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24 Jun 14
Melinda MottEtiene Wenger, a major contributor to the idea of a Community of Practice defines the term, explains how they're used within organizations, and discusses the importance of maintaining them so that they're most effective.
Communities of Practice Community of Practice CoP EdTech 543 Etienne Wenger learning Theory
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Michele Gardner Hale"Yet systematically addressing the kind of dynamic "knowing" that makes a difference in practice requires the participation of people who are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge."
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mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity
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Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity
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michelemmartin* provides guidance and resources when needed
* helps communities connect their agenda to business strategies
* encourages them to move forward with their agenda and remain focused on the cutting edge
* makes sure they include all the right -
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dolors reigLearning as a social system, communities of practice
business transformation coaching collective intelligence communities of practice community comunidades comunidadesonline intranets knowledge ecosystem management consulting organizational health
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14 May 10
Doug BelshawEtienne Wenger's article from 1998 about communities of practice
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Giorgio BertiniMembers of a community are informally bound by what they do together–from engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problems–and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities. A community of practice is thus di
business transformation coaching collective intelligence communities of practice community intranets knowledge ecosystem management consulting organizational health learning orga
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24 Feb 10
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We now recognize knowledge as a key source of competitive advantage in the business world, but we still have little understanding of how to create and leverage it in practice. Traditional knowledge management approaches attempt to capture existing knowledge within formal systems, such as databases. Yet systematically addressing the kind of dynamic "knowing" that makes a difference in practice requires the participation of people who are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge.
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24 Jan 10
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12 Jan 10
Juan Rafael Fernández«Communities of Practice. Learning as a Social System», by Etienne Wenger [Published in the "Systems Thinker," June 1998]
collaboration comunidades_práctica learning red_social research textos_clave
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By participating in such a communal memory, they can do the job without having to remember everything themselves.
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Members of a community are informally bound by what they do together–from engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problems
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When communities of practice cut across business units, they can develop strategic perspectives that transcend the fragmentation of product lines.
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- A community of practice is different from a business or functional unit in that it defines itself in the doing, as members develop among themselves their own understanding of what their practice is about. This living process results in a much richer definition than a mere institutional charter. As a consequence, the boundaries of a community of practice are more flexible than those of an organizational unit. The membership involves whoever participates in and contributes to the practice. People can participate in different ways and to different degrees. This permeable periphery creates many opportunities for learning, as outsiders and newcomers learn the practice in concrete terms, and core members gain new insights from contacts with less-engaged participants.
- A community of practice is different from a team in that the shared learning and interest of its members are what keep it together. It is defined by knowledge rather than by task, and exists because participation has value to its members. A community of practice's life cycle is determined by the value it provides to its members, not by an institutional schedule. It does not appear the minute a project is started and does not disappear with the end of a task. It takes a while to come into being and may live long after a project is completed or an official team has disbanded.
- A community of practice is different from a network in the sense that it is "about" something; it is not just a set of relationships. It has an identity as a community, and thus shapes the identities of its members. A community of practice exists because it produces a shared practice as members engage in a collective process of learning.
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Relationships to Official Organization
Relationship
Definition
Challenges typical of the relationship
Unrecognized
Invisible to the organization and sometimes even to members themselves
Lack of reflexivity, awareness of value and of limitation
Bootlegged
Only visible informally to a circle of people in the know
Getting resources, having an impact, keeping hidden
Legitimized
Officially sanctioned as a valuable entity
Scrutiny, over-management, new demands
Strategic
Widely recognized as central to the organization's success
Short-term pressures, blindness of success, smugness, elitism, exclusion
Transformative
Capable of redefining its environment and the direction of the organization
Relating to the rest of the organization, acceptance, managing boundaries
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they know what is relevant to communicate and how to present information in useful ways
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They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
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They can retain knowledge in "living" ways
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They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge
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This collaborative inquiry makes membership valuable, because people invest their professional identities in being part of a dynamic, forward-looking community.
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They provide homes for identities.
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Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations.
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Communities of practice structure an organization's learning potential in two ways: through the knowledge they develop at their core and through interactions at their boundaries.
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while the core is the center of expertise, radically new insights often arise at the boundary between communities.
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Legitimizing participation. Organizations can support communities of practice by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring is acknowledged.
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Negotiating their strategic context. In what Richard McDermott calls "double-knit organizations," people work in teams for projects but belong to longer-lived communities of practice for maintaining their expertise.
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Organizations must therefore develop a clear sense of how knowledge is linked to business strategies and use this understanding to help communities of practice articulate their strategic value.
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Being attuned to real practices. To be successful, organizations must leverage existing practices.
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Fine-tuning the organization.
