1 - View learning as work and work as learning. Recognize learning in all it's forms in order to find ways to nurture it and connect it across the organization.

2 - Count on the informal. That is where work gets done.

3 - If there is a learning problem, look for patterns of social participation and exclusion. Are some people choosing to exclude themselves? Are they being kept out by a community or other circumstances? Do their existing forms of participation create a conflict? All three may apply, in varying degrees, for a woman manager who finds herself in an old boys' network. In this context, the importance of informal learning communities has been, if anything understated. If learning is participating, both formally and informally, exclusion from golf outings and other male executive activities can undermine the career of the most qualified person.

4 - Keep learning as close to practice as possible. Be suspicious of any process that attempts to extract knowledge from the communities of practice where it is kept alive, to transform this knowledge into a curriculum, and to deliver it outside of practice.

5 - Treat Communities of practice as assets. Encouraging learning communities by supporting reflection processes and access to information as part of the practice itself. Given the right conditions - enough understanding of circumstances, access to resources and control over their destiny - communities of practice can use their shared history as a social resource to learn very much, very fast.

6 - View individuals as members of communities of practice, not by stereotyping them, but by honoring the meaningfulness of their participation. Recognize, for example, that the cadre of volunteers who staff the hospital's gift or coffee shops are not only members of the community of volunteers but also an informal public relations community who give people directions and information, and convey, with every contact, that the hospital is a friendly (or unfriendly) place.

7 - Encourage the formation and deepening of communities of practice by legitimizing the work of pulling them together and valuing the informal learning they facilitate. If staff nurses come up with an idea for improving patient care over lunch, then take that idea to their supervisor, and are met with a response like, "Well, write up a proposal and the appropriate committee will review it," or "That's an idea that should come through the Committee for the Enhancement of Patient Care," will those nurses be motivated to generate new learning and new ideas in the future?

8 - Manage boundaries between communities of practice as opportunities for learning. Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of objects and people in their ability to bridge across practices. A protocol, for instance, becomes useful to the extent that someone can negotiate its relevance to a specific patient.

9 - Expect transformations, misunderstandings, and reinterpretations when people, artifacts and information cross boundaries of practice. Pay particular attention to artifacts and documents that are supposed to create links across boundaries. When in doubt, have objects accompanied by someone. Pharmaceutical companies do not merely send literature; they dispatch a sales rep, too.

10 - Value the work of brokering learning among communities; it often does not look like work. The connection across departments provided by a group of caregivers going to lunch together can be as essential to the quality of care as any protocol.

11 - Be attuned to the emergence of new practices at boundaries. The value of these new practices may initially not be recognizable by the criteria of existing practices.

12 - View the organization as a constellation of interconnected practices. Give local communities enough information and encouragement to negotiate how they fit within the whole and contribute to the efficiency of the organization.

13 - Put communities of practice in charge of their learning, recognizing that they need access to other practices in order to proceed. No practice can fully organize the learning of another. But at the same time, no practice can fully organize its own learning, because no practice has the full picture.

14 - Make sure that the organizational apparatus is in the service of practices, and not the other way around. Avoid organizational demands that do not somehow serve the practices on which they are made. The purpose of having organizations is not to replace communities of practice with an abstract sense of affiliation, but to recognize their existence and to provide the resources and information to help them locate their practices in a broader context and align with one another in order to work together.