I had a great day on Tuesday exploring a Community of Practice that has formed within a NSW local government council. This group call themselves the green champions and 40 representatives across the council participate to make sustainability an integral part of every staff member's daily activities. The aim is to 'show by doing'.

Some of the reasons it works: the CEO and elected leader openly advocate the group and provide legitimacy for its activities. This encourages managers to support the involvement of their staff. There is a small core group that work to tap into and unleash the Green Champions' passion for sustainability. Members of the group spoke about how the Green Champions allows them to make a difference, how they learn about sustainability and can take that home and into their personal lives (such as the school sustainability committee). Some of them have the opportunity to apply their formal qualifications in water, waste, energy management etc. Members described some of the key success factors as the informal nature of the group, how it can avoid some of the internal red tape to get things done, their opportunity to contribute ideas and see them actioned and how every area of the business is represented. The group like it that they are a little edgy and can push the boundaries to get things done.

An example of how the group makes a difference:

What if a single warrior could have the knowledge of thousands?

Two weeks ago I gave an after dinner speech to the Australian Army Knowledge Management conference. Just before the speech I was introduced to the guy that has responsibility for running the Battle Command Knowledge System, which hosts CompanyCommand along with fifty other forums, Colonel Charles (Chuck) Burnett. I was a bit taken aback as I had a copy of CompanyCommand in my hand and was intending to use it as an example during the talk.

I was fortunate to spend some time talking with Colonel Burnett the next morning and he was very generous with his time. I was particularly interested to hear that one of his greatest challenges is continually justifying the value of the forums like CompanyCommand to his chain of command. Not that having to justify the value of a community of practice is a new thing; its just that having to justify the value of one of the most visible CoP success stories in the world seemed remarkable.

To tackle this, he conducted a survey last year to collect examples of how the communities of practice were making a difference. There were 2500 responses; problems overcome, mistakes avoided, money saved ... lives saved. The collected stories are now a key part of communicating the value of the CoPs (we have previously blogged about this technique here and here).

I will finish this post with a quote from the CompanyCommand book:

It became clear to me...that CompanyCommand.com was not about the website. Rather it was about a community of professionals sharing and learning in a fast-paced dynamic operational context; the technology simply enabled the process. In fact, the more I thought about and observed the...forum, the more I realised that the core technology of the forum was the people and the conversations, not the computer.

Now, I just need to wangle an invitation to the US Army KM conference in October this year ☺

If you are community of practice leader and want to experience learning in a relaxed atmosphere with some of the very best minds, then you might like to check out Bev and Etienne's BEtreat. It will be an interesting mixture of the professional and the personal. One day you will be at the cutting edge and the next at a birthday party, and your family is invited too. I wish they lived in Australia but for all those who can make it to California 6-10 July pop in, have some fun and learn something along the way.

Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith

I’m often the technology steward for communities of practice (CoP). I create the Ning spaces and configure ‘em, I setup the email lists, I work out whether we should have a wiki or a blog or a discussion forum or some other combination of communication technologies. As you can see I’m quite a geek: I really do love it.

And whenever I get stuck I’ll contact my friends at CPSquare: Etienne, Nancy and John. And while I know they all have a deep understanding of CoPs I tend to ask Etienne the theory questions, Nancy the technology questions and John the group dynamics questions. Together they are a formidable team. Sadly I think their new book, Digital Habitats, will give them strong cause to suggest I should RTFM: Read The Flipping Manual.

Digital Habitats (DH) has a single goal: to help the reader understand the role of technology steward in cultivating a community of practice: what is it, why you would do it, are you are cut out for it, how to do it and where to find help. But it is not a shoppers guide nor a roadmap for technology selection.

There is a lovely photo of Etienne, Nancy and John in the preface and I feel that reading DH is like have a friendly conversation with them on a sunny balcony. They provide the context, a little theory, then lots of practical tips supported by real life stories to ground it and make it memorable.

For me there are three ideas in this book I have already put into practice with great effect.

Experience shows us that all know that communities of practice are different, and sometimes poles apart. DH introduces the idea of community orientations to help us understand where the emphasis might lie and therefore what technologies make most sense.

There are 9 orientations: meetings, open-ended conversations, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community participation, serving a context. With my engineering communities, for example, I’ve asked the members where they see their current orientation and then ask them to identify where they would like to be. A community might start off very content focussed but realise that the real benefits will come from providing access to expertise. By understanding this orientation gap the technology steward can start introducing tools to facilitate the future orientation needs.

The second idea I find useful is how my friends (I was going to say ‘the authors’ but it didn’t feel right) describe the range of activities a community might be engaged in. The axis range from informal to formal and learning from to learning with. This diagram helps me ensure I’m thinking about the full range of possibilities when helping communities members design their CoP.

DH envisages three types of readers: deep divers, attentive practitioners and just do it-ers. The just do it-ers are directed to chapter 10 which contains an action notebook. It is a series of checklists to help you think about the role of the technology steward. What I love about chapter 10 is that I can jump in and start learning about the role by doing things and then come back to the descriptions contained in the rest of the book when it is more meaningful for me. DH makes the job of finding the relevant descriptions in the other chapters easy through a multitude of cross-links from chapter 10 to the relevant book section.

There are very few practical community of practice books available (I can think of 3 others) and Etienne has already had a hand in writing one of them. So Digital Habitats is a valuable addition to this exclusive club. It’s highly readable and practical and will definitely help make a difference to the quality of your technology support for your community of practice.

Three weeks ago I arrived in London for a couple of weeks work and a couple weeks holiday. One of my must-see destinations was the water pump in Broadwick Street, Soho, which was the main contamination source for the 1854 cholera outbreak (my family think I'm crazy). This pump is also the star attraction on John Snow's famous map showing the geographic distribution of deaths from the cholera outbreak and is one of the earliest example of epidemiology (in case you were wondering, I studied geography at uni). So imagine my surprise when I arrived at the pump to find it was also a community of practice meeting spot for Soho cycle couriers.

I wandered about the pump for a while taking photos (to the cyclists' amusement) and listened to their conversation, which of course consisted of telling stories of what happened in the morning and over the week. Nothing written down, no social software, just oral storytelling.

Finding or creating these places for community in organisations is an important step is supporting communities of practice. Ideally they should be somewhere you can eat, chat informally and know that when you arrive, there will be other people just like you to share your stories with.

You might be thinking, but what if my organisation is distributed and we can't get everyone in one place? Well, do what the London taxi drivers do, form clusters across the network to tell your stories. Here's a photo of one group of taxi drivers who meet on Russell Square (there is a little group of them behind the silver taxi).

To link across the small groupings the taxi drivers use technology: blogs, newspapers, websites, radio.

Meeting in small clusters for oral storytelling and linking across these clusters for wider knowledge sharing might be a useful pattern to adopt in organisations.

On Tuesday I worked with three new communities of practice in a government agency. Each group was quite different but in all of them we talked about the things the groups should do first. I promised to send them ideas on conversations they might consider early on. Here is what I have come up with so far.

• Purpose: an important discussion early on is to determine the purpose of the group - why it exists. While many groups will have similar descriptions of their purpose (learning, tap into the organisation's knowledge in the domain, solve problems faster, standardise practices etc), each group needs to have this conversation.

• Knowledge Market: this process encourages participants to identify things they can offer (specific techniques, documents etc) and things they need to learn or need help with. This process can be done face to face or via teleconference. It helps the group build relationships and to start sharing their knowledge and expertise.

• Community Orientations: a concept developed by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith and described here. In this activity groups discuss the areas they will focus mostly on in the short term.

• Discussion tables. This activity is designed to get groups talking about the things they can do to improve their practice in the selected domain. In this conversation useful things to think about are things that will make the biggest difference for the domain and things that will make their work easier/better/more enjoyable/more rewarding.

What others are there?

This morning I had a conversation with Mark Bennett about Anecdote's CoP Health Check service. The health check focusses on elements of Etienne Wenger's CoP model which includes executive sponsorship. The conversation with Mark highlighted how the issue of executive sponsorship needs to be addressed at numerous levels.

There might be a business line sponsor such as the Chief Engineer who is very interested in the business results delivered by the CoP and the value proposition of having people spend time on CoP activities. These sponsors take an active interest in the CoP and its activities.

You might have a champion high up in the organisation (the CEO or another C-level position) who gives the CoP its 'license to operate' and who might use the CoP as part of a strategic imperative such as creating a more collaborative organisation. These are great sponsors to cultivate and to communicate success stories to.

There might also be a third type of sponsor. One that is easy to overlook in the normal course of events but who becomes critical when times are tough and money is tight. This sponsor is the person in charge of the business unit that pays the wages of the CoP support staff and who funds the technology used by the CoP. This form of sponsor is the one coming to the fore given the current economic climate. Don't fall into the trap of waiting till the axe is ready to fall before engaging with this sponsor group and ensuring they can see how the CoP initiative is adding value. If you haven't been engaging these sponsors, yesterday would be a good time to start.

On that day when Adelaide's temperature reached 46.7C I was running a workshop for the spatial modelling and drafting community of practice. Their ritual is to have a BBQ for lunch, which seems a little crazy given the heat but that didn't stop us. We all retreated to air condition comfort to chow down on our lamb chops and snags.

Into my third bite I noticed an animated discussion between two of the engineers talking about their love for motor bikes. They'd worked out they both had an interest in German classics and one was describing a fuel tank issue he was having. Mid-conversation one of them jumped up to retrieve a motorcycle magazine to illustrate his point.

Then in an instant the conversation morphed into a description the magazine-wielding engineer was having with a fighter jet he was working on. He was facing an intractable maintenance issue that was causing him technical and political pain. They delved deeply into the issue. You could see that there was trust and respect in the conversation and this trust and respect was at least partially developed while discussing their hobby.

Tomorrow is the big launch. Nancy White has been toiling away with Tony Karrer to develop a dynamic website that aggregates community and network blogs. Tony is the technical wiz behind the site and there are plenty of ways to discover new and interesting information about one of the topics I love: communities of practice. Nancy is the ultimate connector and this effort is a natural extension to all the great work she does with online facilitation and communities. So here is the URL. Have fun.

http://cc.fullcirc.com/

A couple of weeks ago I ran a workshop for a community of practice, that I helped establish a 18 months ago, to reflect on what had been achieved. One of the exercises was to compare the community's current state with the nine community orientations described in Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith's forthcoming book Digital Habitats. A community orientation reflects the tendencies the community adopts to learn together. Here they are:

1. Meetings
2. Open-ended conversations
3. Projects
4. Content
5. Access to expertise
6. Relationships
7. Individual participation
8. Community cultivation
9. Serving a context

As I was preparing for the workshop it was clear to me what orientations 1 to 6 meant but I was unclear about 7 to 9, so I left them out of the exercise with a note to self to find out more. So today I gave Nancy a call and got her to explain the last three orientations and I recorded the conversation so you can listen in.

Digital Habitats will be an important book for all community of practice co-ordinators, especially the technology steward who is the focus for the book. To keep an eye on when the book will be published I recommend you keep an eye on the book's blog.

BTW the community orientation exercise simply involved getting the participants of the workshop to plot on a radar chart, which I'd drawn on a whiteboard, where they thought the community was currently and then do this again for where they would like to see the community of 12 months time. It generated a terrific conversation and a feel of mutual purpose. Here is what the result looked like.

Just to let you know that my paper on tacit knowledge and communities of practice has been featured on insightory.com.

It's a simple idea: if you have more promoters than detractors you can expect your business to thrive. This is the basis of the Net Promoter Score, a metric to give you a sense of how well your business is going.

When I first learnt about this single-question metric I was sceptical but then I had a coffee with Jon Smiles who had just finished a role with Orica (Australian chemical and mining services company). Jon told me how they used Net Promoter Score to transform their business unit's culture. Every three months they would survey and calculate their NPS and this would get everyone thinking about how they could make the place more attractive and compelling to their staff so they would not hesitate to recommend their company to colleagues and friends. By having a single score they didn't fall into the typical survey trap of thinking the results directed them towards a particular solution. Instead they were encouraged to use their own judgement and local smarts to develop initiatives. Imagine what they could have done if they combined this approach with using business narrative.

So I thought, "hey, I could use this to assess the health of communities of practice." But I will need to ask the typical Net Promoter Score questions from two perspectives:

• How likely is it that you would recommend the Acme Community of Practice to a colleague?
• How likely is it that your manager would recommend the Acme Community of Practice to their staff?

So last week I asked 17 members of a CoP I'm working with these two questions and here are the results.

  

The NPS for the members was 35%.

The NPS for what the members thought of how likely the managers would recommend the community was -53%. You can see that there is plenty of work to be done getting the managers on board. Our approach in building this community was to get it done under the radar and get some runs on the board. We've done that now so our next step is to tell our stories to the mid level managers and above.

