Purposeful or speculative communities?

A community of practice can be more or less purposeful or speculative – what are the choices and how do you strike the right balance?

I’ve always said that the two foundational questions to answer about a community of practice are,

1. first, who is it for, because community is about people so ‘who’ comes first;
2. and, second, what – what is it about (because it’s a knowledge management intervention so we need to know the subject it’s concerned with), and what does it do (because its activities and services – what it does about its subject for its members – are really critical).

And when I say these questions are foundational they may, of course, be only tacit and poorly understood at the start; or be emergent or an ongoing discussion.

And I’ve often talked about this ‘definition’ hinging on a purpose – what it is that delivers to the members and the host organisation, that the community does or provides, that delivers value to both stakeholders? That’s the definition.

But in real life, whereas some communities of practice are very focused, many are more speculative. The more focused ones are very purposeful about getting together the people who have a drive to share experiences and ideas, and improve their knowledge and performance (I recall Etienne Wenger [in person] giving the example of the car doors community at an automotive plant that brought together people from the ‘doors’ stages in the lines of many different vehicles). Some others are more diffuse, such as the Human Resources community in a large, global organisation that brought practitioners together and often had general news and updates sharing and someone talking about their work as a ‘guest speaker’. One has a laser focus to do doors better, the other is about more generally raising awareness about a broad practice area.

It may be useful at least to consider that there are these different flavours rather than just assume one (in the HR example the organisers couldn’t understand that it could be any different, and so, it really couldn’t). There are choices to be made – and I think they should be choices for the members, who will bear in mind their understanding of the organisational need as well.

Whilst I say there are choices to be made, I do have a general view and it is this. My general view is that we are very busy in this life, busy with the ‘must do’ work. In the face of that, a ‘talking shop’ that isn’t aligned with those burning platforms shouldn’t be the first choice. Equally so, if we’re too focused on today’s problems and the known solutions then we’re risking missing the innovation and the break-out / breakthrough ideas. So we can use alignment as our key organising principles and within that allow speculation. The reverse is also possible: mostly speculative but containing deep-dives into specific, right-now needs too. Both are possible – I prefer the former in general in a work situation (although experience teaches you how to switch strategies too). I look for the existing organising principles in the organisation – structure, process, value chain, mission/vision/strategy, subjects and so on – and seek to see if we can model a community framework first of all around those pillars.

So the way we should respond to this situation, I suggest, is to err towards being purposeful, and also carve out a space for speculation. I prefer to frame it as a paradox with “and” rather than as a contradiction with “but”. Paradoxes allow more possibilities, and greater clarity.