Communities of practice and the "long tail of knowledge"

Part of the value of communities of practice is proividing access to the Long Tail of experience

There is a tendency in many companies to see Knowledge as being the province of the Experts.

As a result, they set up expert centres to look after the knowledge, and expert networks to share knowledge between experts around the organisation.

However one of the big culture shifts within Knowledge Management is the recognition that Knowledge is the province of all Knowledge Workers, not just the experts. Expert networks will access only a small part of the knowledge of the organisation, the remainder  (the "Long Tail") will be held by the non-expert Knowledge Workers.

Take the example shown in the graph here. The graph represents 50 workers within an organisation, with varying levels of experience from 30 years to 1 year. Initially the company decides that they will share knowledge by setting up a small network between the four experts - those with 15 or more years of experience (the red bars). Between them, these experts have 88 years of experience.

After a while, the company decides to replace the expert network with a full community of practice, where all 50 of the knowledge workers take an active role. The total years of experience within the community is now 274 - more than three times the experience than that held by the experts alone.

The value of this added experience comes when it is applied to knowledge in the work context. Knowledge is contextual - the application of knowledge changes on where it is applied, and when, and to what. The larger community has seen many more contexts, and the person who gives the advice is not necessarily the person with the longest experience, but the person with the most relevant context. Maybe that person has only been in the company a year or two, but if they have had relevant experience within that short time (particularly experience which is unusual or niche), they can answer questions, offer advice, and add real value based on their unique experience.

This is the concept of the long tail of knowledge.

The "long tail" is a term that has has gained popularity in recent times as describing the retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The long tail of knowledge is a knowledge sharing strategy of offering a huge amount of knowledge transfer opportunities, with relatively small numbers of each particular question/answer exchange. It allows niche knowledge to be sought and found, provided the community of practice is large enough and broad enough.

Large online communities of practice allow access to the Long Tail.
Small expert groups access only the short head.

Should selection of communities of practice be managed, or unmanaged?

Is the best approach to setting up and selecting Communities of Practice a managed one, or an unmanaged one?

There has always been a polarity of views between those who see Communities of Practice as something that should be allowed to flourish naturally and unmanaged, springing up as a bottom-up initiative in response to user demand, and those who see communities as more powerful when they are aligned with the business strategy, and managed from the top down to provide a valuable resource to their members.

In this top down selection , the company decides on strategic knowledge areas, and deliberately selects communities to support these, assigning leadership and core members and securing resources. This allows resources to be spent supporting the communities which will have most value to the company, but sometimes these top down communities may not align with the interests of the workers.

In contrast, in the bottom-up selection, the company enables the organizations with community tools, and watches for communities that form spontaneously around an area of business need. These CoPs are often high energy, but may not coincide with areas of knowledge which are strategic for the business. Also it is all too common to find multiple CoPs starting up which cover the same topic as each other, and communities that initially flourish then wither and die.

Given that we have two stakeholder groupings in KM (management and knowledge workers) and both need to be satisfied, and given that satisfying one without the other can lead to instability in your KM program, how do we choose which way to support our CoPs?

We are not talking here about the management of communities that have already been set up.

   

I think it is pretty well established that communities, once in place, need management, so long as it is self-management. A community without self-management may deteriorate into rancour or fandom (see  "a group is its own worst enemy") or fade away (see "what happens when the facilitator is removed"). A community with too much management from above may also die (see "how over-management can kill a community"). The ideal is a light management from within - from a community leader and core group, and a self-determined community charter. 

I think it is also well-established that there are two stakeholder groupings for Communities of Practice - the community members who work in the practice area, and the management team responsible for the practice area. Therefore whether the selection of CoPs is managed or unmanaged, any CoP should ideally meet a need from the membership, and a need from the management. (see Siemens experience on the "customer trap" for KM).

That still leaves us with the question of the balance between managed and unmanaged selection of the portfolio of communities. 

Shell's experience

Let's look at some real experience. As part of a 2007 Linked-In discussion on "Communities of practice, limited or unlimited" (now no longer available), we have a useful story from Arjan van Unnik, who was head of Knowledge Management at Shell.

"In my experience the decision about "limited"or "unlimited" turned out to be an underestimated parameter ... I managed a portfolio with some 35,000 users (no pre-registration - everybody personally requested membership for 1 or more communities).  ....Initially we carefully managed the CoP's, based on skillpools. Than the step was made where everybody via the IT department could request a community. The fragmentation resulted in roughly 35% reduced activity in the communities. I had to implement corrective actions and increase the management of the portfolio." 

 "One of the biggest breakthroughs was when we combined this unmanaged set of 100+ CoP's into a managed set (15+ years ago, and violating all theories about CoP's). Other companies that are successful in CoP's (Fluor, Schlumberger) also manage their portfolio. I've heard about a company that did not manage their portfolio, ending up in more CoP's than number of staff... Not managing the portfolio indeed implies the risk of ending up in a situation that again staff do not know which communities to join - we had that as well back in 1997, before we started to manage the portfolio".

So Shell tried both approaches - managed and unmanaged. The switch from managed to unmanaged led to a reduction in activity, leading Shell to switch back again.

30 different ways a Community of Practice can add value

How can communities of practice add value? Let me count the ways.

Image from wikimedia commons

Here's a list we made of 30 different mechanisms by which a community of practice can add value to an organisation.

No doubt you can think of more!


