Knowledge Ecology and Communities of Practice

Keynote presented at Knowledge Ecology Fair 98.

Outline:
Personal prelude
Three waves of change
What is knowledge ecology?
How does KE relate to knowledge management (KM)?
What Are Communities of Practice?
The Rise of Knowledge Ecology
The Rise of Communities of Practice
Recommended reading on knowledge ecology
Recommended reading on communities of practice

Personal prelude

I was born in Budapest, two months before the Red Army liberated our ghetto from the Nazis. I turned against the Communist rule in college, and organized underground study circles of political philosophy, that earned me 20 months of jail. What propelled our circles into action was our thirst of knowledge and community.

Today, the same thirst of a growing segment of corporate citizens fuel the fastest growing twin trends of US management practice: "knowledge ecology" (KE) and "communities of practice" (CoP).

It is a very exciting time for me to be here with all of you, knowledge ecology pioneers who came from all over the world to embark on this learning journey "beyond knowledge management."

Three waves of change

In the 1970's, "information management" took the place of "data processing" as a discipline and practice for increasing productivity and organizational performance. The irresistible evolutionary waves of the new didn't destroy the old; they transcended and included it.

In the mid-80's, "knowledge management" took the place of "information management" as a leading management practice for increasing productivity and organizational performance. Again, the new transcended and included the old.

Managers had hardly enough time to grasp the benefits, ROI, "best practices" of knowledge management, when, in the mid-90's, "knowledge ecology" started knocking on their door.

For a more complete picture of the 3 waves, look up this diagram .

TO THE OUTLINE

What is knowledge ecology?

Knowledge ecology (KE) is a growing body of knowledge and practices focused on continuously improving the relationships, tools and methods for creating, integrating, sharing, using, and leveraging knowledge. It is an interdisciplinary field of management theory and practice, inspired and nourished by the confluence and cross-impact of such powerful memes as:

"information ecology" (Davenport, Prusak)
"community of practice" (Wenger, Seely Brown)
"business as complex adaptive system" (McMaster, Wheatley)
"bootstrap strategy" (Engelbart)
"organizational learning (Argyris, de Geus, Senge)
"intellectual capital" (Edvinsson, Sveiby)
"hypertext organization" (Nonaka, Takeuchi)
"generative learning communities" (Veltrop)

The cross-fertilization of KE's intellectual origins will lead to unprecendented breakthroughs in organizational performance, business and social value. As one of the organizers of KEFair, it is a great pleasure for me to see a number of these disciplines' originators and leading thinkers present in our faculty.

TO THE OUTLINE

How does KE relate to knowledge management (KM)?

Knowledge management provides your organization with actionable information and opportunities to win in the marketplace by building more knowledge value into your products and services.

Knowledge ecology adds the context, synergy and trust necessary to effectively use information, recognize dangers and opportunities, and turn them into knowledge and successful action.

What Are Communities of Practice?

Managers who try to pressure employees to create and share knowledge, soon realize that they are facing an up-hill battle. That's because knowledge--as it manifests in individual, team and organizational competences--is not a "thing" that can be "managed", as we do with data and information.

In the last few years, forward-thinking business leaders and managers started asking themselves: if knowledge is a capacity for effective action, generated and renewed by productive conversations in trustful relationships, then what is needed to develop such capacity faster than the competition?

There's a slowly but steadily growing recognition that the answer may be found in supporting the company's communities of practice, removing the barriers to letting them do what they are already doing, but more effectively, efficiently and with more enjoyment: to steward core competences, sometimes faster and cheaper than the formal organization.

"Community of practice" (CoP) is a term that refers to the ways in which people naturally work together. It acknowledges and celebrates the power of informal communities of peers, their creativity and resourcefulness in solving problems, and inventing better, easier ways to meet their commitments.

"A community of practice is a group of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common class of problem." - Brook Manville, Director of Knowledge Management at McKinsey & Co.

