Every strategic community of practice has a support team. This small group of people makes life easier for members. Etienne Wenger calls it “enhancing member value for time spent.” The support team organises meetings, links members, features new members on the community’s website and a myriad of other tasks that help the community to connect and grow.

Support team staff are special individuals. They should have a good reputation among the community members, be natural facilitators, understand the principles of community development and are liked and respected by their constituents. A successful support team member is defined as much by their character traits as their skills. Organisational hierarchies, however, tend to force people unsuitable for the role (wrong character traits) into delivering support team functions. While skills can be taught, the character traits are unlikely to change—you just need to find the right person. Being forced to accept a support team lacking essential character traits is a sure way to kill your community of practice efforts.

One of our clients, a large mining company, addressed this issue by forming its many community support teams by selecting the right people from the field into this headquarter function for a set period of time. These people are selected based on their natural networking capabilities, their reputation in the field and their ability to act as an effective catalyst for community effectiveness. Support team roles are sought after because they link people into new relationships at headquarters which helps to enhance their careers.

An alternative approach is to in-source the right people to serve the support team function. Anecdote is offering this service to its clients by ensuring it sources the best possible people (right attitude) to work closely with the organisation to foster its community efforts. Please contact us if you would like to know more about this new service.

Here are some the character traits a support team member should have:

If you love reading essays by some of the world’s top thinkers, then get onto the Edge mailing list (www.edge.org). This month’s set of essays included one by the French anthropologist, Dan Sperber who is known for his work on a naturalistic approach to culture.

While Dan’s essay on culture was short (I would have loved to read more), he made me stop and think a number of times and I kept on say, “man, that makes a lot of sense.” For example, we are probably all guilty of thinking of culture as if it floated in the background affecting our every decision. Here is what Dan said:

Most of Dan’s essay argued against memes as a mechanisms for cultural evolution. The meme mechanism relies on people imitating one another and attempting to replicate content. Dan believes we don’t do this at all, rather we listen to what people say as an indicator (evidence) of their meaning and then we construct our own meaning. The process is about meaning construction, not replication.

The construction view has a massive impact on how we attempt to create communications in organisations. This view suggests that communicators should move away from a focus ensuring people understood (and replicated) the meaning of the communication and move to creating an environment where a beneficial meaning might be constructed. This might explain why so many communication efforts are failures.

Nancy White is one of the most prolific and interesting online writers about communities. Nancy has compiled these web pages offering practical advice to those interested in establishing online communities. Well worth a visit and permanent bookmark.

Distributed or large communities of practice require subdivision—one cannot feel a sense of community, for example, with another 1000 colleagues. One way is to nurture topic areas which are best supported by a credible subject matter expert. Sometimes the best subject matter expert is too busy to act as a community topic leader. By dint of their expertise they are in high demand. John Vucko, the Global Community of Practice leader for BHP Billiton, suggested this solution. Ask the busy expert to suggest an apprentice who might take on the role of topic leader and then ask the expert to mentor this person in the role. The apprentice typically sees this as an opportunity to form a closer relationship with a recognised expert while also increasing their profile within the organisation. The expert feel they can contribute without being overwhelmed with additional responsibilities.

It seems to me that there are not enough tips being shared about how to get a community of practice up and running and how to sustain entusiasm once it’s going. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps beyond, I’m going to post those things that have worked for me. Of course I would love to hear your experiences and suggestions as well.

New communities present a paradox: members want to join a community but without members there is nothing to join. I remember in the early days of ActKM, to create the impression a community really did exist, we manufactured the online conversation. Well, ‘manufacture’ might be too strong, but we did create a roster where we took turns to post a message on the online forum. This tactic continued for about 6 months. When we reached around 100 members the conversation self generated.

ActKM has never been a tightly knitted community and I would imagine that a group with stronger social ties would require less effort at the outset.

The last two weeks have been a blast. We hosted Etienne in Canberra and Melbourne and spent some more time together at KM Australia. A big thanks to my Melbourne collaborator, Sandra Mercer at the State Services Authority. If you missed seeing Etienne speak, here is a recent interview posted by the Knowledge Lab. Broadband is recommended to download this one.

Thanks to Nancy White for this link.

Off to KM Australia on Wednesday.

I will be in Canberra on Monday to host a series of events ‘starring’ Etienne Wenger. I will be doing the same in Melbourne on the 19th in collaboration with Sandra Mercer, the coordinator of the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network. Should be great fun.

In Thomas Friedman’s talk to MIT (http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/266/) about his new book, The World is Flat, he argues that there have been three phases of globalisation. Phase 1 is between 1492 and 1800 and was dominated by nations spreading their influence across the globe. Phase 2 was well established by 2000 and was dominated by global corporations. Phase 3 was triggered by a fluke of investment around 2003–04. The dot.com boom fuelled an unprecedented investment in optic fibre communication infrastructure across the globe. Individuals from Mumbai to Moreton Bay were now collaborating in new way which were previously impossible—just think of Skype, Groove, wikis, blogs, Google. This 3rd phase is dominated by individuals.

Anyone reading this blog is probably operating in this 3rd phase. For myself I have numerous collaborators whom I’ve never met face to face in Canada, Spain, USA. It seems to me that new knowledge-based business ventures must immediately conceive themselves as individuals with global connections. Friedman provides many entertaining examples of how hopelessly ‘phase 2’ his think had been and that a new mind-shift if required to effectively operate in this current environment.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz at IBM while we were developing approaches to designing interventions using barriers and attractors. In fact, at the time Dave and I had both developed separate, yet similar, approaches to intervention design: Dave’s was called ABIDE (Attractors, Barriers, Identity, Diversity/Dissent and Environment) and mine was FABRIC (Feedback, Attractors, Boundaries, Rationale, Interaction and Context). Here is a description of Dave’s approach as captured by the AOK moderator Jerry Ash.

I’ve now conducted 5 or so intervention design workshops using ABIDE and I have discovered that the term ‘barrier’ is problematic. With ABIDE a ‘barrier’ is anything which impedes action. An obvious barrier is the physical layout of an office but there are many non-physical barriers such as the organisation’s structure (the silos), people’s professional status and access to resources (who gets funded). ‘Barriers’ define the containers which impede action.

The problem faced in a workshop setting is that the term ‘barrier’ is loaded. No matter how carefully you explain what you mean by a barrier participants translate the definition to mean, “a barrier is a problem.” Here is a typical workshop participant’s train of thought in this matter: “Oh yes, culture is a barrier and so is our lack of leadership. But the biggest barrier we face is getting people to commit to the project.” Quickly the conversation moves away from identifying the bounds which contain the action, to a list of problems that should be tackled. It becomes confusing for everyone.

While the term ‘boundary’ doesn’t strongly suggest something that inhibits action, I have found it to be a more useful term in the intervention design workshop setting. As you can see, while the term barrier might be the most accurate it is less than practical in getting the desired outcome—ie. a useful complexity based intervention. Words are powerful things.