Community members can

1. Solve problems for each other 
2. Learn before" starting a piece of work - using the CoP as a "Peer Assist" mechanism
3. "Learn during" a piece of work, drawing on the knowledge of the CoP
4. "Learn after" by sharing lessons with the community
5. Support each other emotionally, through messages of support or congratulations
6. Benchmark performance with each other 
7. Exchange resources through the community, such as tools, templates and approaches
8. Collaborate on purchasing (buying things that any one member could not justify) 
9. Collaborate on contracts (using the purchasing power of the community) 
10. Cooperate on trials and pilots 
11. Share results of studies, and maybe remove the need for others to re-do the same study
12. Exchange equipment (re-use old equipment, share spares) 
13.  Mentor and coach each other 
14. Provide a "sense of belonging" for the members

The community collectively can

15. Collaborate on a community blog, to act as a real-time story of what the community is collectively learning
16. Act as a learning resource for new staff
17. Build and maintain documented Best Practices, perhaps using a community wiki as a shared knowledge base
18. Build and maintain a curated document base as a shared resource
19. Decide a taxonomy and/or metadata scheme so members can record their knowledge in a consistent way
20. Identify the most useful resources (for example through feedback and voting)
21. Recognise the most helpful and generous sharers (for example through "contributor of the year" awards)
22. Develop lists of common risks and warning signs (and what to do when you see them) 
23. Develop checklists and templates for member use
24. Develop FAQs for new staff or for customers
25. Create knowledge products for use by clients or customers
26. Identify knowledge retention risks 
27. Identify training gaps and collaborate on training provision 
28. Identify new opportunities for the organisation within the practice area
29. Innovate new products, services or opportunities by combining ideas from everyone
30. Advise the organisation on strategy within the practice area

Why knowledge is social, not personal, and the implication of this view for KM.

There is a school of thought that knowledge lies only in the minds of individuals. I think this is misleading, and that reality is both more complex than this, and more interesting.

A search of the internet will find  a commonly held view in KM circles that Knowledge only exists in the brains of individuals.  

"Knowledge is in the mind" people might say, "and all else is information".  Thomas Wilson argues this point in his provocative paper "the nonsense of Knowledge Management", which was written as a polemic against the way Information Management was rebadged Knowledge Management by software vendors and consultants (a process described by Wilson as "search and replace marketing").

This viewpoint suggests that any way that an individual can find to express knowledge (spoken words, written words, recorded demonstrations) just turns it into information, and that any management applied to this process can only be information management.

Certainly the view of knowledge as a human attribute is very useful as a way of distinguishing knowledge management from information management. However I feel that this view focuses too much on the individual, and that in reality knowledge is not an individual attribute, but something shared and social.  (Please note that in this blog, I use the word "social" to mean related to interactions and relationships between people, rather than as a type of media).

The social nature of knowledge

To introduce this topic, I can do no better than to repeat the words of the great Larry Prusak, spoken at RostatomKM 2016

A key point that we (and by we, I mean the collectivity of practitioners and researchers) have learned is that Knowledge is profoundly social. It is not a factor of the individual but a factor of groups of people. Individuals may have separate memories, but do not have separate Knowledge. 

Larry's point is that Knowledge is a collective thing. The "tacit knowledge" we hold in our heads is either invented by ourselves or comes from the collective, and what we invent for ourselves is at best provisional knowledge, and at worst delusion. It can include

• opinions
• hypotheses
• prejudices
• cognitive biases
• fantasies
• falsehoods.

What turns these opinions etc. into knowledge is social confirmation and acceptance.

You think you might know something, but it could so easily be confirmation bias, and you don't know this until you start to test it with others. 

We see this clearly in the development of scientific knowledge. As part of the scientific method individual scientists develop and test hypotheses, but before these hypotheses are accepted as knowledge, they go through a process of peer review and socialisation. As the UK Parliament site explains

Peer Review is the means by which scientific experts in the field review the output from this process for validity, significance, originality and scientific clarity. Peer review is not, as some outside of science might think, designed to be a fraud detection system. Therefore in our view Peer Review and the subsequent publishing of research is only part, albeit an important one, of how new discoveries become accepted into our collective scientific knowledge.

That last sentence is important - "collective scientific knowledge". There is no such thing as "individual scientific knowledge", and you could argue, as Larry Prusak does, that there is no "individual knowledge" either.

Plato defined knowledge as "justified true belief", which means there needs to be a justification mechanism which can judge "truth". Self-justification by the knower makes no distinction between truth and opinion, and between knowledge and bias. It is the social group that justifies knowledge.

Note however that just because a social group confirms something, does not yet make it knowledge. There are many people in the USA for example who "know" that the world is run by a cabal of devil-worshiping paedophiles, or who "know" that Covid vaccination programs are a tool for government control. Most of us recognise this knowledge as false delusion, but these people "know" they are correct because their views are confirmed by others on the internet. Therefore social justification is not enough to make something knowledge - that justification needs to be continually tested (something that is very difficult to do when confirmation bias is involved). 

The implications for Knowledge Management

This alternative viewpoint - that knowledge is social and is held by groups of people rather than by individuals - still distinguishes knowledge from information, but takes us away from the individual human as the unit of analysis for Knowledge management. Here is Larry Prusak again;

There is much greater emphasis on Networks, Communities and Practices, and I state today that this is the correct unit of analysis if you want to work with knowledge in organisations: Networks, Communities and Practices.

This has five main implications:

• You need to define your Knowledge Management Framework so that the primary "knowledge unit" is the practice area, and the networks and communities of practice are the mechanisms by which knowledge is shared and managed. This is the approach we take at Knoco when building Knowledge Management Frameworks, and we know that it works.
• Much of the knowledge work you do will not be concerned with individuals or with documents, but with the interactions between people working in social groups. It is within these interactions (Peer Assists, Retrospects, Knowledge Exchange) that knowledge is built, tested and justified.
• Documented knowledge should be owned and managed by the communities and networks. They should manage the wiki sites where knowledge is compiled and kept up to date (I mention wiki sites because wikis are, by design, created by ad managed by communities and networks.
• The collective knowledge should always be open to challenge and testing, in case the community has fallen into a trap of confirmation bias.
• You will find that the main culture change is getting people to see knowledge as something collective, to be built and maintained socially, rather than their own personal property to be protected and hoarded. 

Try this alternative social-centric viewpoint - I think you will find it very powerful.

Why you should not make the KM CoP your first Community

It is tempting, when starting KM in your organisation, to set up a Knowledge Management community of practice as a way to demonstrate the value of communities. I suggest this may be a mistake.

Of course knowledge management will need a community of practice, but there are three reasons why a KM CoP is not a good public early stage pilot project.

Firstly in the early stages of KM, Knowledge Management is not yet a practice area. There is no large group of people in the organisation who have KM as their main role.  They may be interested in it, they may be passionate about it, but they are not yet practitioners. Any KM community will therefore be somewhere between a community of interest and an innovation community, and not representative of the business CoPs you wish to establish.  