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Because communities of practice must be self-organizing to learn effectively and because participation must be intrinsically self-sustaining, it is tricky to use reward systems as a way to manipulate behavior or micro-manage the community. But organizations shouldn't ignore the issue of reward and recognition altogether; rather, they need to adapt reward systems to support participation in learning communities, for instance, by including community activities and leadership in performance review discussions. Managers also need to make sure that existing compensation systems do not inadvertently penalize the work involved in building communities.
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Providing support.
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They do not require much management, but they can use leadership. They self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational environment. The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without overwhelming them with organizational meddling.
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Michel BauwensCommunities of practice develop around things that matter to people.
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03 Jan 09
Howard RheingoldCommunities of practice develop around things that matter to people.
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We now recognize knowledge as a key source of competitive advantage in the business world, but we still have little understanding of how to create and leverage it in practice. Traditional knowledge management approaches attempt to capture existing knowledge within formal systems, such as databases. Yet systematically addressing the kind of dynamic "knowing" that makes a difference in practice requires the participation of people who are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge.
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We frequently say that people are an organization's most important resource. Yet we seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through which individuals develop and share the capacity to create and use knowledge. Even when people work for large organizations, they learn through their participation in more specific communities made up of people with whom they interact on a regular basis. These "communities of practice" are mostly informal and distinct from organizational units.
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Defining Communities of Practice
Communities of practice are everywhere. We all belong to a number of them–at work, at school, at home, in our hobbies. Some have a name, some don't. We are core members of some and we belong to others more peripherally. You may be a member of a band, or you may just come to rehearsals to hang around with the group. You may lead a group of consultants who specialize in telecommunication strategies, or you may just stay in touch to keep informed about developments in the field. Or you may have just joined a community and are still trying to find your place in it. Whatever form our participation takes, most of us are familiar with the experience of belonging to a community of practice.
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- What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members
- How it functionsmutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity
- What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.
A community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:
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Communities of practice exist in any organization. Because membership is based on participation rather than on official status, these communities are not bound by organizational affiliations; they can span institutional structures and hierarchies. They can be found:
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Across business units: Important knowledge is often distributed in different business units.
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Across company boundaries: In some cases, communities of practice become useful by crossing organizational boundaries.
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Communities of practice are not a new kind of organizational unit; rather, they are a different cut on the organization's structure–one that emphasizes the learning that people have done together rather than the unit they report to, the project they are working on, or the people they know.
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different from a business or functional unit in that it defines itself in the doing, as members develop among themselves their own understanding of what their practice is about.
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in that the shared learning and interest of its members are what keep it together.
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different from a team
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It is defined by knowledge rather than by task, and exists because participation has value to its members. A community of practice's life cycle is determined by the value it provides to its members, not by an institutional schedule.
-
A community of practice is different from a network in the sense that it is "about" something; it is not just a set of relationships. It has an identity as a community, and thus shapes the identities of its members.
-
Relationships to Official Organization
Relationship
Definition
Challenges typical of the relationship
Unrecognized
Invisible to the organization and sometimes even to members themselves
Lack of reflexivity, awareness of value and of limitation
Bootlegged
Only visible informally to a circle of people in the know
Getting resources, having an impact, keeping hidden
Legitimized
Officially sanctioned as a valuable entity
Scrutiny, over-management, new demands
Strategic
Widely recognized as central to the organization's success
Short-term pressures, blindness of success, smugness, elitism, exclusion
Transformative
Capable of redefining its environment and the direction of the organization
Relating to the rest of the organization, acceptance, managing boundaries
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- They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
Communities of practice fulfill a number of functions with respect to the creation, accumulation, and diffusion of knowledge in an organization:
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They can retain knowledge in "living" ways, unlike a database or a manual.
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They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge.
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They are not as temporary as teams, and unlike business units, they are organized around what matters to their members. Identity is important because, in a sea of information, it helps us sort out what we pay attention to, what we participate in, and what we stay away from.
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They provide homes for identities.
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Whether these communities arise spontaneously or come together through seeding and nurturing, their development ultimately depends on internal leadership. Certainly, in order to legitimize the community as a place for sharing and creating knowledge, recognized experts need to be involved in some way, even if they don't do much of the work.
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- The inspirational leadership provided by thought leaders and recognized experts
- The day-to-day leadership provided by those who organize activities
- The classificatory leadership provided by those who collect and organize information in order to document practices
- The interpersonal leadership provided by those who weave the community's social fabric
- The boundary leadership provided by those who connect the community to other communities
- The institutional leadership provided by those who maintain links with other organizational constituencies, in particular the official hierarchy
- The cutting-edge leadership provided by those who shepherd "out-of-the-box" initiatives.