"Communities of practice are peers in the execution of 'real work'. What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows." - John Seely Brown, VP and Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp

Michael McMaster articulated the essence of this trend as follows: "fostering the growth and development of such communities will provide the maximum in learning, knowledge development and flexibility of response to the marketplace."

If your organization's flexibility of response to the marketplace is a function of an open culture of collaboration, then growing a culture of communities of practice, supportive to sharing innovative work practices is an economic necessity.

That's why we at CoIL say, "We envision a world where people's capacity to manifest their highest aspirations is nurtured and enhanced by all social organisms. For the first time, we now find ourselves at a point where the confluence of technological opportunity, moral responsibility, and economic necessity demand that we create such a world."

TO THE OUTLINE

The Rise of Knowledge Ecology

To meet the need "to know what each other knows", peers separated by distant boxes of the organizational chart--and in global companies, by distant time zones--started forming communities of practice. They frequently exchange notes and solve problems in the virtual environment of the company's intranet.

In today's knowledge-driven economy, the highest-payoff investment that any business can make into its improvement strategies is the investment into improving the relationships, tools and methods for creating and sharing better practices. That's the economic foundation which has been giving rise, in the last couple of years, to knowledge ecology. Another trend that drives KE's momentum is the emergence of the Web as a global communications environment which requires new skills in adapting this technology for maximum business results.

"Build expertise in the social design of electronic spaces; it will be a core competency in the next decade. Social design of knowledge-creation environments will become a strategic role for the human resource function, providing a much needed bridge between other corporate functions, such as IS, R&D, and corporate education." (Creating the Corporate Commons: the Intersection of Intranets and Telecommunities, Institute for the Future, 1997)

I developed a conceptual framework of knowledge ecology and started designing corporate knowledge ecosystems for my clients in 1991. I had to wait only 6 years for the KE ideas to catch on. In 1997, I co-facilitated with Arian Ward (Hughes Space & Communications), a series of public KE events: online dialogue forums combined with experiential, on-site learning journeys, called "knowledge cafés". Look for the story "Getting Physical and Virtuial" in Fast Company magazine, February/March, page 200. 1997 was also the year, in which the first international knowledge management conference had KE in its tagline: "From Information Management To Knowledge Ecology". It was the one organized by Edna Pasher & Associates, in Herzliya.

The rise of knowledge ecology, and the needs it has to meet, gave birth to a new kind of challenge: how can companies train fast enough the new breed of knowledge professionals needed to win in the marketplace: knowledge editors, facilitators, brokers (cross-pollinators), and cybrarians.

I believe, the most impactful form of education that new knowledge professionals can get, comes from being engaged in the daily action of supporting real work in knowledge communities, reflecting on their own experience and sharing them with their peers.

Learning teams that some of the sponsoring and other organizations are forming here at KEFair, please take note: your highest take-home value of KEFair may not come from this or that workshop or keynote, but from the self-reflective, collaborative learning of your members how to steward and coordinate knowledge creation in virtual environments like this one.

TO THE OUTLINE

The Rise of Communities of Practice

Communities of practice exist and are recognized sources of technical and organizational innovation and learning, in companies as diverse as Xerox, British Petroleum, IBM, Monsanto, NCR, and National Semiconductor.

The concept itself was developed in the late 80's, by such researchers and corporate executives as Etienne Wenger of the Institute for Research on Learning, his colleagues, and John Seely Brown, VP of Xerox.

What is the business value that informal CoPs can deliver to the organization?

Their value propositions include:

Developing and spreading better practices faster
Connecting "islands of knowledge" into self-organizing, knowledge sharing networks of professional communities
Feeding and being fed by web-based repositories of proven solutions as well as new approaches
Fostering cross-functional and cross-divisional collaboration
Increasing the participating employees' ability to initiate and contribute to projects across organizational boundaries

Last year, the Corporate Leadership Council published a major study about the "CoP" movement, with the title "Community-of-Practice Network".

According to the study, CoPs that make a positive difference on the bottom line, are built "through non-management" which translates into such critical success factors as :

Multidirectional Alignment
Community membership spans the corporate organization chart both laterally and vertically; hierarchical position, however, affords managers no special considerations in community interactions... Output of community is reusable, has multiple applications throughout the company.