Calculating the Net Promoter Score

Here is how you calculate NPS.

Count the number of respondents who scored 9 or 10. These are your promoters

Work out the percentage of promoters in the whole group.

Count the number of respondents who scored 0 through to 6. These are your detractors.

Work out the percentage of detractors in the whole group.

Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to calculate your Net Promoter Score.

According to Fredrick Reichheld (2003) the median NPS from over 130,000 surveys across a range of industries is 28%. Yet some of the best businesses have NPS of 70% or more.

It's hard to say that 35% is a good score for this CoP but it would be good for other communities to do a similar activity and see if we can compare. Just from experience of working with lots of different CoPs I would say this group is highly motivated and engaged. Whether we can compare NPS scores between CoPs is not a necessity. Most importantly this will give the leaders of this CoP a way to sample the mood of their community and inspire them to try new and interesting activities.

Reichheld, F. F. (2003). "The one number your need to grow." Harvard Business Review 81(12): 46-54.

In the previous two posts (Shawn's on his forthcoming presentation and Chandni's about collaboration between Google and P&G) have used specific examples to illustrate how collaborative practices can add value to an organisation.

In many cases, the value of collaboration is difficult to articulate using numbers. We (not surprisingly I guess) strongly advocate that organisations systematically identify, collect and communicate their collaboration 'success stories'. Our experience is that these stories are critically important when the inevitable question gets asked about why we are investing in collaboration. We have developed a CoP Health Check and stories are a key part of this process.

A recent article in the Washington post (via Seth Kahn and the Working Stories list) describes how an Indian company has a 'chief belief officer' who uses mythology to help managers make meaning of their roles. A quote from the article is very relevant given the way many companies are reacting to the global financial crisis

He likens layoffs to the slaughter of cows, which Hindus revere as symbolizing life. "The standard Western management principle is 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it,' " Pattanaik said. "In our ethos, 'if you measure it, you destroy it.' "

We have blogged previously about the fallacy of the 'if you can't measure it ..." mindset previously. But for those with roles related to collaboration etc this can be a nervous time as companies look to shed staff to save money. Word on the street is that some of our friends have already been 'made redundant'. It might look good on the P&L, but it can also be like draining the life-blood out of organisations.

Stories help us communicate value when things can't be measured, and they are powerful tools in persuading people and changing their minds. As an example, some time ago, Rio Tinto produced a video on one of their success stories and made it publicly available (I notice it is now available on YouTube). We have used this video extensively as it provides a concrete example of how collaboration creates value and how communities of practice can operate. In late November, I met with a CEO who had been tolerating the creation of communities of practice in his professional services firm. I showed him the Rio Tinto video and his face lit up and he said "I get it. That's what I want. Why didn't I get shown this video years ago?"

So, if you have lots of metrics but not many examples it might be time to sniff out and articulate a few success stories.

For years software vendors and consulting firms have been developing SAP software components for NSW government agencies and on-selling the same software to numerous other NSW government agencies. These practices are only possible in an environment where the government agencies do not collaborate. In 2008 these agencies got together to share how they were using SAP and worked on ways to collaborate on new government-wide developments. In the first few days of collaborating a tiny piece of code to change how invoices were handled was shared across multiple agencies—each of the receiving agencies saved $5,000 by sharing rather than reinventing. And some of the developments cost millions to develop. The potential benefits are staggering.

When times are tough it’s important to make the most of available resources. Organisations of all shapes and sizes have spent millions of dollars on ‘collaboration’ software yet the level of sophistication in the way we collaborate hasn’t improved dramatically. It’s time to be more systematic and effective collaborators and this starts with understanding what it really means and not fretting over the functionality of communication software, regardless of how alluring the latest web 2.x version looks. We need to build collaborative cultures and skills.

This presentation describes why collaboration matters now more than ever. It paints the picture of what we are up against but shines a light on what’s possible. And by understanding the different ways of working together and the different types of collaboration we can create a new mental model as our collaboration foundation.

Most of the presentation, however, will focus on the practicalities of developing effective collaboration cultures and skills with plenty of illustrations from our work with organisations like NSW Government, Rio Tinto, BAE Systems, and a sprinkling of examples from around the world.

The foundations are there. The software is available. The need is clearly here. 2009 will mark the tipping point where organisations will move from emphasising collaboration tools to placing the effort on people, on their behaviours and capabilities. We mustn’t forget: it’s people who collaborate.

When: Monday March 2, 12:00 - 2:00pm

Where: Treasury Theatre, Lower Plaza, 1 Macarthur St. East Melbourne

Light Refreshments provided

To RSVP click here

You might like to read our paper on collaboration as pre-reading.

In the latter half of 2008, we worked with a number of companies to establish communities of practice. In training the people with key roles in the communities (such as the coordinator, core team members and those with support roles outside the communities) a common question arose..."what do we do first?"

Of course the answer to this depends on the specific context. Nonetheless, we have had a crack at listing the four things that community coordinators should focus on to get things going:

1. Build membership. Phone people who might be interested in the domain and ask them who else they know that is interested in the domain and what are the key challenges the domain faces. Recruit people to help the coordinator - the core team for the domain. Organise a face-to-face meeting to launch the community.
2. Establish a rhythm of activity. Get the discussion list working actively. Set a regular time for meetings/teleconferences.
3. Focus on action. Ask the group what they think is important to the domain. What things would make the most difference in their domain? What things are they interested in working on? Note: this last question is likely to get very different answers than the previous questions. Use the action oriented model for community development.
4. Collect success stories. Use a few key metrics as indicators, but not too many. Ensure the workload to collect them is low. Do not make the indicators into targets. Consider using Net Promoter score as an indicator.

The rationale in reducing the list to a few key things is to help the coordinator to focus their efforts, and to help them figure out where to start. Are there other key things that should be included in the list, or replace any of the areas listed?

Yesterday I spend the day with 40+ other TED enthusiasts at Monash Uni watching and discussing TED videos. We believe it was the first independent TED event in the world. Lot's of interesting people there including presentation guru, Les Posen, who has just returned from MacWorld after giving a two-day workshop on a cognitive perspective on using Keynote, and Stuart French, who told a gruesome story of murder in his backyard. There was also my new Jelly co-working colleagues Susan, Pieter, Sjors and Jason. Sjors had a big hand in organising the event. Great job!

Most of the day was spent watching the videos and chatting about them in small and large groups. It was great for sparking new ideas. There was one live speaker, Dr Ninian Peckitt, who told us about how he rebuilds people's faces using manufactured implants made from titanium. This talk was fascinating if not a little gruesome. Not for the faint hearted. Amazingly there are strong political forces against manufactured implants because they are less expensive and surgeons don't make as much income from using them. Major face surgery that would normally cost $80,000 can be done for $40,000 using Ninian's approach.

Here are the videos we watched:

• Do schools kill creativity by Ken Robinson
• Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy? by Dan Gilbert
• My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
• How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes by Philip Zimbardo
• A 3-minute story of mixed emoticons by Rives
• Our priorities for saving the world by Bjorn Lomborg
• The art of collecting stories by Jonathan Harris
• Sliced bread and other marketing delights by Seth Godin
• The mystery box by JJ Abrams
• Why we age and how we can avoid it? by Aubrey de Grey

The video that had the most impact for me was Phil Zimbardo's talk about the Stanford Prison experiment. In particular I liked the point that more often than not it's not the bad apple that's the problem, it's the bad barrel. This got me thinking about why we often go after the bad apple. Perhaps it's because our major sensemaking device is our ability to tell ourselves stories and the most compelling stories are about individuals. At lunch Jason made the point that perhaps groups are represented in stories by archetypes or gods so that the story remains compelling. This idea has lots of ramifications for blame, scapegoats, performance appraisals etc.

Just a word of warning on the Zimbardo video. It contains many pictures of the Abu Ghraib tragedy, which are shocking.

Do you have a community of practice with members distributed around the country? Is your community deeply technical and use a suite of technical software tools to get the job done? So how do you keep track of who is doing what, or more importantly, who has done what, so you can get in contact with a fellow community member when you are about to embark on something similar?

A group of engineers I met yesterday had a simple approach. Each month the group's co-ordinator sends an email to all members asking them to write a short paragraph on the simulations they are working on, what parts of the software suite they're using, the type of modelling technique they're employing and when they expected to finish. Most importantly they include their name.

The report is sent to management creating the impetus for everyone to contribute. It's sent to all the members. The members store the reports in their email and when they start a new project they search through the reports to see who's done something similar.

I suggested they might create the report in a wiki and tag each entry with the type of modelling etc. so new members can see the history of reports they day they arrive. This valuable information is currently locked in people's email inboxes. The other advantage of using the wiki is that the co-ordinator can open the new report page in the wiki at the beginning of the month and members can start populating it with what they are doing, and by the end of the month the report is finished. This is also a great way to do newsletters.

One of our clients is a large engineering firm (perhaps Australia's largest) and I've been working with them over that last 12 months helping to establish some communities of practice. Our first one focussed on technical draftsmen and is off and running well. Their domain is well defined, they have good participation and have developed a strong rhythm of activity. From the outset I've encouraged them to collect their stories of success such as the one about how the members designed and delivered a three-hour course on diagram naming and part number databases (to the uninitiated this sounds prosaic, but part numbers is a massive issue for engineers). They've run it three times and it has been a resounding success.

The other community of practice has a sprawling domain: engineering. I tried to advice against such a broad domain because it fails the basic identity test where I ask whether people stand up proudly and say, "I am an engineer." It turns out they are more specific than that. They are mechanical engineers, print circuit board engineers, or electronic simulation engineers, to name just a few of the possibilities. So this CoP has limped along and today the core team sat down to redesign the approach.

After a good discussion we identified two technical sub-groups in the engineering community that we could focus on: print circuit board designers and another group that uses a particular systems analysis tool. The third group was role based and while we didn't pinpoint the exact engineering role to focus on we recognised that there were roles like project engineer and engineering manager who might value learning from their colleagues. This role-based community also enables the broader engineering-related issues to emerge while also keeping the conversations lively and relevant to the participants.

This might be obvious to the many CoP experts out there but we learned today that you can overly focus on technical groupings to establish CoPs and forget about role-based groupings. In this case there's still a strong desire to maintain a broad engineering-wide domain but we will foster the CoP by focussing on specific sub-groups and over time look for ways to connect these groups.

Over at the Influencer blog David Maxfield has written a four post series on improving teamwork based on one of the key insights from his co-authored book, also called Influencer, which is simply changing a few behaviours can drive a lot of change. David calls them vital behaviours.

For example, the two vital behaviours David believes are essential for effective teams are:

• Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank, and respectful way
• Everyone holds everyone accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments, and for bad behaviour—regardless of role or position

This got me thinking. What are the vital behaviours for communities of practice?

This morning I was talking to Matt Moore about this and he suggested these two:

• When someone asks a question members provide answers. No one is left hanging.
• Before you ask a question you put some effort finding the answer and in doing so respect the everyone's time
  

Both have a tragedy of the commons feel about them in that to continue to get value from the common (the community) you don't just milk the system dry (ask questions but never answer).

Last night I gave a talk to the KMLF on Building a collaborative workplace and posed two vital behaviours for communities of practice:

• community leaders meet regularly to shape and improve the community
• community members band together in small groups to create things that are valuable to themselves and the entire community

While I think these vital behaviours are important I think we need to be mindful of the variety of orientations a community of practice might adopt of just find the orientation has emerged because there are likely to be vital behaviours for each one. The idea of community orientations was introduced to me by Nancy White. It's an idea she has been working on with John Smith and Etienne Wenger in preparation for their new book on technology for CoPs. John has a good graphic on slideshare that lists the orientations as:

• meetings
• projects
• access to expertise
• relationships
• context
• community cultivation
• individual participation
• content publishing
• open-ended conversation

I suspect my second vital behaviour about members banding together only makes sense in project orientations. The other three might be universal. What do you think? What are the vital behaviours for successful CoPs?

Before you answer it's worth considering what David says about what is a vital behaviour:

Here are some "vital behaviors" that aren't really behaviors at all: "Respect all team members," "Achieve all team targets." The first is a quality, while the second is a result. The vital behaviors describe actions people can perform. A good test is to ask yourself, "If I told 10 people to demonstrate this vital behavior, would they all perform the same actions?"

A couple of years ago we helped the Australian Army establish three communities of practice around these domains: doctrine, urban warfare and air manoeuvre. In the process of intentionally helping these communities get established we created the conditions for an unexpected community to arise: a community of spatial modellers.

The spatial modellers created massive simulations of combat forces and were a group of people distributed around Australia. It was difficult to share their models however because of restrictions places on the Defence email system. So when we made available a Lotus-based collaboration environment available they discovered they could use it to share their models. It started with model sharing and then online discussions started and before we knew it they were an active community of practice.

