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Wenger, E., & Snyder, W. (2000). Communities of practice: the
organizational frontier. _Harvard Business Review_
(January-February 2000), 139-145.
An article for managers encouraging them to carefully cultivate
communities of practice (CoP) in the workplace as they may reinvent
companies the same way that teams did "not so long ago". After
describing what a community of practice is and how it can help the
company to be effective by being "the hidden fountainhead of knowledge
development", the authors then describe how management must
be careful to not disrupt the informal, emergent nature of the CoPs
when trying to exploit them. Strategies for supporting the communities
without killing them are provided.
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You know, like plants. In a field. Fertilized.
Wouldn't it be marvelous if we lived in a world where management and
management consultants weren't constantly attempting to co-opt the
methods by which workers empower themselves?
Communities of practice, to my eye, form because the existing social
structure of a corporation is not providing what is needed. CoPs
transcend organizational divisions and hiearchies because the members
want to get things done. Corporations would do well to pay attention
to this resistance to hierarchies.
CoPs also have a tendency to resist formal methods. While it is
obvious that corporations must have some policies and methods to get
the job done (and deal with regulations) they would benefit from
taking a critical thinking approach to problems instead of a
prescriptive approach: empower individuals and groups to think. I
suppose this is what drives the desire to cultivate CoPs.
In general corporations, instead of paying so much attention to the
emergence of CoPs should instead pay attention to what causes them to
emerge. Why are they needed? How can we adjust the organization so
that its nature supports what the CoPs step in to do?
Or, honestly, let's work harder to get rid of corporations and
specious distinctions between workers and managers. Everyone is a
worker and everyone should be a manager. People should be responsible
for themselves in a community of common goals. That's what's so ironic
about managerial desire to hop on the CoP bandwagon: CoPs are people
taking responsibility for themselves in the face of a system that
believe it has to do it for them, and is failing.
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