INTERVIEW: Developing strategic communities of practice

Sandra Higgison speaks to Madelyn Blair about developing strategic communities of practice.

How did you become involved with communities of practice?

I had worked with information systems for 20 years. During this time, I created the information-flow analysis process that allowed organisations to develop high level information strategies. I also spent years teaching an interactive course called Making Information your Competitive Edge, on how to research and find information from electronic sources. Moreover, much of my work took into account group dynamics. So, when KM came along, I understood both the value of knowledge to the organisation and the individual, and I understood the difference between databases and knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing in communities was a natural extension of my background in learning and group work.

What is your definition of a community of practice?

A community of practice is a group that comes together (face to face or virtually) to learn from each other. The members have a common interest as well as a common desire to learn. The members may also have a common purpose to which they will apply the lessons, but this is not necessarily so. As a group that learns from each other’s experiences, a community of practice is an excellent model of good adult learning.

What distinguishes CoPs from a business units or teams?

A business unit has a mission achieved through the co-ordinated action of many individuals who each contribute a part. It is an ongoing enterprise, and its mission should reflect this long term aspect.

A team is made up of several individuals and has an objective that is achieved through the co-ordinated action of the members. Its objective is usually something that can be achieved in a specified period of time.

While the members of a community of practice may overlap with the members of a business unit or a team, its purpose is different. The primary purpose should be to learn, and this purpose is one that can continue as long as the community continues. One of the characteristics of a community of practice is that it does not have to be limited to the employees of the same company. Some of the strongest and most valuable communities of practice to which I belong include members from many organisations around the world. In the case of the Federal Highway Administration in the US, the communities of practice embrace members from State Highway Departments where the greatest need for and experience in highway related knowledge exists.

How can organisations ensure communities of practice are fully exploited for strategic advantage?

Responsibility for ensuring that CoPs are fully exploited for strategic advantage begins with the organisation. The business goals must be clearly defined and communicated. This is some of the most basic advice managers can get, and it still applies to CoPs. From this, communities of practice can define their own missions in relation to the business goals that have been defined. And the organisation needs to confirm this linkage of mission to business goals with the necessary support for the members to do this. Suggested changes that come out of the community must have a means to be actuated. A sponsor helps in this process. Moreover, there are built in incentives within the organisation to utilise the lessons learnt by others. It must be a reinforcing cycle.

In one example, there is no incentive for utilising the lessons learnt in CoPs regardless of rhetoric. Great ideas are discovered, and no substantive change is brought back into the processes of the organisation. In this organisation, individual performance is highlighted, and giving attention to a group effort works against this norm. As a result, the support for the communities is drying up. Members rarely attribute their ideas to the work of the community. Management does not see the necessary return for their investment, because it only looks at the productivity of individuals.

What are the key considerations when aligning CoPs with business goals?

Alignment of CoPs with business goals involves two dimensions. The first is determining how much learning is desired. There must be some open space in which learning can occur. If the CoP is over structured through specific goals that must be met, there will be no open space, and learning will be stifled. On the other hand, if the only goal is learning, the lessons gained may become so removed from the business goals that they can’t even be communicated let alone acted upon. So, while it would be great to say that learning is the most important goal of a CoP, it must relate to the business goals sufficiently to allow for the lessons to be received and acted upon.

The second dimension is the balance between whether the learning is to support continuous improvement or radical innovation. Continuous improvement comes from sharing experiences the members have had and what they discovered made the work better, faster, of higher quality or something else, but always on how to do the same thing. Radical innovation opens the question of whether what is being done is the right thing (in addition to being done well) and comes from opening up the discussion within the CoP. John Seeley Brown says that innovation occurs in the white spaces between disciplines. Allowing a CoP to create innovative ideas means that the discussion is opened up to those from other areas of the business, those from outside the business, even those who do other kinds of work. For example, I often encourage CoPs that are looking for new ideas to bring in artists to help them see the world in a new way. Innovation is usually within the capability of the CoP if the members can gain a new perspective.