I was reminded of this experience reading Clay's book and his story of how Meetup (something I have been using for a number of years) works to create new Meetup groups. Members can search for a topic, such as storytelling, and express an interest in joining a group when it exists. When enough members show an interest someone might be inspired to create a new group.

Organisations should take a similar approach. Yes, keep developing intentional communities of practice and use them to also create the conditions for new communities to emerge on their own. You might be surprised to find that the emergent ones being more successful, but of course in a complex space there is no way of knowing which ones will succeed of fail. Just don't kill off the opportunity of good things happening under their own steam.

If you are interested in establishing and fostering communities of practice, and in particular are keen to understand the role social technologies such as blogs, wikis and social booking might play in their development, then you'll want to check out this new learning event from CPSquare:

Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice

We have been designing this event (runs over 5 weeks) as a virtual field trip and experimental lab where you will engage your heads and your hands (and hopefully your hearts) and get a good feeling for these technologies and how they might support communities of practice.

You will be guided on this journey by the following practitioners:

Beth Kanter, Beverly Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, John Smith, Nancy White, Nick Noakes, Shawn Callahan, Shirley Williams, and Susanne Nyrop.

I hope to see you there.

Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, the these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

One of the best ways to illustrate the value of Community of Practice efforts is to find stories of success and to use them. We previously posted on the publication of 'Stories from the Coal Face', a booklet produced by Rio Tinto's coal division that communicates many of the ways that CoP have added value to the business. Rio Tinto has made a short video on one of the stories and this is publicly available on their website. Well worth checking out and using as an example of how collaboration can make a big difference in unexpected ways. I particularly like how the video engages the product group CEO and sends a message to the organisation about moving to a more collaborative culture using both the people and technology aspects.

Thanks to Mark Bennett for the link and for his perseverance in achieving the production of the video.

As the co-ordinator of the SIKMLeaders community of practice, Stan Garfield asked the community members this question:

"If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

Here's my answer.

All KM is change management
View every knowledge management initiative as a change initiative, which means helping the leadership group to imagine what it will be like when it's done and after imagining it, they want it. It also means getting the employees engaged in working out how it's going to work and then getting people to volunteer to work on it. It will also involve a recognition that most KM initiatives are affected by culture (actually, what isn't) and culture is never completed, done, ticked off the list of things to do. Consequently, a continuous improvement approach is needed.

Link to what matters
Make sure that the the most powerful people in the organisation understand and believe the answer to, "so what?" Always link the KM initiative to what people care about. Mostly that's the business strategy but there have been times when I've worked with organisations without a clear business strategy, so a linkage there wasn't going to help. Find out what matters and if the KM initiatives doesn't make a difference, dump it rather than try and make it fit. A poor fitting KM initiative will eventually unravel anyway so it's better to dump it early than to forced to dump it when heaps of resources have been spent and it's barely limping along.

Collect stories early and often
It's often hard to quantify the value of KM initiatives. So whenever you hear a real live experience, no matter how small, take a note of what happened and tell others. We're helping an engineering firm start a community of practice for its draftspeople. At the first teleconference a woman in Newcastle recounted how she was creating a library of screws for a particular type of aircraft. A fellow in Adelaide piped up saying they already have a library of screws and it also includes auto-placement. You could hear the excitement in the woman's voice on hearing this work had already been done, "and it even has auto-placement." The couple joined forces and updated the library and made it available to the whole community.
This is a small story but one senior leadership heard from the very beginning of the community's development and they could retell to other leaders in the company while finishing their anecdote with, "and this is just one thing the community is doing." While the business benefits must be articulated, the stories gave the community time to establish themselves.

Inspired by a conversation with Chris Young at Thiess, Robyn and I ran a knowledge market activity with our client and their spatial modeller community of practice.

We had three objectives:

1. Help participants appreciate the nature of what members are keen to share with the community and what members are seeking to learn
2. Create new connections among community members
3. Identify knowledge gaps

This is how we did it.

The invite

Before the teleconference we invited all members to email us one thing they were keen to share with the group and one thing they would like to learn from the group. It's important to emphasise in the invitation that their offering and request should be as specific as possible. Rather than offer "35 years of experience in aeronautical parts design" suggest something like, "I have developed a tool for estimating the ..." Look for tools, techniques, stories of success and failure, data, templates. Things community members would value.

Facilitating the session

We compiled the offerings and requests in a spreadsheet and recorded the members name who was offering or requesting.

On the teleconference we gave a quick introduction and described the objectives.

Then we started with the offers. We said something like, "John Smith has a technique he's developed for modelling motherboards that reduce the likelihood of manufacturing faults. Anyone interested?" People would pipe up and we recorded their names. Sometime the offerer would provide some additional explanation of what was on offer.

After the offers we did a similar thing for the requests.

It generated lots of conversations and you can tell members were sorting out issues and decided to catch up later for a more in depth conversation.

Results

We ran a short survey after the meeting. All 14 attendees responded to the survey. On a scale of great, good, neither good or bad, bad, awful, 2 people rated the meeting as great and 12 rated it as good.

Lessons

Getting people to be as specific as possible is an important factor in successfully running this session.

Let me know if you give it a try. Love to know how it goes for your community.

Here is a poem by Lao Tsu, a Chinese philosopher circa 700 BC. It's well quoted on the web but it was difficult to find exactly which writing it was included in (any ideas?). Anyway, it speaks to how we should be helping our communities of practice develop.

Go to the People
Live with them
Learn from them,
Love them.

Start with what they know,
Build with what they have.

. . . But with the best leaders
When the work is done
the task is accomplished
The people will say,
‘We have done this ourselves.’

Your teleconference system is one of your most important KM technologies.

Here are 7 things a facilitator can do to improve teleconference experience.

1. Encourage everyone to be on time . Unlike f2f meetings where people can sneek in and catch up, arriving late at a teleconference meeting seems to be doubly disruptive.
2. Introduce everyone. When you walk into a room you can do a quick scan of who's there. That's not so easy on a teleconference so ask each person to announce themselves on arrival (some systems automatically provide announcements) and when everyone is ready to start do a quick whip around of names starting from the person closest to Greenwich then move west. OK, you don't need to do the Greenwich thing but it's quite fun in a global group getting people to work out their longitude.
3. Remind everyone of who's speaking. When you have a dozen or more disembodied voices on the line it can be hard to work out who's talking. Get people into the habit of prefacing what they say with their name, for example, "Shawn here, to get our community of practice going ..."
4. Reduce background noise. The more people you add to a teleconference the more likely someone will have a noisy background, noisy typing as they take notes or some other annoyance for the rest of the participants. Point out the mute functionality of the system or the handset they are using and asked people to turn off any other device that might interfere with the call (such as mobile phones).
5. Rotate start times to be fair to all timezones. If you plan a regular get together on the phone and your participants are scattered around the world, don't leave one geography to do the graveyard shift.
6. Use IM or a chat room to increase richness. This is probably the most important suggestion. Encourage everyone to join a chat room of group instant messaging (such as Skype) and as the call proceeds urge everyone to jot down what they are hearing, share urls, and create an artefact of the meeting. You can use it to jog your memory latter and during the call see what people are getting from the session. I was introduced to this approach by my colleagues at CPSquare and John Smith and I have written a practice note on how to do it.
7. Record the call. For those who can't make the meeting simply record the call and share the audio file.

There are a range of other practices you might want to include such as employing additional technology to share screens (I was part of a fascinating teleconference today where one participant shared his screen and showed us how to design sheet metal components using engineering drafting software), share presentations, online voting, whiteboards. You might also want to practice ensuring everyone can be heard especially when there are a group of people in a room sharing a teleconference phone.

So I would love to hear the tips and tricks you've seen work. I'm sure we are going to see and be part of many more teleconferences.

BHP Billiton axed their division called Operational Excellence last year. This was the group that, among other services, supported the organisations Knowledge Networks (also called communities of practice but language matters in this story). BHPB had developed the networks over the last 10 years but when the new CEO arrived he thought that if the business lines thought these networks were valuable then they should support them. Operational Excellence was a corporate service and while I don't know the exact numbers there might have been 30 or more people supporting their knowledge networks program.

Knowledge networks in BHPB were formal affairs. There was a defined process for creating one. Senior sponsorship was required. There were funded extremely well. And each one had one or more support people helping to run the network. In the case of their Global Maintenance Network there were at least a handful of support people. At the same time groups of people could informally come together without corporate support and these groups were communities of practice. Ironically it's a career limiting move at BHPB to mention knowledge networks because they connote corporate, bureaucratic and expensive. But calling gatherings of professionals 'communities of practice' is OK and perhaps even applauded. Language matters. History matters.

Just to let you know that Etienne Wenger and his collaborators at CPSquare are running their 4 week online workshop shortly (starts the 28th of January so you had better hurry). If you are interested go to:

http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/index.htm

Let them know you found out about the course via the Anecdote blog and they will provide you with a discount.

I recently picked up a copy of Fast Thinking magazine (summer 2007 issue), and found an interesting article on a group of software developers who organically-formed a community of practice. They call themselves SuperHappyDevHouse, and although they started off in California’s Silicon Valley, they have attracted interest from other places in the world, including New Zealand, which now has its own ‘devhouse’ as an offshoot.

What I found interesting about this is their community, although formed online, is nurtured through regular get-togethers (what they actually call ‘parties’). It doesn’t seem uncommon for software developers to create a natural communication conduit online – this is what they do, right? But what they realised is how important it is to have face to face contact that allows for people to get to know each other and have informal conversations to establish relationships. When conversations start in this more organic way, topics have more spontaneity, and although they may meander, stories emerge and ideas are sparked in a way that isn’t always allowed for in an online forum. Of course, the online forum is emerging as essential in communities of practice, but face-to-face relationship building is something that will never lose its importance in human relationships.

The SuperHappyDevHouse ‘parties’, which are replete with innovation-minded, lap-top toting developers young and old, last around 12 hours, and result in knowledge sharing, collaborative explorations and what they fully expect to roll into innovation.

2008 marks a busy year for Anecdote and this graphic gives you an idea of our workshop schedule. Storytelling is represented with bears, business narrative with fish and communities of practice with balloons. As you can see we are running workshops in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth. Here is the full, printable version of the schedule you can download and put on your wall. Alternatively, pop over to our workshops page and register your interest in attending via the web.

By the way, we can also run these workshops internally within your organisation.

In starting any community of practice, the first objective is to help the members recognise the value they will get from being and working together. Often we will help organisations kick their communities off with a work shop that has a number of objectives but perhaps the most important is to foster deeper connections among the potential members. Here are some of the activities I've used to do that. Would love to hear about activities you have found useful.

• asking participants to bring to the workshop one thing that other participants might value. It might be the description of a tool, tips, data, stories. We would pin this to a wall encouraging people to ask questions and talk about their artefacts—great triggers for conversation
• interviewing key members before the workshop to better understand key issues, potential hot topics and what they feel are the enablers and blockers for the community
• run a sociometry exercise where you arrange people physically in a room according to a set of questions ranging from, How far did you travel to get to this meeting? How much experience do you have as a HR professional? to Who do you collaborate with? or Who do you go to to solve difficult problems? With these latter questions the participants place their hand on the shoulder of the person they identify as their answer. An instant social network forms. A terrific exercise to help people get a sense of the knowledge and social networks already in place.
• conduct appreciative interviews with people you don’t know well. This process is a one-on-one interview where each person talks about three highlights in their career and the listener retells their stories back to them. Then they swap places. This is always a memorable and impactful experience.
• build a social network diagram on a wall of the participants with post-its and string. Another way to see what networks already exist and for the group to see where the potential is for the community.
• take photos of each person to be displayed on the online directory. If an online directory doesn’t already exist for the community then it's a good idea to build one. People find it easier to remember facts about a person if they have a picture of their face. With a digital camera we can snap everyone’s photo to provide the basis for the directory. You have to make this a fun exercise so as not to scare people off and best to tell everyone of the plan before they arrive—no surprises when it comes to photos.
• Good conversations around topics that matter. We like to use the World Café technique to facilitate a set of conversations around the hot topics. We encourage people to retell their stories in these small group conversations as this also helps to foster relationships.

There are a whole bunch of useful concepts used by organisations to focus their community of practice and knowledge management programs. Some of the more useful and memorable ones are listed below:

• Learn Before, Learn During, Learn After - the concept used by BP and described by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell in 'Learning to Fly', which remains an excellent practical reference on communities of practice and KM in genel
• Connections, Conversations, Content - the core concept of the US Army CompanyCommand Professional Forum as described in the book 'CompanyCommand' by Nancy Dixon et al. This concept is described as "a network of company commanders who connect in conversation about relevant content to advance the practice of company command" (page 3).
• Discover and Adopt, Discover and Adapt, Develop and Share - the CoP mantra developed and used by the communities of practice within ExxonMobil
• Ask, Learn, Share - used by Shell International to provide the focus for their community of practice program. The 'Shell Blue Book' remains a fantastic example of collecting and presenting CoP success stories and we previously blogged about it here.

