Assignment 2
Discuss key factors in creating a community of practice within a business

Name: Aaron Overington
Student ID: 05020344
Paper Number: 157.240
Paper Title: Social Media in Business
Paper Co-ordinator: Dr. Barbara Crump

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In 1991 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger defined a Community of Practice (CoP) as a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This definition was further refined in 1998 by Wenger who identified three dimensions by which a community of practice defines itself by, namely what it is about, how it functions and what are its outputs (Wenger, Learning as a Social System, 1998). In the writers opinion there are three key factors involved to creating a community of practice in the business environment and this essay will seek to discuss each of these. We will start with the domain of the community of practice, then the community itself and finally the practice. It is the combination of these three factors, according to Wenger, that make up a community of practice and the development of each of the elements in parallel that develops it (Wenger, Communities of Practice, 2006). We need to comprehend initially though that a Community of Practice is not the same as a team. John Brown and Estee Gray suggested in their 1995 article that “At the simplest level, they are a small group of people who’ve worked together over a period of time. Not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorised or identified group… They are peers in the execution of ‘real work’” (Brown & Gray, 1995).

The first key factor to consider is the domain of the Community of Practice. This has been defined by Wenger as a shared competence between the members implying that a base level of knowledge about the subject matter is required (Wenger, Communities of Practice, 2006). He also refers to this in his 1998 framework as the joint enterprise dimension of Communities of Practice; members collectively agreeing on the definition of what the community is about and holding each other accountable to that (Wenger, Learning as a Social System, 1998). Where a group of people in an organisation perform similar jobs there will already be a shared domain in place (Hildreth, Kimble, & Wright, 2000) so the identification of the domain should be clear. It is possible that a community of practice may already be in place inside the organisation, albeit in a casual format, and without a label naming it as such. Conversations in the lunch room between colleagues exchanging stories so that they can share ideas is an example of this. The initial membership of the community of practice needs to decide the scope of the community and from a business context, identify the specific topics they want to address in the short-term (Serrat, 2008). Opponents to the building of Communities of Practice argue that they are similar to the medieval guilds whereby knowledge is closely guarded and barriers are erected to seclude participants (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). This can result in an extreme view of the communities knowledge and the participants own self-worth and cause internal power struggles that can undermine the integrity of the community. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus also suggests that the shared competence that enables the domain to exist also limits the communities ability to learn new information and add to the domain knowledge (Bourdieu, 1990). These issues can be countered by holding the community accountable to the business needs and drivers that established the Community of Practice in the first instance and, if necessary, re-defining the domain to address new issues that confront the business (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002).

The second factor to consider is the community itself. It is important to realise that the leadership of a business cannot make a Community of Practice, they can only create the environment for one to naturally develop and then support those communities that do emerge (Roberts, 2006). The organisation also needs to remember that simply creating a forum website by itself does not make a community, however the members of the website that engage in activities and share knowledge do make a community and they need to be permitted the time and the space to participate (Wenger, 2006). It is through these interactions that the trust and relationships develop between the participants and allow for the sharing of ideas. Some studies have shown that the community aspect helps new members to make better decisions and helps build their confidence (Li, Grimshaw, Nielsen, Judd, Coyte, & Graham, 2009) as well as create value and improve performance (Lesser & Storck, 2001). Apprenticeships are an example of this whereby a new member to a community learns from the existing members through the shared knowledge and experiences they have. The optimal community membership is one that reflects the different approaches, professional interests and perspectives that will allow innovation and growth to occur in the community (Snyder & de Souza Briggs, 2003). Culture plays an important role in a community, and the success or failure is, to a degree, dependent on the national culture. For example Asian countries that value collectivism may show greater returns from a Community of Practice than a country that is characterized by individualism such as Australia (Hofstede, 1991). The impact of sociocultural characteristics on Communities of Practice is also suggested by Steven Kerno as a contributor to the success or failure of these communities (Kerno, 2008). Whilst it is difficult to mitigate the cultural aspect entirely, efforts should be taken to have membership that is cross-cultural to reduce any negative impact.

The third key factor to consider is that of the practice. This is the body of knowledge that is built up over time through the telling of stories and the sharing of methodologies and tools by the community participants. Part of the process in creating a Community of Practice is defining what knowledge will be captured and stored, how that will be done and how will it be disseminated to the wider group. In this setting, the term practice refers to the way individuals actually perform their work duties as opposed to how the business defines the work should be performed through policies and procedures (Lesser & Prusak, 1999) and is a dynamic process through which individuals learn how to do their jobs. By adopting a specific language and using defined artefacts, the community can achieve great efficiencies, but as Wenger et al described in 2002 this can also lead to barriers forming excluding outside participation and worse, prevent the practitioners from seeing what does not fit their paradigm (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). They also describe several other potential issues that can develop over time if the community does not develop, including documentism whereby the focus is on recording all information without a gatekeeper to critique it, resulting in meaningless information clusters and amnesia which is the opposite of documentism and limited recording is performed resulting in repeated rework for similar issues. These issues and the others they describe of dogmatism and mediocrity can be overcome by encouraging the members to actively participate in the community, benchmarking the performance of the community against others both internally and externally and valuing all members contributions so their personal reputations can develop (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002)

The three key factors discussed above are by themselves not the key to create a Community of Practice in a business, however combined they provide a solid framework in which the community can develop and grow. Imagine a Venn diagram of the three factors. Individually the domain, the community and the practise can offer an insight into how the knowledge gained in the workplace can be harnessed and used but it is at the intersection of all three where magic can happen and the real power of Communities of Practice are realised.

Bibliography
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