Customer Reviews

Cultivating Communities of Practice

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Wenger, McDermott and Snyder draw on the past to describe the usefulness of a community of practice. In the Stone Age knowledge was passed on to others while people gathered around a fire and discussed hunting strategies. A community of practice is a group of people who may be trying to solve a problem and who interact about a topic in order to deepen their knowledge. The aim is shared insight and information. The authors write that in the time of ancient Rome corporations of metalworkers, potters, masons and craftsmen formed communities with a combined business and social function. Moreover, in the Middle Ages artisans formed guilds as a way to share knowledge and experiences. Therefore, the authors argue that community as a basis for knowledge creation and management has a long historical tradition.

Wenger, McDermott and Snyder believe that knowledge management needs to become more systematic and deliberate. The authors believe in the collective nature of knowledge, which involves every person contributing their perspective of a problem. A Community of Practice (CoP) allows for the connection of isolated pockets of expertise across an organization. The CoP consists of a domain of knowledge, a community of people and the shared practice they are developing. The community environment allows for interactions, relationships, sharing of ideas and the opportunity to ask difficult questions. The purpose of the CoP is to create, expand and exchange knowledge. The authors believe that a large number of CoP members rarely participate. Instead they watch the interaction and learn from the discussions that occur, learning from them. The authors believe that the most valuable activities consist of informal discussions that occur between members to solve a particular problem. A case study given is that of Shell, which has created CoP's around particular technical topics.

Wenger, McDermott and Snyder go into detail over how a CoP functions. At the beginning it is important to find common ground between all the members of the community. Members need to find out if they share similar problems and passions with one another. The authors believe a variety of communities exist: help communities, best practice, innovation and knowledge stewarding communities. Usually a community coordinator is needed who identifies important issues and plans events. The author's method for assessing the performance of a community consists of asking the questions: What did the community do? What knowledge did they produce? And how were those applied to get results?

All the characteristics mentioned, although are only intended by the authors to represent a CoP, share similarities with a virtual community. In fact the authors believe that Internet technology such as asynchronous threaded discussions can be used for distributed communities of practice. In fact some CoP's have websites where members have their pictures and biographical information on the site. However, Wenger, McDermott and Snyder make no connection between a community of practice and a virtual community. In fact they don't mention the two being related in any way at all, despite the dynamics appearing to be very similar. At the end of the book this omission seems very obvious given the incredible growth of virtual community at eBay and Amazon.

Writing a good book on the topic of communities of practice must a difficult task. The research challenge arises from the difficulty of finding hard data in a soft subject. The complexity of human interactions in groups defies neat categorizations and explanations. The authors of this highly readable volume do better than you might expect. Combining their deep knowledge in the subject with examples from a range of large companies (Shell Oil, Hewlett-Packard, Ben & Jerry's), they explain how this promising aspect of knowledge management and organizational culture can work. Along with stories about communities of practice at various stages of development, the authors succeed in providing a fairly well-developed scheme for these communities and their care and feeding.

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. This book explains the potential value of CoPs, their structural elements, principles for crafting CoPs, analyzes their stages of growth, explores their downsides, investigates how to measure the value they create, and what role they play in community-based knowledge initiatives. It seems unfair to criticize this book, but more detail on how to implement CoPs would have been welcome. The authors have developed a helpful framework for understanding CoPs, illustrated by examples, but the reader will still need to think hard to implement them in a new setting.

This is a very interesting book in explaining how to initiate communities of practice, their lifecycle and their role in the sharing and development of knowledge. Over the last ten or twenty years there has been much written about new organizational structures and the emerging importance of developing and retaining knowledge within corporations. Wenger, McDermott and Snyder approach this topic from a social perspective and apply some standard community building concepts to "communities of practice". This contrasts much of the popular thinking on these topics that tend to overemphasize the role of technology in helping to build communities or address knowledge management issues.

Cultivating Communities of Practice is and excellent handbook for anyone involved in the setup, participation or stewardship of "communities of practice" within a corporation. I would though suggest that the emphasis is on "corporation", which in some cases implies individuals having some predetermined alignment (presumably with the interests of the corporation). There is some very good discussion at the end of the book covering communities of practice outside of the corporation with and some review of supply chains and 3rd sector examples, although very limited coverage. It was noted that the focus has been on corporations as this is where there are solid examples of these practices. Hopefully a future book will address this area in more depth.

This book is identified as "A Guide to Managing Knowledge", and it does fit this description well. If you still believe that technology can be the primary component of a knowledge management strategy, then you need this book to better understand the nature of knowledge management in terms of communities of practice.