Secondly, even if you are successful with your KM CoP, it doesn't really form a showcase for the rest of the organisation because of the credibility issue. Going to managers in the business and trying to sell KM on the basis of "look at our Knowledge Management community and how well it is working" is a bit like a car salesman trying to sell you a Lexus by saying "I drive a Lexus myself - it's great". You would not believe him, and the manager in the business would not believe you. She wants to see other business managers who have gained benefit from KM, not KM enthusiasts endorsing their own product. 

Thirdly a KM community will not, in the early days, demonstrate business value. KM is not yet a core competence, there are no KM metrics, there is no baseline of KM performance, so you cannot show the savings that will convince the sceptic. This is will be difficult even when KM is mature, as KM is a support function rather than a frontline function (we support the sales staff, the engineers, the knowledge workers), so our metrics are one step away from the hard business metrics. 

If you wish to set up a showcase community of practice pilot, then choose

• a frontline function, 
• an established area of practice, 
• where you can show business benefit. 

Then later on you can set up the KM community of practice once KM has become a practice area. Prior to that point you may need to establish a network of KM champions, for example, but do not treat this as one of your public pilots, and recognise that the nature of this network will change as soon as KM roles are established in the organisation. 

KM will not become a practice area until KM is embedded, which is when the KM CoP will really take off.

Why communities of practice need active management

Here is a cautionary tale about the importance of active Community of Practice management and facilitation, and what happens when the facilitator is removed.

The story comes from Tom Humbarger, who was the community facilitator for a professional community from January 2007 until he was made redundant in July 2008. During his time as facilitator, Tom actively managed the community through -

• delivery of bi-weekly email update newsletters 
• production of monthly webcasts 
• active blog posting and blogger outreach 
• uploading of fresh content each week 
• continual promotion of the community in various forums through guerilla marketing 
• ongoing brainstorming and strategizing with respect to improving the community experience 
• priming of discussion forums, and 
• ongoing communications with individual community members

During Tom's active role the community grew from zero to 4,000 members, and had a sustained high level of activity as shown in the plot above, of 1300 average weekly visits to the community site.

However things changed once Tom was no longer playing the facilitator role. Once he was no longer in place:

• Membership growth slowed from 55 new memners per week to 20;
• The number of visits to the community forum dropped by 60%;
• The number of pages viewed per visit dropped by 22%;
• The time on site decreased by 33%;
• Fresh activity (new posts and questions) tailed off to near zero.

The community of practice limped on for a few more months, but performance was lacklustre.

Tom's story, and the graph above. demonstrate clearly the value that a facilitator brings to a community of practice.

If you want a successful community of practice, it needs facilitation and management. 

Are communities of practice losing popularity as a KM mechanism?

Results from the Knoco 2020 global survey of Knowledge Management seem to show that the use of Communities of Practice is in decline.

Every three years since 2014, knoco has conducted a global survey of Knowledge Management. The latest survey is completed, and the final report written (go here to order a free copy).

One of the intriguing results from one of the graphs was that the usage of Communities of Practice seems to be in decline. So I did a bit more digging in the dataset, and came up with some more evidence.

Firstly, CoPs seem to have slipped down the list of priority approaches. 

The plot below is based on a question that asks respondents to prioritise various approaches within their KM strategy. This question has been asked in all three surveys, and the graph below shows the percentage of people who have chosen each of the options as their highest priority.

You can see that "connecting people through communities or networks" was the most popular "first choice" option in 2014 but has decreased significantly over the 6 years, and is now in 4th place.

Secondly, fewer organisations seem to be using CoPs as part of their KM Framework. 

Participants were asked whether they applied Best Practice, Lesson Learning, Communities of Practice, and (in the 2020 survey only)  Knowledge Retention. The percentages anwering Yes to this question for these four (largely tacit knowledge) approaches are shown below for the three surveys.

You can see that 62% used CoPs in 2014, 57% in 2017 and 55% in 2020. A steady decline.

Finally the organisations in 2020 which ARE using CoPs, are applying fewer of the components, and getting lower levels of satisfaction. 

This last one is a bit more subtle. Out of 13 potential component elements to a CoP framework, respondents in 2020 are using fewer (an average of 5.3 in 2020 compared to 5.4 in 2017 and 5.9 in 2020), and recording lower levels of satisfaction (3.04 out of 5 in 2020 compared to 3.16 and 3.2 in 2017 and 2014).  The prevalence of community sponsors, comunity business cases and community wikis is significantly less in the most recent survey.

These three pieces of data suggest that the use of Communities of Practice is in a slow decline.

But why?

I have to admit that I really do not know why this should be the case. Communities of Practice have been a mainstay of KM from the beginning; they are a powerful mechanism for peer to peer knowledge transfer, and they are the nearest thing to a KM silver bullet. So why are they not still top of the list as a KM priority?

Could it be that the survey datasets have changed - that the types of organisations answering the most recent survey are different? They are no smaller - if anything the average size is bigger in 2020 - but they are less multinational. One explanation might be that the 2020 respondent organisations contain a much higher proportion of government admin departments, and a smaller proportion of professional services firms. So maybe its not that CoPs are in decline, but that KM is being applied more in areas where CoPs are not a common mechanism. Maybe the government admin people need to discover the power of communities?

How to select a methodology for a CoP event

You want to plan a face to face event for your Community of Practice in order to transfer knowledge, but which event style do you select?

This is a discussion I have been having recently, and it struck me that this might be a useful blog post.

Now there may be many reasons for a CoP event; to launch the CoP, to celebrate CoP achievement, or to agree on the CoP charter, work plan, objectives and knowledge focus areas. For these purposes you may use many styles of meeting - Open Space, World Cafe, Knowledge Market etc. 

However if we assume that the purpose of the CoP event is to transfer knowledge among the members on one or more topics of interest, then the primary driver of the choice of event style or methodology is driven by two factors:

• The number of CoP members who have knowledge and experience on the topic ("knowledge holders", and
• The number of CoP members who actively need to acquire the knowledge ("knowledge needers"). These are not just "interested parties" - these are people who will apply the knowledge they gain to improve the way they work. 
• Please note that many people can be both holders and needers - they hold some knowledge but need to acquire more. 

