John Sharp Background: Informal Networks are UbiquitousWhen people work together, they invariably form many informal networks of relationships that go beyond formal organizational patterns. Numerous corporate studies find that people working in organizations develop informal networks of relationships based on proximity, personal attraction and common backgrounds among its members. Moreover, much important work that assists the operation of many companies gets done through such informal connections cutting across departments. In short, people in organizations never just strictly follow the formal organization and never behave just as cogs in a machine. The networks of relationships that employees form across functions and divisions often enable the organization to accomplish tasks faster or better than would be the case if communication and action took place along formal organizational lines alone. These informal networks can cut through formal reporting procedures to jump-start stalled initiatives and meet extraordinary deadlines. Providing conditions that encourage these social links, revamping formal organizations to let the informal ones thrive, can help organizations harness the real power in their companies. For example, see Jeffrey R. Krackhardt Davidhanson, Informal Networks: The Company Behind The Chart, Harvard Business Review, January 1993. A Community of Practice (COP) is a special type of informal network that emerges from a desire to work more effectively or to understand work more deeply among members of a particular specialty or work group. At the simplest level, CoPs are small groups of people who've worked together over a period of time and through extensive communication have developed a common sense of purpose and a desire to share work-related knowledge and experience. (Good online examples of discussions of communities of practice include Thomas Stewart, The Invisible Keys to Success, Fortune Magazine 6 August 1996 http://pathfinder.com/@@cfmIeQUAbnwrmKLP/fortune/magazine/1996/960805/edg.html, John Seely Brown & Estee Solomon Gray, The People Are the Company, FastCompany Magazine, November 1995 at http://www.fastcompany.com/fastco/Issues/first/People.htm or http://www.fastcompany.com/t1/inprint/01/people.htm, and The Document Management Alliance Whitepaper, Communication is a Social Activity, at http://www.aiim.org/dma/accomplish/dmawhite.html). Typically such groups do not overlap with company-assigned teams or task forces. Because they grow out of human sociability and efforts to meet job requirements (especially those not anticipated and supported by the formal organization and formal training for work), a COP is typically not an authorized group nor a role identified on an organization chart. In fact they can work at cross-purposes to the organization's leaders intent. Stewart in The Invisible Keys to Success notes, "As communities of practice proliferate, occupational principles begin to compete with administrative principles." A person's responsibilities to the communities of which he is a member sometimes conflict with each other, and with the rules and interests of the companies he works for. People in CoPs may perform the same job (technical representatives) or collaborate on a shared task (software developers) or work together on a product (engineers, marketers, and manufacturing specialists). They are colleagues, bound together by their common responsibility to get a certain type of "real work" done. There are typically many communities of practice within a single company, and most people belong to more than one of them. CoPs are typically small groups of specialists that learn together. They emerge of their own accord: Three, four, 20, maybe 30 people find themselves drawn to one another by a force that's both social and professional. They collaborate directly, use one another as sounding boards, teach each other. Such groups cannot be created by fiat, and reorganization, reassignments, and company failure to live up to implicit commitments can easily destroy them. Because CoPs generate extraordinary learning, they are among the most important structures of any organization where thinking matters. Steward claims that "Even though they tend inevitably to undermine an organization's formal structures and strictures, they are tolerated because they deliver value that formal organization cannot." A Seminal Analysis of CoPsA February 1991 article in Organization Science (Vol.2, No. 1, pp. 40-57) by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation) describes a study of Xerox repair representatives. While these service reps attempted to follow the company manuals and course training to repair these complex systems, too often the official manuals (which for didactic purposes reduced the amount of information given to reps) proved inadequate. As a supplement successful reps learned in lunch room conversations and other "social" occasions key "war stories" about ways to fix certain machine problems that had no solutions in the official repair manuals. Reps also exchanged stories about how to deal with difficult customers that proved useful, but again went well beyond their formal training. These informal stories about tough repair problems and tough customers act as repositories of accumulated wisdom. In addition to the "canonical" or official company teaching, repair reps also needed "non-canonical" learning, developed through work and in social exchanges, to be efficient reps. Brown and Duguid called this type of informal work-related social grouping a "community of practice." Because of their personal interaction, face-to-face traditional CoPs develop knowledge and understandings that go beyond their "book learning" and formal certification in a trade. Through informal interactions with like specialists they develop new information about how to do their job and how to act in certain