This book, just published by "the three musketeers of Communities of Practice", is a practical guide to managing knowledge. What makes this book special is that it goes far beyond the simple explanation and advocacy for communities of practice, which we have all been reading about for the last five years. Through in-depth cases from firms such as DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey & Company, Shell, and the World Bank, the authors expand on many practical aspects one should have in mind when engaging in a community development: The "seven principles", the "five development steps" are presented in practical terms and with great details so that they can be used as a framework for all practitioners.

The approach to "cultivating" and nurturing communities, as opposed to "managing" them, is also explained so that managers will hopefully resist the urge to try and control them using mechanistic mental models. At last, the question of measuring value creation for organizations is addressed in convincing and, again, practical ways.

There is also some wisdom in this book. The "dark side" of communities of practice is also addressed. If unproperly managed, communities of practice can indeed create isolation, collusion, or tensions, which can be quite destructive for community members and sponsoring organizations.

This book is an essential reading for any leader in today's knowledge economy. It will undoubtedly remain as a reference for all of us practitioners who want to develop communities of practice for the benefit and long-term success of organizations and their employees.

The authors have done an impressive work collecting best practices from industries. The book is a good textbook for all KM and OD practitioners to consider in learning about CoP. However, as one of the reviewers have noted, it does not tell you the steps in nurturing a CoP since human behaviours differ among (as well as WITHIN) organisations. The book does however provide a clear definition of how a working CoP would look like.
Readers who are keen on KM should read other works on social network to complement the learning. At the heart of any CoP is social dynamics. Understanding that will help to create CoP that is sustainable and useful to the organisation.

I ordered this book on a co-workers "you need to drop everything you are doing and read this book" recommendation, and I must confess, it was immediately useful the day after I read it (and still two weeks later, after I've had a chance to share its insights with hundreds of people). And indeed I have found myself recommending it, despite numerous limitations.

The strongest and most important contribution this book makes is to first define a robust definition of community and community practice within the command-and-control corporate hierarchy. I especially appreciated that the authors did not go overboard (as so many business authors do) and try to redefine absolutely everything in terms of their particular insight. Their restraint makes the first two chapters a very safe "if you care the least bit about this subject, you need to get grounded in these two chapters *now*".

The most glaring omission of this book is that there is no discussion whatsoever about free/open source software. Granted the book was published in 2002, but by that time:

* Netscape started the open source Mozilla project (1998)
* Red Hat went public on NASDAQ, using a community-based R&D model (1999)
* IBM committed to invest $1B into Linux (2000)
* Amazon.com reported its first-ever profit, attributed in part to its use of Linux (2001)

One possible explanation for this omission is that the authors wanted to leave technology (and thus technology-mediated practices) entirely out of their discussions. But the fact remains that the free software community, which was started explicitly as a community first (Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman), and the open source movement (which was a combined commercial/community symbiosis, see Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly Open Source)) are defining examples of the cultivation of communities of practice at the billion dollar level in 2002 (and now well past $10B today). Such an omission makes me very ambivalent about recommending this book to the communities I work within.

Hopefully the authors will see fit to release a revised and updated version, one which maintains its neutral and yet insightful perspective, while also giving some much-deserved attention to both the free and open source software communities as well as the ways in which those communities have enabled other communities to operate (using the World Wide Web, Wikis, and other open source technologies).

In Cultivating Communities of Practice Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder set out to "write a new book targeted at practitioners" (p. x). Concentrating on the birth, growth, and even death of communities of practice within organizations they have studied (mostly engineering, management, and financial institutions), they have surely succeeded in their goal. Or have they missed an opportunity?

Unfortunately, their extended stays in the rarefied air of Shell Oil, McKinsey & Company, the World Bank, Hewlett Packard, and DaimlerChrysler left little time or space to discuss communities of practice for "the rest of us"-- teachers, community organizers, small business owners, nurses, construction workers, real estate agents, factory workers, fishermen, truck drivers, clerks, mechanics, cab drivers, soldiers, etc. I am sure that the authors concentrated on only a handful of elite companies because that is where they worked and observed communities of practice in action. It is not until page 224 of a 232 page book that they discuss the "real world" problems of a San Diego County Health and Human Services director.

This is not to suggest that they failed in their enterprise--just that they misled their readers. Had they titled their book "Describing Communities of Practice in Elite Organizations" they would have succeeded brilliantly. Although the book is somewhat short in providing real solutions to preserving the knowledge of communities of practice (CoPs) (see Publisher's Weekly review on Amazon.com), the authors have provided a comprehensive, and detailed description of how CoPs are born, mature and evolve, and even fizzle out. The book is a fairly dry read, however. The trust and sociality of CoPs is never quite real in this book because the authors never humanize the communities. The example communities are detailed without descriptions of the interplay of individuals with real names (or even pseudonyms), and real feelings. We are left to imagine how trust develops within these groups without the benefit of any clues. It is as if the authors are studying these organizations with white coats, and don't wish to accept that communities are made up of real people.

