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. 

Why facilitation is a core skill in KM

Tacit knowledge is shared and captured through the interaction of people and teams, and facilitation is key to effective interaction.

Facilitation is one of the Key skills of the Knowledge Manager. The vast majority of organisational knowledge is carried in people's heads, and the most effective way to transfer knowledge is through human interaction.


But not just interaction. Knowledge sharing and transfer requires:

• open behaviours (listening, exploring, not criticising);
• dialogue rather than argument or debate;
• balanced input from many people - not a few people talking, and the others listening;
• effective process to be followed, within a given time frame.

Without facilitation, none of these are easy to achieve!

So what exactly is facilitation, and how does it work?

A good illustration of facilitation, and how it differs from teaching and coaching,  is the "facilitraining rainbow".  I am not sure who first drew this diagram, but I include my version here.  It shows different types of interaction between and individual and a group, with teaching-style interactions on the right, and facilitator-style interactions on the left. Basically:

• A teacher "owns the content" of the interaction. They provide the knowledge content, and pass it on to someone else;
• A facilitator, in contrast, owns the process, and the participants in the interaction own the knowledge content. The facilitator provides the structure and behaviours to allow content transfer or capture to happen. 

To facilitate is therefore to impartially support the interaction between the participants in order to optimise knowledge discovery, creation or transfer. To facilitate is to serve the group by encouraging, aiding, and leading the dialogue.

The zone of the Knowledge Management facilitator is therefore definitely on the left hand side of the rainbow.  The KM facilitator has low ownership of the knowledge content, and a variable level of interaction with the group in question, depending on the process being followed.

• In Retrospect meetings, After Action reviews or other lessons capture meetings, the level of facilitator interaction with the discussion is relatively high, and considerable facilitation of the discussion may be needed. In a Retrospect, the facilitators role is to ensure the team reach ground truth, and deliver valuable lessons.
• Similarly in ideation or innovation processes the facilitator may be more interactive as they strive to ensure a high level of open thinking.
• In other KM processes such as Peer Assist, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Markets, Knowledge handovers and so on the facilitator is less active, and often acts more as a process and behaviour monitor.

However in all of these processes, good facilitation is very important, and facilitation should be a core skill for the KM team, and a core service that the team provides. 

Facilitation - the first skill a new KM team needs to learn

The most valuable skill for the Knowledge Management professional is the skill of facilitation. This is one of the first skills a new KM team must learn. 

Photo by Nicholas Wang on Flickr

Knowledge is created and used by people - it needs to be externalised an internalised by humans, and in today's world that usually means people working in teams or in networks. Wherever people interact, facilitation becomes an enabler.  Certainly once knowledge is documented it needs to be treated as information, which is where skills of information organisation become more important than facilitation skills, but this accounts for only about 25% of KM work.

The other 75% requires interactions with and between people;

• Knowledge is created through interactions between people, for example team meetings such as After Action review, Lessons capture, where learnings are discussed;
• Knowledge is internalised through interactions between people, for example Peer Assists where a project team internalise lessons from others, and discuss what this may mean to them;
• Knowledge is most easily transferred through interactions between people - either face to face or electronically mediated; in community of practice meetings ann online discussions.

 The quality of these interactions directly affects the quality and quantity of the knowledge transfer, and facilitation is the key factor in enabling high quality interaction.

You can’t just assume that any interaction results in a high quality exchange of knowledge, as there are often many barriers - barriers of hierarchy, of shyness, of lack of trust or openness or honesty, of taking shortcuts, or cross-talking, or asserting without listening. Good quality facilitation can help remove these barriers. In fact, as my post on "a group is its own worst enemy" shows; unfacilitated groups will often introduce facilitation or moderation just as a way to keep discussion fruitful.

The role of facilitation

Effectively identifying and exchanging knowledge in a conversation or meeting requires

• High quality interactions between people 
• Open behaviours – listening, exploring, not criticising 
• Good listening 
• Dialogue, not discussion, assertion or argument 
• Balanced input from many people - not a few people talking, and the others listening
• Following a process - exchanging views, divergence, convergence

The role of facilitation is to make it easier for a group to effectively deliver these high quality interactions. The role is one of assistance and guidance, not control. The facilitator looks after the process and behaviours of the conversation while the group looks after the content of the conversation.

Facilitation is not

• Teaching  - you are not teaching the group about meeting process, you are helping them to deliver results from a process or conversation 
• Coaching - you do not coach them towards the right answer – you don’t know the right answer – they do! 
•  Reviewing and assessing - you will not tell them at the end whether they conducted the meeting correctly or incorrectly – you make sure they do it effectively.
• Team leadership - the team leader is always interested in the outcome, and cannot facilitate effectively. The facilitator is almost never the team leader.