The crossplot of these two factors above is used to suggest some methodologies or styles of knowledge transfer meetings, all of which should be based on positive dialogue between the knowledge holders and knowledge needers. Also note that if your CoP meeting addresses many topics, then you may need many styles of meeting at the same event - either one after the other, or in parallel in separate spaces. How do you find out the topics, and the number of holders and seekers within the CoP? You either conduct a survey, do some knowledge mapping, analyse the questions in the community forum, or hold a Knowledge Market. 

If you have a relatively small number of knowledge holders and a large number of knowledge needers, then you can hold a lessons learned discussion. This requires active moderation, and should be driven by questions from the knowledge needers. The discussion will create reference content for the CoP. Alternatively, a storytelling session may be appropriate. Or if the knowledge is very polarised, with one or two experts and everyone else in the CoP novices, then a training session may be the best approach, but try to drive the training by the questions of the needers as much as possible.

If you have one or two people with experience in the topic and a moderate number of knowledge needers, then in some cases a knowledge site visit may be appropriate. Here the CoP meeting is held at the premises of one of the knowledge holders (a factory, or a working office) who can demonstrate the knowledge in application.

If you have many knowledge holders and many knowledge needers, then a knowledge exchange may be appropriate. Here the CoP members discuss the topic, and all its subtopics, exchanging experience, answering questions, and discussing and co-creating best practice. The process is driven by the questions of the knowledge needers, and is suitable when there are one or more areas of practice applied by most of the CoP members, but where approaches differ. This process can develop good practice reference documents for future use by the CoP. 

If there are a moderate number of knowledge needers, then you can run a Peer Assist to enable knowledge transfer to the needers. Generally the process adds value to others as well.

If there is a topic where there are a few holders and a few needers, it may be best not to make this the focus of a CoP event, but to create a small action learning group, which will report back to the CoP through the online portal, or through short briefings.

Finally if there is a new topic which the CoP wants to explore, but currently has no experts or knowledge holders, then a more open process such as Open Space or World Cafe/Knowledge cafe.

However if transfer of knowledge is your aim, use one of the processes above to ensure effective dialogue between the knowledge holders and the knowledge needers. 

Do social media stifle knowledge sharing?

Do online social media drive a "spiral of silence" which can stifle proper debate?  It can, according to this techcrunch article, which points to this survey from Pew Research.

Shhh by Catherine on Flickr

I think everyone would agree that for knowledge to be shared effectively in organisations, people need to feel free to enter online debates and feel free to disagree with the opinions of others. Knowledge often comes through comparing and challenging conflicting "truths" in order that new truths and new knowledge can be born.

However the nature of online social media is such that we often create our own silos, and when addressing potentially contentious topics, are unwilling to discuss ideas which the rest of the group does not share (a structure called "polarised crowds" by this article, which I also explore in this blog post on groupthink in social media).  This has been referred to as "a spiral of silence" where people with dissenting views remain quiet.

The Pew Research survey explored the willingness to debate online by choosing a contentious topic (in this case the topic of government surveillance) and exploring how openly people would be willing to discuss this in various settings.

As shown below, social media are at the bottom of the list, and people are nearly 4 times less willing to share their thoughts openly online than they are round the dinner table.

Image from this pew research article

The study has the following conclusions

Overall, the findings indicate that in the (government surveillance) case, social media did not provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent to express their opinions and debate issues. Further, if people thought their friends and followers in social media disagreed with them, they were less likely to say they would state their views on the story online and in other contexts, such as gatherings of friends, neighbors, or co-workers. This suggests a spiral of silence might spill over from online contexts to in-person contexts, though our data cannot definitively demonstrate this causation. .

Does this spiral of silence apply in workplace social media?

I have seen this happen in the work setting, as in the example below.

A new community of practice for project managers was launched in an organisation. Over a couple of months, activity started to pick up nicely in the community forum, with many people asking questions and receiving answers. However when we followed up with the originators of the questions, we found an interesting pattern had developed. The first answer to the question set the tone, and from that point the only people contributing to the thread were those who agreed with the first answer. Anyone who disagreed found a private offline way to contact the questioner, such as a phone call or a personal email.

We were able over time to resolve this behaviour through strong facilitation, and the community now works well in publicly exploring multiple views on all topics.

For those of us seeking to foster knowledge sharing within an organisation, the research study quoted above is very important. If we do not address this tendency towards a spiral of silence, our in-house social media will either create a new set of silos - silos divided by opinions rather than by geography or by organisational hierarchy (the "polarised crowds" mentioned above) - or people with contrary opinions will just drop out of the conversation.

The lessons to the Knowledge Manager are clear

 To start with, we cannot afford plural communities of practice covering the same topic. There needs to be one community covering each main work topic, not two or more polarised ones.

Then within each topic, disagreement needs to be sought and explored, in service of finding the truth. This is part of the role of the community facilitator - the role of allowing a diversity of opinion, and promoting and facilitating the dialogue that allows this diversity to be explored and resolved.

Finally, for the really contentious topics, you need a face to face discussion, such as a Knowledge Exchange.

The Knowledge Manager as Gardener - an organic metaphor

People often think of Knowledge as being Organic, or being an Ecosystem. But what does this imply for Knowledge Management and for the Knowledge Manager? 

gardener, Filoli, by David McSpadden on Flickr

The ecosystem or the garden is a pretty good metaphor for the world of Knowledge in an organisation. Knowledge is something that grows and develops; that can be replicated and seeded. It is not something immutable like a car or a factory or a pound coin that can be physically managed. Instead it needs to be nurtured and tended.

The Knowledge Manager, in this metaphor, is the gardener.  And anyone with a garden will know that if you want to produce flowers or vegetables, the life of a gardener is hard work, and gardens require a lot of management.

Let's assume you are tending the Knowledge Garden for your organisation. Let's assume that you are doing this to create value for the key stakeholders - the knowledge workers, the management, and your external customers.  If you want to create value from a garden, you don't just "create the conditions so anything can grow", because all you get is nettles, brambles and other weeds.

Instead you have several tasks.