settings. Through collaboration a CoP generates a common, shared understanding of events and an action orientation for dealing with such events the next time they arise. Many of the examples in the literature on CoPs focus on small groups that find time, often through off-job time or "water-cooler" time, to meet and discuss their specialties, their work environments and customers, and through this informal interaction expand their understanding of their profession. Such CoPs act like in-company professional societies. People are informally invited to join and stay on in an informal group because they have something to learn and to contribute. The notion of "practice" is critical in CoP, pointing out that the group concentrates on learning that emerges only though working, or actually practicing one's craft. CoPs supplement the book and classroom learning of many trade and professional workers. To learn how one does work in this organization, or in this area, that goes beyond the official "canonical" training for that activity implies that a key part of learning how to work is learning how to communicate and share information within the community of practice. In this sense, learning is about work, and work is about learning, and both are social. As informal groupings CoPs show many of the same qualities as informal communities. The group itself sets its own goals (understanding their specialty and its applications), membership boundaries (the group itself decides who is in, who is out, who are the respected leaders and who are the more casual followers), personal relationships (from casual acquaintance to friendships to deep emotional bonds), generalized reciprocity (a sense of mutual commitment to the community: one member may help another simply because they belong to the same community, not because of a personal relationship) and production of collective goods (the shared and enhanced understandings and expansions of professional knowledge in the organizational context.) The literature claims that such intense face-to-face CoPs seldom grow larger than fifty people, and typically are much smaller. This is about as big as a group can get before losing the physical ability to carry on the intense collaboration needed to build a shared commitment and outlook on their world. Can Cross-Functional Teams Develop Communities of Practice?Other parts of the literature focus on communities that grow up in cross-functional (rather than specialists) groups. One definition of CoP is a group of practitioners involved in a common activity, albeit performing different roles (As defined in The Knowledge Construction Glossary at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ostwald/glossaries/kc-glossary.html#C). Essential characteristics of cross-functional communities of practice pointed out in this definition are:
An example : James Euchner, a vice president in Nynex's research and development department, began thinking about the role of informal communication when he was puzzling over why some groups at Nynex were quick to adopt new technologies, others not. For example, some groups needed, on average, 17 days to set up data services for customers. Euchner hired an anthropologist to learn why. She found that different departments involved in the process never communicated informally and, as a result, didn't understand one another's roles and needs or solve problems together. When she and Euchner put the workers together in the same room, they created an environment that allowed informal groups to form around various tasks, which soon grew into a full-fledged community of practice. Result: a mutual sense of purpose and a sharing of ideas that cut the time to provision data services to just three days. (From Stewart, Invisible Keys to Success) Studies of R&D have found that formal reporting structures, mandatory reporting meetings, and formal written procedures effectively destroy the informal communications among team members because they inhibit the informal exchanges that learning depends on. In attempts to manage R&D some companies have slowed it down by an excess of formal procedures, unintentionally impeding communities of practice. (See, for example, Stewart, Invisible Keys to Success) The Dangers of the Instrumental Fallacy in the Face of Growing ProfessionalismMost individuals in organizations both want to make a difference and to be good at their jobs. They also strive to keep personal control over their lives and futures. At times corporate leaders fall into the instrumental fallacy - the danger of treating people as instruments, as well-behaved tools for the organization's purpose. Organizations, especially those heavily dependent on professionals, ignore informal networks in frequent reorganizations and promotions at their peril. (This section draws heavily on Charles Handy, Beyond Certainty: The Changing Worlds of Organisations, Harvard Business School Press, 1996). Organizations who think of their people as role occupants who can be replaced and moved as long as the role is properly defined, not only fall into the instrumental fallacy, but also neglect the growing importance in professional knowledge workers, who tend to give higher allegiance to their profession than to the corporation they practice in. More and more the chief asset of knowledge-based organizations are the intellectual skills of its key professionally skilled people. In many corporate plans increasingly the delivery of new and higher margin services and products depend on the allegiance and performance of these professional knowledge workers. As Gary Hamel (in Managing Out of Bounds, notes (at http://www.strategosnet.com/revolution/frontlin/moob.html): "The machine age was a physical world. It consisted of things. Companies made and distributed things (physical products). Management allocated things (capital budgets); management measured things (the