A mechanism for practitioners to reach out to other practitioners
Becoming a better practitioner, not learning about practice
Boundary-spanning
Business metrics
The company as a constellation of overlapping CoPs
Concept of practice
CoPs cannot be "essentialized" by skill catalogs or yellow pages
Core competencies live in communities of practice
Documents as "strange attractors" of CoPs
Emergent structure cannot be separated from the process
How "being local" is a limitation
Legitimate peripheral participation
Life cycle of CoPs
Organizational learning at the periphery of CoPs
Tools for representing problems, building prototypes, and creating solutions
Using intranets for electrifying communities of practice

A mechanism for practitioners to reach out to other practitioners

"Communities of practice form and share knowledge on the basis of pull by individual members, not a centralized push of information. Knowledge-based strategies must not focus on collecting and disseminating information but rather on creating a mechanism for practitioners to reach out to other practitioners. Business managers must set high performance aspirations and then create incentives and systems for practitioners to solve problems together. IS managers must then develop systems that facilitate an exchange of ideas and solutions, as well as track participation."
  (Harvesting Your Workers' Knowledge,
 by Brook Manville & Nathaniel Foote, McKinsey & Co.,
 in Datamation, July 1996)

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Becoming a better practitioner, not learning about practice

"Corporations must provide support that corresponds to the real needs of the communities of practice. The central issue in learning is becoming a better practitioner, not learning about practice. This approach draws attention away from abstract knowledge and cranial processes and situates it in the practices and communities in which knowledge takes on significance."
  (John Seely Brown, VP and Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.)

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Boundary-spanning

"Large organizations, reflectively structured, are well positioned to be highly innovative and deal with discontinuities. If their internal communities have a reasonable degree of autonomy and independence from the dominant world view, large organizations might actually accelerate innovation. Emergent communities that span the boundaries of an organization are likely conduits of external and innovative views into the organization."
  (John Seely Brown, VP and Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.)

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Business metrics

"Knowledge-based strategies focused on communities of practice must be linked to performance and ought to be measurable by traditional and widely understood business metrics. The communities of practice must be able to see the link between their sharing and hard business outcomes appreciated by senior management.

Why should IS managers care about business metrics? Because technology and its builders are often unfairly blamed for the failures of knowledge-based systems. IS managers can save themselves grief by helping to capture and share appropriate metrics for the benefit of the communities."
  (Harvesting Your Workers' Knowledge,
 by Brook Manville & Nathaniel Foote, McKinsey & Co.,
 in Datamation, July 1996)

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The company as a constellation of overlapping CoPs

A company can be seen to consist of numerous, often overlapping, but rarely formally recognized communities of practice - an informal structure which exists in parallel with more formal forms of organization.
 Peter Hillen, Congruity

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Concept of practice

"The concept of practice connotes doing, but not just doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do. When I talk about practice, I am talking about social practice.

Such a concept of practice includes both the explicit and the tacit. It includes what is said and what is left unsaid; what is represented and what is assumed. It includes the language, the tools, the documents, the images, the symbols, the well-defined roles, the specified criteria, the codified procedures, the regulations, and the contracts that various practices make explicit for a variety of purposes. But it also includes all the implicit relations, the tacit conventions, the subtle cues, the untold rules of thumb, the recognizable intuitions, the specific perceptions, the well-tuned sensitivities, the embodied understandings, the underlying assumptions, the shared worldviews, which may never be articulated, though they are unmistakable signs of membership in communities of practice and are crucial to the success of their enterprises."  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity,
  by Etienne Wenger, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 1997

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CoPs cannot be "essentialized" by skill catalogs or yellow pages

"Some companies confuse communities of practice with competencies and go looking for them in hopes of cataloging skill sets and maybe even enshrining those skills into some sort of corporate knowledge base. It is true enough that knowledge is the coin of the realm within communities of practice; moreover, one has to be able to give as well as take knowledge in order to remain a member in good standing. But the knowledge that gets passed around in these communities is not limited to the sort of explicit information that can be cataloged or computerized or bullet-pointed in a training curriculum. Quite often it takes the form of implicit, or tacit, knowledge."
 Communities of Practice: Learning Is Social. Training Is Irrelevant?,
 by David Stamps Training Magazine, February 1997

