“Communities of practice”

“Communities of practice”

What you learn

Work as (community) practiceScience (etc) as (community) practice

Learning as following workLearning as (macro) collaborationICT as an environment for realising this

How you learn

Work learning as authenticLearning relationships as like work relationships

iCohere provides an engaging platform for building collaborative communities of practice. Our web community software integrates all of the most critical community-focused features into a single user-friendly and secure environment.

Tomoye Ecco – Community of practice social software. The quickest way to drive informal learning in your organization.

"Education..."

0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400

& metacognition

& scaffolding

& learning style

& personalisation

& VLE

& int wh board

& CofP

google hits (000s)

"A company must continue to focus on its processes so that they stay attuned to the needs of the changing business environment…. A process-centred organisation must strive for ongoing process improvement. To accomplish this, the company must actively manage its processes. Indeed, we can now see that the heart of managing a business is managing its processes: assuring that they are performing up to their potential, looking for opportunities to make them better, and translating these opportunities into realities."(Hammer, 1996, Beyond Reengineering )

“BPR”: one approach to organisational life

What hatched “communities of practice” as an idea?

BPR emerges as a clear, direct, consistent, generic solution in at a time (1980s) of fluctuating business advice fads.

Thus, we must excise the divisions and “diversions”

“BPR”: the clean sheet, the process model, ….and the ICT – organise around value-adding

Early 1990s : 50% of Fortune500 companies have a “VP Reengineering”  

BPR: some history

Evaluating process accounts of work

On “processes”:

Successes tend to come from narrow band of endeavourProcurement, shipping and receiving, warehousing, billing

Linear, well-defined activities. Yet the longitudinal links matter Less successful in management, in R&D

Areas were sense-making and interpretation are more problematic Wenger on claims processors - their problems traceable to meaning clashesCompany explanations poorly harmonised with case practicalities

Thus attend to practice (how things "get done"), as well as process

On practices: Note the following…

- The call for "working to rule" quickly brings work to a halt - Practice: participants look laterally (to peers) more than longitudinally/hierarchically - Yet Process analyses tend to be top-down and wary of variations in meaning - People tend to be “inserted” into processes - social resources neglected (BT’s canned chatter)  

Case Study: William Orr on photocopy engineers

ThesisKnowledge is distributed and not readily proceduralised

 Observations

(1) A process: Customer > Service Centre > Rep > Site visit > Diagnose > Documentation > Fix > Clear Call. [Supported by training and directive documentation]

(2) The Practice: Large machines with sub-systems fail unpredictably, undermining error codes and documentation

An individualised role gets subverted to informal teams - starting even at breakfast

Narration as resource: Telling of (war) stories to derive coherence. Identification of expertise Stories become repositories of (collective) memory

(Informally) collaborative

Reps subvert process: for parts management and for mutual cover. The sense of improvisation Practice hidden by making-good returns

Implications

(1) The social dimension of organisational functioning

"the overlaps and alliances that bring disparate communities together. Indeed it is precisely in these overlaps that core competencies live".

"You can’t divorce competencies from the social fabric that supports them""the most valuable knowledge often resides where we are least able to see or control it; on the front lines, at the periphery, with the renegades. Companies that embrace the emergent can tap the loci of knowledge work“

 (2) New ICT "a network place, rather than an electronic space, where people interact as a community“

[Xerox issue two way radios and then an archived database of incident] 

The community imperative

Claims worker: "the corporation mainly remains an abstraction for you“

Engineer: "when you face a problem that stretches your knowledge, you turn to people like...“

CEO: "on a day-to-day basis you live among your peers“

"We frequently say that people are an organisations most important resource. Yet we seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through which individuals develop and share the capacity to create and use knowledge."

Nature of “communities of practice”

• Membership by participation, not organisational definition. • Can span organisational structures and hierarchies (diffuse) • A common focus: they are "about" something (goals-oriented) • Mutually recognised shared knowledge and experience ("common knowledge") • Support “legitimate peripheral participation” (LPP) • Homes for personal identity (Learning as "membership")

Things they “do”

• Identity (sites within which individuals work up sense of self) • Memory (repository of organisational information) • Movement and analysis (offer channels for information flow within organisation) • "To preserve tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture." • Learning (permit entry and legitimate participation at periphery)

Couple this “melting pot” with a felt practical challenge of education

Problem: “inert knowledge”….

Diagnosis: “situate” learning in “communities of practice”

“Inert knowledge”

Lave: Weight watchers

“..take three quarters of two-thirds of a cup of cottage cheese”

Situated solution:

Fill a measuring cup 2/3 with cheeseEmpty it onto the tableForm into a circleCut of ¾ of it

Situated solution:

Fill a measuring cup 2/3 with cheeseEmpty it onto the tableForm into a circleCut of ¾ of it

Formal solution:

3/4 x 2/3

3 x 24 x 3