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Legitimizing participation. Organizations can support communities of practice by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring is acknowledged.
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Negotiating their strategic context. In what Richard McDermott calls "double-knit organizations," people work in teams for projects but belong to longer-lived communities of practice for maintaining their expertise.
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Being attuned to real practices. To be successful, organizations must leverage existing practices. For instance, when the customer service function of a large corporation decided to combine service, sales, and repairs under the same 800 number, researchers from the Institute for Research on Learning discovered that people were already learning from each other on the job while answering phone calls. They then instituted a learning strategy for combining the three functions that took advantage of this existing practice.
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Fine-tuning the organization. Many elements in an organizational environment can foster or inhibit communities of practice, including management interest, reward systems, work processes, corporate culture, and company policies. These factors rarely determine whether people form communities of practice, but they can facilitate or hinder participation.
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Providing support. Communities of practice are mostly self-sufficient, but they can benefit from some resources, such as outside experts, travel, meeting facilities, and communications technology.
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- provides guidance and resources when needed
- helps communities connect their agenda to business strategies
- encourages them to move forward with their agenda and remain focused on the cutting edge
- makes sure they include all the right people
- helps them create links to other communities
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- Line managers must make sure that people are able to participate in the right communities of practice so they sustain the expertise they need to contribute to projects.
- Knowledge managers must go beyond creating informational repositories that take knowledge to be a "thing," toward supporting the whole social and technical ecology in which knowledge is retained and created.
- Training departments must move the focus from training initiatives that extract knowledge out of practice to learning initiatives that leverage the learning potential inherent in practice.
- Strategists must find ways to create two-way connections between communities of practice and organizational strategies.
- Change managers must help build new practices and communities to bring about changes that will make a constructive difference.
- Accountants must learn to recognize the capital generated when communities of practice increase an organization's learning potential.
- Facilities managers must understand the ways in which their designs support or hinder the development of communities of practice.
- Work process designers must devise process improvement systems that thrive on, rather than substitute for, engaged communities of practice.
© Etienne Wenger, 1998
Sidebar: Different members of an organization can take actions in their own domains to support communities of practice and maximize the benefits they can provide:
© Copyright, 2001, Community Intelligence Labs <!--Footer starts here-->
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Debra BeckOnline version of a key Wenger article
communities_of_practice dissertation research community collaboration wenger
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continually renegotiated by its members
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social entity
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shared repertoire
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Gabriela SellartEtienne Wenger Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.co-i-l.com%2Fcoil%2Fknowledge-garden%2Fcop%2Flss.shtml
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Add Sticky NoteEtienne Wenger
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shared practice
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communities of practice are fundamentally self-organizing systems.
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not a new kind of organizational unit; rather, they are a different cut on the organization's structure–one that emphasizes the learning that people have done together
-
outsiders and newcomers learn the practice in concrete terms, and core members gain new insights from contacts with less-engaged participants
-
defined by knowledge rather than by task
-
produces a shared practice as members engage in a collective process of learning
-
develop the knowledge that lets them do these other tasks
-
They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
-
They can retain knowledge in "living" ways
-
They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge
-
They provide homes for identities.
-
Identity is important because, in a sea of information, it helps us sort out what we pay attention to, what we participate in, and what we stay away from.
-
development ultimately depends on internal leadership.
-
have intrinsic legitimacy in the community
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recognizing the work of sustaining them
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giving members the time to participate in activities
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value communities bring is acknowledged
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The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without overwhelming them with organizational meddling.
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No community can fully design the learning of another; but conversely no community can fully design its own learning.
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28 Jul 08
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22 Jul 08
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- A community of practice exists because it produces a shared practice as members engage in a collective process of learning.
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Communities of practice preserve the tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture.
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Just because communities of practice arise naturally
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some might actually wither under the institutional spotlight
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development ultimately depends on internal leadership
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inspirational
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day-to-day
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recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring is acknowledged
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The learning that communities of practice share is just as critical, but its longer-term value is more subtle to appreciate.
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makes sure they include all the right people
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05 Jul 08
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16 Jun 08
Michelle WalkerDefinition, COPs in Organizations, Relationships to Official Organization, Importance, Developing and Nurturing COPs
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Rebecca DavisCommunities of Practice: Learning as a Social System
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Legitimizing participation. Organizations can support communities of practice by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring is acknowledged. To this end, it is important to have an institutional discourse that includes this less-recognized dimension of organizational life. Merely introducing the term "communities of practice" into an organization's vocabulary can have a positive effect by giving people an opportunity to talk about how their participation in these groups contributes to the organization as a whole.
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Public Stiky Notes
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