Knowledge and Communities

Eric Lesser, Michael Fontaine, Jason Slusher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781136390517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Knowledge and Communities is the first book dedicated to a major new knowledge management topic. "Communities of Practice" are cross-organizational groups of people sharing knowledge, solving common problems, and exchanging insights and frustrations. Knowledge and Communities, a collection of authoritative articles, describes the dynamics of these groups and explains how they enable organizational knowledge to be creating, shared, and applied. The book teaches how organizations can empower both traditional and on-line communities and make them a cornerstone of a general knowledge management strategy. Readers will learn how communities can help unify an organization and its external stakeholders, such as customers and suppliers, and how they can critically support an e-commerce strategy. Knowledge and Communities will help readers understand a primary vehicle for building an organization's social capital and competitive advantage.

PART ONE

Practical Applications

1

Communities of Practice: The Key to Knowledge Strategy^*

Etienne Wenger

Communities of practice are everywhere. They exist within businesses and across business units and company boundaries. Even though they are informally constituted and reside within a specific area of practice, these self-organizing systems share the capacity to create and use organizational knowledge through informal learning and mutual engagement. Wenger believes that communities of practice are key to understanding the complex knowledge challenges faced by most organizations in today’s knowledge economy. To that end, Wenger sets the boundaries of what constitutes a community of practice and how it resides within different types of organizations. In this chapter, Wenger proposes a framework that motivates firms to recognize the critical knowledge generated by communities of practice to engage and identify common work practices, foster belonging, and deploy a knowledge strategy through transformation. With his framework, Wenger highlights how communities forge new connections and relationships with the greater organization—where the community is legitimized as a place for sharing and creating knowledge.

What if the key to the complex knowledge challenges faced by most organizations today lies in age-old, utterly familiar, and largely informal social structures known today as communities of practice? How would we “manage” knowledge? What shape would a knowledge strategy take?

Executives have long understood the value of knowledge and learning, at least at some intuitive level. More recently, these concerns have come to the fore with talk of a new economy, knowledge-based organizations, and learning as the ultimate competitive advantage. But what to do about such elusive, dynamic processes as learning and knowledge has not been quite so obvious.

Although most of us appreciate that we have learned as much through informal processes as in classrooms, we are not sure how to combine informal and formal aspects of learning in our organizations. And even though most of us are painfully aware that we know much more than we can ever tell, that knowledge in practice is much more a living process than an object, we can’t seem to refrain from treating it as a “thing” when we consider the need to “manage” it. Typical solutions have ranged from large training departments and corporate centers of excellence to complex information systems and collections of knowledge bases on Intranets. All with mixed results. Managers have focused on these formal efforts, not so much because they necessarily believed these were ideal or complete solutions, but because such approaches seemed tangible, justifiable, and amenable to such hallmarks of organizational success as formal design, implementation, and measurement.

Managers needed to move decisively, but missed a key element—a clear understanding of the kind of structure that could in practice take responsibility for learning and knowledge. They had clear structures for other purposes, and had replaced the silos and ivory towers of traditional functional organizations with business units—structures they found better suited for focusing on markets and product lines. More recently, they discovered teams as the ideal structures for locating the ownership of tasks and projects. But what about the ownership of knowledge? Where should it be located? What was going to be the new structure to take on this responsibility?

The answer to this very contemporary organizational question lies in an age-old structure. Since the beginning of history, human beings have formed communities that accumulate collective learning into social practices—communities of practice.¹ Tribes are an early example. More recent instances include the guilds of the Middle Ages that took on the stewardship of a trade, and scientific communities that collectively define what counts as valid knowledge in a specific area of investigation. Less obvious cases could be your local magician club, nurses in a ward, a street gang, or a group of software engineers meeting regularly in the cafeteria to share tips. Such communities do not take knowledge in their specialty to be an object; it is a living part of their practice even when they document it. Knowing is an act of participation.

Communities of practice may well represent the natural social structure for the ownership of knowledge, but they have been around for a long time, and they are everywhere. Organizations are already full of them. So what is new here? Why even pay attention? Well, what is new is the need for organizations to become more intentional and systematic about “managing” knowledge, and therefore the need to give these age-old structures a new, central role in running a business. A growing number of leading organizations in the private and public sectors (some of which are mentioned below) are pioneering this approach. Communities of practice represent the latest wave in an ongoing evolution of organizational structures, whose four primary types can be summarized in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Four Waves in Organizational Design

Because of their informal nature, communities of practice have remained largely invisible within organizations and have not been part of the language of management until recently. Now they represent the new frontier for organizations, the promise of great opportunities for pioneers of the knowledge age. They must be acknowledged, supported and fully integrated into the operation of organizations; and all this without disrupting the informality, collegiality, self-organization, and internal leadership that are critical to their ability to steward an area of expertise effectively.²

A Knowledge Strategy

If communities of practice are the natural stewards of knowledge in an organization, what does a knowledge strategy look like that takes this as its foundation? What is its overall shape? A knowledge strategy based on communities of practice consists of seven basic steps grouped into four streams of activity:

1. Understand strategic knowledge needs: what knowledge is critical to success?

2. Engage practice domains (find communities): where will people form communities around practices they can engage in and identify with?

