Community of Practice: A Primer

We’re paraphrasing slightly but there is a famous quote which goes along the lines of, "I always try not to be the most intelligent person in the room and, if I am, I find a different room.”

No matter our level of expertise on a subject, we can always benefit from frank and honest exchanges of ideas with likeminded people who are also facing similar challenges and opportunities to us. A problem shared is a problem halved after all and, with so many of the problems we face in our professional lives being shared across departments and even organizations, a pooling of intellectual resources will often yield solutions no one person could have produced alone.

In recent years, this phenomenon of like-minded people meeting up to discuss issues and challenges in this manner has been dubbed a "community of practice.”

Community of Practice

A community of practice is usually self-organized by persons within an organization and aims to improve skill or knowledge within a set field by sharing ideas and openly discussing the challenges of the day.

Participation in a community of practice is voluntary and attendance is normally driven purely by an individual’s desire to improve their own abilities in their role and, by proxy, the success rate of their involvement in their company’s work. Not only is knowledge and skill improved by attending a community of practice, but the relationships built can strengthen the organization as a whole and each person can gain a greater understanding of their place in the gestalt of things.

"The major advantage here is that people are interacting with those they do not generally work with,” writes Workpath. "During meetings, participants have the opportunity to share their individual experiences with one another and, as a result, create new opportunities and master specific challenges. New ideas can only emerge from interaction of various networks, in which each party shares its own view. In turn, this influences the decisions of others and creates a learning effect. In a professional setting, working and learning always go hand in hand. A community of practice promotes this relationship.”

Organizing a Community of Practice

Because communities of practice are not mandated meetings, it usually falls to interested parties to organize them, instead of upper management. However, starting a community of practice in your own organization is not a difficult affair if you have some basic organizational skills and a desire to see it come to fruition.

According to Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, a community of practice contains three key elements: domain, community, and practice.

• Domain covers the main area of concern the community of practice will seek to address.
• Community, as the name suggest, are the people interested in gathering to address the domain in the community of practice.
• Practice describes all the experiences, ideas, documents, and tools which will be used to explore the topic defined in the domain.

As you can see, everything begins with the domain and is defined by its relationship to the area of concern laid out in that stage of the process.

"A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people,” writes Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner. "It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as "expertise” outside the community.”

Once the domain has been established, the community of practice organizer can begin approaching people they think will have the expertise (as defined in the above quote) to best tackle the topic. These people could be from the same department or from a different one. Some communities of practice are even inter-organizational, although these obviously involve considerably more organization to assemble.

The following table shows what the interactions of a typical community of practice might look like, which should give you some ideas to get started with.

(Image source: wenger-trayner.com)

With these stages available to you, you can easily start your nascent community of practice down the road of solving the problems laid out in the domain. Once the community of practice is established there is no limit to what you can achieve and, once the initial domain has been resolved, a fresh one can be established and similarly addressed.

Final Thoughts

Now you’re up to speed on the topic of the community of practice, it’s easy to see the potential benefits. Follow these steps to establish one in your own organization today and begin pooling resources to solve challenges and propel the business forwards.

Join us on workshop day to take an active part in addressing community of practice – the concept, the practice and the early lessons learned from our adaptation with Director of Global Technical Services and Medtronic Technical Fellow for Medtronic, Dr. John Chrisentary at Field Service Medical 2023, being held in February at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, CA.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.