We have been working during the year with Mark Bennett, who is the steward of Rio Tinto's extensive communities of practice program. Mark has been looking for an appropriate concept to use within Rio Tinto and while liking the concept of ask-learn-share, its linear nature didn't sit right. So Mark has designed this concept and is testing its utility in simply describing the focus of their CoP initiatives.

Rio Tinto's coal division here in Australia recently published a booklet called 'Stories from the Coal Face' and, inspired by the Shell Blue Book, it describes how CoP have contributed to the business. Mark Quinn (yes, another Mark) is the driving force behind this booklet and behind the CoP activities within the Rio Tinto coal business. It is an internal publication so you might have difficulty getting your hands on a copy, but well worth it if you can.

Graham Harvey in his book 'Seducing the Vigilante Customer ' tells of his experience in a restaurant.

"Even though I sort of half guessed what the answer might be, I went ahead and asked the question anyway.

"Why do you have Cardiff, Wales written under your name?"

"Cardiff is where I was born." replied the waiter.

The conversation then continued for a couple of minutes centring on how long she had been in Australia, why she had left Wales etc. She also explained that everybody in the hotel had their birthplace inscribed on their respective name badges and how positive the idea had been in creating conversation between guests and staff."

Although Graham is looking at this from a sales and marketing perspective his point is relevant to any group that is trying to build relationships. A key step in establishing rapport is engaging in conversations on a first name basis as quickly as possible.

You could have a lot of fun with this. Here are a few possibilities from the conventional to the quirky:
* your nickname
* sports you love to play or watch
* the footy team you follow
* your favourite biography
* what's on the cover of your diary
* a thought provoking quote
* your personal motto
* the beginning of an interesting story

Can you suggest any better ones?

Add something interesting or unexpected to a name badge at your next seminar, conference or community of practice kick-off meeting and watch curiosity get those conversations started.

Last year I wrote this short paper arguing that communities of practice were an effective strategy to transfer tacit knowledge. This week we gave the old look and feel a makeover and updated the pdf.

This paper therefore provides guidance on how to identify and foster such communities of practice in your organisation. It explains why communities of practice are effective in managing tacit knowledge, describes how to ‘map’ communities, and provides suggestions for garnering management support. Finally, the paper describes three common traps to avoid.

I was having dinner with Etienne last week hosted by Bronwyn Stuckey—thanks Bron. I haven't laughed so much for a long time.

So it was nice to see Knowledge Labs post an interview and 7 video clips with Etienne. Here's the blurb.

Etienne Wenger is one of the founding fathers of Social Learning Theory and the concept of “Practiced Communities”. People are learning together – every individual deals and engage in many different communities of practice. Here people negotiate and define what competence and knowledge is. To know something or to be competent builds on the individuals experiences of being in the world - learning is a constant transformation or journey of the self.

[via Dissident]

Technorati Tags: etienne wenger

Just cleaning up my Bloglines and thought I would share some of the posts I was saving.

• Brad Hinton reflects on oral history and storytelling and points to some useful resources.
• Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics) sharing Mark Twain's view of work and play.
• If you have read Made to Stick, you might also like these columns from the Heath brothers in Fast Company.
• Psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes some excellent essays. Here is one on our biases.
• This is a neuroscience blog and here they talk about the difference in thinking with exploration or direct reward
• Why It's Hard to Get Rid of Old Ideas - this will be the subject of an upcoming post I think
• Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators by Stephen Dale (well worth signing up to Stephen's RSS)
• Here I reveal (again) my stationary fetish. Grid and ruled paper.
• Victoria Ward on silence.

Enjoy!

The 'up or out' policy is well known in consulting firms like McKinsey & Company. If you are not promoted in 5 years to partner then you're out. It has been estimated that up to 5/6ths of people who leave McKinsey leave as a result of this policy. What might be surprising to some is that a similar (mostly tacit) policy exists in Australia's public sector; it's up or assumed you have given up on your career. This mindset of having to keep moving up the hierarchy is not isolated to the public service, the Australia Army has a similar and more overt example with what is informally called POMs—Passed Over Majors. These majors are readily recognisable because they wear a medal representing 10 years of service. Ten years as a major typically means you've been passed over.

To be a career bureaucrat requires a broad experience of policy and programme delivery. It's not unusual for someone to spend as little as 6 months in a job before moving to their next position. If you spend more than 3 years in one position then, according to senior management, you have given up, you've become stale. This expectation creates havoc resulting in what seems to me like excessive churn. One section I'm aware of has had 9 managers in 12 months. Remarkably the team held together and managed themselves, which was a testament to their resilience.

High churn will remain because the senior leaders who've benefited from hopping from one position to the next are now the power group whose every move and utterance is scrutinised by the aspiring leaders of the future. The power group will tell the stories of how they got ahead and expect the aspiring ones to do the same. The culture has been set and reinforced.

The result for knowledge (and in turn, productivity) is both good and bad. Frequent movement creates cross-pollination fostering opportunities for innovation. That's a good thing. People leaving after 2-3 years, however, creates knowledge gaps, especially if the group operates like a group of individuals, which happens a lot. Head down, bum up, getting your particular output out the door.

Knowledge retention has the wrong sound to it. It makes you think about holding on to what you've got. You immediately think of knowledge capture, which is an unhelpful mindset. Knowledge circulation might be a better phrase because the aim, I believe, is to share knowledge among people in the group so that it is resilient to someone leaving.

To become resilient to knowledge lost requires the adoption of a set of knowledge sharing practices that operate all the time, not just when you learn someone is leaving. They might include the following:

• participating in communities of practice
• after action reviews
• lessons learning sessions
• working together (radical concept) rather than as individuals
• pairing expert with novice
• fostering knowledge sharing behaviours
• story listening and telling

Nancy White and I have been working on a project to help our client enhance their collaboration practices. In the process we've identified three types of enterprise collaboration. Love to hear what you think of the idea. Nancy is riffing on this topic too and has added a bunch of other cool resources in her post.

Collaboration is the act of working with people to get something done. We can look at collaboration at three levels within the enterprise.

In Team Collaboration, the members of the group are known, there are clear task interdependencies, expected reciprocity, and explicit timelines and goals. To achieve the goal, members must fulfil their tasks within the stated time. Team Collaboration often suggests that while there is often explicit leadership, the participants cooperate on an equal footing and will receive equal recognition. An example is a research project to develop a prototype for X in five months with six team members and a set of resources.

In Community Collaboration, there is a shared domain or area of interest, but the goal is more often learning, rather than task. People share and build knowledge, rather than complete projects. Membership may be bounded and explicit, but periods are often open or ongoing. Membership is often on an equal footing, but more experienced practitioners may have more status or power in the community. Reciprocity is within the group, but not always one-to-one ('I did this for you, now you do this for me“) An example might be a community of practice that is interested in the type of research mentioned in the team example above. A member of that team may come to her community and ask for examples of past projects.

Network Collaboration steps beyond the relationship centric nature of team and community collaboration. It is collaboration that starts in individual action and self interest and accrues to the network. Membership and timelines are open and unbounded. There are no explicit roles. Members most likely do not know all the other members. Power is distributed. This form of collaboration is driven by the advent of social software, a response to the overwhelming volume of information we are creating. It's impossible for an individual to cope on their own.

An example of network collaboration might be members of the team in the first example above bookmarking web sites as they find them. This benefits their team, possibly their related communities of practice but it also benefits the wider network of people interested in the topic. At the same time, they may find other bookmarks left by network members relevant to their team work. This sort of network activity benefits the individual and a network of people reciprocally over time. The reciprocity connection is remote and undefined. You act in self-interest but provide a network-wide benefit.

Originally posted on 29/11/06

Technorati Tags: nancy white, social software

In 2001 Shell collected a bunch of stories and put them together in a booklet now know as the Blue Book, but with the official title of Stories from the Edge: Managing Knowledge through New Ways of Working within Shell's Exploration and Production Business. It’s a landmark publication because it shows that a company in a hard-nosed industry like oil exploration and production recognises the value of storytelling and are getting benefits from its application.

The booklet (87 pages) is in four parts:

• Global Networks
• Global Consultancy
• Centres of Excellence
• Distributed Teams

Many of the stories tell how the organisation has saved money  by sharing knowledge. Others are about how new tools and techniques have been used. In each case the stories are in the language of the Shell employees. Here’s an example:

Pecten Cameroon's research revealed that other operators had achieved production gains by injecting demulsifier downhole in gas lifted wells, reducing viscosity in the production string and thereby increasing production. After a trial evaluation of their own, the company obtained a gain of 500 barrels per day or $5 million per annum. The approach is being extended to 17 other wells with prospective gains of $9 million per year.

What I find most interesting about the Blue Book is how the authors recognised that collecting and sharing stories of success is a powerful way to garner resources for things like communities of practice, which are notoriously difficult to develop a business case for. In fact, any learning initiative is difficult to justify in a strictly analytical way (to see why have a look at this post I wrote a while back-Learning initiatives need stories not measurement).

BHP Billiton has taken a similar approach with their communities of practice (also called Networks). Check out their Ok Tedi story.

Throughout the Blue Book are quotes from Dave Snowden’s early papers on narrative techniques for knowledge management. I hadn’t heard about any work Dave had done with Shell so it was a welcomed surprise.

I saw the slide pack from a Gartner briefing today. It listed the ‘Top 10 Technologies for 2007’. Included in the list was ‘communiites and collective intelligence’. This ‘technology’ involves linking people within and beyond your organisation and helps organisations to ‘move beyond “enablement” and tap the value of internal communities’ and to ‘exploit the power of scale to solve problems in new ways’.

Interestingly, communities were shown at the very start of the ‘Gartner Hype Curve’ – at the technology trigger point. This is much early in the cycle than I would have expected and it is long before the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ or the ‘trough of disillusionment’. 

The slide pack is advertised as being available from here, but I couldn’t find it.

I have just returned from the UK and from co-delivering a training program for new CoP coordinators in a global company. It was a great experience and I learned much about communities of practice. In the week before, I spent some time in Brisbane looking at some of the company’s CoP success stories. A number stood out, including this one:

In early 2005 a CoP was established around the data and process standards used to manage physical assets across a multi-site division. The company knew that a new module of SAP will be introduced in late 2008 and that achieving agreement on data and process standards was a key to successful implementation. In early 2007, the CoP members took on the challenge of establishing the standard and, using a wiki, they did it inside 6 weeks.

Aside from the importance of this achievement, what stood out for me was management’s insight in establishing the community long before it was needed to tackle this key business issue. Using hindsight its obvious that the group needed to work on their social capital before they could be ‘tasked’. Building a capability in this manner is a great example of thinking strategically about communities of practice.

The following four conditions are cited as factors that communities of practice might consider in deciding whether something should be made explicit:

• it is relatively stable
• it has longer lasting value for a larger community
• it is expected to be retreived relatively frequently
• it will be maintained and kept up to date

1. A van Unnik, Shell EP LLD, Benefits of Developing Knowledge Sharing Communities, Abu Dhabi International Conference and Exhibition, 10-13 October, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2004

I’m truly blessed in knowing lots of interesting people. I don’t mean to boast but this morning it really dawned on me. I’m very lucky. The other thing I’ve come to understand about myself is that I’ve reached an age, or perhaps a stage in my career, when I’m happy to admit that I don’t know the answer. More than that, I’m comfortable in contacting my many friends and colleagues (usually on Skype) and say things like, “I’m giving a presentation next week and I’m not sure I really know that much about one of the aspects they want me to talk about.”

I said something like that to John Smith this morning on the topic of revitalising communities of practice. He said that I should start by thinking about the Etienne Wenger’s CPD model (community, practice and domain).

Thinking about this model will prompt you to ask a series of questions, he said.

• maybe the community needs new domain areas or domains that were once on the periphery need to be brought into the centre
• perhaps the community needs to explore new tools and practices to expand its repertoire
• perhaps there are members who have left the group in the past who might now like to re-enter and invigorate the community

Now here’s the interesting thing. After only five minutes listening to John’s suggestions a whole bunch of things sprung to mind for me. For example, I’ve seen communities flagging because the members didn’t really have a strong, shared identity with the community’s domain. One example is a community I’m part of that discusses complexity science in organisational settings. It continues to struggle because none of us really identify as complexity-dudes. It fails my “I am a …” test. 