• Tilling and fertilising the ground. For gardening and for Knowledge Management, you need to get the conditions right for growth. This is the culture change element of your role - the communication strategy, the hearts and minds campaign. Also you need to provide the supporting infrastructure. Just as a gardener needs to put in place the canes, cloches and trellises to support the new seedlings, so you need to ensure there is sufficient technology to support emergent KM activities (recognising, of course, that technology alone will not create KM, any more than trellises alone will not create a garden).
• Planting the seeds. These are the proof of concept events, the KM pilot projects, the early Knowledge Assets and the trial Communities of Practice which you might set up in the places of greatest demand and greatest knowledge value. 
• Watering and fertilising the growing seeds. As a Knowledge Manager, the early seeds in your KM garden will need your oversight and your support. You will need to work with the CoP leaders, the knowledge owners and the project staff to ensure the early KM work does not wither and die through lack of care.
• Propagating the growth. Some of the plants in your KM garden will thrive. Learn from these, find out the secrets of their success, and seek to reproduce these elsewhere. Just as a gardener will  take cuttings, runners and seeds from their prize-winning plants, you too can propagate success from the best performers. 
• Removing the weeds and pests.  If there are any things that hamper the growth in your Knowledge Management garden - be these incentives that backfire, loud sceptics, or misbehaviour in Community of Practice discussions - then you need to address them, and see if you can remove them before they start to spread. Internal competition incentives, for example, need removal before they stunt the growth of KM or kill your tender plants. 

This is all very hard work, but the rewards for successful Knowledge Management are the same as those for a successful gardener - a thriving ecosystem and a mountain of produce.

Success factors for communities of practice - evidence from the World Bank

Communities of Practice are a promising intervention in Aid and Development, but what do they need to make them work?

Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish and you feed them for life. Set up a Fishing Community of Practice and you have the core of a thriving and sustainable industry that will last for generations.

That is the appeal of CoPs in the development sector. The development agency becomes not the provider of resources, nor the provider of knowledge, but the means by which the developing industries can manage their own knowledge and co-develop their industries.

But how well do these communities work, and what do they need to succeed? This is the topic of a 2005 World Bank study by Johnson and Khalidi, which looks at successes and failures in 3 communities of practice in the Middle East. The lessons they draw from this study as listed below, and even through the study has a limited sample, the conclusions match what we already know from in-house communities. I reproduce the lessons below, some of the commentary from the report, and some commentary of my own in italics.

1. The most important issue determining a CoP’s success is leadership. A committed, energetic leadership is vital. The CoPs that specifically allocated funds to community leadership witnessed more dynamic activity over the course of the two years, whereas the activities of the third CoP (which did not apply the seed funding to staff, but rather covered these costs through the support of their organizational host) have all but stopped.  We know that leadership is crucial (this was number 7 out of the 10 success factors in our survey) and CoP leaders with training and enough time to do the role is success factors 3 and 4 from the Warwick business school survey. See also this post. Community leadership is crucial.
2.  An organic need for networking is another critical success factor. Two of the pilot CoPs had a clearly identified demand from their members, who had requested a formalization of interactions. The third CoP did not tap into an existing network, but rather sought to create a new network. This more supply-driven approach had mixed results. Again survey results show that a demand-based community is likely to be more successful than a supply-based community, and this applies to CoP events as well as to online forums. The best communities are those which answer the questions and solve the problems of their members.
3. A solid issue/knowledge base is needed before a community will coalesce. Moreover, interaction should be based on questions that lead to something concrete, like publications or face-to-face meetings, to help the community gel. Again we see the use of questions, in this case to create content. I would disagree that you need content before a community can coalesce, but I do agree that you need one or more issues. 
4. Technology may not play a large role in networking.  This is a large conclusion from a small dataset - two of the communities attempted virtual interaction using e-discussions and both decided not to attempt another e-discussion. However the reason for the failure of the discussions is unknown. Each community held successful workshops; one held a large workshop but had no follow-up, while the others  had more modest workshops with many side discussions. Each had a static website with minimal new content added (perhaps as a result of the failure of online discussion), one of which has been completely stagnant since its creation. I would say that all these World Bank communities succeeded through workshops, but failed to back them up through technology. The conclusion that "technology may not pay a large role" is therefore untested, and our survey showed that "a mechanism for interacting online" was the number one success factor for in-house communities of practice. The world bank study shows you can have some success without technology, but has not tested the power of technology to, for example, support community interaction between the workshops. 
5. There is a strong cost-benefit argument for supporting CoPs for knowledge exchange and learning. The US$20,000 invested in each CoP has had a far greater impact than had it been spent on a time-bound learning event. CoPs have the advantage of being active and adapting over time. The value proposition for a CoP is obvious, also the means of value delivery, and this blog contains many examples of quantified benefit from KM, many of which were delivered by CoPs. However this is still a mechanism which the Aid sector seems to be struggling with, and evidence of value such as shown in this article is very welcome. 
6. A limited understanding of what a CoP entails can significantly affect the relevance and quality of CoP activities. CoPs can be easily mistaken for short term activities, meaning CoPs may get started but that they will not last. Donors who are thinking of supporting CoP activities should be aware of this, and adjust their expectations accordingly. Communities of practice are not a short term solution. They grow, mature and evolve over years and decades, and it is in their later life that the greatest value is delivered.

What makes a community of practice successful? Top 10 factors

There have been many articles and blog posts (including here) listing "Top Success Factors for Communities of Practice". Usually these are based on a combination of experience and theory. Here's a different approach.

Image from wikimedia commons

As part of our global global Knowledge Management Surveys in 2014 and 2017, we included an optional section on communities of practice. 251 people out of the 700 participants answered this section. Those that did were asked to rank the effectiveness of their Communities of Practice in adding value to their organisation. They were also asked to identify which of a list of CoP components they apply as part of their CoP approach.

The combination of these two questions allows us to work out which of those components make the most difference to the effectiveness of the CoPs. The "difference figure" is calculated as (average effectiveness when this component is included) divided by (average effectiveness when this component is absent), expressed as a percentage. High percentages therefore represent the greatest effectiveness impact. The top ten factors are listed below, together with their effectiveness difference (for example CoPs with a way of interacting online are rated as 23% more successful than those which don't).

To be clear, this list is based not on theory or experience, but on looking at the common elements between successful CoPs as defined by global knowledge managers. The list is in order of declining importance, with the most important factors at the top. Obviously these elements are not independent, and so the list is approximate rather than exact.

