Operationalizing Communities of Practice

Michael Dreikorn - 10/3/07

An aging workforce is becoming the hard-felt reality not only in the United States, but also in Europe and Japan.

U.S. Army: Sharing Lessons from the Field

It began gradually, organically. Some young, noncommissioned officers wanted to share their experiences, talk about their jobs and learn from one another.

An aging workforce is becoming the hard-felt reality not only in the United States, but also in Europe and Japan. The obvious impact is that there won’t be enough hands and legs to do the jobs being performed today, but a more critical impact will be the loss of tacit knowledge, which is not explicit and often not documented.

It is the tacit knowledge that operationalizes our organizations and provides us with innovation. The challenge, then, is managing the retention and sharing of our valuable tacit knowledge. Communities of practice are an effective method for bringing tacit knowledge into the light, sharing it, contextualizing it and putting it to good use.

The concept of a community of practice is simple — all that is needed is a group of people who have a common interest and the desire to share their knowledge within a community. It doesn’t have to be formally structured, but the greater the definition of process, the higher the returns will be in managing knowledge and applying it to create value. Here are a couple of examples.

On the less formalized end of the scale, some professionals are self-motivated and decide to meet periodically to share their experiences. The meeting and sharing of knowledge has obvious benefits to those who participate, but the long-term retention of knowledge remains tacit and resides only in the minds of those in the group.

Another less formalized, yet effective, community of practice is the discussion groups that have been created under the banner of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), a 93,000-member professional association that advances learning, quality improvement and knowledge exchange to improve business results and create better workplaces and communities worldwide.

ASQ discussion groups are communities of practice that are geographically based and share industry experience as it relates to quality processes. The first discussion group was created as part of the ASQ’s biomedical division in the Boston area.

This group was made up of quality professionals from various pharmaceutical companies in the region. Their objective was not to compete against one another but, rather, share their tacit knowledge regarding the challenges they all faced. Although the process began very informally, structure and process eventually were introduced to better manage interaction and knowledge sharing.