Contrast this with the communities of practice we’re working with in mining companies. Many of the community members have been with the company for 15 or more years and have only done one type of job. They might be underground safety guys or iron ore process guys or pit optimisation guys. They define who they are by the work they are doing and in many cases a job well done will save lives. When this is the case the community of practice seems to thrive if you also have good community coordinators and it’s developed a good rhythm of activity.

John left me with this thought, “If your community of practice is flagging then get the group focussed back on practice.” One way to do that is to implement my action-oriented CoP process.

A couple of years ago Etienne Wenger stayed with me and my family for four days. The poor man. I kept bugging him with CoP questions and my strongest memory from this time was Etienne’s most common answer to my questions of how to do this and how to design that He simply asked, “So what do the members think?” Get the members to design the community activities, the domain, the practices. So when your community is flagging, go the the members for help.

Having people you can contact quickly to have short, meaningful conversations is priceless. Knowing someone’s name, their contact details and their expertise is not enough. You need to have a relationship with someone, a common language and an ability to absorb what you are hearing. John and I are in a community (of CoP practitioners) which helps this conversation happen. At the same time John exercises choice in what he tells me, how deep or wide he goes, how much time he spends and how much effort he puts in during the interaction. This is his gift.

I just read with interest an article in the NASA ASK Magazine about training new teams to operate the two Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. The process takes over 12 months ‘apprenticeship’ and requires learning many of the systems associated with the rovers to ensure they have the context require to successfully operate the vehicles.

The NASA ASK Magazine is an interesting knowledge sharing initiative that communicates success stories intended to share good practices and lessons learned with fellow practitioners across the Agency. ASK stands for ‘Academy Sharing Knowledge’. The underpinning philosophy is that

I just had coffee with Greg Shepherd. He coordinates the Dining and Activity Network in Melbourne. What a delightful fellow. I was asking him about which activities his social club members seem to love the most and surprisingly he said walking was best for building community. As Greg explained, walking enables a group of people to clump into small groups and talk without being forced in an intense face to face meeting. When you tire of one conversation you can easily slow or quicken your pace to join a new clump. This probably explains why the blog walks are popular.

Our behaviour changes with the roles we play, and sometimes we need a trigger to remind us to move from one role to another to ensure our behaviour suits the context. The TV series, The West Wing, provides many good examples of where this switch falters. For example, President Bartlett will have an intense meeting with his advisors, Josh and Toby, and then receive a surprise visit by one of his daughters. In most cases the President fails to make the switch from leader to father and deals with his daughters in an inappropriate presidential fashion.

Dave Snowden brought this concept of an identity switch to my attention last week when Mark and I spent the day together in Canberra. He told the story of a project he was involved in helping lorry drivers reduce back injuries. At the end of a trip, a lorry driver changed roles from ‘lorry driver’ to ‘lorry unloader’ and in this role switch many drivers don’t change their mind-set to remember safe lifting practices.

To help the identity switch occur, Dave suggested the company introduce a ritual so that upon reaching the destination, and before unloading the truck, the driver must fasten a weight-lifting belt around his waist signifying the switch in roles from driver to unloader, and in the process helping him become aware of safe lifting practices.

We saw a similar identity switch occur for managers who need to switch roles from spreadsheet jockey to coach. For example, a manager might be working intensely on her computer when a staff member knocks at the door. A good manager can switch roles from being focussed on the computer to being focussed on the person. A useful ritual might be to stand up and move to another chair when someone arrives at your office, clearly signifying the change in roles. 

I met John Smith and Bev Trayner face-to-face for the first time last year in Florence at a CP2 dialogue. I’d known both of them for years before this meeting. Before Florence it was an online and Skype acquaintance. My face-to-face meeting made a huge difference on how I viewed my role in our community: I’m more involved, I can see the core team, I can really hear the language.

John and Beverly have just published a paper on how they have brought communities together using a combination of online and face-to-face interactions. In each case the face-to-face part consists of an event. Online interactions are used to ramp-up and then ramp-down before and after the event.

They conclude their paper with six heuristics:

1. Design for learning using CPD model is productive
2. Spending time on social processes
3. Using different media to negotiate language as part of a larger process
4. Creating new possibilities: subgroups and outside experts as resources
5. Demonstrating leadership roles in different media
6. Provoking shifts in "comfort zones."

Kathy Sierra had made an astute observation about user communities: they thrive if more people, from novice to expert, ask and answer questions. In fact, Kathy focuses on how to get more people answering questions and in particular how to get the intermediate-level users involved in answer giving. The strategy is a smart one. If more people are answering questions they become more involved in the community’s activities, they learn more (a great way to learn is to teach), they stay involved and add value to the community.

But there is another reason to get your intermediate-level members answering novice questions: experts are not great at conveying what they know because their years of practice have enabled them to abstract and internalise how they get things done and explaining it to a novice is difficult for them. It is better for a novice to learn from an intermediate-level practitioner than from an expert (check out Ackerman et. al. 2003 or Ericsson et. al. 2006)

But here is the challenge:

Encouraging a “There Are No Dumb Questions” culture is only part of the solution. What we really need is a “There are No Dumb Answers” policy.

Kathy suggests six steps to create a “There are No Dumb Answers” culture:

1. Encourage newer users—especially those who've been active askers—to start trying to answer questions
2. Give tips on how to answer questions (see below)
3. Tell them it’s OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they’re guessing
4. Adopt a near-zero-tolerance “Be Nice” policy when people answer questions
5. Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer’s dignity.
6. Re-examine your reward/levels strategy for your community

Here are a couple of FAQs from javaranch that give suggestions on how to ask and answer questions (java developers have a tradition of running phrases together with each word captilised—just in case you were wondering):

http://faq.javaranch.com/view?HowToAskQuestionsOnJavaRanch

• ShowSomeEffort
• SearchFirst
• CarefullyChooseOneForum
• EaseUp
• PatienceIsAVirtue
• UseAMeaningfulSubjectLine
• DoYourOwnHomework
• TellTheDetails
• AvoidRedHerrings
• IsolateTheProblem
• PostRealCode
• UseOneThreadPerQuestion
• UseRealWords
• KeepItDown
• UseCodeTags
• UseTheForumNotEmail
• RespectYourCoranchersPrivacy
• HowToCopyEnvironmentVariablesAndDirectoryStructures
• SayThanks
  

http://faq.javaranch.com/view?HowToAnswerQuestionsOnJavaRanch

• FirstRuleDoNoHarm
• BeNice
• BePatient
• ReadTheQuestion
• ReadTheAnswers
• AdmitWhenYouAreGuessing
• DontWakeTheZombies
• DejaVuAllOverAgain
• LetThemDoTheirOwnHomework

Ericsson, K. A., N. Charness, et al., Eds. (2006). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Ackerman, M., P. Volkmar, et al., Eds. (2003). Sharing Expertise: Beyong Knowledge Management. Cambridge, Massachuetts, The MIT Press.

This a re-posting as I have updated the diagram that goes with the post and there seems to be a growing interest in this simple model.

There often comes a point in the life of a community of practice when the group really benefits from creating tangible things designed to improve the members’ practice. This point occurs sometime after the early days of formation after the members have worked out their domain, and they know who’s participating, how people get on with one another, and how members communicate.

Following is a simple approach designed to coordinate action within a CoP. 

There are five parts to this approach:

• general discussion
• discussion tables
• a list of possible projects
• small groups (ideally 3 people) working on things together
• database

The general discussion is anywhere the community talks together as an entire group. This might be at regular face-to-face meetings or online using a discussion forum. It’s important not to overwhelm or bore members with too much information or information that is only relevant to some members. The general discussions, therefore, benefit from some level of facilitation.

A discussion table is when community members come together to discuss a topic related to the community’s domain. The community coordinator might organise discussion tables on a regular basis. They can be done face-to-face or be conducted online. There should be no more than 12 people at a discussion table at one time to ensure everyone is present and active. If there are more than 12 people interested in the discussion table topic then run multiple discussion tables. During the conversation a participant notes down the ideas of things the community might do to improve their practice. For example, if you were part of a business narrative community and the topic was ‘running effective anecdote circles’ someone might suggest, “we should develop a anecdote circle facilitator’s kit” or “we should develop a member’s training program”. These ideas would be noted and added to the list of possible projects. A summary of the discussion table conservation is also distributed to the entire community.

The list of possible projects is a simple list of all the suggested projects and activities arising from the discussion tables and other forums. You might put the list online and allow members to vote on each suggested project. Members are invited to take on a project from this list in groups of three and ideally with people you haven’t work with before. This simple rule helps the community create new social networks. These small project teams might use an online collaboration space. Once they’ve completed their project they communicate the results to the entire community and store the outputs where members can access them (database).

The community makes progress by hosting discussion tables and encouraging active and robust conversation that leads people to suggest things that would be good to do as a community. The list of projects grows and some are tackled based on the energy and enthusiasm of members. The process of undertaking these projects in small groups creates new relationships which in turn creates new conversations and new ideas for future discussion tables.

Related posts:

• Using Quickplace to support a Communities of Practice
• New white paper: connecting people with content

Social searching is the next big step in helping you get the search results you need. This is how it works. Someone in your community creates a community search engine for your group and then everyone in the community starts using it. When the results appear you add value by telling the engine which results don’t belong and which ones should be promoted to the top of the list. The more the community uses the engine the better the results. 

I’ve created three social search engines using Swiki from Eurekstar:

• people issues related to knowledge management
• evaluation of hard to measure initiatives
• meaningful organisational change

If you are interested in these three topics please bookmark these links and use the search feature as much as you can. We can then see, as a community, how we can improve our searchability.

I’m planning to be in Hong Kong for the The 3rd Asia-Pacific International Conference on Knowledge Management (11–13 December) and as part of the conference I will be running a half day workshop on Starting and Sustaining Communities of Practice on the 15th of December. You can register for the workshop here. Here is the description of the workshop. Of course there will be a good amount of narrative included the workshop.

Communities of practice are one of the most powerful organizational structures available to connect people, access expertise, facilitate learning and create business value. But communities of practice are often fickle, and present paradoxical challenges in their design and management.

This interactive half-day workshop is designed to help participants to design and foster sustainable communities of practice within their organizations, be they public sector, private enterprise or not-for-profit. The workshop will address the creation of social structures that can take responsibility for fostering learning, developing skills and artifacts, and managing knowledge. It will help participants to understand how to balance the need for sustainable communities by having both autonomy and informality; and for the community to be structured to support organizational objectives.

Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden have written a thought provoking chapter on inter-organisational learning networks. I’ve seen their ideas develop over the last few years (on listservers, Skype chats, rare meet-ups and presentations) and this paper is an excellent synthesis and application of three key ideas (in my words):

• idealistic approaches predicated on predictability, analysis and the depiction of ideal future states are total nonsense for making progress in a highly connected, complex environments.
• dispassionate and objective observers can carefully analyse and diagnose ‘the problem’ then implement a solution—more nonsense. The fact is observers impact what they observe and every diagnosis is also an intervention.
• experts have the solution—even more nonsense. The knowledge required to change and successfully adapt exists within the group and participatory approaches seed and harness natural social processes.

The chapter goes on to say:

Two of the most important elements of the naturalistic sense-making approach are narrative (as one of the primary mechanisms of complex knowledge transfer, creation and interpretation in human society) and networks (as one of the primary realities of human life – we are still, unless artificially constrained, tribal and clan-like in our needs and perspectives).

The rest of the chapter looks at inter-organisation learning networks from the perspective of tangible benefits delivered by this type of organisational structure. K&S note that “Inter-organisational learning networks are valuable yet intangible: while participants feel that they and their organisation have benefited, they struggle to explain what exactly those benefits are and how they can be expressed.” According to K&S, the broader literature points to speed of innovation difussion and improved knowledge creation as tangible benefits of these types of networks, but Cynthia and Dave suggest three more:

• improved negotiation of multiple identities
• increased discourse regarding trust and rule structures
• greater productive conflict

I’m not going to give a blow by blow description of the paper. Instead I will highlight a few of the ideas that grabbed my attention—mind you, it sparked many thoughts.

Naturalistic approaches … seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted.

Most Significant Change is an obvious technique for monitoring because of its participatory nature and it’s story based. I know Dave has a slight reservation about MSC because he sees it as privileging some stories over others. I think Dave makes a fair point and MSC done badly will focus on the selection rather than the dialogue that’s created by the selection process. This is a danger to keep in mind for MSC practitioners.

Many employees do their work without being able to answer the question, "Who are you in this organisation?" (And possibly just as importantly, "Who are the others in this organisation?" and “Who is this organization?”).

When I was in London last week I met Martin Clarkson from the Storytellers and their business is entirely focussed on using a story approach to address “Who is this organisation?”