1. A way of interacting online - 23%
2. A performance contract or objectives agreed with the sponsor - 20%
3. A charter or terms of reference which reflects the members' view of the network objectives - 19%
4. A clear focus on business issues - 19%
5. A business case - 19%%
6. A defined facilitator in addition to the leader - 18%
7. A defined leader - 17%
8. A store for common documents - 15% 
9. Training for CoP leaders and facilitators - 13%
10. A collaboration tool for collaborating on documents - 11%

Also, let's not forget that size is important, and with Communities of Practice, Bigger is Better.

So the number one requirement for effective CoPs is a way to interact online, while requirements 2, 3, 4 and 5 are all about governance and a common valuable purpose. Then 6, 7 and 9 are about leadership.

Give communities a defined common purpose, a way to interact, and good leaders, and success will follow.

Bigger communities of practice are more effective, data shows

The bigger a community of practice is, the more value it delivers. At least according to our KM surveys. 

Knoco conducted two major surveys of knowledge management programs in 2014 and 2017, collecting in total more than 700 results.

As part of the survey, participants were asked whether Communities of Practice (CoPs) formed part of their KM approach. Over 250 people then continued to answer supplementary questions about their CoPs. (this was an optional section and not all of the people running CoPs took the option)

One of these questions covered the average size of CoPs in terms of teh number of members, and another was a subjective assessment (marks out of 5) of Community effectiveness in delivering value. 
From the plot shown here, there is a very close link between CoP size and perceived CoP effectiveness. Larger is better, and the largest CoPs were ranked as the most effective. There seems to be a jump in effectiveness between 100 and 500 members, which may represent "critical mass"

This is not to say that smaller CoPs don't add value, but respondents marked these are less effective.

As you might expect, the larger CoPs are found in the bigger organisations, confirmed by the plot below of average CoP size v organisation size. The large organisations, with CoPs of more than 100 members, are where CoPs were deemed the most effective at delivering value.

However the survey also showed that the majority of CoPs are small - the modal size being 10 people, the median 50 and the mean 250 (see plot below).

There are a lot of organisations out there with very small Communities of Practice, delivering disappointing results. If this is your organisation, with many small CoPs, then consider if possible amalgamating them, as Bigger seems to be Better.

Go here for more details of the survey results, and how to ask for a free copy.

Example Community of Practice charters

Every community of practice should have a charter, but what does a good charter look like?

Image from wikimedia commons

One of the main success factors for a community of practice is a charter.

A charter is a definitional/governance document, created by the community members, which describes what the community is for, and how it will work. Often a draft is created by the community core team, or by the people present at the community launch event, and that draft is then refined over time through discussion within the community.

The community charter usually contains the following elements:

• Community Purpose - what the community is for; it's high level aims and vision, and business case if appropriate 
• Objectives - what the community is trying to achieve in concrete terms; things that you can measure
• Scope – which areas of practice knowledge are in scope, and which are not
• Processes - the ways in which the community will operate in order to share, use and co-create knowledge
• Tools – the technologies the community plans to use 
• Roles – who does what (names of the community leader, sponsor, core team etc)
• Principles and Behaviours - which underpin the community.

Let's look at some charter for real communities of practice, and see what they cover. My favorite is the third one.

The Community Charter for the PMI Agile Community of Practice contains the following elements:

• Vision of Who We Are (a community of highly accountable project professionals, improving skills, expanding minds, and continuously raising the day-to-day effectiveness and professional satisfaction of project teams across the world.)
• Mission (To equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge)
• Values
• Goals & Objectives
  • Resources
  • Committed from our sponsor
• Expected from community stakeholders 
• Roles
• Working/Operating Agreements

I like the way resources has been split out, and I like the way "values" and "operating agreements" are differentiated.

The Wisconsin Heart health community charter is a 9-page document containing the following sections:

• Overview
• Justification
• Scope
  • Vision (Wisconsinites living with healthy hearts)
  • Mission (To improve cardiac health related outcomes across Wisconsin - especially a reduction in hypertension - through the advancement of best practices, establishment of strong organizational relationships, and the mutual activities of community of practice members)
  • Goals
• High level requirements
• Major Deliverables
• Participation
  • Benefits
  • Norms
  • Ground Rules
• Assumptions
• Constraints
• Risks
• Roles and Responsibilities 
• Facilitator

For me, this is just a little too long, and many of the sections which could be single sentences, are paragraphs instead. However it is certainly a very well though through charter, and there are several charters out there that use a similar template.

The Restraint Reduction Network community of practice

Without using a formal template, the page linked above defines

• The Vision of the community (We are a community seeking to equip one another to reduce restrictive interventions through using person-centred, proactive, preventative and therapeutic strategies)
• The Mission (We share and discuss resources, tools, policies, research and personal experiences to encourage and inspire one another as we seek to improve quality of life for those at risk of restraint and the people who interact with them on a daily basis)
• The tools the community uses,
• and a really nice "Rules of Engagement" Graphic linked below.

I think I like this charter best because it is concise and straightforward, and the Rules of Engagement poster is inspiring, simple, and can be printed and posted on a wall as a reminder of the way the community works.

When knowledge sharing becomes collaboration

There is a step in the maturation of communities of practice when their focus shifts from knowledge sharing to collaboration

Working together, a photo by Hepcat75 on Flickr.

Collaboration is an unnatural act in humans.

We are tribal animals, and all our instincts lead us to see life in terms of "us and them". When we divide people into teams in our "Bird Island" experiment, for example, each isolated team naturally starts to compete against the others without any prompting from us.

The famous "Eagles and Rattlers" experiment showed how this competition, when strengthened, began to lead to destructive behaviour. We can see this behaviour in any society driven by competition for limited resources.

This is often the case in business. Divisions are in competition for budget and people, and as a result the familiar organisational silos emerge and strengthen. The Eagles/Rattlers experiment demonstrated that traditional forms of team-building - social events, movies etc - did not break these silos. Something different is needed.

Communities of practice can begin to break these silos. Initially Communities operate as a self-help mechanism, where people in one silo raise a question which people in other silos can answer. Through principles of reciprocity and "what's in it for me", knowledge begins to flow through the communities.

However there is a radical step in Community behaviour, when they start to focus, not on value to the individual, but the value they collectively can generate. In our Community Maturity model, this is the step from 3 to step 4 on many of the key variables, and is where communities move from being a mechanism for knowledge-sharing to a mechanism for collaboration.

