How we do it

We use many approaches to cultivate communities of practice and mobilize collective intelligence in organisations. It's been distilled from George Pór's experience of 20 years in designing, hosting and facilitating hundreds of virtual communities, and further tested and formalized during his stay at INSEAD as Visiting Senior Research Fellow, 2001-2002. Community Design Architecture is our proprietary methodology that underpins all of our approaches. This page is a brief introduction to its principles and benefits. Other approaches we use are highlighted in the sidebar.

• What is the Community Design Architecture
• Why to use it (what value it can deliver)
• What are its underlying principles
• The role of CDA in promoting evolutionary fitness

What is the Community Design Architecture

The Community Design Architecture (CDA) is a systemic, highly scalable and robust methodology for the facilitated co-evolution of communities of practice, other forms of c-learning communities, and knowledge networks, with their virtual learning environments.

Developed by Community Intelligence Labs, CDA is an enabler and source of company-specific frameworks for creating virtual campuses and supporting learning communities of various size, purpose and operating style.

Virtual campuses can host organizational knowledge ecologies defined as follows.

People and their communities in value-creating relationships, with continuous access to their shared knowledge, both of which are supported by enabling technologies.

Those components define the four layers of CDA as a methodology for generating the social, business, knowledge and technology architectures of virtual teams, learning communities, and their networks. The four layers interact, cross-fertilize, and feed one another.

Social Architecture – the network of relationships, collaboration, communication and coordination, with supporting agreements, principles, metrics, leadership roles, decision making etc, need to create open and trusting interactions.

Knowledge Architecture – the body of available knowledge (intellectual capital) to be upgraded to meet new challenges, by orientation, exploration, reflection, sense-making, and shared memory.

Business Architecture - financing, attracting and allocating resources (two-way value propositions), business model to ensure sustainability.

Technology Architecture – an advanced online environment with a wide range of tools to support collaboration, communication and coordination in an efficient, effective and enjoyable way.

Those layers may strengthen or weaken each other, depending on how well they're designed for mutual enhancement and the emergence of multi-dimensional synergies. For instance:

the good health and vibrancy of a community's knowledge ecosystem* (knowledge architecture)
is a key factor in defining the success rate of its business ecosystem ( business architecture).

What is the source of a robust knowledge ecosystem? High-trust relationships in and among the teams and communities, and the practices which produce this high-trust.. (social architecture).

* The concept of the knowledge ecosystem was popularised widely by Knowledge Ecology Fair '98 , and elaborated on in George Pór's article on "Nurturing Systemic Wisdom through Knowledge Ecology."

What is an "architecture" and what it can enable?

"The science and art of architecture lie in skilfully relating parts to a greater whole, creating a form uniquely appropriate for the exercise of a specific set of functions." (from The Web of Inclusion: a New Architecture for Building Great Organizations, by Sally Helgesen).

A well-designed architectural framework should let the community:

Reduce mistakes due to approaches to community design, that don't account for the complexity of what is required to cultivate coherent and productive conversations in cyberspace.

Orient evaluation of choices and tradeoffs among numerous design options, guided by a small set of generative design principles.

Coordinate collaboration between design team, community members, sponsor, facilitator and all those who have a stake in the community's success.

Foster co-evolution of self-organizing "emergence" and deliberative "design," mirroring the co-evolution of the community with its enabling architectures.

Establish coherence of design, by cycling through the key design dimensions, in re-iterative loops.

Chart an optimal course of the project, that takes into account the interdependence of the four design areas--community, knowledge, business, and technology--and their systemic interdependence

Focus attention and other resources, first, on the critical path of design.

Design principles

The CDA methodology is built on 4 inter-related design principles: Designing for Emergence, Transformational Measure, Innovation Focus and Enabling Productive Conversations. Those principles and the corresponding practices serve as attractors of higher-order communal capabilities.

Designing for Emergence

Communities are complex adaptive social systems characterized by the phenomenon of “emergence.” It means that they can produce surprising new capabilities through the differentiation and integration of their members' capabilities. They cannot be planned or “engineered” like a formal organization.

The “designing for emergence” principle is concerned with ensuring that all enablers of emergence are given proper attention throughout the design process. They include all tools and processes that foster:
- spontaneity and individual and group creativity
- member initiatives and experimentation
- various forms of member-to-member interactions
- opportunities for group formation at the lowest possible transaction cost

Productive Conversations

A key process for fostering the emergence of new meaning and solutions in communities is the re-combination of ideas born in productive conversations. That re-combination occurs mainly in conversations.

The principle of "productive conversations" is concerned with designing into the system the capacity to sustain networks of coherent dialogues and productive inquiries involving any number of members and their communities, across distance and time.

"Across time" implies that there should be explicit provision to promote the synergy of real-time (synchronous) and delayed-time (asynchronous) dialogues, which is the richest source of emergence through idea re-combination.

Transformational Design

Design is a matter of choice; it's the artful use of freedom and constraints for maximizing the communities' and their members' potential to create value with the designed environment.

The “transformational design” principle is concerned with ensuring that all tools, structures, and processes are optimised for continually meeting the user communities evolving learning needs and aspirations.

To meet that requirement, transformational design has to be robust, flexible, and scalable.

Innovation Focus

"If innovation is not widely understood to be the community’s lifeblood, the pace of member acquisition will slow and membership will slowly erode." (Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities, by John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong)

The principle of "innovation focus" is concerned with 4 architectural layers as 4 domains of innovation, and with their cross-pollination. The measure of innovation value of each is in the value of new possibilities that they can open to the community.

For example, good design brings social and knowledge innovation into interplay with one another and with business and technical innovation. That interplay will lead to more consistently high returns than environments strong in only one or two dimensions of innovation.

Therefore, virtual learning environments should be optimised--with effective, real-time feedback loops--for synergy across the social, knowledge, business, and technical layers of the architecture.

The pivotal role of CDA in promoting evolutionary fitness

The reach and agility of a community's or organization's nervous system* (its network of productive conversations) is a key determining factor of its evolutionary fitness: its capability to evolve and continually renew itself.

A key measure of evolutionary fitness is the speed at which better work and learning practices come into being and spread through the organization's knowledge ecosystem which is intricately interwoven with the other three architectural layers.

* A detailed presentation of the "organizational nervous system" concept can be found in "The Quest for Collective Intelligence" by George Pór, published in the anthology "Community Building: Renewing Spirit and Learning in Business", New Leaders Press, 1995.