I was reminded at this point of the simple test I use to assess the likelihood a community of practice forming. If you can sensibly complete the sentence, “I’m a <blank>”, then there is a chance a community might form. For example, I was helping a Defence organisation start a community of practice for project managers. I asked them, “do people ever say, ‘I’m a project manager.’?” Absolutely! Great … people identify themselves as project managers so we could get a community going. The next community was more problematic. They wanted to create a community around the competency of ‘technical.’ Does anyone say, “I’m a technical.” No… I suggested they think of another possible community to establish.

One of the ways people have always talked about identity has been through the telling of identity stories which feature the individual or group as a coherent character with certain highlighted characteristics – the lone genius, the band of principled rebels, the misunderstood nobility. Stories told for purposes of identity negotiation (both individually and collectively) are fundamentally different from stories told for other purposes.

K&S point out three characteristics of an identity story:

• the story is well known
• they tend to have a dramatic or performance nature
• they are apparently useless; they appear to be about nothing

These stories help people understand what it means to be part of the group. I heard this story last week which I think is an identity story:

A new salesman joined the company and a week after joining was told by his manager that the team was meeting in Jervis Bay. On the day of the meeting the salesman got up at 4am and made the trip down the coast and on arriving at the bay phoned his manager on his mobile to find out the exact location of the meeting. The salesman was told the Jervis Bay is the name of the meeting room of their conference centre in the city.

The example of a sacred story of the nine day fortnight reminded me of the importance of trying to find these stories in organisations. One way might be to ask, in the middle of an anecdote circle, whether anyone is aware of stories that are told and retold. I did this a couple of days ago and the fellow I was talking could immediately recall two negative stories. I’m not sure these are the sacred stories described in the chapter but I’m sure they are important to how things get done.

I loved the analogy between a Tour de France team (a peloton) and an organisation dealing with complexity.

K&S suggest a set of three heuristics for ethical narrative work:

1. always declare up front the use of narrative techniques (no stealth story work)
2. if asked any question about what sort of narrative intervention you are doing (such as instructing executives in how to tell stories for cultural change), answer honestly
3. appoint an independent arbitrator for any dispute over the use of narrative techniques in organisations

The last section of the chapter is about productive conflict. I have to admit that before reading this section and before chatting to Dave about the use of debate in a variety of forums I was sceptical about its effectiveness. As I saw it practised it seemed to be very much “I’m right, your wrong” approach that seemed to me less that productive. But I think if productive conflict is practised as described in this chapter I can see how a level a friction can be extremely beneficial. K&S’s main point, as I understood it, is that if a group focuses on conflict around ideas (cognitive conflict) and avoided conflict associated with interpersonal relationships (affective conflict) and conflict over who should do what (process conflict) a product outcome can emerge. This also assumes the group has a desire to improve the understanding or has a group problem to solve. Using a sporting metaphor, “play the ball, not the player.” 

This chapter is well worth a read. The only criticism of have of it is the slight feeling of disjointedness throughout. Each section was interesting and useful but I couldn’t always see how it fitted into a larger picture.

For some time now I’ve been advocating what I call ‘action-oriented communities of practice.’ The model is described here and it’s in use by a range of communities of practice. The starting point is to convene short, intense discussions around topics of interest to the community. This can be done online or face to face but should be limited to about 12 people per discussion table so everyone who attends is present. But what do you talk about?

One option is to organise a Wikipedia raid where a group of people work on a single entry in the Wikipedia encyclopedia. The community just picks a single entry related to its domain and as many people from the community that can be mustered work to improve the entry over a short period of, say, 24 hours. At the same time the community might conduct an online discussion to talk about ideas for future community actions this activity prompts. At the end of the raid the community will have improved an artefact directly relevant to its interests, worked together as a community (a bit of a barn raising activity) and developed new ideas for the future.

Here’s an example of an invitation to a Wikipedia raid.

I'm on route home from Florence (at Heathrow) and I just wanted to get down some thoughts about the Prato Dialogue I've just attended. Eight CPSquare members met for 3 days and we engaged in sustained conversation supported by the bare essentials: a couple of flips charts, chocolate, good food and wine and plenty of humour. It was a real joy. Think about those times when you've attended a conference and you had great conversations in the corridors or at morning and afternoon tea. Well Prato was that without all the boring powerpoint presentations that keep you away from the conversations. Actually, we talked a lot about conversations. I proposed that conversations were waning in organisations and we pondered why and what might be done to turn the tide. We recorded and documented every session so expect to see the details over at the Prato Dialogue blog. Our major theme, understandably since it was a CPSquare event, communities of practice.

I think we were blessed with an excellent group of people. All were great listeners, with an array of practical experiences and theoretical knowledge. There was also diversity with each one of us coming from a different country, some were old mates while others, like me, were new to the group. And despite being a new comer I didn't feel like an outsider. Some of the guys are now heading off to the communities informatics conference in Prato to run a workshop based on the ideas that were covered during our conversations. I believe they will be running a Most Significant Change session to show how this technique can be used to evaluate a community of practice.

actKM is running its 7th annual conference on 25 and 26 October. This is the best KM conference in Australia because it consists of practitioners talking about how it is done – no vendor presentations. It’s a two day program with an excellent conference dinner—not to be missed. The conference theme is “Realising the Knowledge Management Vision” with a focus on balancing and integrating the cultural and technical elements of knowledge management theory and practice to deliver tangible organisational benefits.

I will be there along with Robyn Ciuro. Let me know if you are going because I would love to catch up.

The conference program is here.

And you can register here. 

A couple of years ago I started a little group in Melbourne called Emergence. It’s open to anyone who wants to talk about the application of complexity thinking to organisational issues. It has had some ups and downs but I’m seeing a resurgence of interest in the group. New members have joined and they want to make something of it.

The group, as you can imagine from the topic, consists of highly educated and thoughtful people. We have scientists, consultants, engineers and managers as members. I have been surprised, however, at how bad we are at having a conversation. I went looking for ways to help the group this morning and found this list of things to avoid and I think we might infringe on ever point.

• Do not get tempted to answer questions that will move you away from your topic
• Do not have separate discussions with just one person
• Do not interrupt people when speaking (unless they don't seem to stop...)
• Do not let a few active people set the agenda
• Do not use slang or bad habits like saying "right" after every sentence

In particular we have one member who dominates the conversation and jumps wildly from one topic to the next. I skyped Nancy White for her thoughts and she suggested we introduce a ‘talking stick’-like object. This will help.

The list of things to avoid comes from the Oxford Research Group but I found the list at this student’s group site. They also provide a list of things to do. I’ll share both lists to our Emergence group as a potential set of guidelines.

• Allow the audience to influence the agenda, so that you speak to their real concerns
• One argument at the time
• Stay cool ­ even when the audience doesn't
• Be objective
• Finish one topic before starting the next (if possible)
• Respect the chair
• Ask those not so active
• Avoid “dangerous” topics that will move the discussion away from disarmament (the Oxford Research Group is interested in peace negotiations)
• Ask people to repeat their question if you are not sure you have understood it
• Establish common ground

I also went looking for structured dialogue techniques and wasn’t able to find any described in detail. Are you aware of any specific dialogue techniques which you think we should try out. It’s a great little group for experimenting with a number of methods. They are up for it.

A handful of community of practice practitioners are meeting in Florence this October to reflect on the field’s theory and practice. Here is the blog Beverly Trayner has established to support our efforts.

If you want to understand Communities of Practice you couldn’t do better than join John Smith, Etienne Wenger and Bronwyn Stuckey on their online exploration of CoPs (see announcement below). You might also like to know that CPSquare members, a community of practice for community of practice practitioners, have an RSS feed which aggregates all our blogs.

The next “Foundations of Communities of Practice” workshop starts SOON -- on Monday September 11th!  It's an extraordinary experience for many people (including the organisers: Etienne Wenger, Bronwyn Stuckey and I -- and a wonderful bunch of guest speakers and mentors who generously contribute their time and expertise :-).

One participant in the Spring Workshop said something like, "This is the most brilliant e-learning design I've ever seen."  At the moment I can't put my hands on it and I haven't for his permission, but it really did make me feel good and, although it's a pretty big commitment to participate in this workshop, it is an investment you won't regret!

More details about the workshop and the registration form are here:

 http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/index.htm

John Smith tells an amusing anecdote about our conference call last week and makes some comments about conference calls and communities of practice.

I was on a conference call on the weekend discussing Steve Denning’s book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, with the CP Square guys. In chapter 7 Steve makes a clear distinction between CoPs and Networks where the latter consists of a group of people who link together for mutual benefit, such as an alumni. While a community of practice is a group with formed for the purpose of improving member practice. Now, if you take extreme examples like your LinkedIn contacts (a network) and Shell’s Turbodudes (a CoP of geologists interested in turbidites) the difference between the two forms of organising are clear. But when we consider the middle ground it seems that the organising structure is in the eye of the beholder. For example, ask a handful of people who participate in ActKM, some will say it is a network while others will swear it is a community of practice.

I would like to propose that the way we perceive the group type as either a network or a CoP depends on whether people have heard and retell the group’s foundational stories. I know many of the ActKM stories because I was there from the start. I can tell you the one about the KMCI debacle which helped get ActKM started, the one about how the listserver system went haywire and we introduced moderation and the one about the YahooGroups being deleted. So I see ActKM as a CoP. I’m also a member of CP Square but I don’t know that group’s stories and consequently I see it more as a network than a community. I would like to change my perception in that case.

This is merely an observation. Does it hold true in your experience?

I was reminded earlier this week of an event in 2000 when I was working for SMS consulting that demonstrated the dramatic and adverse impact that inappropriate management can have on a community of practice.

A small group of consultants interested in knowledge management had started meeting regularly and over several years the group had expanded to include members in all other SMS offices. While the company provided support in terms of facilities, beverages, food and permission, we were for a long time just tolerated rather than valued.  When the company realised that knowledge management had business potential and that their little CoP had developed methodologies, presentations, business development materials and had in fact completed a few projects, they decided to take this KM stuff seriously. So, they appointed a manager to ‘oversee’ the activities of the group. At his first meeting, the manager advised us to stop developing these materials and our new priorities were to be the development of a business case to justify our continued existence and a document development schedule. We were thrilled – NOT! As soon as we started making a difference we were to be diverted from work that contributed to our practice of KM. The next week most of the group didn’t turn up - same the week after. Fortunately, after a ‘either he goes or we go’ chat with the regional director, the new ‘oversight’  arrangements were removed.

This experience is evidence of an APQC finding that “management can hamper or kill a community, but it cannot make it thrive”.  It demonstrates that management intervention needs to be carefully handled and that there is always a delicate balance between member value and organisational value.

1. ‘Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice’ APQC Report, 2001, p9.

The Guardian has pulled together some statistics suggesting that for every 100 people online only 1 person will create content and 10 will “interact” with it. The other 89 will just view it.

Here are some stats from the article:

• each day at YouTube there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads
• 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users
• in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, 1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups

My own research with Trish Milne shows a similar ratio. In our survey of ActKM members (a mostly online knowledge management community of practice) 78% said they’ve never contributed to the online discussion yet were regular readers. The regular posters on ActKM would account for about 1–5% of the membership.

The important message for me is this: look after your content creators because it’s tough building online communities and you must encourage those people who contribute.

[thanks to Nerida Hart for the pointer]

Milne, P. & Callahan, S. D. 2006. ActKM: the story of a community. Journal of Knowledge Management, 10(1): 108-118.

There often comes a point in the life of a community of practice when the group really benefits from creating tangible things designed to improve the members’ practice. This point occurs sometime after the early days of formation after the members have worked out their domain, and they know who’s participating, how people get on with one another, and how members communicate.

Following is a simple approach designed to coordinate action within a CoP. I first spoke about this approach in relation to setting up a Quickplace environment, which in retrospect might have been a mistake because many people couldn’t see how the ideas where relevant if they weren’t using Quickplace or when technology isn’t in the community’s sights.

There are three parts to this approach:

• discussion tables
• a list of possible projects
• small groups (ideally 3 people) working on things together

A discussion table is when community members come together to discuss a topic related to the community’s domain. The community coordinator might organise discussion tables on a regular basis. They can be done face to face or be a facilitated online discussion. I think there should be no more than about 12 people in the conversation to ensure everyone is present and active. If there are more than 12 people interested in the discussion table topic then run multiple discussion tables. During the conversation one of the participants keeps a note of ideas involving members taking action to improve the member practice. For example, if you were part of a business narrative community and the topic was ‘running effective anecdote circles’ someone might suggest, “we should develop a anecdote circle facilitator’s kit” or “we should develop a members training program”. These ideas would be noted and added to the list of possible projects. A summary of the discussion table conservation is also distributed to the entire community.

