Ambient KM: A simple framework for starting Communities of Practice

To start a CoP: make it simple and compelling.

Pre-requisites

But first, consider at least 2 things before starting one:

There's a group of people who are in the practice, although they may not know each other
There's a good reason for them to come together

On some occasions, legitimacy to participate in community activities is a key consideration. One such example is the accountability of work hours. When such issues are pertinent, the community needs to have a sponsor. But the sponsor should stay out of community activities to encourage peer sharing - something pretty tough to keep them out when they are funding.

A group of people

Organisations that see CoPs as tools for developing capabilities are right. However, there must be enough people in the practice so that they can socialise their knowledge and personal artifacts.

A company has trained 250 technical professionals on cloud computing over a 2-day course for the last 6 months. However, there wasn't enough cloud computing projects for them to hone their skills. Since they are not in the practice, the value of coming together is low. Their managers and themselves would rather invest in learning that's necessary for their work.

A good reason

This is what touches their intrinsic motivation to congregate.

An organisation was trying to start a Sales CoP for its Sales Managers, who are organised by industry business units. They sell services and solutions that are offered by specialised Line of Business (LOB) units. When the sales community first tried to start, it didn't gain any traction as both the community leader and the members didn't see a good reason for them to come together. "Why should I share customer insights which are not relevant to the rest?", "Why should I share my penetration strategies when I'm not sure if others will share", "Will they be interested in my customer relationship stories"; and I think you'd agree with me that it's not in sales folks' DNA to share knowledge openly.

So what can make these skeptical Sales Managers come together?

To sell services, these Sales Managers have depended on occasional one-direction briefings from LOB units and access to some brief service offering documents. With limited knowledge, some Sales Managers weren't confident to sell services, and they often delay an opportunity for a second meeting that involved the LOB specialist. As such, some Sales Managers found a compelling need to have 2-way dialogue with LOB units to equip them with the knowledge to sell services. And after each sharing, the LOB specialist can make us of the online community space to update Sales Managers on trends, value propositions and stories.

A simple framework

There are many resources out there that show us a systematic process of starting a CoP. My experience points to an approach that requires us to do as little as possible before the first community gathering. It involves 3 steps:

Identify the reasons that would bring practitioners together.
Design community activities that would help the community meet the objectives.
Design an online community space to support these activities.

Reasons that would bring practitioners together

If there's a leader identified for the community, invite the leader in this conversation. It'll be good that the leader can bring along one or two more members at this stage that'll form the core group. If a leader doesn't assist, then a central function such as the KM team needs to initiate conversations with practitioners who are preferably from diverse job profiles. My experience points to a greater elicitation of insights if we go on a one-to-one interview. Once we identify reasons that would bond practitioners, get feedback from the next practitioner that we'll meet. This would help us identify compelling reasons versus skeptical ones. During these interviews, we'll be able to identify practitioners who exhibit higher interest levels, and we can invite them in a planning session for the first CoP kickoff meeting.

Community activities

We craft community activities to help build relationships, create a basis for meaningful interaction among community members, and for us to realise the community objectives. For instance, an IT developers community who've identified code sharing as an objective, may perhaps bring along code artifacts, tell why they are sharing them and contribute them in a single workshop; we call this barn raising. This creates a spike in content, generates enough examples for future contributors, and helps the core team identify any issues during the process. In order to create trust in sharing codes and using codes, we can design networking activities to help members open up and know each other better.

Online community space

Digital habitats is a book dedicated to this topic. When members are not meeting face-to-face, community members depend on technology to participate remotely in community activities. A configuration is the design of tools and features to support an activity. For example, members communication may be done through a Blog, with an email notification feature turned on for every new post and comment. We need someone who can steward the use of technology in a community, so that the members can get clear guidance on how to use the tools.

Resources