3. Develop communities: how to help key communities reach their full potential?

4. Work the boundaries: how to link communities into broader learning systems?

5. Foster belonging: how to engage people’s identities and sense of meaning?

6. Run the business: how to integrate communities of practice into running the business of the organization?

7. Apply, assess, reflect, and renew: how to deploy a knowledge strategy through waves of organizational transformation?

The overall structure of this knowledge strategy is represented in Figure 1.2. The first six steps are paired in three curved arrows that represent three streams of activity, with the fourth in the center keeping the momentum of the whole process. The shading indicates both the tension between the steps in one arrow and the complementarity of the end of one arrow with the beginning of the next. The double arrows at the breaks indicate interactions with three kinds of broader socio-economic systems in which a knowledge organization participates:

Figure 1.2 A Knowledge Strategy Based on Communities of Practice

Note that the strategy is not linear. Rather it is an ongoing, dynamic process of renewing the capabilities of the organization by cycling through these steps. The strategy does not simply start at step 1 and end at step 7. Steps can happen in parallel, and every step can be a point of entry into the whole process. You may start at step 1 mapping the knowledge needs of a business strategy and the practices required to realize this strategy. But you may also start at step 3 if some people want to connect better with their peers by forming communities, or at step 4 if some communities need to learn how to communicate across boundaries. You may even start with a need to foster belonging in order to solidify your organization and galvanize it around its mission. No matter where you start, eventually you will need to have the whole wheel rolling.

• It participates in traditional economic markets where it offers its products and services and where it learns about needs and opportunities

• It also participates in talent markets because its ability to respond to its knowledge challenge depends on its ability to recruit, develop, and retain talent

• Last but not least, it participates in what I call “social learning systems,” such as an industry, a region (e.g., Silicon Valley), or a consortium where learning requirements blur relations of competition and collaboration. I argue elsewhere that in a knowledge economy, participating in these broader social learning systems is as crucial to success as participation in economic markets.³

Build a Strategic Capability Framework

The work of developing the organizational capabilities needed for success has two aspects. On the one hand, it requires the analytical work of translating a strategy into a description of the knowledge required. On the other hand, a capability must be realized in the form of practices that people can engage in and develop by investing their personal interests. This requires a social understanding of how communities can form to take responsibility for these practices.

Step 1. Map Key Knowledge Needs

The first step is to establish the organization’s knowledge needs as determined by such traditional factors as core competencies, effects on performance and reliance on innovation.

Core Competencies

Companies need to choose the competencies they will focus on as a source of distinctive advantage.⁴ Such strategic competencies include the basic knowledge necessary to be a player in a given industry as well as the specialized knowledge necessary to be a leader in the organization’s areas of strategic focus. Then companies must make sure that they build internal capabilities in these areas, lest their market position be usurped by a competitor. They will need to nurture communities of practice that grow and maintain these capabilities.

Effects on Performance

The ultimate purpose of developing capabilities is to enable performance. Establishing knowledge needs will require an understanding of how specific kinds of knowledge influence the performance indicators that the organization decides to monitor.⁵ This involves an analysis of core business processes to determine the source, significance and cost of suboptimal performance, and to discover what knowledge is needed for improvement. For example, you can determine what kind of knowledge will increase your chances of fixing a problem on the phone with a customer, and avoid a costly trip to the customer site by a technician.

Reliance on Innovation

Developing a community of practice with this knowledge would benefit performance. Some strategies rely more on innovation than others for their success. If you focus on leading-edge technological innovation, for instance, then you need the kind of vibrant practices that will push the envelope in these areas. But there are other kinds of innovation. Some companies will concentrate on operational efficiency or distribution logistics to compete on price in a commodity market. Others will emphasize marketing inventiveness or customer-specific innovation based on an intimate knowledge of their clients. Once dependence on innovation needs have been clarified, you can work to create new knowledge where innovation matters.

Articulating these strategic knowledge needs provides a framework for developing communities of practice. It helps the organization set priorities, direct resources, and respond to opportunities. It also helps communities clarify their relationship with the organization, legitimize their work and participate more actively in shaping strategic directions. Even if they focus on an emerging area that is not the current strategic focus, having a language to connect knowledge and performance is a tool to articulate, the value they create.

Step 2. Find Communities

The second step is to translate the knowledge needs of the organization into a set of critical practices around which people can form communities. These domains of practice should be concrete enough to permit members to engage wholeheartedly and develop their expertise and their professional identifies. Without personal engagement and passion for the topic, communities of practice will not thrive. A core competence, for instance, is often defined too broadly and abstractly for any one to form a practice around it. If passenger safety is a core competence for an airline, it will translate into a multitude of actual practices in maintenance, in training for flight attendants, or in pre-flight check-ups.

The way to perform this translation is to find or recognize existing or potential communities in key areas. Shell and Chevron, for instance, have developed an interviewing process to accomplish this by following existing networks and exploring the potential benefits of forming communities of practice. In most organizations there are usually people who are already involved in thinking about areas of strategic significance and who are likely to have some connections with each other, however loose. At National Semiconductor, senior managers put together a list of strategic competencies to carve a market niche; they realized the list was not enough. To develop these competencies actively they needed to know what they looked like in practice. They launched a pilot effort to interview multiple practitioners whose work related to one of these competencies. These interviews uncovered the nature of the relevant domains of practice, the identity of key practitioners, the connections that did and did not exist and the issues they faced related to these domains. The very process of interviewing practitioners and potential leaders prompted many to take the initiative to form tighter communities with colleagues in other business units.

An exploratory process oriented t...