It is therefore important to set what I call loose-tight goals for CoPs where the goals are clearly ‘alignable’ with business goals, yet not so tightly that they stifle flexibility – the space – to learn. Second, it is important to determine how much innovation is needed to achieve those goals and take the necessary action to support the level desired. Both can be adjusted over time, but the considerations in question remain the same.

This still assumes that the business has clear strategic objectives to ensure that a proper balance can be made within these two dimensions. Clear objectives allow for innovation to be dealt with rationally – well enough to recognise when things need to change and when it is important not to change.

What are the dangers to the organisation as a whole of aligning communities of practice too closely to business goals?

The goals of the organisation can’t be the goals of the CoP. An organisation has a long-term mission. It does this by taking actions – manufacturing a product, writing a book, teaching students. A CoP should be primarily directed towards learning so that outside of the CoP, members can work better, processes can be refined, efficiencies gained and quality enhanced. Being too closely aligned with business goals will reduce learning and the resulting impact. Organisations that restrict CoPs to focus on tightly defined business goals have actually set up work groups not CoPs.

How should an organisation decide which communities to align to business goals?

In the organisations with which I have had experience, all CoPs ere sponsored by the organisations were aligned with business goals to some degree. Even if they were allowed to innovate, they were expected to innovate in ways that were useful to the organisation.

The World Bank’s website says, “Knowledge sharing at the World Bank has evolved over time. From an early emphasis on capturing and organising knowledge, its focus is now on adopting, adapting and applying knowledge in a way that helps World Bank staff, clients and partners work more effectively to reduce global poverty.” Thematic groups (the bank’s terminology for CoPs) began their work in 1997 to qualify information posted to databases. Today, they are asked to direct their learning more broadly so as to contribute to the bank’s broadest goal, poverty reduction.

What factors should dictate the level of investment an organisation makes in a community?

I believe there are four main factors to consider when making the investment in CoPs.

Resource availability – Staff must have time to participate. The organisation must have money or technology to offer support to the CoPs. Databases aren’t free, neither are CoPs. But in the end, staff must have time to participate;
Willingness to change – Lessons learnt within CoPs need to get into practice. If the organisation is one that naturally embraces new ideas and practices, there is a greater likelihood of a positive return from investing in CoPs. If the lessons are brought into the work processes of the business easily, then the investment can be recovered quickly. If the organisation is slow to incorporate new ideas, then it has to question why it is even thinking about CoPs. The cost of bringing the changes needed to take advantage of the lessons learnt may be greater than the cost of learning the lessons (within the CoP). Simple ideas that require six months to enter the practice of the organisation wastes precious opportunity. The organisation has to be truthful to itself. Going with what seems to be popular in management theory just to appear to be current is not the same as making a commitment to act on the knowledge sharing done through CoPs;
Capacity to measure impact – I work a great deal with creating learning environments, whether classroom, community, distance or experience based. The piece of advice that is hardest to get across is that evaluation must be part of the design. It is not an after-thought. It is exactly the same with CoPs. Designing the CoP involves designing how it can be evaluated. Like other learning experiences, it depends on the objectives;
Senior management support – Management must believe that if there is something to be learnt to improve the work, it is best known by the staff that do the work. This is a necessary condition for success. This is a factor that doesn’t contribute to the level of investment, it is the factor that determines if any investment is worthwhile. I call it the litmus test for the investment decision.

What measures/metrics can organisations use to ensure that CoPs are generating a return on their investment?

There is no magic set of indices or metrics for ROI except the ones that make sense to the organisation. Capture the changes that come from the CoPs and collect the appropriate statistics. If the business goal is to expand market share, then the ultimate measure of any lesson from a CoP must relate, for example, to market share, market penetration or perhaps customer loyalty. If the business goal is to reduce costs, then the measures must relate, for example, to cost of production, speed of delivery, number of customers served through a unit. If the business goal is to change the living standards of people in the developing world, then the measures must eventually show economic changes, for example, of increases in annual income, enlargement of the middle income population, increases in local food production. It is therefore essential to be clear about the overall business goals at the beginning and to look at the management philosophy that supports the creation of CoPs. Both are needed, because some of the impact and the resulting measures can require time to achieve.

