Community of Practice

In the late eighties, an anthropology professor and her doctoral student investigated traditional master–apprentice relationships in the training of several vocations: native Mexican midwives, west-African tailors, British quartermasters, and – to shake things up – a group of Alcoholics Anonymous as a kind of non-vocational training control group.

Published in 1991 as Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation with a charming 80s psychedelic cover, they coined the term “Community of Practice” that has taken the corporate world by storm. But the phrase occurs only a handful of times in the book, while it is about practices of communities, the fleshing out of this concept still had to wait for a few years.

Lave and Wenger did not set out to improve corporate training, and they did not formulate a learning theory or a learning concept that could be implemented in a learning setting. They envisioned an analytic category, namely Situated Learning and its most important cornerstone, Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Situated Learning is not a posh word for “learning on the job”. It concerns itself less with a physical place, instead situating the learning process in social interactions and contexts. And the big social interaction is the apprentices’ participation that is both legitimate and peripheral. Where “legitimate” points at a common goal, the completion of vocational training, and both sides’ intent to see it through and to do what they can to see it succeed, “peripheral” hints at a gradual involvement. The apprentice maybe only watches at first, until the master is satisfied that first small ancillary activities can be carried out. The apprentice starts at watching, ends up at doing everything the master does, if only a bit clumsy maybe, but this gradual trajectory in levels of competence is common to all those professions, and contributes to the construction of a professional identity. As does professional language, jargon, ways to express things that are particular to a community of professional practitioners. Lave and Wenger are very clear on the point that learning the profession also means “speaking like a midwife/tailor”.

Now, Situated Learning has been seminal in educational psychology, but few companies care about theories devised by anthropologists. And it’s hard to see how the Community of Practice in this stage of description and development could have ended up at the average workplace.

Fortunately, Wenger took his doctorate and decided not to stay in academia forever. First he devised his own learning theory, and now it is a proper leaning theory, and he did so by another field study: in a proper company. An insurance company and its clerks and secretaries, that is. He looked at how claims processors and people working in adjacent jobs formed a community with a respective identity: “We, the claims processors”. He found ways to handle things that were contingent, these processes could have been established differently, they just happened to be like this in that department. “That’s how we process claims”. All of that he published in another colors-gone-wild-covered book, the 1998 Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity.

Now, Social Learning is quite a bit more practical and applicable than Situated Learning, but it is still a lot about constructing one’s identity, which in turn contributes to one’s life’s meaning and its relation to the work place. Let’s skip all that and go straight to his 2002 book, now with a proper, grown-up, abstract art cover, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. That is where Wenger actually goes all-in with commercializing the concept. Lave has been long out of way, returning to anthropologist/ethnologist research. Wenger sees the potential applicability in the corporate world, if he can only twist it a bit towards the new big thing: knowledge management in companies. That’s what this book is finally all about: how does the Community of Practice help companies become one of those fabled “learning organization” that Senge preached – spoiler alert: Communities of Practice transcend hierarchies and are supposed to enable tacit learning – and how do managers encourage and nurture those magical groups? Wenger and his wife pushed hard on that angle, and today they sell consulting services worldwide and certify trainers in a franchise model not unlike David Allen‘s Getting Things Done methodology. Here he really does away with all the education science and anthropology baggage and writes a straight business advice book.

What is a Community of Practice, according to its prophet? A group of people who are (1) interested to further a domain, (2) form a community, and (3) share a common repertoire or practice.

The domain is the subject, a common focus of interest that is also relevant for the business. The community is the people acting upon this domain, who also take responsibility for its furtherance in the company. This also implies an indeterminate duration, Communities of Practice are not projects with defined deadlines, they are an ongoing concern. But the most important is the shared repertoire and practice: participants develop common attitudes, ways of thinking about the domain, and ways of acting particular to that group. Another Community of Practice could develop totally different practices, even with similar people and the same domain. The ongoing engagement with one another leads to concrete social relationships. Communities of Practice are insofar more than loose networks of people, as the participants don’t act uncoupled from each other.

An important part of social practices are narratives, shared experiences and stories about what had happened before. But commonly used tools, computer programs and methods also count as shared repertoire, strengthening the group’s experience of identity.

As amorphous as Communities of Practice can seem, they definitely end at the point where a group of people does not share common bodies of knowledge, and where the people don’t feel especially like being part of a concrete group.

Communities of Practice may be totally informal, they can easily develop without anyone intending to form a Community of Practice, and even without anyone noticing that they are part of something “with a name”.

But what does that mean in practice, what properties do Communities of Practice commonly exhibit?

First of all, the participants are co-equal, Obviously, corporate hierarchies still exist. But the weight of one’s voice is not displayed by the org chart, it is attributed by others according to one’s contribution. This friction with traditional hierarchies is a sore point that needs to be navigated carefully.

The participants are self-selected, not sent to the group by their boss. Communities of Practice offer a low-threshold entry, anyone can “peripherally participate” and start lurking. Ideally they progress with time as they are socialized in the group (“encultured”) towards a more meaningful contribution and a more central participation.

In this way Communities of Practice can function both as a mechanism to signal one’s coworkers that one is interested in some domain, but also as an internal register of competences, where the Community of Practice now works as an obvious contact point to find domain experts.

The development of a shared practice is supposed to help in externalizing and disseminating implicit knowledge within the company, but across organizational boundaries.

Companies love Communities of Practice, because they offer a form of training that speaks to employees’ self-motivation and need for autonomy, but also does not tie up training staff, like courses or workshops would do. It does not directly cost money, although this ambiguous position towards resources, especially working time, has potential to make employees feel unsure about how much time might be too much time spent. This resource conflict needs to be settled up front, with management clearly delineating guidelines.

In the end, successful Communities of Practice are tricky for management to handle, because they cannot really be “founded” by management or ordered to work on some concrete deliverable. Both are clear signs that a project team is intended, maybe cross-functionally staffed, but not the informal, sometimes even unconsciously formed structure of a Community of Practice. But where such structures form, management would be well-advised to nurture and support them, applying a mostly hands-off approach.