initiation phase
• Conducting surveys, deep stick discussions and gathering feedback from the ground may also be useful
• As a leader, suggest corrective actions and help bring things back on track should they deviate.

Culminate

“Don’t stop when you’re tired; stop when you’re done — Marilyn Monroe

• Actively manage your portfolio of CoPs
• Once the objectives are achieved, culminate the respective CoP and channelize the resources in other areas by forming new CoP
• Ensure that all artifacts are secured for future reuse
• Organize lessons learned sessions and invite other CoP members as well so that they can get benefitted
• Most importantly, acknowledge the work done by each of the community member as it creates reinforcement impact.

Feel free to customize and use the above roadmap in your respective organization. If you are already running or are part of an active CoP, do let me know what you do for the success of the CoP?

References:

[1] Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[2] Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier by Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder from the Harvard Business Review (January-February 2000)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belongs solely to me and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated.