Review

A short insight packed book about building communities of practice. There’s nothing revolutionary but it provides a good overview to anyone interested in starting or improving a practice. Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t considered using skill benchmarks as a way to pair individuals with a learning parter or buddy. Worth the time.

You Might Also Like:

How to Lead in Product Management

Roman is one of my favourite product management authors. His concise, to-the-point writing style is incredibly respectful of your time. He delivers wall-to-wall concepts without any storytelling fluff, providing just enough prose to get the point across.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: Empowered by Marty Cagan for Tech Professionals

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "Empowered" by Marty Cagan, the Silicon Valley product development expert. Learn about the key principles and practices for creating successful products and building high-performing teams

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "The Making of a Manager" by Julie Zhuo, the product design and management expert. Learn about the key principles and practices for becoming an effective manager and leader, based on Zhuo's own experience and insights from top executives.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Community of Practice: a group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly
• The case for CoPs…
• Support organisational learning
• Accelerate professional development
• Enable knowledge sharing and management
• Support better communication
• Build better practices
• Make people happier
• Break down silos
• Help with hiring and retention (happier and more motivated people)
• There are three major ways you can learn:
• Learn from reading, training
• Learning from doing
• Learning from others
• Knowledge is created through the transformation of learning experience
1. Concrete Experience: having a new experience
2. Reflection Observation: reflecting on that experience
3. Abstract Conceptualisation: concluding and learning from that experience
4. Active Experimentation: Trying out what you’ve learnt
• Learning activities that create for a more rounded curriculum. Most of which the community of practice makes easier…
• shadowing people and learning from others (CoPs create connections)
• formal classroom training (CoPs can build their own curriculum)
• self-initiated learning (networking, speaking to colleagues, reading, writing, speaking)
• sharing ideas and support from others (CoP is a place to share and get support)
• small experiments and running short projects
• questions, retrospecting and feedback loops
• Bringing together a diverse group of people that share the same challenges, but have different experiences, creates a wider pool of knowledge to draw from when it comes to problem-solving
• As a CoP matures → it will move from sharing knowledge to solving shared problems
• Happier people do better work and are more motivated (happiness makes people 12% more productive)
• Daniel Pink’s three points of motivation:
• Autonomy → the desire to direct our own lives
• Mastery → the urge to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose → the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
• Community leadership roles:
• Build, sustain and develop the CoP
• manage people and dynamics
• support and facilitation
• informing, advising or coaching members
• defining professional direction and standards
• representing community members within and outside the organisation
• Create an aspirational, achievable and easy to understand vision
• SMART goals can help
• Involve the community in creating them
• Increase knowledge within the permanent staff to reduce reliance on contractors
• Who should join? Do they share a similar…
• Role
• Environment
• Work goals
• Challenges
• Learning goals
• Learning relevant to day to day work
• CoP members should be aligned on purpose, learning, challenges and teaching
• Your community should collectively decide on how to spend its time. Allow for:
• Building social connections
• Learning as a group
• Talking, solving problems and building better practices
• Sharing outside the community
• Creating community improvements
• Do skills confidence mapping
• The 5 stage model of adult skill acquisition (link)
• Novice: follows the rules
• Advanced beginner: recognises patterns
• Competent: chooses a perspective
• Proficient: responds to situations
• Expert: Writes their own rules
• Help people rank their own skill level
• Another model of skill acquisition Dreyfus Model → ShuHaRi
• Shu → the protection stage, follows what the master teaches them
• Ha → the breakaway stage, learning principles behind a technique, begin to integrate learning into their practice
• Ri → the creating stage, student creates their own approaches and adapts what they’ve learned to their own circumstances
• If you know everyones skills, you can match people with learning buddies.
• If you’re all weak in one area you could bring in an external trainer
• Types of members:
• Core
• Active
• Occasional
• Peripheral
• Outside
• Key elements of a self-sustaining practice are:
• Leadership → CoP members are comfortable with leadership
• Membership → are engaged, and focused on vision, organise interactions and activities
• Knowledge and practices → continues to learn, create better practices and standards
• Skills development → take the lead on member professional development
• Visibility and support → people outside of the community advocate for it

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

1. Why you need Communities of Practice in your organisation

• Community of Practice: a group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly
• The case for CoPs…
• Support organisational learning
• Accelerate professional development
• Enable knowledge sharing and management
• Support better communication
• Build better practices
• Make people happier
• Break down silos
• Help with hiring and retention (happier and more motivated people)
• There are three major ways you can learn:
• Learn from reading, training
• Learning from doing
• Learning from others
• Most behaviour is learnt observationally. From observing others, you form an idea of how to behave. Later, that information serves as a guide for action
• CoPs take advantage of social learning between members
• David Klob learning model
• Knowledge is created through the transformation of learning experience
1. Concrete Experience: having a new experience
2. Reflection Observation: reflecting on that experience
3. Abstract Conceptualisation: concluding and learning from that experience
4. Active Experimentation: Trying out what you’ve learnt
• Communities of practice give people opportunities to experiment with what they have learnt, in a safe environment and with the support of other people
• Learning activities that create for a more rounded curriculum. Most of which the community of practice makes easier…
• shadowing people and learning from others (CoPs create connections)
• formal classroom training (CoPs can build their own curriculum)
• self-initiated learning (networking, speaking to colleagues, reading, writing, speaking)
• sharing ideas and support from others (CoP is a place to share and get support)
• small experiments and running short projects
• questions, retrospecting and feedback loops
• Communities of practice can break down organisational silos improving communication and workflow
• CoP are great for knowledge sharing → capture what people know about a topic to transfer it through people changes, inform others, identify important practices and minimise loss of corporate memory
• Knowledge management is never solved by technology alone
• You need people to keep it alive
• Only a subset of knowledge is easy to share and write down (Explicit Knowledge). Much of our knowledge is Implicit (or Tacit)
• Tacit knowledge is practice
• Explicit knowledge is process
• If you don’t support the sharing of Tacit knowledge, you’ll lose knowledge when people move on
• Bringing together a diverse group of people that share the same challenges, but have different experiences, creates a wider pool of knowledge to draw from when it comes to problem-solving
• As a CoP matures → it will move from sharing knowledge to solving shared problems
• It’s easier to hire if you have a strong CoP:
• It’s a draw in itself for new candidate
• As a group you define what good looks like better
• Each new joiner gets the CoP to support them during onboarding
• Having a strong CoP enables you to hire more junior members (as you know you can build their skills)
• Happier people do better work and are more motivated (happiness makes people 12% more productive)
• Daniel Pink’s three points of motivation:
• Autonomy → the desire to direct our own lives
• Mastery → the urge to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose → the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
• Ryff and Keyes highlighted 6 points of motivation:
• autonomy
• environmental mastery
• personal growth
• positive relations with others
• purpose in life
• self-acceptance
• Clearly a CoP can support with mastery and purpose

2. The stages of a CoP

• Stages are from the Book ‘Cultivating Communities of Practice’ (by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder)

• Stages of a CoP

• These stages follow Tuckman’s stages of group development too: Forming - Storming - Norming - Performing

3. Creating the right environment

• The ability to meet regularly
• Need to communicate regularly
• Getting together in realtime (helps build trust) as well as asynchronously
• Vary content to avoid repetition
• Do the hard work to get people together
• Familiarity and trust is built through ad hoc conversations, when people start to share things about themselves outside of work activities.
• Consider appointing coordinators to get the group together
• The right community leadership
• Need to be knowledgable, passionate, respected and empowered
• Can be a full time role to do it well
• It’s hard for a community to flourish if it’s a side project
• Empowering leaders through org structure → structure your organisation around communities of practice. Everyone belongs to a team, but everyone belongs to a community of practice too. Spotify calls CoPs (tribes).
• Creating a safe to fail learn environment
• Trust is the basis of a successful community of practice
• Safety: whatever their experience, they can contribute and ask questions without being judged.
• Everyone needs to acknowledge they can learn from others within the community too
• Important to be welcoming and friendly to new members
• Address any bad behaviour that ruins the safety of the space
• Keep the community closed in the early stages
• Getting support from your organisation
• Organisations must support CoPs for them to reach their potential
• Get up front support to establish the community quicker
• If you’re unsure about how supportive your company will be, gain momentum behind the scenes first → get some evidence of how it’s working
• Support = time (reducing billable time), people and money

4. CoP Leadership

• Different Types:

• Community leadership roles:
• Build, sustain and develop the CoP
• manage people and dynamics
• support and facilitation
• informing, advising or coaching members
• defining professional direction and standards
• representing community members within and outside the organisation

