Only about a half-dozen times in my 20+ year professional career has a
business "concept" really struck me as a revelation, as something with
lasting and important value. The latest has been "Communities of
Practice", the concept (I believe) developed by Xerox Parc's IRL and
expounded upon in recent Fortune (Aug 15 Tom Stewart column) and Strategy
& Leadership magazine (July/Aug/96). I think what really resonates about
this concept is that it's at once revolutionary and eminently reasonable,
and it's *people-centred* (you know, that "resource" we don't put on the
balance sheet ;-) Here's two quotes that really hit home to me:
"They emerge of their own accord. Three, four, 20, maybe 30 people find
themselves drawn to one another by a force that's both social &
professional. They collaborate directly, use one another as sounding
boards, teach each other. You can't create communities like this by fiat,
and they're easy to destroy. They are the most important structures of
any organization where thinking matters, but they almost inevitably
undermine its formal structures...you can define them in terms of the
learning they do over time... [they have] an enterprise but not an agenda,
that forms around a value-adding something-we're-all-doing...[and] it
involves learning [so that] over time the community develops a way of
dealing with the world they share" [Stewart]
"The tension of our times is that we want organizations to behave as
living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines...
Organizations are living systems. All living systems have the capacity to
self-organize, to sustain themselves and move toward greater complexity
and order as needed. They respond intelligently to the need for change.
They organize and then re-organize themselves into adaptive pattens and
structures *without any externally imposed plan or direction*." [Wheatly
& Kellner-Rogers, in S&L]
I find this concept extremely compelling, in that it explains elegantly
and simply why most "imposed" strategies, systems & structures fail to
bring about the desired changes, and how and why people learn (or not) in
organizations. The concept of the company as eco-system, which my Ernst &
Young colleagues expounded a couple of years ago, suddenly makes sense to
me. It raises a host of (I think) important new questions about
organizational development & learning, such as (just to whet LO members'
appetite):
(1) How can management encourage this self-organization and maximize its
fruitfulness and efficiency, without inadvertantly interfering with it and
destroying the communities of practice?
(2) If (as seems logical) these communities should be empowered to
self-educate its membership, how can this be done, and how can (or should)
the community's knowledge and learning be cross-pollinated to the
organization's other communities?
(3) If the management structure to support these communities of practice
is Tom Peter's "new, small center", can centralized management
"self-dis-integrate" itself to become this new helpful, hands-off body?
(4) If the communities of practice are self-organizing and hence
self-selecting, should exclusion from these communities be grounds for
dismissal from the organization, and should inclusion (since these
communities often extend beyond organizational boundaries) be
pre-condition for hiring?
Dave Pollard, Chief Knowledge Officer, Ernst & Young
Caledon Hills, Ontario, Canada
pollardd@inforamp.net
Dave.Pollard@CA.EYI.com
--Dave Pollard <pollardd@inforamp.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>