The list of possible projects is a simple list of all the suggested projects and activities arising in the discussion tables and other forums. You might put the list online and allow members to vote on each suggested project. Members are encouraged to take on a project from this list in groups of 3 and ideally with people you haven’t work with before. This simple rule helps the community create new social networks. These small project teams might use an online collaboration space. Once they’ve completed their project they communicate the results to the entire community and store the outputs where members can access them.

The community therefore makes progress by hosting discussion tables and encouraging active and robust conversation that leads people to suggesting things that would be good to do as a community. The list of projects grows and some are tackled based on the energy and enthusiasm of members. The process of undertaking these projects in small groups creates new relationships which in turn creates new conversations and new ideas for future discussion tables.

Related posts:

• Using Quickplace to support a Communities of Practice
• New white paper: connecting people with content

One of our newsletter readers asks the following question in relation to our article on expertise location: 

“do you have any comments or references on how to go about the evaluation of this expertise?”

Building a groups’ capability to assess the validity of advice, ideas and suggestions is an important skill. The first step is awareness. How often do you hear people, especially management gurus, saying “my research suggests …” then never actually referencing the research results. This happened this week in ActKM where a poster said:

So I asked for the reference and the poster said that he didn’t have access to the reports but thought it would be a good idea to cite references—and then omitted the citations!

I asked for the names of the reports, but no reply. Another member of the community supported my idea of citing references in these cases but after that, total silence. The community is tacitly giving permission to this behaviour.

This is an example of where the community is not building a capacity to recognise flawed advice. Following are some ideas on the skills communities could develop which would help the entire group be more discerning.

I remembered two useful references when I was asked about evaluating expertise: Chris Argyris’ book Flawed Advice, and Bob Sutton’s essay called Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? But before I remind us of some of Chris and Bob’s suggestions on evaluating expertise let me describe some of the things I’ve learnt from experience (probably just common sense).

• Listen for stories. Without stories advice and expertise remains abstract and devoid of experience. Become aware of the richness of the story—how detailed are they? do they include facts?
• Are they ever wrong? I’m suspicious of people who purport to have all the answers and have never made a mistake in their life.
• Can they see what’s missing? Deep expertise is not just the ability to see what’s happening and make suggestions for improvement but the ability to see what’s missing and knowing what to leave out. This idea was introduced to me in Gary Klein’s book on Intuition.
• Simple, clear language. If you really understand what you are talking about you should be able to convey your ideas simply, clearly and concisely.
• Triangulate the expertise with your social networks. Jim tells me that Martha knows her stuff; Anne tells me that Martha is top notch; but Martha doesn’t keep telling me how wonderful she is. My confidence in Martha is high.
• An expert in one field doesn’t make them an expert in everything. There is a well known psychological pattern where if people believe a person is an expert in a field, such as corporate strategy, they are inclined to believe that person in also expert in other similar fields, such as mergers and acquisitions.

Chris Argyris suggestion is to listen for advice which is: “… illustrated, encourage inquiry, and are easily tested.” On the other hand be wary of  advice “that include little or no illustration, inquiry, or testing” and where defensive reasoning dominates. The problem with this suggestion, as I see it, that much advice is not easily tested or takes considerable time to test it. For example, we have been saying that anecdote circles are an excellent method to elicit stories and they create a positive and trusting experience simply based on our experience. It is not until this year that we have put this to the test and had each participant who attended an anecdote circle provide an evaluation of the experience that we were able to test our assertion. BTW we are presenting our results at KM Asia.

I’ve written a post about Bob Sutton’s suggestions to test management advice here. I call his suggestions heuristics for bullshit detection (please excuse the vulgarity of this phrase. You should know that it is quite a common term in Australia and I believe Australians are great bullshit detectors).

Thanks to Nancy White for a conversation that helped me remember some useful ideas.

 

Trish Milne and I had one of our papers recently published in the Journal of Knowledge Management entitled, ActKM: the story of a community. Here are some of the finding from our research:

• 78% of respondents had never or only infrequently posted to the online discussion
• 21% of respondents indicated that ActKM has sparked initiatives in their organisations
• Over a 1/3 of respondents indicated that they have made off-list contact with list members and 80% of these contacts were with people with whom they had not previously communicated
• The ability to network with new and interesting people was listed as the most valuable aspect of ActKM

20% of the 840 members of ActKM responded to our survey. The paper also reports on interviews we did with frequent contributors and the core team.

Milne, P. & Callahan, S. D. 2006. ActKM: the story of a community. Journal of Knowledge Management, 10(1): 108-118.

The actKM list has a discussion underway to collect stories of how people have (either successfully or otherwise) tried to get management support for their KM activities. The story below is the one I submitted.

So, while I would love to say that the MD immediately approved the business case for travel for the domain teams, this wasn’t the outcome.  But there was a major change in the MD’s attitude towards the domains.  It went from ‘tolerating their existence’ to seeing clearly how they could and were adding value to the business.  I then continued to look for and test other stories…

 

John Smith and Beverly Trayner have written an interesting and useful paper describing how community coordinators can use a combination of online technology and face-to-face meetings to enhance learning. In particular their designs for ramping-up discussions online in preparation for face-to-face meeting and then ramp-down online, shows how we better integrate the virtual with the real.

Mark and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves over the last couple of days delivering our communities of practice workshops. The discussions were excellent. Thanks to all the participants.

One conversation led me to rethink how to conceptualise the relationship between projects and CoPs. In many organisations projects are the lifeblood. It’s how things get done. These projects consist of teams striving to kick goals and hit targets. Communities of practice, on the other hand, are designed for learning and improving the capabilities of their members. While they might have a stated mission their trajectory evolves rather than being predefined. I used to draw these two entities as an arrow and cloud.

Projects often pose questions to the communities and practice. The adept community of practice is aware of the projects it can assist and pro-actively provides answers and ideas.

The problem with this combination of metaphors (arrow and cloud) is it reinforces the stereotype that communities of practice are fluffy, ethereal, add-ons which are only exist to serve the real business of the organisation—the projects.

Here is an alternative depiction where the community of practice acts as the solid core supporting the project’s activities. The back and forth interaction between the community and the project remains but the message changes to one where the community is a solid and real foundation to how things get done around here.

I would love to hear of other ways to represent these ideas. 

It’s interesting how I’ve found myself drawn into discussion lately around the difficulties of facilitating engineers and scientists. If facilitating engineers and scientists is difficult, imagine then, the challenge of how to educate, train and inform engineers and scientists on ‘how to be more facilitative’. With many organisations now developing communities of practice to meet strategic knowledge management objectives such demands on scientific and engineering staff may be more common than you think. Given that ‘being facilitative’ is one of the requirements for successfully nurturing and developing communities of practice, how does one go about about being facilitative?

Of course, nothing is impossible. Scientists and engineers are at a disadvantage though. The big disadvantage I see is that scientists and engineers often live in fear of (publicly) asking stupid questions. When you have spent most of your life training to be ‘a problem solver’ or to ‘have the answer’ some light is shed on the problem of being facilitative. Being facilitative requires one to often ask what appears to be stupid questions, maybe even naive questions. At least I think so. If you’ve spent alot of your time, training and effort, being the one to answer questions, how hard is it going to be for you to ask “what do others think?”.

I think that being facilitative requires one to be happy with not knowing and yet maintain the desire to know. For group sensemaking this is a critical insight. If the facilitator is willing to live with the uncertainty of not knowing, which by the way is where you will find yourself spending alot of time as a facilitator, the group will find itself getting to better outcomes. Being happy with not knowing yet maintaining the desire to know sets up a great precondition for sensemaking. Dissonance. For a scientist and engineer who might presume to know, the possibility for group sensemaking immediately starts to close down.

As we have been finding from our reflective practice on language in facilitation, language is something which emerges from a mindset and there definitely appears to be a mindset which goes along with ‘being facilitative’. I’ve blogged before about what I think are foundational elements for facilitation, many of these reflect this mindset element.

Facilitation is more than just finding some great processes like you might at the citizen science toolbox and applying them. Though this is a great place to start. Facilitation is something you have to get your hands dirty with to learn. Action learning if you will. Once you start you will soon learn the power of empathy, asking stupid questions and laughing at yourself along the way.

Steve Denning has compiled some of his recent posts on list-servs like com-prac and made the compilation available on his website. He covers the following topics:

• Is a request for the ROI of COPs legitimate?
• Is ROI the right measure for CoPs?
• Do stories support numbers or vice versa?
• What’s the motive behind asking “what’s the ROI?”
• Does the ROI help when it comes to the crunch?
• The problems of the worst CoPs

Aber Whitcomb, CTO for MySpace, revealed to Robert Scoble some of the secrets behind MySpace’s popularity. They sound similar to the advise one might give to anyone starting a community of practice.

I was reminded last week that projects provide great opportunities to develop communities of practice.  No surprises really, with all that project time and effort spent consulting with stakeholders, reconciling divergent positions and building relationships to effect a meaningful change.

But many opportunities are missed to create communities of practice as part of project or project-like activities - communities that can maintain the project 'domain' once the project is declared complete and the project team dismantled.  Communities of practice provide the cross-organisational structures that can help maintain the changes introduced by the project.  Our organisations undertake many ‘projects’ that develop bodies of 'practice' – often very good ones. The reality however; is that they start dating from the moment they are published and progressively become less accurate and relevant and useful, until someone decides that a new project is needed to revamp the body of practice. 

With a different mindset and a few extra resources, communities of practice can be nurtured as part of the project.  In many cases, these communities can undertake much of the maintenance work need to keep the body of practice up-to-date and useful.  Of course, projects can also be undertaked with the express purpose of building a community of practice.

Kathy Kuryl from the Tasmanian government pointed out a great example of this last week.  The Tasmanian government undertook a project to improve the practice of project management. An impressive and tailored set of resources were developed that have been well received across all Tasmanian government departments. A cross-government community of practice has also been nurtured that plays a a major role in maintaining and improving these resources.  Go to http://www.projectmanagement.tas.gov.au/ to see the results and output of this project.

Last month actKM faced a disaster. On the 15th January YahooGroups deleted the actKM group. It's a long story and not really the point of this post but it amounted to a member complaining to Yahoo that another member infringed their trademark. So instead of deleting the offending posts, Yahoo deleted the whole group.

I first heard of actKM's disappearance from David Williams. I'm the group owner so Dave called me to see if I knew anything, which I didn't, and was then told of the desperate attempts to contact Yahoo. The first couple of weeks were the hardest because we didn't know why it vanished and while David and Nerida Hart maintained their efforts to contact Yahoo on a daily basis there was no response.

It was time for plan B. I fired off emails to Nancy White, Etienne Wenger, and John Smith. Mark contacted Patrick Lambe, Jerry Ash (AOK), Dave Snowden, Joe Firestone, David Gurteen and many others. We tried to get in contact with everyone we knew in the community of practice and knowledge management discipline who might help out. Fortunately both Nancy White and Patrick Lambe knew some  people at Yahoo, and played key roles in activating networks. The Yahoo contact started to make enquiries inside the  behemoth. Dave Snowden was talking to the member who had complained to Yahoo and smoothing things out from that end.

As actKM convener, Mark Schenk played a pivotal role. He spent many late nights understanding what actually happened, talking to the protagonists and smoothing the waters, and contacting the owners of other missing KM groups (a Malaysian and Indian KM groups vanished too). At the same time Mark and the actKM committee members, with the help of Ron Rogers (IT support guy extraordinaire), started a new discussion list and web-site (including a blog). During this time Mark would have sent 100s of emails to the community, community sponsors and people at Yahoo.

Eventually the Yahoo product manager contacted Mark and said that the growing momentum of the grass roots blogging and email campaign could not be ignored and they reinstated our group, minus the offending emails. Yahoo realises that this was an unfortunate event and are currently looking at ways to improve their service.

There are two lessons for me. First, never underestimate to power of networks. As Nancy said a few times in emails: networks rock! When a group of passionate, smart and dedicated people decide to band together to right a wrong there is nothing stopping them. Second, there needs to be a conductor, a voice of reason, a cool head, and Mark played this role to perfection.

[Update: it looked liked the Yahoo lawyers made the decision to remove the group. As Seth Godin says, the lawyers must see them selves as part of the marketing department and in this case they didn't.

I was visiting Beverly Trayner’s blog today and noticed that she references a set of Nancy White’s del.icio.us tags on communities of practice. I think this is an excellent idea. If you are unfamiliar with del.icio.us think it of a website where you can bookmark websites that interest you and everyone else can see what you’ve bookmarked. You then categorise your bookmarks with tags. Here are some of Nancy’s (choconancy is her username and part time addiction) community of practice tags:

• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/communitiesofpractice
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/communitytechnology
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/technologyforcommunity
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/techreport

I haven’t been as organised as Nancy with my tagging but you are welcomed to have a look at the mishmash of things I’ve found interesting on the web: http://del.icio.us/unorder

We’ve been helping one of our large corporate clients this week make sense of a series of social network charts and during the process the team identified a strong community of practice which appeared to be having a conspicuous integrating effect on their division. In this case the community was a network of hygienists.