In addition, by concentrating on a handful of Fortune 100 companies, they have fallen prey to two of the very problems they discuss in their chapter on the downsides of communities of practice- 1) narcissism, which they describe as being so overly concerned with oneself and one's own agenda that one lacks "direct exposure to markets and customers" (p. 143), and 2) localism, failing to transcend boundaries "to develop the range, intensity and diversity of connections that would maximize the synergy between groups and people" (p.146). By concentrating on elite workers in a handful of companies, they have failed to transcend the boundaries that would allow them to make this book relevant to the vast majority of the world's workers. Hopefully, the message is not that we are not eligible to become practitioners of community, just that the authors haven't expanded their community to accommodate us...yet.

Nevertheless, the comprehensiveness of their analysis is impressive, and will no doubt appeal to corporate managers seeking a book to help them understand what communities of practice are, how they form and evolve.

This is one of the classics in the field of communities of practice, and deservedly so. I would consider it a "must-read" for anyone who wants to know more about how communities work. However, it's not a novice's book; it won't provide the nuts-and-bolts, step-by-step directions you may want if you are just getting started with communities of practice.

The metaphor in this book's title says it all. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder have written a practical guide aimed at helping you grow and develop semi-informal communities capable of having a life of their own. The model they put forward is fairly simple and easy to understand.

Communities of practice, according to the authors, have three essential focal points. The first is the "domain" which is essentially the topic area or subject that people gather around to discuss, learn, and improve. Next is the "community" which includes the people who want to learn, share, and engage one another. In the words of the authors, these communicating people are the "social fabric of learning." Finally you have the "practice" which is a specific set of frameworks, tools, information, language, stories and documents that the community shares and produces with one another. All communities of practice must address the domain, community, and practices if they are going to be successful and meaningful.

With this framework in mind, the authors go on to discuss how communities of practices move through five idfferent stages--from potenital to transformation--as they mature. The majority of the book discusses the opportunities and obstacles that we face when working with a community of practice throughout the five stages. Many key ideas emerge in these chapters. Stewrdship seems to be more important than management. We cannot expect communities of practice to only solve the problems we face (which they can), but we must also expect them to create problems of their own. Building connections and aiming to add value to each community member should be an early priority. These statements are just a small sample of the ideas discussed.

Finally, the book ends by discussing how you might measure the value added and how community-based knowledge initiatives can help an organization improve its overall learning and performance.

No doubt the addresses a "soft" topic. My reaction is that effectively stewarding a community of practice requires a fairly unique person who is able to work for the good of the group and has particularly strong networking and opportunity identification skills. That said, the authors do a superb job of helping us see exactly what skills are needed for growing our own community.

This is a highly practical and easy to read book. I read this cover-to-cover in a single day. The theory of communities of practice is largely limited to only essentials and most of the time is spent helping the reader see how communities operate. If you are looking for advice about how to form a learning or discourse community around a particular issue or topic at work, or if you are interested in forming a collegial group that shares and learns about a topic, then this book is for you. This book is very much about life long learning in a professional context. It presents the community of practice as a nice alternative to the formal team or ad hoc committee. In short, this is a users' guide for meaningful and productive knowledge management groups and learning communities.

This is a very useful detailed assessment of the role of communities of practice as developers and stewards of knowledge and their interaction with the application of knowledge inside commercial organizations. (The book is written around business organizations, but its content applies very well to public sector organizations as well and will be useful to public sector knowledge managers.)

The authors' focus of attention is - explicitly - on communities within (almost by definition quite large) organizations, and how they can be cultivated as a key element in the organization's success. Although the authors acknowledge that communities of practice can and do cross organizational boundaries, their attention to this aspect is cursory. As a result a number of very important issues (for example the degree of openness permitted/encouraged where communities cross organizational boundaries, the challenge to professional loyalties, access by specialists who are isolates within their own organization to communities of practice across the nation or the world, the management of communities of practice across strategic alliances) do not get attention.

That is about my only criticism and is almost more in the nature of a plea for someone to provide equivalent coverage of that critically important and growing field of interest.

The book defines communities of practice (COP) in relation to other groupings (for example it makes a useful distinction from communities of interest, while acknowledging that the distinctions are 'fuzzy' - see the useful table on P. 42). It also identifies the key roles, key elements and principles affecting the successful operation of COPs and factors requiring attention over their life cycle. The authors also identify diseases of COPs and their causes, address the difficult issue of measuring and managing value creation through them and provides guidance on the role of the management structure of an organization in fostering and supporting COPs within it.