Tasks of KM facilitation

Some of the KM processes require more active facilitation than others. Facilitating a Peer Assist, for example, is relatively light-touch, while facilitating a Retrospect requires much greater involvement from the facilitator. Some of the tasks in the latter case include

• Asking the questions. An After Action review or Retrospect is all about questions - What happened? Why did it happen? How do we repeat or avoid this in future? These are open questions, and the facilitator's role is to make sure each one is asked, and each one is fully answered.
• Ensuring equal input. "Susie, you have been quiet so far - what are your views on this?". "Mickey, thank you for that, now let's hear what some of the others think"
• Identifying themes or common threads in a discussion “Many of us have identified planning as a problem in this project – I wonder if we need to have a short discussion on planning“ 
• Clarifying confusing statements , or ask for more detail on lessons “Mr Lao, you said that it was important to plan properly – can you tell us what proper planning would look like?” 
• Summarizing and organizing the ideas “If I can just summarize our discussion, we would suggest that in future, projects approach planning by ……….” 
• Testing for agreement “Is that a fair summary of the discussion? What do you think?”

Gaining facilitation skills

There are many organisations (for example the International Association of Facilitators) that provide general training in meeting facilitation, and one of the first things a new KM team should do is attend such a course. 

They then need specialist training or coaching in KM facilitation, to perfect the specific skills of knowledge capture, of facilitating online communities of practice. The US Army, for example, provides extensive AAR training, and you can find many of their videos online.

Find yourself a good KM training company to give your team the core skills they need. Contact us if you need help.

Why facilitation is important to KM processes

As long as Knowledge Management involves face-to-face interaction between teams and individuals, Facilitation has a key role to play.

Good facilitation is essential to effective face-to-face KM processes.  Effectively identifying and exchanging knowledge in a meeting requires high quality interactions between people. These interactions need to be built on

• Open behaviours – listening, exploring, not criticising 
• Good listening 
• Dialogue, not argument 

This requires balanced input from many people; not a few people talking, and the others listening.  It requires process to be followed, within a given time frame. Without a facilitator, none of these are easy to achieve, particularly when you want to achieve the high-quality dialogue that is the basis of knowledge sharing!

Facilitation is the process of making it easier for a group to effectively deliver the objectives of a meeting such as a Lesson Capture meeting, a Peer Assist, or a Knowledge Café.  By providing non-directive leadership, the facilitator helps the group negotiate the meeting processes, so that the group arrives at the required objectives. Their role is one of assistance and guidance, not control.

The facilitator looks after the process of the meeting, while the group looks after the content of the meeting.

Everyone comes to a meeting with their own agenda and their own preconceptions (and they are often unaware of these). Some want to talk, some want to defend a prior opinion, some want to avoid challenge, some want to challenge, and so on. The facilitator needs to ensure that the group, as a whole, delivers the required result, rather than some individuals delivering their personal agenda.

This is particularly true in those KM events which aim to produce value for others, such as Retrospects, where the facilitator needs to play a particularly active role. Even where the meeting is designed to deliver value to the team, for example in a Peer Assist, everyone apart from the facilitator is primarily interested in the content of the meeting. The role of the facilitator is to manage the process of the meeting, and through good process to deliver good content.

The facilitator provides "psychological safety"

People need to feel safe in order to be open. Even if the broader organisation culture is not an open one, the facilitator can still set the tone for the meeting itself through helping the team decide on ground rules for the meeting, and then monitoring behaviours as the meeting progresses - intervening if necessary; for example "I get the feeling we are beginning to criticise and judge each other here. Let's remember our ground rule of "no criticism" and keep listening in an open way?" Sharing knowledge can be a scary thing to do at first, and the facilitator needs to make sure that people feel safe to share.

Facilitation is not

• Teaching You are not teaching the group about Retropects or AARs, you are helping them to deliver results from a Retrospect or AAR 
• Coaching You do not coach them towards the right answer – you don’t know the right answer – they do! 
• Reviewing and assessing You will not tell them at the end whether they conducted the meeting correctly or incorrectly – you help them to do it correctly! 
• Team leadership The team leader is always interested in the outcome, and cannot facilitate effectively. Your role is a neutral role.

Some of the key facilitator skills for KM process meetings are as follows:

• Ensuring balanced input, and that the meeting is not dominated by the most senior people, or the people most comfortable with sharking their knowledge. Everyone has something to contribute, and the facilitator should encourage everyone to share; 
• Identifying themes or common threads in a discussion “Many of us have identified planning as a problem in this project – I wonder if we need to have a short discussion on planning“ 
• Clarifying confusing statements , or ask for more detail on lessons “Susie, you said that it was important to plan properly – can you tell us what proper planning would look like?” 
• Summarizing and organizing the ideas “If I can just summarize our discussion, we would suggest that in future , projects approach planning by ……….” 
• Testing for agreement “Is that a fair summary of the discussion? What do you think?”

Facilitation skills are important

If facilitation is important, then access to facilitation skills is equally important.  You can provide access to these skills in three ways:

• You can train the KM team in the skills of KM facilitation. I always suggest this to KM teams, and facilitation is one of the most important skill-sets that you need to develop. The KM team can then provide a facilitation service to the business.
• You can train a cadre of KM facilitators in the business; perhaps the KM champions, or people within the Project Management office. 
• You can use external facilitators. Several of our Knoco clients have asked us to provide an external facilitation service for major projects, making sure that knowledge capture is always handled in a professional and consistent way, delivering high quality outcome.