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  Sunday, October 20, 2002


 

Communities of Practice
Five Factors for Success

In the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling limiting censorship, Justice Potter Stewart remarked on the indelicacies of the case, "I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it." In the past, such a remark could have been also applied to the art of new knowledge creation. Today, however, methods of producing relevant knowledge for businesses are emerging that can be described, facilitated and advocated.

A leading means of knowledge creation and production are the popular Communities of Practice. This article examines Communities of Practice and offers five factors to recognize them and assure their success.

Communities of Practice are deliberate collaborations to expand the capacity for organized people to acquire, produce and apply knowledge for business benefit. They are used to advance and reciprocate knowledge contributions of stakeholders internally and externally. Communities of Practice stand-alone with the singular motive of advancing the net intelligence of the enterprise. They are aligned only to the particular knowledge opportunity. Their specific deliverables are higher densities of collaborative relationships, heightened awareness, improved responsiveness and deeper relative instinct of the knowledge domain.

Communities of Practice are not task forces, project teams, quality circles, steering committees, special interests groups, focus groups, brainstorming sessions, offsites, review boards, shared documents, newsgroups, chatrooms or any other of the myriad of modern organizing foundations.

Success Factors

Opportunity Focused: The most successful Communities of Practice focus on entrepreneurial and administrative opportunities. They promise the possibility of innovation that has yet to be broadly recognized or formally structured. The enthusiastic and informal nature encourages and demands non-linear, discontinuous, and breakthrough thinking: behaviors central to new knowledge production and advancement.

Person-to-Person: Communities of practice are proximate, interactive, people-oriented activities. Since Communities of Practice operate in the domain of tacit, non-codified knowledge, the venue must be a shared, co-located, human workspace. Notable behaviors are agreeable discussion, collaboration, and frank, impartial dialogue. Most collaborative point technologies, like email, webcasts and discussion groups are ineffective in shaping Communities of Practice. Only rich, multimodal and many-to-many collaboration services that provision and sustain people-to-people interactions are effective electronic platforms.

Empathetic Leadership: Enthusiastic individuals that crave interaction on the particular knowledge domain are the most successful leaders of Communities of Practice. These leader-facilitators deeply appreciate the profound value of exposing and developing ideas in a varied cognitive environment. Their genuine devotion expresses itself through listening, co-development and shared production of new knowledge. While leaders provide the spark to bootstrap the community, they also recognize their most valuable contribution is as a peer and participant.

Broad Participation: Communities of Practice are inclusive. The most effective span organizations and always include partners, suppliers and customers. Since the motive is to cultivate and expand individual capacity to acquire, produce and apply knowledge, the breadth of exposure is key. The individual is paramount. Overbearing, "Confucian-type Mandarins" participating to simply advance their own lofty opinions won’t be successful and will be weeded out naturally. Technologies that embrace the social network architecture of the community, are most effective. 

Self-Organizing and Non-Political: Communities of Practice gather strength and momentum from fluid, social, ad hoc and informal properties of interested people. Very often, there is literally no financial or reporting structure. The appetite for new knowledge motivates participants. This motivation delivers self-organization and diffusion of both the Community and the deliverables. Communities are one organizing foundation that does NOT required sponsorship, executive or otherwise. In fact, when a Community of Practice does attract the political attention of the organization, it is a testimony to its success, and will simply and most suitably evolve into one of the previously mentioned structures. So called peer-to-peer network architectures and pervasive client applications are best suited to the facile and graceful self-organizing nature of productive knowledge communities.

In conclusion, Communities of Practice are an important addition to the toolkit of organizing foundations. They are specific in mobilizing individuals and their production of knowledge for business. They are participative, interactive, spirited and fun. Participants are so eager and driven by the pursuit of knowledge they transcend the unfortunate barriers so prevalent in organizations. The product of the Community is self-organizing and self-diffusing by nature.

The rigid and conventional 'IT' systems that force a certain interaction modality upon community are counterproductive to new knowledge creation. Only high valance technologies that adapt to the smooth and flowing social models of the community will serve to amplify the faint signals of the community for new knowledge creation.  

Communities of Practices provide deliberate coordination of individual knowledge and accelerate aggregation and effectiveness. Intermodal and social collaborative tehcnologies broaden the potential for high-fidelity interactions and innovation. The great Nobel Laureate economist, Friedrich August Von Hayek summarized this point well in his groundbreaking 1945 article in "The American Economic Review" titled, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," with the following remark: "Every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him."


9:24:57 AM    comment []


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