balance sheet); management invested in things (plant and equipment). The language of accounting is a language of things. In the machine age, people were ancillary, things were central." "In the information age, things are ancillary, knowledge is central. For more and more companies, the ratio of market value to book value is a multiple of three, five, ten or more. A company's value derives not from things, but from knowledge, know-how, intellectual assets, competencies -- all of it embodied in people. And none of it's on the balance sheet" Professional knowledge workers view themselves as having lives and skills beyond the organization. Such knowledge workers prefer organizations that recognize their individual talents and provide space for their individual contributions. They prefer small, autonomous work groups based on reciprocal trust between leaders and led, groups responsible, as far as possible, for their own destiny. Familiarity and reciprocal trust do not automatically come with occupational role assignments. To the extent that an organization relies on professionals, it must pay particular attention to personal relationships, to communities of practice. While they are hard to build, destroying them is fairly easy. One way is to just keep moving people, promoting them, keeping work groups fairly instable. Another is to fail to successfully market their newly-developed skills. Increasingly certain types of professionals stay with large organizations because they hope it can provide marketing resources, job opportunities, and the leverage that comes with size. They hope for the opportunity to work on interesting tasks with interesting people, their own community of practice. Professionals want to believe that what is good for the individual professional is also good for the organization. They know their skills are "wasting" assets that must be continually renewed, that new learning must continually go on. What they ask of the organization is that it facilitate and encourage this continual learning. In return for interesting tasks and skills maintenance, professionals owe loyalty to the organization, but they behave as if that loyalty is conditional. If the organization reneges on the implicit contract to facilitates individual development, fails to take advantage of significant development or learning by a professional, or fails to sell their skills and keep them employed in interesting projects, many individuals feel released from any obligation to the corporation. Professional require management by consent if they are to give their best; consent that is theirs to give or to withhold. This implies that:
Professionals have both the right and the duty to sign their own work, both literally and metaphorically. A signature on one's work may be the best single recipe for quality. For reasons of personal pride, as well as fear of recrimination, few will want to sign their names to an inferior product.
Can CoPs be scaled up through improved electronic communications?A key question: can communications technology help CoPs (or something similar) scale up, so learning and information can be shared in a global company? Can the lower time costs of communicating electronically support larger grouping and CoPs than the smaller groups more dependent on personal communication? "... The challenge ... facing any company that wants to tap the latent power of its emergent communities: how do you achieve scale? CoPs seldom grow beyond 50 members - that's about as big as they can get before they lose the intense collaborations needed to build shared commitment. ... How can CoPs leverage themselves to affect the fortunes of such a giant organization? Part of the answer comes from technology… New
approaches to work require new kinds of computing. The
age of desktop computing is giving way to the era of
social computing. Virtual Communities in an On-Line WorldLiterature on "virtual" communities in on-line worlds give some clues to the possibility of CoP support through communications. This literature points to a "weaker" sense of community, a discourse community Discourse CommunitiesFor example, Thomas Erickson of the Apple Computer Research Laboratories, in Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Community as Participatory Genre at http://www.atg.apple.com/personal/Tom_Erickson/VC_as_Genre.html, suggest that virtual on-line communities have some attributes close to a CoP. Members of a discourse community are those who participate in a genre: they have shared goals, they communicate with one another, and they use various participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback. So we have arrived back at the notion of community, albeit one that is weaker than the traditional conception: discourse communities are more in the background, as mechanisms for supporting conversation, rather than as an end in themselves. Collective Goods Theory Applied to Mailing ListsMarc A. Smith, from the U.C.L.A. Department of Sociology, in his thesis Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons, at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs6704/papers/msmith.txt, does an in-depth analysis of "community" as evidenced in on-line discussion groups. He works from the perspective of the "collective goods" produced in an on-line community, pointing particularly to social network capital (the number of social relations available to an individual), recognition or status within a group for some contributors, the development of knowledge capital in successful groups, and a feeling of communion or membership within a group. Virtual communities produce a variety of collective goods. They allow people of like interests to come together with little cost, help them exchange ideas and coordinate their activities, and provide the kind of identification and feeling of membership found in face-to-face interaction. In the process they