| 27/06/08 | | Vital behaviours for communities of practice |
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?"
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| 10/06/08 | | Intentional communities and designing for emergence |
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.
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| 6/04/08 | | Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice |
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.
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| 4/04/08 | | Craftsmanship |
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.
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| 9/03/08 | | Community of Practice success story |
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.
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| 24/02/08 | | Knowledge management lessons |
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 managementView 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.
| 22/02/08 | | Running a knowledge market on a teleconference |
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:
- Help participants appreciate the nature of what members are keen to share with the community and what members are seeking to learn
- Create new connections among community members
- 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.
| 3/02/08 | | Lao Tsu on communities of practice development |
Go to the People
Live with them
Learn from them,
Love them.Start with what they know,
. . . But with the best leaders
Build with what they have.
When the work is done
the task is accomplished
The people will say,
‘We have done this ourselves.’
| 31/01/08 | | Seven ways to get more from your teleconferences |
Your teleconference system is one of your most important KM technologies.
Here are 7 things a facilitator can do to improve teleconference experience.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 ..."
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
| 31/01/08 | | BHP Billiton axes its Knowledge Networks |
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.
| 29/01/08 | | Etienne Wenger's Online CoP Workshop |
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.
| 25/01/08 | | Organic Communities of Practice |
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.
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| 17/01/08 | | Storytelling, Business Narrative and Community of Practice Workshops |
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.
| 17/01/08 | | Starting a community of practice - fostering relationships |
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.
| 12/12/07 | | Communities of Practice |
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.
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| 7/11/07 | | Name badges as conversation starters |
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.
| 16/10/07 | | Explaining the action-oriented communities of practice model |
A while back we developed the action-oriented communities of practice model as a simple way to systematically build connection and output from a CoP. I thought it might be useful to explain this model as a simple Sketchcast.
Technorati Tags: sketchcast
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| 12/10/07 | | Participation in communities of practice |
I'm really enjoying Sketchcast. One of the reasons why I think this is an important knowledge transfer technology is the feeling I'm getting that people are getting fed up with so much reading. A couple of weeks ago Daryl and I ran a narrative workshop for a construction company. We plastered the wall with anecdotes from their company and as people arrived we invited them to read the stories. There was a visible sigh from these guys. It wasn't their preferred method of taking in information. Mind you, once they got started they really enjoyed hearing their colleague's stories. I guess it made me think that we need to always be on the look out for other ways to present information and the rough sketch is an essential part of any repertoire.
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| 10/10/07 | | Relationship between projects and communities of practice |
Here is a sketch I often draw when talk to CoP co-ordinators.
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| 27/08/07 | | Tacit Knowledge Retention with Communities of Practice |
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.
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| 31/07/07 | | Etienne Wenger on Communities of Practice |
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]
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| 29/07/07 | | Quicklinks |
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!
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| 24/06/07 | | One of the many forces driving the need for knowledge retention practices |
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
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| 21/06/07 | | Three types of collaboration |
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.
Technorati Tags: nancy white, social software
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| 22/03/07 | | Shell's blue book - a fine example of storytelling |
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.
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| 15/03/07 | | Communities of Practice - a strategic technology? |
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.
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| 14/03/07 | | Thinking strategically about communities of practice |
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.
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| 13/03/07 | | Make it explicit when... |
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
- 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
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| 3/03/07 | | Revitalising communities of practice |
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.
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| 17/02/07 | | Driving the Mars Rover |
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 process is a kind of apprenticeship, where observation, study, and supervised practice combine to pass on knowledge and skills that book learning or theoretical discussion alone could never teach. We think this is the only effective way to teach the complex and subtle skills a rover driver needs.
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
stories recounting the real-life experiences of practitioners communicate important practical wisdom. By telling their stories, managers, scientists, and engineers share valuable experience-based knowledge and foster a community of reflective practitioners.
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| 16/02/07 | | Walking to create community |
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.
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| 28/01/07 | | Using small rituals to switch roles and behaviour |
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.
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| 22/01/07 | | Moving from on-line to face-to-face and back again |
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:
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Design for learning using CPD model is productive
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Spending time on social processes
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Using different media to negotiate language as part of a larger process
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Creating new possibilities: subgroups and outside experts as resources
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Demonstrating leadership roles in different media
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Provoking shifts in "comfort zones."
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| 21/12/06 | | Foster your communities of practice by getting members to answer questions |
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:
- Encourage newer users—especially those who've been active askers—to start trying to answer questions
- Give tips on how to answer questions (see below)
- Tell them it’s OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they’re guessing
- Adopt a near-zero-tolerance “Be Nice” policy when people answer questions
- Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer’s dignity.
- 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.
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| 3/12/06 | | Action-oriented communities of practice |
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
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| 26/11/06 | | How a community can find the information it needs |
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.
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| 11/11/06 | | Running our communities of practice workshop in Hong Kong |
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.
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| 2/11/06 | | Kurtz and Snowden on inter-organisational learning networks |
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.
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