In the last edition of Time Magazine, from Joe Klein's article on Obama's victory:
[community organizers] have delivered a message to Rudy Giuliani, whosneered at the Republican National Convention that he didn't even know "what a community organizer is." This is who they are: they are the people who won this election.
From David Snowden through Lilia Efimova:
My own view is that communities can evolve, but cannot be designed top down. Of course you can stimulate and direct evolution. However a CoP "Roll out" plan always gets me worried.I think I do not totally agree on this one. It is true that the most vibrant communities were self-started and self-organized groups of people, but you cannot infer from this that active communities cannot be rolled out as project teams, especially in large organizations where the behavior of employees by and large depends on their position in the org chart. I know places where employees with brilliant ideas will not move unless given the order to. Do not underestimate the need of human beings to obey.
Dave's statement is correct: fostering the development of communities of practice is really a question of stimulating their starting conditions "[which] can be as simple as making the tools available, or providing some initial stimulation or sponsorship". But in many cases, especially in large vertical organizations, people are just not ready to adopt a view of their organization as a complex adaptive system. They can be really frightened to start networking with their peers, because that's not what the boss wants. So providing a safer and more familiar environment that looks more like a project team, with templates and checklists, can prove handy for community development. Yes it is paternalistic in some way, but it is a form of education, in the etymological sense: teaching people to fly on their own, to paraphrase Chris Collison.
I view my job at Schneider as very similar to this guy's on the deck of an aircraft carrier - called the "yellow dog" in the French Navy- I provide guidance and tools for communities to take off. Once they have, they are on their own. But before that, they follow some basic rules that will at least provide a minimum level of safety for them and for the company. Luckily, I also "fly" too, otherwise I would get bored.
Fantastic suggestion by my friend Gilbert Brault: Using student interns as core group members for communities of practice in our company.
Can you imagine the learning potential? Students are always looking for internships in large corporations, and large corporations often have a hard time giving them traditional marketing, R&D or even production jobs. If students could take some of the leadership roles in our communities of practice, not only would they learn a lot about the company and the business, but our community members would learn a lot as well because they suddenly would have access to relevant academic research and expert networks through those students. I would be delighted to have a junior mechanical engineer in my woodworking community of practice. Not only could he or she alleviate some of the day-to-day logistical hassles of running the community, bu he or she could bring valuable insights, new ideas, new contacts...
Just think about it as a fascinating new way to build valuable bridges between the academic and corporate worlds. Has anyone tried this before?
On Thursday and Friday of last week, we at Schneider Electric had our first management seminar devoted to Knowledge Management. It was a big success, because we organized it entirely as a knowledge sharing exercise –no pressure for decision making-, and because some people from my own network of KM practitioners could actually attend :
- Frank Leister, the CKO of SAS and co-author of "Leading with Knowledge" gave an outstanding presentation of KM at SAS.
- Allan Underwood, Knowledge Manager at Bureau Veritas, had a booth about the KM program of his compan on our knowledge fair
- Christophe Binot, CKO of Total, gave his feedback on our emerging KM program in a very credible and insightful way.
- Nicolas Rolland, KM Professor at CERAM in Sophia Antipolis near Nice, wrote an excellent tutorial on KM and gave it away at our knowledge fair.
- Denis Meingan, Consultant at Knowledge Consult in Paris, and specialist of CoPs, ran a workshop on managerial behaviors to foster a knowledge sharing culture.
All these guys were invited one month in advance only. They were not paid any fees except for Denis. And yet they all came !
Amazing what networks can do!
Bumping into Open Tech Support - The Ultimate Tech Support Site, I came to think...
When I have a computer problem here in the office, I sometimes ring IT support for help. An anonymous guy I do not know (each time someone different) answers the phone, asks me a series of questions, and then gives me a ticket number. Any time between a few hours and three months after (depending on the priority), another guy comes to my office, takes my seat, asks for my ID and password and tries to troubleshoot the problem. I don’t know what he is doing; he mumbles to himself, and does not try to explain anything. Then one of two things can happen. Either he leaves without a solution, which leads to another ticket or to the new claim that « we don’t support this software », or his solution works but with dramatic side effects on other applications. (Sounds familiar ?)
Why couldn't tech support take a different perspective and view its primary role as educating employees to solve the problems themselves? Wouldn't it look very different? The employee would be expected to learn the basics with manuals ou e-learning tools, even on company time. She would then « graduate » into a community of practice of IT users of the company, with special interest groups, discussion forums, troubleshooting guides, meetings etc. She would not pay for the service of having her PC troubleshooted, but for the service of accessing the community and its social network.
It would undoubtedly take more of her time, but she would be incredibly more effective and happy in her daily work.
I know I would.