face familiar problems of defection, free-riding and other forms of disruptive behavior although in new and sometimes very unexpected ways. The novelty of the medium means that the rules and practices that lead to a successful virtual community are not yet well known or set fast in a codified formal system. In many ways virtual communities are modern incarnations of the committees of correspondence of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Like those groups formed around the political and scientific interests of the day, virtual communities are composed of groups brought together by a common interest and separated by potentially great distance. A successful mailing list will take on many attributes of community. Interaction in virtual spaces can come to share many of the characteristics of "real" interaction - people discuss, argue, fight, reconcile, amuse, and offend just as much and perhaps more in a virtual community. In mailing lists one sees examples of attempts to control behavior by correction, by suggestion, by appealing to the rules of the group, by attempting to keep posters on topic, and so on. Smith finds that successful mailing lists many participants come to have emotional attachments to one another without ever facing each other He notes that a history of romantic correspondence shows this could happen even in pre-listserv days. Marc Smith point to examples in his study of listservs on the WELL. "WELL-beings, or WELL-ites, often turn to one another for more than information that can be parlayed into other forms of capital. Within the WELL people turn to each other for support during crises and camaraderie during triumphs."
But most mailing lists don't succeed. Critical mass in postings will not be achieved, too few postings will be on topic, and days will pass with no new contributions. Mailing lists as Schelling PointsOne significant aspect of virtual communication may be the way in which it alters the economies of communication and coordination, thus making it possible for larger groups to "succeed" with less effort and difficulty. In successful on-line discussion groups users frequently develop relations with other users that have some stability and longevity. This should not be surprising considering the ease with which network systems allow individuals to find others with like interests. Listservs or electronic discussion groups are in many ways dynamic electronic "Schelling" points. In The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Schelling developed the idea of natural and constructed points that focus interactions, places that facilitate connections with people interested in a participating in a common line of action. The clock at Grand Central Station is an example, as are singles bars and market places. Each is a space designated as a point of congregation for people of like interests. Networks enhance the flexibility of Schelling points by radically altering the economies of their production and use. Members of these virtual social networks frequently identify their groups (and groups of groups) as "virtual communities". Many users turn to listservs as a convenient way to quickly find information. The mailing list acts as an "organic information filter." Getting just the right piece of information can be difficult. But on a listserv of people with common interests and experiences, various users often have sifted through large amounts of information, have had different experiences, are expert in differing areas, and each can be drawn upon by others in the discourse community. Issues of Trust in Mailing ListsBut whose answers can the information seeker trust? For professional knowledge workers trust tends to be based on demonstrated competence. While outside certification and reputation help, nothing succeeds more than demonstrated competence. Building such trust takes contact, communication, time, and certification from others you trust (from your local community of practice, for example) that the individual giving the answer comes from a sound background with demonstrated competence. Because of the public and shared communication of written messages on a listserv, others can quickly and easily comment on and add to any given answer. Even without face-to-face contact, regular readers of a listserv will come to judge the competence of frequent contributors by the perceived reasonableness of their answers and by certification, both in on-line replies and from comments with one's local CoP, that a particular contributor is competent or not so competent. Communities might be definable as a set of overlapping networks of communication that remain stable for some duration and, in their intentional form, are capable of acting collectively towards a particular end. A community can be said to have failed when it is no longer able to foster any cooperation among its members. Marc Smith then looked for examples of individuals being encouraged to participate, the returns on participation, and the kinds of disruptions that raise the question of monitoring and sanctioning systems. These aspects address the construction of commitment in the virtual community and mechanisms that are enacted to maintain and defend it against the endemic temptations that threaten to dissolve the systems that maintain the collective goods produced by an active mailing list. Social pressure, from insult to incarceration, to make good on all debts helps communities maintain the essential collective good of trust. A successful community, by contrast, is capable of directing individual action towards the construction and maintenance of goods that could not be created by individuals acting in isolation. These goods can be categorized as various forms of capital. Members of the WELL produce two forms of capital in abundance, although not every member of the community is able to make equal use of these resources.
