Partly out of a sense of drama and partly to make a point I sometimes find myself being dismissive of “collaboration” and “sharing knowledge”.

This is why.

First, social learning is first and foremost about – well – learning. Learning as a social enterprise. Say, write, or even think a word that you assume makes sense to someone else and you are engaging in something social. Coming to a shared understanding of what that word represents (or not) has been a process of social learning. That process hasn’t necessarily been smooth. The word has been contested, hijacked, distorted, re-interpreted, adapted, agreed, and disagreed on. Its shared meaning right now is simply a snapshot of its unfinished journey through social learning.

That’s the same with all artifacts, reifications, and processes that make up social learning in communities of practice. The ride to where they are today has not necessarily been smooth. There may have been some collaboration along the way, but it’s unlikely to be the full story.

What’s more, collaboration can be a euphemism for papering over disagreements and politics. It can be a way to silence voices or disregard issues of power. But disagreements, contestability, and awareness of power are all opportunities to enrich and maximize a community’s learning capability. It’s not necessarily collaboration you want, it’s the maximizing of your learning potential. And doing that requires an artful mix of engaging diverse voices, stimulating people’s imagination to what’s possible, and creating horizontal alignment among them.

What about sharing knowledge, the favorite child of collaboration? Forget it. What happens if you’re in a room (or a discussion forum) and are told to share your knowledge? Nada. But what if you are in a room with someone you can relate to who shares a problem they face? The chances are you will jump in to help – with stories of what you did in similar circumstances, what worked, and what didn’t.

We meet lots of community organizers losing sleep over the question of how to get people to share knowledge. If it’s going to keep you up at night, a more fruitful question is how to help frame an inquiry about what is not known. What is an issue facing a member that most people will relate to? How do you get them to tell a story about it in a way that invites a response? What kind of activity will deepen the inquiry – a debate? case clinic? role play? And how will you track and share how this leads that person to change how they “do business” and what happens as a result?

Framing the inquiry means tuning into the learning imperative (i.e. what we don’t yet know), doing ground work (who else shares this problem and what are the different perspectives that would be useful to bear on this?), designing a meaningful activity (one that will help push the inquiry), and keeping a record of the learning as it flows into practice and has an effect on the world (and feeding this back to the community).

So if you hear someone ask me about collaboration and knowledge sharing, be warned. I might just say boo!

Yet again I have a client – of 5 years – who has made the technology a centre-piece of their strategy.

I cry.

It’s a technology that I suggested and helped to create. But I seem powerless to convince them that the proportion of resources they are investing in technology as opposed to building the learning network are a waste of everyone’s time.

Technology and community building are not the same thing. I get it. Funding can be easier for tech. Tech is sexy or mysterious – depending on your relationship with it. Organizations understand $$ for tech.

But it won’t build you a network. Building a network requires social artistry, persistence, understanding the community, knowledge of the domain, attention to practices, conversations, more conversations, and concern for creating value.

If your only qualifications are being a tech whizz, you are not cut out for the job.

If training people on how to use a simple technology takes up a hundred per cent of your attention, you are on the wrong track. If it takes up less than five percent of your time – in response to requests by network members – you are probably getting close.

It’s community building 101. And I have to watch as my.own.client repeats the same.old.mistake.

I cry.

A dynamic project

Banks have had a bad rap of late, so it was a really pleasant surprise to see the work they are doing. It did not seem an obvious home for an ambitious social learning project, but it is what we found there. In less than a year the project has launched about two-dozen communities of practice. They have established a process for starting new communities and a framework for guiding their evolution. They are reaching the stage of forming a community for community leaders.

Focus on people

Again we were reminded of the importance of starting a social learning initiative by focusing on the social first and the technology second. Their Jive platform has opened the door, but they are determined that people and practices will drive the process. This strategic focus on learning is a key element of their success so far.

Score cards and health checks: three-partite conversations

We had some interesting insights in our conversations about community health checks. They experimented with a scorecard approach that resulted in a simple numeric score for a community health and maturity. Community leaders wondered what it meant to be a 2.8 as opposed to a 3.2, especially on criteria that they didn’t necessarily see as important in their context. Numbers can be misleading when they are a substitute for substantive conversations about what a community is doing and achieving. The key insight that came out was that a health check requires the combination of three perspectives:

• • The perspective of members who contribute to and benefit from the learning of the community
  • The perspective of sponsors who can see the potential of the community to improve the performance of the organization and develop strategic capabilities
  • The perspective of the social learning team that has developed a good sense of what a successful community can achieve, what a healthy community looks like, and how to assess and enhance its vitality

Similarly, setting objectives requires a convergence of organizational imperatives, member needs, what can be expected from a community, and the passion of a person or a core group ready to take leadership and deliver on the promise.

