Fred raises an interesting question:
Fred Nickols wrote:
...snip...
> It strikes me as much more difficult for the organization to take the lead
> in initiating or starting up a Community of Practice. A CoP, by its very
> nature, is part of the informal organization, not the formal organization,
> and much of the "practice" around which people organize consists of
> workarounds in relation to inadequate work methods and procedures handed
> down from on high.
>
> Does anyone know of any instances in which companies have successfully
> initiated Communities of Practice? I've heard of a few but when I've
> pursued them to learn more they evaporate.
This is an important question. Companies might identify and recognize even
nurture and encourage CoPs (as was the now famous case with the Xerox
service technicians of John Seely Brown) but can they initiate them?
Depends a great deal upon what you mean by community. Even if you did
'start' one the community might then take its own form and slip around the
interactional facilities, joint tasks, boundaries, artifacts, orientation,
focus, communication and other elements. They might as a community move in
their won direction and even leave behind the original purpose and
procedures set in place by the company.
I borrow the above elements from Etienne Wenger, the unparalleled observer
of CoPs, who did look to how communities build. Here are 3 possibilities
from his book Communities of Practice which might broaden the
considerations of what initiation of a CoP might look like or involve:
"Similarly, coming together from a variety of locations for a training
session can be an occasion for creating a community among people who might
not otherwise have much opportunity to meet."
"Being included in what maters is a requirement for being engaged in a
community's practice, just as engagement is what defines belonging. What
it takes for a CoP to cohere enough to function cab be very subtle and
delicate. ... In order to be a full participant, it may just be as
important to know and understand the latest gossip as it is to know and
understand the latest memo."
"When it concerns practice and identity, design inevitably confronts
fundamental issues of meaning, time, space, and power. These aspects can
be captured with four dualities [participation vs. reification, local vs.
global, designed vs. emergent, identification vs. negotiability] which
represent four basic dimensions of of the challenge of designing for
learning. ... Designing for learning [and I argue that Wenger means design
of a condition that might nurture a CoP as well] is not a matter of chaos
versus order or narrow locality versus abstract globality, but a matter of
combining them productively."
On this last point, I hold that it shows how influential and yet powerless
a company may be in relation to coPs. It may be by certain actions
unwittingly influencing the formation of communities of practice and might
by overt conscious efforts stifle them. The process is complicated.
Therefore, I earnestly hope that others will offer any information that
they have as well as to initiation of CoPs.
-- T.J. Elliott Cavanaugh Leahy & Company tjell@mail.idt.net Mind On The Job newsletter http://idt.net/~tjell 914 366-7499
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