Marc Smith notes that the WELL offers a different good than monetary gain, it offers status within a group. Being knowledgeable in the WELL and being free with your knowledge is a sure way to gain status, friends, and visibility. As with any community, the WELL's most effective reward is recognition. As a result visible reciprocity is a major means of increasing status. Smith also noted examples of upset from posters who failed to receive recognition for a contribution, and how this came to be the source of some irritation and disruption in a discussion, leading to some flaming and hurt feelings. These networks established around particular subjects are themselves a collective good, but they are also the foundation for two other goods, knowledge capital and communion. The collected intelligence and memory to be found in virtual communities has led some to speculate about their power to amplify mental capacity and there is some evidence to support the idea: a collective mind is a powerful force. A virtual space has some generic qualities that distinguish it from the space of face-to-face interactions.
By this I mean to capture the sense of membership that is found in more traditional communities. Membership is, along with community, an ill defined term. At minimum, membership involves rights, obligations, and some modification of identity. Communion also suggests a non-instrumental contact with the group, an emotional bond. Mailing lists do exhibit a high level of responsiveness and dynamism usually associated with real-time interaction. The qualities of being aspatial and potentially asynchronous expands the pool of potential participants of virtual communities beyond that of most space-bound ones. It is not uncommon to settle into a long and satisfying discussion with someone who lives on a different continent while in a virtual community. Despite the fact that both kinds of systems provide mostly the exchange of unadorned text, users of these systems have come to feel that they participate in a community that fulfills many of the roles more commonly found in traditional face-to-face communities. Example of a recent discussion of building a community for a commercial Web sitePiece of article from Web Marketing discussion group From: From: "J.P. Vaughan" <vaughanj@ix.netcom.com>, Build It, Develop a Community, and They WILL Come We launched our web site (Creative Real Estate On-Line http://www.real-estate-online.com) on November 28, 1995…. About six months ago, I wanted to put something on our site that would make it more "interactive." Without knowing it at the time--or even intending it--we found a way to get many of our visitors to return once or twice each DAY… We put up an electronic bulletin board system, which we call our "Interactive News Group." Given the many hundreds of existing usenet newsgroups out there, you might think creating a new one on your web site would be a waste of time. Not true. I don't know about the newsgroups you visit, but all the real estate newsgroups are mostly advertisements. There is almost zero content. On our News Group, there are zero advertisements (because I delete them) and 100% pure content. The messages are also "threaded" so a response to a posting goes directly under it, rather than 10 or 25 messages below (as in usenet). As a result, some of the discussions that emerge on our site are fabulous. Other experienced real estate investors engage in friendly debate on a variety of topics and offer opinions and advice freely to the beginners. New topics and discussions evolve every single day, which is why many of our visitors return two or three times a day. They want to find out what's new, what's happening. Even more important, our visitors are developing relationships with each other! They are not only networking with each other via email and telephone; some have even met in person. When that happens, your web site ain't just a web site anymore, folks. It starts to transform into a "community" (a social group having common interests). Our visitors are becoming friends who know us and
trust us. And, of course, the bottom line: Product sales
have soared. The Hope: Collaborative Applications Can Extend the Reach of CommunityWhat is a collaborative technology? (Roschell, IRL)
From a software designer's perspective (Clancy).
Conditions for Creating a Community of Practice (Congruity)If there is not already a CoP with on-going communication, merely offering an electronic technical means to communicate is not likely to create one.
Congruity has had the negative experience of facilitating CoP-like groups, then having the group wither away when they no longer are involved. |
Communities of Practice Links
Page last updated on 17 Mar 1997