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Core competencies live in communities of practice

"Companies do much of their most important work through CoPs -- especially in the overlaps and alliances that bring disparate communities together. Indeed, it is precisely in these overlaps that core competencies live. Most companies make the mistake of defining competencies as discrete technologies: patents, trade secrets, proprietary designs. But a real-world competence -- a sustained capacity to outperform the competition-- is built as much on implicit know-how and relationships as on tangible products and tools. You can't divorce competencies from the social fabric that supports them."
 John Seely Brown

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Documents as "strange attractors" of CoPs

The multitude of digital documents now being generated are "digital artifacts" around which communities of practice choose to organize themselves in distinctive ways. The documents and the communities interpenetrate and become mutually dependent; the documents would not exist but for the communities of practice, and vice-versa.
 The Dynamics of Digital Documents in: Documents in the Digital Culture: Shaping the Future, A Report on a Workshop Held at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 1995

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Emergent structure cannot be separated from the process

"Asserting that it is learning that gives rise to communities of practice is saying that learning is a source of social structure. But the kind of structure that this refers to is not an object in itself, which can be separated from the process that gives rise to it. Rather it is an emergent structure . . ."
 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity,
 by Etienne Wenger, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 1997

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How "being local" is a limitation

"IRL's Wenger likes to point out that all communities of practice are local. That doesn't mean there aren't communities whose members are geographically dispersed; it means that every community of practice takes a parochial view of the organization. That's why communities can be the source of problems as well as solutions. Their local viewpoint may keep them from understanding the needs of others in the company. 'No practice has the full picture,' says Wenger, 'not even the practice of management'."
 Communities of Practice: Learning Is Social. Training Is Irrelevant?
 Training Magazine, February 1997

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Legitimate Peripheral Participation

MUDding facilitates "legitimate peripheral participation," a term that Xerox PARC's chief scientist John Seely Brown discussed in his speech at PC Forum last March. Legitimate peripheral participation occurs when the members of a group can hang out at the boundary between the center of a group and its periphery. The members are not responsible for the conversation but are free to join in whenever they wish. To illustrate how communities of practice form through legitimate peripheral participation, Brown described an experiment in which Xerox repair technicians were outfitted with two-way radios that created a shared audio space. They could listen in at the periphery and jump in when they saw fit.
 John Seely Brown

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Life cycle of CoPs

"They come together, they develop, they evolve, they disperse, according to the timing, the logic, the rhythms, and the social energy of their learning. As a result, unlike more formal types of organizational structures, it is not so clear where they begin and end. They do not have launching and dismissal dates. In this sense, a community of practice is a different kind of entity than, say, a task force or a team."
 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity,
 by Etienne Wenger, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 1997

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Organizational learning at the periphery of CoPs

Not only do organizations learn by developing and storing their competencies in groups of practitioners; they react to and create change primarily through activity engaging the periphery of these communities - absorbing new members, colliding with other communities, dealing with stimuli from outside.
Each community of practice is a focus of learning and competence for the corporation. Especially in today's knowledge intensive organizations, much of the work of the corporation is accomplished or thwarted through the interaction and overlap of distinct communities of practice.
 Peter Hillen, Congruity

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Tools for representing problems, building prototypes, and creating solutions

"IS managers must find ways to facilitate the key activities of communities--problem solving and innovation. This will mean providing new application architectures that allow members to represent problems, build prototypes, and create solutions. These tools--for modeling, scenario development, and analysis--must be open, flexible, and easy to use by any member of the community."
 (Harvesting Your Workers' Knowledge,
 by Brook Manville & Nathaniel Foote, McKinsey & Co.,
 in Datamation, July 1996)

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Using intranets for electrifying communities of practice

"To capitalize on the expertise of its employees in developing new products in more productive ways, National is establishing Communities of Practice (CoPs) - groups of engineers who share knowledge, tools, design methodologies, successes and even mistakes - to develop their design engineering competence. An important tool supporting CoPs is National's internal web."
 from the demo of National Semiconductor's Internal Communities of Practice website

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