The Value of Community
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Over the last few posts we have talked about what a Community of Practice (CoP) is, what one looks like, and the different roles involved in a CoP. You are probably now asking…What the creation of a CoP does for me and my organization. Below are some of the benefits that can be expected from a well-implemented CoP infrastructure:
Increased social inclusion
Because people self-assign to groups, people will naturally go to the groups in which they are most interested.
Increased problem solving
Problem solving is both a meta-competency of CoP and an outcome. People become better at solving problems because that is what the group practices and does with each other. Companies who employ CoP’s actually find unlikely solutions to problems often ‘out on the floor’ rather than the process engineering office.
Development of new capabilities
Companies that use CoP find that capability can often be learned more quickly than in traditionally formal training where the relationship is one-to-many. In a CoP, the relationship is many to many which fosters quicker speeds of new capabilities.
Reduced time to mastery
Mastery is a function of fine-tuning a capability. By creating a CoP, the organization can help the best become better rather than merely getting people up to a minimal base. People who are motivated by further success will naturally find each other in the CoP.
Leveraged best practices
By engaging people in a CoP, the best practices rise to the top of the discussion group. Peer review is powerful and the best practices will inform all.
Creation of new knowledge
New knowledge is a natural outcome of a CoP. Traditional new knowledge must pass the muster of various levels of scrutiny, which are typically vested in current forms of knowledge. By submitting new ideas to the community, a good idea merely needs one champion to help validate it rather than succumbing to one ‘nay’ in the typical organizational stack.
The Impact: Strategic Success through Communities of Practice
In a mature business environment, improvements from process engineering such as Six Sigma and TQM are arithmetic at best; you sooner or later reach the top of the curve in strategic interventions and become limited to the law of diminishing returns.
By nurturing the informal learning culture and aligning it to strategic objectives, we begin a new strategic intervention where the improvement curve is potentially exponential.
The bottom line? By creating a Communities-of-Practice infrastructure, your organization will be transformed into a learning organization…one that values and learns from the implicit, tacit knowledge of its workers, not just the formal learning. This learning organization can then be directed in real time towards discovering and implementing whichever strategic objectives are proposed.
I would love to see a discussion of any experiences you have had with either formal or informal Communities of Practice.