5. Identifying Who is in the Community

• Your job description probably defines the members. If not…
• What need is the greatest?
• What are your trying to accomplish with your CoP?
• Are there existing connections you can build on? It makes it easier.
• Find pockets of people already meeting and build upon that
• People working in the same place and in the same role.
• As the community matures, you’ll find new people
• Create an aspirational, achievable and easy to understand vision
• SMART goals can help
• Involve the community in creating them
• Increase knowledge within the permanent staff to reduce reliance on contractors
• Who should join? Do they share a similar…
• Role
• Environment
• Work goals
• Challenges
• Learning goals
• Learning relevant to day to day work
• CoP members should be aligned on purpose, learning, challenges and teaching

6. Becoming Community

• What makes a sense of community? (Chavis and McMillan 1986)
• membership
• integration and fulfilment of needs
• shared emotional connection
• influence
• First steps in creating a community
• Get everyone together
• Icebreaker
• Share what you’re working on, stories from your week
• Talk about what to do next as a community
• Encourage people to come → role out the welcome mat when they do
• Stick to a regular day and time
• If people travel a long way, make the most of their time and build social connections
• Make time for people to get to know each other in a more relaxed sitting
• Create alignment around shared goals
• What is your community vision?
• How will you work together?
• What will you do together?
• A vision creates shared understanding and helps create common tasks
• Ask people to feed in and comment on the vision
• How will you work together?
• Community principles → how you work together
• Community Values → set of beliefs that everyone shares
• Create a shared backlog to work against as a community.

7. Getting Value from Community Interactions

• Your community should collectively decide on how to spend its time. Allow for:
• Building social connections
• Learning as a group
• presentations and talks
• deliberate practice
• games and workshops
• visits and tours to other places
• Talking, solving problems and building better practices
• Less-structured meetings where they can discuss things together
• Lean coffee (create options, vote on topics, set agenda)
• Solving problems in smaller groups (break to discuss challenges)
• Three is a great number for this (triads are great)
• Sharing outside the community
• Show and tells
• marketing material
• presentations and training
• crossovers with other communities
• Creating community improvements

8. Identifying Skills Gaps to Work On

• What skills are needed to do the role?
• Start with job descriptions
• Capture everything CoP members do on a day to day
• Group similar things together (de-duplicate)
• Discuss if they’re part of the role or not
• Do some iterations to come up with a list of skills
• Ask people to highlight additional skills they have or want (that might not be role specfic)
• Do skills confidence mapping
• The 5 stage model of adult skill acquisition (link)
• Novice: follows the rules
• Advanced beginner: recognises patterns
• Competent: chooses a perspective
• Proficient: responds to situations
• Expert: Writes their own rules
• Help people rank their own skill level
• Another model of skill acquisition Dreyfus Model → ShuHaRi
• Shu → the protection stage, follows what the master teaches them
• Ha → the breakaway stage, learning principles behind a technique, begin to integrate learning into their practice
• Ri → the creating stage, student creates their own approaches and adapts what they’ve learned to their own circumstances
• Create personal development plans:
• Get people to focus on one important area
• If you know everyones skills, you can match people with learning buddies.
• If you’re all weak in one area you could bring in an external trainer

9. Growing the Community of Practice Model

• Growing the community:
• Initially you’re limited to your immediate network
• As the community grows, focus more effort on growing it’s membership past just these people
• Resources to help you grow:
• Your extended networks
• Your community’s networks
• Your story
• Things to consider?
• How can CoP members get the story out? (tap up your network)
• Are there formal or informal structures you can use to reach people? (Line management)
• What marketing tools can you use? (posters, or digital equivalent)
• Are there any other people whose help you can enlist? (use a common connection to introduce you to new pockets of people)
• Making the message easy to understand (make it easy for people to self-identify)
• Types of members:
• Core
• Active
• Occasional
• Peripheral
• Outside
• Identify and grow community leaders → natural leaders will be active members and will start to identify themselves by the amount of effort and engagement they give to the community.
• Let them become part of it
• Leadership needs to be taken on by the group
• Be careful about bringing in people to your safe environment and upsetting the dynamics
• Setup open learning sessions on areas of interest outside of the community
• Where there is cross-over knowledge work with other CoPs to get together with a particular topic in mind

10. Self-Sustaining Communities of Practice

• CoPs only exist if there’s interest from members in maintaining the group
• A community will best survive when it becomes self sustaining and organising
• Self-organisation comes from a clear understanding of the communities goals
• On regular occasions, the community will need to revisit it’s vision to see that it’s still relevant
• Key elements of a self-sustaining practice are:
• Leadership → CoP members are comfortable with leadership
• Membership → are engaged, and focused on vision, organise interactions and activities
• Knowledge and practices → continues to learn, create better practices and standards
• Skills development → take the lead on member professional development
• Visibility and support → people outside of the community advocate for it