Autonomy and Resource Allocation
CoPs are responsible only to themselves; people join and stay only because they have something to learn and contribute. Management role involves the provision of resources to community members to support their self-generated initiatives. Output of community has some sort of 'stamp of approval' from senior management to confer legitimacy; but management expressly refrains from directing community output. Hold CoPs accountable only for funds provided to support specific initiatives.
In my work with corporate CoPs, I observed two additional conditions of having CoPs fulfill their potential to enhance corporate performance:

Facilitation
Establish a facilitator, or a team of facilitators, depending on the size of the community, typically members respected for their integrity, knowledge and people skills, to build and maintain momentum.

Create a Knowledge Ecosystem
Design and implement a knowledge ecosystem to enable community members in different locations to conduct effective, efficient, and enjoyable knowledge sharing, collaboration and coordination of action. It should have both real-time and asynchronous conversation-support software, integrated with Web-enabled knowledge bases that can be accessed any time, from any place, by any member of the CoP.: Community membership spans the corporate organization chart both laterally and vertically; hierarchical position, however, affords managers no special considerations in community interactions... Output of community is reusable, has multiple applications throughout the company.
Autonomy and Resource Allocation
CoPs are responsible only to themselves; people join and stay only because they have something to learn and contribute. Management role involves the provision of resources to community members to support their self-generated initiatives. Output of community has some sort of 'stamp of approval' from senior management to confer legitimacy; but management expressly refrains from directing community output. Hold CoPs accountable only for funds provided to support specific initiatives.
In my work with corporate CoPs, I observed two additional conditions of having CoPs fulfill their potential to enhance corporate performance:

Facilitation
Establish a facilitator, or a team of facilitators, depending on the size of the community, typically members respected for their integrity, knowledge and people skills, to build and maintain momentum.

Create a Knowledge Ecosystem
Design and implement a knowledge ecosystem to enable community members in different locations to conduct effective, efficient, and enjoyable knowledge sharing, collaboration and coordination of action. It should have both real-time and asynchronous conversation-support software, integrated with Web-enabled knowledge bases that can be accessed any time, from any place, by any member of the CoP.: CoPs are responsible only to themselves; people join and stay only because they have something to learn and contribute. Management role involves the provision of resources to community members to support their self-generated initiatives. Output of community has some sort of 'stamp of approval' from senior management to confer legitimacy; but management expressly refrains from directing community output. Hold CoPs accountable only for funds provided to support specific initiatives.
In my work with corporate CoPs, I observed two additional conditions of having CoPs fulfill their potential to enhance corporate performance:
Facilitation
Establish a facilitator, or a team of facilitators, depending on the size of the community, typically members respected for their integrity, knowledge and people skills, to build and maintain momentum.

Create a Knowledge Ecosystem
Design and implement a knowledge ecosystem to enable community members in different locations to conduct effective, efficient, and enjoyable knowledge sharing, collaboration and coordination of action. It should have both real-time and asynchronous conversation-support software, integrated with Web-enabled knowledge bases that can be accessed any time, from any place, by any member of the CoP.: Establish a facilitator, or a team of facilitators, depending on the size of the community, typically members respected for their integrity, knowledge and people skills, to build and maintain momentum.
Create a Knowledge Ecosystem
Design and implement a knowledge ecosystem to enable community members in different locations to conduct effective, efficient, and enjoyable knowledge sharing, collaboration and coordination of action. It should have both real-time and asynchronous conversation-support software, integrated with Web-enabled knowledge bases that can be accessed any time, from any place, by any member of the CoP.: Design and implement a knowledge ecosystem to enable community members in different locations to conduct effective, efficient, and enjoyable knowledge sharing, collaboration and coordination of action. It should have both real-time and asynchronous conversation-support software, integrated with Web-enabled knowledge bases that can be accessed any time, from any place, by any member of the CoP.

TO THE OUTLINE