Let me explain why this step is so important, by going back to the "Eagles and Rattlers" experiment.

In this experiment, the groups of boys in an American summer camp were divided into hostile tribes by giving them competitive tasks. However the experimenters were able to turn this around completely, and to develop a massively collaborative culture, simply by giving them collective challenges that each group could not solve on their own.

Simple step, massively powerful outcome.  The way to break silos is to give challenges no silo can achieve on their own.

The same thinking can be seen in the "T-shaped Manager" approach. Give managers collective targets, and they cease competing internally.

Communities of practice can take this step almost as an evolutionary process. I remember a Community meeting many years ago, when someone stood up - eyes shining - and said "guys, just think what we would accomplish if we all worked together on this. I bet we could cut costs by 50%!"

This is where a CoP starts to think less about one individual or team solving the problems on another, and more about pooling everyone's knowledge to make a step-change in collective performance.  That's when a sense of true collaboration begins within the Community - something that previously might have felt unnatural.

That's when you can hear the sound of silo walls collapsing

Knowledge Management - a wildflower meadow or a market garden?

In KM - do you "let a thousand flowers bloom"? Or is your garden more planned that that?

Image from wikimedia comons

One of my favourite sayings is that if knowledge is organic, KM is gardening.  And as all gardeners know, gardening is hard work!  Even within the topic of gardening, there is a range of approaches, and we can see that also in KM terms when it comes to how we work with communities of practice.

 There really are two approaches to “community gardening”, which we can call "select and support" and "seed and promote".

 The first approach sets the conditions for community growth, lets communities emerge spontaneously, and then selects and supports the ones that are felt to be strategic. Its like preparing a patch of soil, allowing flowers (weeds) to appear, then thinning out the ones you don’t want and watering the ones you do want. You get a wildflower garden; unplanned, beautiful, but with many weeds

The second approach is to deliberately seed communities on key topics. Here you plant the things you want to grow – the gardenias and the hollyhocks, or the carrots and the pumpkins. You prepare the ground, plant the seed, and nurture the seedlings. You get a kitchen garden or a market garden.

Each approach has its merits and demerits The "select and support" approach makes use of existing networks and existing energy. As a manager or network champion, you will be "pushing on an open door". Payback will be rapid, as there will be very little start-up time and cost. The communities will spring up.

However there may be no existing communities which cover the most crucial and strategic topics, and many of the communities that do emerge may have relatively limited business benefit.

 The "seed and promote" approach allows you to set up communities to cover the three areas of

• Strategic Competencies (crucial to competitive success), 
• New competencies (crucial to growth and new direction), and 
• Core competencies (crucial to income and market share). 

The link between business results and the CoP will be more direct in this approach, and you will get greater traction with management.

However payback will take longer, as you need to climb the start-up curve, and it may initially be hard work generating enthusiasm and energy among prospective community members. These communities will take more work, just as creating a vegetable plot full of prize-winning vegetables takes more work.

But the results will almost certainly, in the long term, be more valuable.

Should you allow people to be anonymous in company online forms?

Is anonymity a good thing in online organisational (in-company) knowledge sharing forums? I suggest it is not, and my reasoning is below.

Public domain image from SVG

When you first set up knowledge sharing forums, it can be tempting to allow people to contribute anonymously, to reduce their fear of exposure. But is this a good idea?

Please note I am not talking about public forums, where people may want to talk about personal problems - relationships problems, abuse, addiction - which they do not necessarily want their family and neighbours to know about. Nor am I talking about anonymous activism, or Wikileaks. I am talking about knowledge-sharing communities of practice as part of an organizational Knowledge Management framework.

There are arguments for and against anonymity, and lets look at those first.

Arguments for anonymity

• In a toxic culture, where knowledge is power, it can be a risky act to challenge the status quo. To ban anonymous comments, is to remove the possibility of honesty. An anonymous forum creates a safe space for knowledge sharing.
• In a non-Western culture, where admitting mistakes is not acceptable, it can be very difficult for people to admit they don;t know, and to ask for help. Anonymity again gives a safe space for asking.

Arguments against anonymity

• People are more likely to share positive knowledge if they get credit for it (see my blog post on keeping the name with the knowledge).
• People are more likely to use the knowledge if they trust it, and if they trust the source. I remember, when testing an anonymous knowledge asset in an organisation, how people responded "Why should we trust this, if we don't know where it comes from".
• It is very difficult to learn from the written word. Most effective knowledge systems allow you to find the contributor of a lesson, a good practice or a document, and to speak with them to learn more. With anonymity, this is not possible.
• If the culture is difficult, toxic, or intolerant of mistakes, then an anonymous forum  acknowledges publicly that you have to be anonymous to share knowledge, and so to an extent perpetuates the culture. Conversely, if people can see knowledge being shared openly by brave souls, and those brave souls being praised and rewarded for it, then you have the potential to change the culture.

That last one is the clincher for me.

If you need to be anonymous to share knowledge in your organisation, something is badly wrong. Work with the culture, sure, for example providing named individuals who can share your knowledge for you if you are not brave enough, or provide alternative safe spaces where knowledge can be discussed and shared without anonymity, but don't reinforce a bad culture.

Instead, seek to influence it; seek to change it.

What is the value proposition for a community of practice?

The whole purpose of community is enabling people to help each other.

Vkw.studiogood [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

The primary vision of Community is a group of people who help each other.  This might be an Amish community raising a barn, pooling their strength and skills to help each other.  Or it might be a rural community pooling their money to fund a village hall, or to buy a village pub in order to keep it running.

In the case of a Community of Practice (CoP) it is a community of practitioners in a specific area of practice, who pool and share their knowledge in order to create a greater knowledge base as a resource for all members.


The value proposition of a CoP is therefore to increasing the effectiveness of its members through access to common and co-created knowledge.  By making the community members more effective though access to common knowledge, the organisation becomes more effective.  The value proposition is therefore firstly to the members, and as a byproduct to the organisation.

A community does not necessarily hold a collective performance objective with the business (although come communities voluntarily choose to do so) but allows each member to deliver better against his or her own individual performance objectives, by giving them access to the knowledge base of the community. 

