Creating and Facilitating Communities of Practice

Abstract

Communities of practice (CoPs) are an emerging, unstructured organizational form that many believe will help companies to truly leverage what they know. CoPs appear to have the potential to galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change thereby improving a company's performance and making it more competitive. However, a major problem with them is that their organic and informal nature makes them highly resistant to management supervision and interference in their activities. CoPs are therefore controversial because there is no clear role for management in them. In fact, if management does get involved, the community often dissipates. Yet paradoxically, CoPs require specific managerial efforts to develop and support them so that their full power can be leveraged. To discuss CoPs and their role in organizations, the authors convened a focus group of knowledge managers from a variety of industries. To help them prepare for the session, participants were given a series of questions to consider in advance on how management can and should develop and facilitate CoPs. This paper discusses the challenges and successes they have had in implementing CoPs and makes recommendations for practising knowledge managers who wish to encourage and support the development of CoPs in their organizations. It concludes that communities of practice have the potential to dramatically change how enterprises operate and compete because they are the mechanism through which knowledge gets both created and turned into action. While they are made possible by technologies that enable people to share insights and ideas around the world, they are first and foremost a social mechanism. Over the next few years, we can expect to see CoPs evolve and new management techniques develop as we learn new ways to leverage knowledge to create value.