How important is an ongoing assessment programme?

Assessment should be built into the system from the start. One of the hardest lessons to get across is that the evaluation needs to be addressed when the programme is being designed. If the CoP wants to change how employees do their work, then include within the design a way for members to set their own goals for change and time for them to explore how they will bring new lessons into their work as a part of the discussion. Then offer an incentive for capturing when they bring new ideas into their work. Capturing these decisions and actions becomes the first step to evaluating, and it contributes to the motivation to learn and change. This evaluation is part of the design. Not only do members not resist this kind of evaluation, the evaluation exercise helps them focus on what they are there to learn.

Communities of practice should never be bothered with an interruption to the flow of learning within them. Rather, they should naturally capture learning as they go. It keeps them healthy as they recognise what they have done, and becomes a natural part of the process so the flow of interaction is continuous. Everyone is kept informed of the results, including management, and it showcases an open learning culture to the whole organisation, which CoPs need to work well and create increased support within the CoP.

A professional CoP located in Washington, DC, called Golden Fleece (a community dedicated to exploring the meaning and methods of using story to help organisations) has no ongoing assessment programme. As a result, the group often frets about not accomplishing what it should. Only when a member takes the time to list the activities and changes that have occurred because of the group’s work does the CoP feel content. Even communities of practice need to be reminded of their own value.

This doesn’t mean that there are no outside measures. External to the CoP, associated measures that help report the impact must be located, captured and communicated regularly (as noted above, these must relate to the business). While this is part of the CoP’s design, it should also be part of the support structure. Don’t create a community until you know how you expect to see it changes in the way things are done. Then build a means of capturing the lessons learnt in ways that actually support the members of the community into the support system itself. For example, online communities capture their lessons as they go. Ford Motor Company is a great example as it has built recognition of the lessons learned and those who have taken advantage of these lessons into the support system.

Without clear measures of some sort (hard numbers are not the only metric; stories are often used to great advantage), management commitment to CoPs will decline. In fact, even the CoPs will decline if they feel there is no impact from the time invested.

How would you summarise the value of communities of practice to an organisation?

Every economic indicator says that for a company to survive, it must be ready to adjust to new factors and forces in the world. To thrive, companies must be ready to adjust even before the factors and forces are felt. This demands that staff be ever ready to learn new ways of doing things, learn new needs of clients and customers, and discover and learn new possibilities. Communities of practice can create the environment where this kind of learning and exploration can take place. They can also be the places where staff prepare themselves for their own career growth – something that every organisation should consider.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Learning is inseparable from collective learning, and social constructionists say that knowledge exists between us. Once it is clear that our knowledge does not exist in our heads alone but rather between us and within our context, communities of practice are a most natural outcome for creating a learning situation. If formal instructors understood this simple principle, they would change the way they teach. When organisations understand this simple principle, they encourage communities of practice.

I’d like to end with a short story. I was once working with a vice president who bemoaned the fact that taskforces could never be trusted to come up with anything useful. I challenged him to think of the taskforce as a group who simply wanted to do something new and distinctive. So, if he were to give them complete freedom to learn and recommend, and follow up on their recommendations, he would have the best taskforces ever. The key, I told him, was to set the boundaries for the group so that as long as they remained within the boundaries, they could do whatever they wanted. His job was to set the boundaries right from the start. He never complained again and found taskforces to be an effective way to create new solutions for existing problems. I believe that CoPs are the same. The boundaries must be large enough to allow learning, excitement and enjoyment, and small enough to ensure that the results are useful. This is the loose-tight fit. It isn’t easy, but it is doable, and it produces quality results.

Madelyn Blair is president of Pelerei. She can be contacted at mblair@pelerei.com