Value creation

They started using the value-creation framework early in the project and are publishing the results in a newsletter/report format. The practice of collecting value-creation stories from the start ensures that the initiative is driven by value creation – for the members and for the organization.

Sponsorship

The focus on value creation will help them develop the various forms of sponsorship their communities will need to reach their full potential. Creating clear sponsorship relationships is key to integrating the work of communities of practice into the functioning of the organization. In addition, it was clear that being able to quantify the commercial value of social learning is central for getting the buy-in from all parts of the organization.

A vision

We talked about the vision of “baking” this way of working into the culture of the organization. The focus on value creation is key to this vision of how an organization can function through an emphasis on empowering practitioners to form learning partnerships of all kinds. Their vision combines high aspiration for commercial value with the resolve to make work more engaging and meaningful. This is at the core of how we understand social learning. It is an ambitious project and the team is not daunted by the scale of what they are aspiring to do.

A great team

The results are a reflection of a great social learning team: smart, friendly, informal, very focused, passionate, productive, and an uncanny ability to be frank with each other.

We developed a new friendship, anchored in a true learning partnership. This blend of serious joint inquiry, committed learning partnership, and personal friendship is the kind of working relationship we really enjoy. It’s how we’d always like to do business.

Thanks to John Stepper, Mara Tolja, Eve Eaton, Ann-Marie Imafidon, Azfarul Islam, Emmi Matsunaga, Thomas Olsen, Paul Field and Howard Guess for sharing their work with us at Deutsche Bank. And thanks to Lauren Klein for making the connection.

Organizational culture can work against communities of practice, if it is individualistic, competitive, and focused on the short term.

Changing organizational culture is very difficult. Change initiatives to address cultural issues have had mixed results at best. One of the problems of these change initiatives lies in their scale: they have to happen in lockstep across the organization. As a result they remain for the most part distant from people’s daily concerns.

Communities of practice are very sensitive to culture because of their voluntary nature and their basis in identity. But for the same reason they are also a locus for the creation of culture. Each community inherits the culture of the organization, and needs to build on what the culture offers. But being self-governed, it can to some extent choose to produce its own culture. This process does not even need to be deliberate.

Cultivating and integrating communities of practice is therefore likely to lead to a kind culture change in the long term, but one that takes place a community at a time. It is therefore less controlled and less uniform than traditional initiatives. But being in the hands of practitioners increases its chances of “taking.”

Knowledge is indeed a source of power; but hoarding knowledge is not necessarily the best way to benefit from its power, especially in the context of communities of practice.

Generalized reciprocity. In a community of practice, sharing knowledge is neither one-way nor merely a transaction. It is a mutual engagement in learning among peers. An improved practice benefits the whole community. Even experts benefit from having more knowledgeable colleagues. Contributing one’s knowledge is an investment in the stock of the community. In this context, the distinction between self-interest and generosity is not so clear.

Reputation platform. A community of practice acts as a platform for building a reputation. It is a long-term interaction through which people get to know each other. Peers are in a position to appreciate the significance of each other’s contributions in ways that make their recognition meaningful. And because communities of practice usually cut across formal structures, reputation can extend beyond one’s unit. As one engineer put it: “The advantage of my community is that it allows me to build a reputation beyond my team.”

With reciprocity and reputation combined, sharing becomes a major vehicle for realizing the power of knowledge. But it is often important that this process extend beyond the community and become an aspect of the integration of communities in organizations. This calls for mechanisms to translate community contributions and reputation among peers into organizational recognition, such as a rubric in performance appraisal for community contributions and career paths for people who take on community leadership.

Existing across an organization’s formal structures, communities of practice rarely derive much power directly from positions in formal hierarchies. But communities do not usually seek positional power, with its control over resources and accountability for investments—tasks for which communities are not well suited. They do seek the power of voice, however: the power to be heard, to make a difference, and to have their practice-based perspective matter. In the knowledge economy, the power of voice becomes just as important as the power of position.

In an organization where the power of voice is acknowledged, managers would routinely ask: “Have you checked with your community about this? What was their reaction?” The one time we saw a community really angry was an occasion when its opinion had not been sought. The company had gone ahead with an acquisition in the domain of the community and the acquisition had not turned out well. Members of the community’s core group were furious that their community had not been consulted. The community, they were certain, could have foreseen the problems. Interestingly, they were not asking for the responsibility to make the final decision. They did not care for the politics associated with such responsibility. But they wanted their voice to be included in the debate.

Executives who sponsor communities bridge between these two forms of power. A sponsor uses positional power to help communities find a voice in the organization. This integrating function is a new and sometimes uneasy role for executives to assume, because it does not identify power with control. Still it is a critical role, whose importance will increase with the growing emphasis on knowledge—and with it on the power of voice.