Specifically the community offers

• Help in solving problems 
• Faster learning through observing interactions between others
• Access to experience and expertise 
• Access to proven practices 

Membership of a CoP should pay its way. If you don't get benefit from being a member, then the CoP is not working. Many communities have voluntary membership on this basis, and it serves as a self-regulating mechanism.

• If the community adds value to the members, the old members stay, new members join, and membership grows.
• If the community does not add value to the members, then members leave and the community dies.

If the community becomes effectively a blog run by a single person, it's not working as it should, and it has become a teaching platform or a communication platform and not a community.

If a community is only a means of publication of news, its a newsletter and not a community.  Communities can use newsletters, but are not created by newsletters.

If a community is concerned only with doing tasks such as writing best practice documents, its a virtual workgroup and not a community.

It's a community if the members hold their knowledge in common, using it to solve each others' problems, and therefore delivering value to the members.

4 reasons why communities of practice can die young

It is not uncommon for communities of practice to start with passion and intent, and to fade away and die out over a period of months. Here are 4 possible reasons why.

Image from wikimedia commons

I have just been reading a very interesting article entitled The Rise and Fall of a Community of practice: A Descriptive Case Study, by Alton Chua. I can't find an online version for you, I'm afraid, but the article describes the experience of developing a community of e-learning instructional designers at Holden College, and why the initiative, which seemed to enjoy a promising start, fizzled out completely in less than one and- a-half years.

Unfortunately this seems to happen all too often. I have spoken with many companies, with experience of attempting to use Communities of Practice, only to see them fizzle out and die.

The Holden College example shows typical reasons for failure, which can be summarised as follows.

1. The Community of Practice was too small. It covered a very narrow element of practice - the creation of e-learning content - and so only had 25 potential members. There is such a thing as Critical Mass for CoPs, which varies depending on the urgency of the topic and whether the CoP can meet face to face, but generally the Bigger the Better for CoPs. Shell, for example, started with 300 small CoPs, but when these struggled, amalgamated them into a handful of giant CoPs. The Holder college CoP was too small to live. 

2. The domain was not really a practice domain, more a task domain. The members were primarily lecturers and teachers - creation of e-learning was a task (and for some an unwelcome task), and not a practice area that the members identified with. The CoP would not pass the "I am a ..." test. There was therefore little identification with the subject matter for the CoP. 

3. The CoP had the opportunity to meet face to face, but found it difficult to organise meetings (partly because of reason 2 above - people did not identify with the topic, so did not prioritise it), and therefore fell back on electronic communication. Critical mass is far greater for CoPs that interact online, and the fate of the Holden College CoP was sealed at this point. 

4. The leader and core group of the CoP decided to focus on "creating deliverables". The interviewed members said that they had joined the CoP to learn from each other, and yet here they were being asked to do additional work. Given that the CoP was voluntary, then people who were already busy, and who would get limited value from the deliverable, voluntarily resigned. Communities operate best though Pull of knowledge - in other words through solving the problems of the members. Once they become Push (publication) mechanisms, they lose a lot of value.

Contrast this with a CoP which I continue to monitor, which started on 1997 and is still going strong 16 years later. It contains nearly 2000 members, covers an area they identify with, has occasional face-to-face conferences, and is focused on solving the problems of the members.

That's how you give a Community longevity.

What you need to know about social tools and KM

Here is a very interesting article from HBR entitled "What managers need to know about social tools" - thanks to Anshuman Rath for bringing it to my attention.  It's well worth a complete read.

Image by Codynguyen1116
on wikimedia commons

The article by Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley, from the Nov/Dec issue of HBR last year, looks at the way companies have often introduced social tools - often because “Other companies are, so we should too” or “That’s what you have to do if you want to attract young talent”  - and describe some of the surprising outcomes.

Here are some of the points the article makes, with excerpts in quotes:

• Use of these tools make it easier to find knowledge, through making it easier to find knowledgeable people.

"The employees who had used the tool became 31% more likely to find coworkers with expertise relevant to meeting job goals. Those employees also became 88% more likely to accurately identify who could put them in contact with the right experts"

• Millenials are not keen adopters of enterprise social tools.

"Millennials have a difficult time with the notion that “social” tools can be used for “work” purposes (and are)wary of conflating those two worlds; they want to be viewed and treated as grown-ups now. “Friending” the boss is reminiscent of “friending” a parent back in high school—it’s unsettling. And the word “social” signals “informal” and “personal.” As a 23-year-old marketing analyst at a large telecommunications company told us, “You’re on there to connect with your friends. It’s weird to think that your manager would want you to connect with coworkers or that they’d want to connect with you on social media [at work]. I don’t like that.”

• How people present themselves on internal networks is important to developing trust.

"How coworkers responded to people’s queries or joked around suggested how accessible they were; it helped colleagues gauge what we call “passable trust” (whether somebody is trustworthy enough to share information with). That’s important, because asking people to help solve a problem is an implicit admission that you can’t do it alone".

• People learn by lurking (as well as by asking).

"Employees gather direct knowledge when they observe others’ communications about solving problems. Take Reagan, an IT technician at a large atmospheric research lab. She happened to see on her department’s social site that a colleague, Jamie, had sent a message to another technician, Brett, about how to fix a semantic key encryption issue. Reagan said, “I’m so happy I saw that message. Jamie explained it so well that I was able to learn how to do it.”

• The way social tools add value to the organisation and to the individual is to facilitate knowledge seeking, knowledge awareness, knowledge sharing and problem solving. The authors give many examples mostly of problem-solving, and about finding either knowledge or knowledgeable people. One example saved a million dollars, and i will add that to my collection of quantified value stories tomorrow.

• The value comes from practice communities. The authors do not make this point explicitly, so perhaps I am suffering from confirmation bias here, but they talk about the "spread of knowledge" that they observed as being within various groups covering practice areas such as marketing, sales, and legal.

The authors finish with a section on how to introduce the tools, namely by making the purpose clear (and the purpose may be social, or it may be related to knowledge seeking and sharing), driving awareness of the tools, defining the rules of conduct, and leading by example.

The article reminds us again that social tools can add huge value to an organisation, but need careful attention and application. Just because Facebook and Twitter are busy in the non-work world, does not mean similar tools operate the same way at work.