This observation started the group talking about what it takes to establish and sustain a community of practice. Of course this is an enormous and complex topic but it did remind me of a story Etienne Wenger told me which I’m fond of retelling.

Etienne was helping a car manufacturer establish a community and practice and the first thought was to connect the company’s engineers. They took this idea to potential community members and discovered there was little interest: the scope was too broad. ‘Yeh sure I’m an engineer but I have nothing in common with chemical engineers.’ The second attempt was to narrow the scope to automotive engineers: still little interest. It wasn’t until they reduced the scope to brake engineers did they find a group of people who thought they had enough in common, a shared identity, to band together as a community of practice.

I now have a simple test to gauge whether a community of practice might form. When someone says, “I would like to start a community of practice.” I ask, “Can you describe the potential members by completing the following sentence? I am a …..” If they can fill in the blank in a way that people can passionately identify with the descriptor then there is a chance a community might emerge. Let me give you an example. I was helping the Department of Defence design a community of practice for project managers. ‘I am a project manager’ was a strong descriptor and so we knew we had a chance. During the design process the client has another job type for which they wanted a community to support simply called ‘technical’. ‘I am a technical’ didn’t inspire so we knew it was unachievable. The ‘I am a …” test is easy and effective.

Our corporate client made a good point during our SNA discussions: the titles they bestow on people could effect whether someone identifies with a community or not. As it happens ‘hygienist’ is a common title and role in the organisation which might help new hygienists seek out and find one another. If you weren’t called a hygienist but did hygienist work in a large corporation you might never realise you should connect to the hygienist community. Renaming roles might be one small initiative in a portfolio of activities you might consider to get a community of practice started.

My holiday at the beach last week was interrupted by the news that the actKM Forum discussion group, of which I am currently the Convenor, had disappeared off the Yahoo! Groups site.  As it turns out, on 15 January, a number of Yahoo groups related to Knowledge Management disappeared completely from Yahoo! without notice or known cause.  The groups were actKM, KM-Malaysia and NCSI-KM-Forum (based in India).  To date, Yahoo! has provided neither explanation or assistance regarding the disappearances, and the groups don’t know if the disappearances were the result of administrative activity by Yahoo! or if they were malicious. 

 The most prominent of these groups was actKM.  It has been operating on Yahoo since 1999, it had over 1500 members and many thousands of messages covering every dimension of the knowledge management discipline.  actKM has been studied and written about extensively due to its prominence as a virtual community of practice. 

Since 15 January, all three groups have taken steps to recover the situation and continue their activity.  actKM is migrating to its own discussion list at www.actkm.org and is encouraging all those who were part of the Yahoo group to join the new list.  The new actKM website is based on a blog.

KM-Malaysia has been superseded by the KMAM Yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kmam/.   NCSI-KM-Forum has started a temporary Yahoo group while they determine the best way forward http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/IKM-Forum/

One of the positives to come from the disappearance of these groups is the way in which many individuals and KM communities of practice across the globe have rallied to support the affected groups.  I would also call on fellow bloggers to help spread the word so that members of these groups know what’s happening.  It’s also a big wake-up call to those with communities hosted on Yahoo! Groups and the like.

Happy New Year to everyone from the team at Anecdote.  We hope you are returning fresh and fully charged to take on 2006…

I have been thinking about a metaphor that describes communities of practice as ‘the right brain of the organisation’.  As we know, the right and left brains are described as performing different functions.  Neurosurgeon Richard Bergland describes them as follows: “…your left brain is your verbal and rational brain; it thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words. …Your right brain is your non-verbal and intuitive brain; it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things’ and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers or letters or words.”  The right brain has parallel processing capacity and can detect patterns in large masses of information; it also copes more easily with vague or missing data.  Michael LeBoeuf postulates that creative thinking requires coordinating and using both sides of the brain.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see most organisations as having a predominantly left-brain focus, with hierarchical structures, emphasis on quantitative assessments and decision making based on numbers such as head count and return on investment, libraries full of strategies, doctrine, policy and procedure and formal lines of reporting and communication (to name but a few relevant characteristics).  Computers can also be described as an electronic extension of our left brains.  

Communities of practice traverse most of the formal structures, processes and reporting hierarchies in organisations. They connect people and expertise irrespective of rank, location, specialisation or division.  Perhaps they allow us to access the ‘right-brain capabilities‘ of our organisations.  If this is the case, and if LeBoeuf is right, then communities of practice are not simply desirable in organisations, they are essential…

I have just returned from a conference in Sydney on Knowledge and Innovation.  I sat on a panel yesterday addressing the question “Communities of Practice: why do they work or fail?” One of the points I made was that communities of practice are often named something else, normally to adopt a title more suitable for the organisational context.  The question was then asked “what other names might be applied to communities of practice”.  I rattled off a few examples, and a number more came to me later.  Here are some of the generic synonyms for communities of practice that I am aware of::

• 
  Networks of Excellence (CRS Australia)


• 
  Centres of Excellence (various)


• 
  Knowledge Networks (ASIC)


• 
  Networks of Expertise


• 
  Special Interest Groups (various)


• 
  Domain Teams (Jacobs Sverdrup Australia)


• 
  Professional Forum (US Army CompanyCommand)


• 
  Networks (BHP Billiton, Shell Oil US)


• 
  Taskforce (eg NSW Health Greater Metropolitan Clinical Taskforce that started as a temporary structure and has now become relatively permanent)


• 
  Thematic Groups (World Bank)


• 
  Tech Clubs (DaimlerChrysler)


• 
  Best Practice Replication Networks (Ford)


• 
  Community of Interest Network (COIN) (Cap Gemini Ernst and Young)


• 
  Practice Forums (legal firm)


• 
  Practice Areas (CSIRO)

Of course, many communities of practice are referred to by specific names rather than the generic ones listed above, with examples including Project Management Forum (Defence Materiel Organisation) and the ‘turbodudes’ (Shell Oil US – as described in Wenger, McDermott and Snyder: Cultivating Communities of Practice).

Do you know of any other generic names used to describe communities of practice?

The gang at CPsquare are revisiting some guidelines they developed in 2003 for communities spanning time zones and countries. The original guidelines provide a great starting point for any global community of practice. I’ll keep you posted on the developments.

One of the suggestions which made me think was the advice to use more complex language because plain English can easily be misinterpreted by a non-English speaking community member.

Notice that in each example  a more precise single word substitutes for two more general words. Perhaps the advice could also be, “reduce your words and be precise”.

Communities of practice thrive on rhythm. I’m not talking about members taking up the tabla of course. Community rhythm is established by holding regular events such as meetings on the first Tuesday of the month, conference calls and distributing the humble newsletter. These events perform the vital function of reminding members that the community exists and interesting things are happening. Doubly important for distributed communities.

I was asked the other day what could be included in a newsletter. Here are some ideas drawn from my experience and what was done at Companycommand.com.

• have a member write a thought piece which challenges the orthodoxy of the group
• highlight new and interesting content that has been posted to the group’s online repository
• run a survey or quiz – you can use Survey Monkey for this (http://www.surveymonkey.com/)
• describe a scenario and then ask people to write in on how they would tackle it
• highlight new members or members who have done something interesting or useful for the group
• let the group know what the core team has been planning or working on
• include pictures
• announce events and remind members of the regular events

What other neat things have you included in a CoP newsletter?

Etienne is running his online community of practice workshop. I highly recommend this event. I had a blast when I first participated and since then have returned as a guest speaker (I should say, typer). Here is the link which will tell you all about it:

http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/

As we know, developing communities of practice is an organic activity. You never quite know what is going to happen or whether it will succeed. This is why a big bang approach is a mistake. To herald to your entire organisation that you are going to develop a community of practice on topic X is likely to cause pain when the initiative fails to gain support. I’ve seen this happen and it even more prevalent when the organisation has just invested in community technology which has forums functionality—”we must get CoPs going so people are using this forum functionality” I hear them say.

Here is the softly, softly approach I recommend people take:

• identify some people with common interests in a domain that is important to the business
• meet with each person separately and ask them about the things that interest, challenge, excite or intrigue them
• common things of interest invariably emerge
• suggest the all of them that they have some interesting things in common and offer to organise a meeting so they can discuss them
• at the meeting suggest they might meet regularly to enhance their learning in the domain

Once the groups starts to develop a rhythm, suggest they think of small tasks to work on together that might improve their practice—here is an approach. Only when the groups says things like, “how are we going to share these documents?” or “can we discuss this online?”, do you investigate technology support. Some groups will get to this point faster than others, and it doesn’t matter one bit.

Finally, keep a look our for indicators which suggest your community is making progress. But whatever you do don’t let management turn these indicators into targets! But that issue is a topic for another post.

I just had an interesting distinction drawn to my attention: the difference between collective meaning and group decision making. I’ve just finished Wisdom of Crowds which argues that under certain circumstances a group will make a better decision than any one individual. The author, James Surowiecki,  provides many examples including finding a submarine, guessing the weight of livestock, and Google’s ability to find relevant web pages. Wisdom of crowds are all examples of group decision making.

For Nancy Dixon the intended outcome of collective meaning making “… is a new way of understanding something that is shared across the collective.” Nancy goes on to illustrate her viewpoint with an anecdote about a North American Indian tribe of hunter-gatherers originally told by Bohm (of dialogue fame).

My work at Anecdote is primarily about collective meaning making. We use narratives collected from an organisation to help people have conversations that they wouldn’t normally have. That said, most companies are unwilling to spend time just talking, especially in the outcome focussed culture of Australia. Consequently, we follow meaning making with intervention design.

After a little bit of gentle cajoling, Nancy White has started to describe what she means by community indicators. And in good community building style Nancy invites us all to participate in the conversation. I love the simple and lyrical language Nancy employs. The idea of ‘signs of life’ (SoL) as an early indicator of a nascent community appeals to me. Those interested in developing communities must be sensitive to these signs of life which Nancy describes as like:

Boundaries are typically difficult to discern in a complex environment which might be doubly true when trying to decided if something is a SoL or CI. I’m sure it doesn’t matter as long as community members are noticing something. Some people are better at detecting these weak signals and they will see signs of life first. Their greatest challenge will be to convince others that they actually exist.

Here is how Nancy defines community indicators:

This works for me. Here is another example of a community indicator. 

The simple act of seeking community indicators is a community building exercise. I can imagine asking community members to help identify CIs and this group activity will create new relationships, new conversations and stronger communities—much like what Nancy is doing with the community_indicators tag.

How do we tune into CIs? How can we improve the chances of noticing signs of life?

OK, so Chip didn’t say that exactly. I heard part of Chip’s speech (on ABC radio) to the market announcing their record profit and he said their success came on the back of “efficiencies gained by sharing knowledge” across the company. I know BHP Billiton has a significant communities of practice program which forms the foundation of their Operational Excellence Division. It’s this division which is responsible for helping people share what they know. They are world leaders in the adoption of communities of practice approaches and this comment pays significant recognition to their good work.

I scanned the papers this morning and did a couple of searches and couldn’t find any journalist picking up this angle of the story. Interesting.

I love what Nancy is doing jotting down the many things which might indicate “community lives here”—yes, turn it into a book Nancy! I discovered these many interesting posts, all with the ‘community_indicators’ Technorati tag, a week ago. Frustratingly I was unable to find a post describing Nancy’s initial idea of a community indicator – Nancy, can you point me in the right direction?

This discovery came at a serendipitous time. I was thinking about the reasons why we try and measure communities of practice and came to the conclusion that trying to determine the link between community activity and organisational performance is a futile task. So what do we do?

I’m not sure if the following analogy has already been drawn, but community indicators are like indicator species; they indicate the health of a the community/ecosystem. Green frogs are my favourite ecosystem example-albeit an inaccurate and imprecise one. If a green frog is an indicator species of a healthy ecosystem, introducing a gross of green frogs doesn’t improve the ecosystem’s health. The same is true of community indicators.  These indicators help people inside the community understand and nurture their ‘environment’ but, please, please, please don’t turn them into management targets.

Now what about senior decision makers and their valid need to be convinced of the business value of communities of practice—the needs and foibles of these decision makers is well described by David Pollard today. I think the key is to remember the purpose: community leaders must persuade these decision makers and realise objective measurement is impossible. So where do look for ways to persuade these decision makers? I think a good place to start is with the ideas of Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds and Robert Cialdini’s Influence. Neither book is on a typical knowledge management reading list but this should change.

Quickplace out of the box is a useful collaboration tool for teams but its default configuration is unhelpful