Communities of practice that have high expectations about what they can achieve tend to be energized. And yet misplaced tasks and expectations can also make the community feel like just another job to do. So the question tasks and expectations hinges on a key distinction between energizing and de-energizing tasks and expectations:

Energizing tasks and expectations. They usually allow practitioners to make a difference with their expertise; they help them connect with each other around their desire to perfect their craft; they have visibility in the organization (or at least with the people who can appreciate the results). Typical examples include solving hard problems, debating a hot issue, or inspecting a competitor’s products.

De-energizing tasks and expectations. They feel like an imposition and make community participation seem like work as usual; they do not entail much learning; and they do not reflect the real value of the community. Typical examples include collecting data, logistics, writing, or answering the same basic questions over and over.

Obviously, this distinction is a subjective matter and the same task or expectation can have either effect depending on the circumstances. Still, we have found the distinction useful because it seems to matter much more than where the task or expectation originated. The critical issue is not whether a given challenge was initially self-generated or suggested from the outside. A technical question from the CEO can be energizing; and a member’s suggestion to review the literature de-energizing. The critical issue is energy. The source of energy in community participation can be an instrumental benefit such as saving time, but just as often, it is learning, excitement, and professionalism. A hallmark of a mature professional identity is a desire to make a difference.

Communities of practice can be propelled forward by energizing tasks and expectations; they can be killed by de-energizing ones. We have seen it happen. Communities of practice can be viewed as a convenient resource to perform tasks for which there is no funding. No matter how much you care about a domain of knowledge, if participation in your community inevitably results in hours of undesirable homework, you’ll want to stay away. If an organization is going to ask communities of practice to perform tasks that are not energizing, but for which they are uniquely qualified, then it needs to fund these tasks explicitly and offer logistical support.

Because of this tension between vertical and horizontal processes, integrating communities of practice in an organization is an exercise in paradox. Organizations tend to pay attention to structures or issues by institutionalizing them but it is a delicate task to integrate communities of practice into the organization without squelching the very self-organizing principle that makes them thrive. When it comes to communities of practice, organizations have varying degrees of institutionalization, which even vary from community to community. It is useful to distinguish between two kinds of institutionalization: institutionalizing communities of practice themselves, and institutionalizing their existence in the organization.

Institutionalizing communities. There are cases in which institutionalizing a community makes sense. When the domain is of critical strategic importance, it may require the investment of substantial resources, including some full-time core members. Some communities include a center of excellence; some even become departments in the organization. But even when they do, it is useful to maintain a distinction between the formal center or department and the community of practice it represents. For one thing, their boundaries are likely to be distinct—some members of the community may not be part of the department, especially the more peripheral ones. And the underlying community may well have different sources of motivation, qualities of relationships, and governance expectations. The institutional part is often best understood as the core of a broader community.

Institutionalizing the existence of communities. Institutionalizing a community into a formal structure requires caution; but it is always helpful to consider ways to institutionalize the existence of communities of practice in an organization—the fact that they are integral to the organization’s ability to achieve its goals. (This is true whether the relevant communities are fully inside an organization or exist across organizations.) Institutionalizing their existence can give them access to executive sponsorship and to resources, such as time, travel, and technology. Time is a good example because it is invariably a central concern for community members in organizations. Institutionalizing the existence of communities helps legitimize the time members spend on their communities without dictating what they do. Participation in communities can also be integrated in HR processes, such as developmental plans, training, and career advancement. This type of institutionalization aims to structure an explicit organizational context for communities. It does not reach into communities, nor attempt to substitute for the practitioners’ self-governance. It is a way to integrate communities by carving a special place for them in the organization, not by molding them in the image of the organization.

In general, it is much better to let participation be voluntary. This way, communities of practice live on because they create value for members, not because of an edict or a box to check. It does not mean that one cannot strongly encourage participation or even request that someone run an idea by the relevant community. But making participation compulsory more generally runs the risk that communities become just another meeting to go to and survive. This is likely to deflate the very social energy that makes healthy communities of practice places of meaningful learning.

Traditionally, knowledge has been viewed as something that experts hand down to practitioners. But organizations in all sectors are discovering that something unique happens when practitioners become direct learning partners by forming a community: they bring insights from their engagement with customers and practical challenges; the knowledge they share and create together builds on these insights and challenges; and they can apply this knowledge to their work because it reflects their experience.

Admittedly, the experience of practitioners cannot be the source of everything they need to know. So there is definitely a role for specialized experts and researchers. But the contributions of these experts and researchers are more meaningful and useful when they are integrated into an ongoing learning process that is driven by practitioners themselves.

In order to reflect the experience of practitioners, a community of practice needs to be self-governing in a fundamental sense. This way, practice can really become the curriculum—in the sense of providing both learning challenges and learning resources likely to be relevant.