Reflections

We have just spent two days with the social learning team at Deutsche Bank. A dynamic project Banks have had a bad rap of late, so it was a really pleasant surprise to see the work they are doing. It did not seem an obvious home for an ambitious social learning project, but it is what we found there. In less than a year the project has launched about two-dozen communities of practice. They have established a process for starting new communities and a framework for guiding their evolution. They are reaching the stage of forming a community for community leaders. Focus on people Again we were reminded of the importance of starting a social learning initiative by focusing on the social first and the technology second. Their Jive platform has opened the door, but they...

We had an interesting visit to the Mandel Institute in Israel. The occasion was the annual conference with graduates of their two-year, intensive leadership program. The theme was “professional identity”. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey opened the day with their work on “immunity to change” and we led the afternoon with our work on “learning citizenship”. It was exciting for us to introduce the concept of learning citizenship in this context for two reasons: it is a major theme of our joint work going forward, and it also happens to be critically relevant to both the theme of the conference and the work of the Mandel Institute with its graduates. Spearheading such an approach in a place in the world where political challenges (which we would view as...

Something got us excited in a strategic meeting with Executive Networks the other day in San Francisco. Executive Networks is a company that builds communities of practice for executives mainly in HR. The Community Directors were very appreciative of our Assessment Framework. They were particularly taken by the value-creation matrix (Figure 7.1, page 39). They liked the idea of integrating quantitative indicators and narratives of value creation and the fact that the usefulness of the framework is both retrospective (what learning a communities has enabled) and prospective (what learning a community may enable). In other words, the framework can be used to account for the value of an existing community and also to imagine the development of a community through...

We had an interesting online conversation with members of KC Blue, the community-leader community at IBM. The meeting was hosted by Laurie Miller and Sandy Yarchin. Many of the members have followed Etienne’s writings to cultivate IBM communities so it felt like a meeting with friends. Information anxiety We addressed many topics, but a highlight for us was much of the conversation focused on dealing with the excess of information and multiplicity of communities – referred to as “information anxiety” by Ed Easton. Identity question An identity question for members knowing who they are (becoming) in relation to so much information from different sources. A practical question for community leaders is how to filter, summarize, recycle and highlight...