Communities of practice are the perfect vehicle for involving practitioners directly in the development of the key capabilities that their practice is a part of. As a result they engage in the development of strategic capabilities critical for achieving the goals of the organization(s) they belong to. For instance, consulting firms cultivate communities of practice so that when clients interact with a consultant they actually have access to the knowledge and intelligence of the whole firm, not just one person. Schools cultivate communities of practice so that teachers move from being lonely practitioners to offering their students the pedagogical creativity of the whole community. Governments encourage communities of practice to learn and find synergies across agencies. Non-governmental organizations are finding that communities of practice provide new ways to foster international development by connecting practitioners from various countries to exchange and explore ideas among peers.

Communities of practice have always existed in organizations, but they have lived “underground” so to speak. The formal and informal parts of organizations have lived parallel but separate lives. In a knowledge economy, this benign neglect is no longer possible. Creating and leveraging knowledge is not amenable to industrial command-and-control hierarchies. It is now essential to legitimize, engage, and integrate into the organization the communities that sustain the capabilities necessary to its success.

Communities of practice will not break silos, but they do create bridges across them.

Large organizations tend to swing between centralization and decentralization. Communities of practice offer another way to deal with the trade-offs involved. Because they are learning partnerships and not regulating entities, they can create synergies across silos without imposing the type of top-down homogeneity that centralization tends to demand. But because they foster discussions of practice across organizational units, they are a counterweight to the type of fragmentation that can result from decentralization. 

Traditionally, knowledge has been viewed as something that experts hand down to practitioners. But organizations in all sectors are discovering that something unique happens when practitioners become direct learning partners by forming a community: they bring insights from their engagement with customers and practical challenges; the knowledge they share and create together builds on these insights and challenges; and they can apply this knowledge to their work because it reflects their experience.

Admittedly, the experience of practitioners cannot be the source of everything they need to know. So there is definitely a role for specialized experts and researchers. But the contributions of these experts and researchers are more meaningful and useful when they are integrated into an ongoing learning process that is driven by practitioners themselves.

In order to reflect the experience of practitioners, a community of practice needs to be self-governing in a fundamental sense. This way, practice can really become the curriculum—in the sense of providing both learning challenges and learning resources likely to be relevant.

If organizations are going to cultivate communities, in their midst or across their boundaries, they have a responsibility to create a context in which these communities can thrive. Large numbers of communities of practice today live inside or across organizations that influence them in many ways. And most of the failures of these communities are at least in part due to a lack of organizational support or understanding. So the organizational side of the cultivating equation is a critical success factor.

Organizations are only beginning to learn how to integrate communities of practice. The point is not to institutionalize them and shape them into the image of the formal organization, but to create “hooks” into formal systems for recognizing, engaging, and supporting them. One big lesson is that bureaucratic processes do not work well for this purpose. Leading organizations are learning that intelligence cannot be designed out of the process. Therefore the key principle is to use formal structures to create spaces, processes, and opportunities for intelligent conversations. Examples include:

Successfully enabling this hybrid combination of vertical and horizontal structures is going to be one of the main challenges of the organization of the twenty-first century.

There really is no set length of time that a community should last. In most cases, a community of practice starts without a clear sense of how long it will exist. It will last as long as members find value in their learning together. The intensity and relevance of this value are more important than the duration of the group. Some communities exist for a very short time and some last for years. Of course just one encounter will not make for a community: some level of sustained interaction is required over time. But a community should be allowed to disperse as soon as it has lived its usefulness.

Because of this tension between vertical and horizontal processes, integrating communities of practice in an organization is an exercise in paradox. Organizations tend to pay attention to structures or issues by institutionalizing them but it is a delicate task to integrate communities of practice into the organization without squelching the very self-organizing principle that makes them thrive. When it comes to communities of practice, organizations have varying degrees of institutionalization, which even vary from community to community. It is useful to distinguish between two kinds of institutionalization: institutionalizing communities of practice themselves, and institutionalizing their existence in the organization.

Institutionalizing communities. There are cases in which institutionalizing a community makes sense. When the domain is of critical strategic importance, it may require the investment of substantial resources, including some full-time core members. Some communities include a center of excellence; some even become departments in the organization. But even when they do, it is useful to maintain a distinction between the formal center or department and the community of practice it represents. For one thing, their boundaries are likely to be distinct—some members of the community may not be part of the department, especially the more peripheral ones. And the underlying community may well have different sources of motivation, qualities of relationships, and governance expectations. The institutional part is often best understood as the core of a broader community.

Institutionalizing the existence of communities. Institutionalizing a community into a formal structure requires caution; but it is always helpful to consider ways to institutionalize the existence of communities of practice in an organization—the fact that they are integral to the organization’s ability to achieve its goals. (This is true whether the relevant communities are fully inside an organization or exist across organizations.) Institutionalizing their existence can give them access to executive sponsorship and to resources, such as time, travel, and technology. Time is a good example because it is invariably a central concern for community members in organizations. Institutionalizing the existence of communities helps legitimize the time members spend on their communities without dictating what they do. Participation in communities can also be integrated in HR processes, such as developmental plans, training, and career advancement. This type of institutionalization aims to structure an explicit organizational context for communities. It does not reach into communities, nor attempt to substitute for the practitioners’ self-governance. It is a way to integrate communities by carving a special place for them in the organization, not by molding them in the image of the organization.

Being a community of practice does not depend on size. It depends on identification with the domain and enough mutual engagement to produce learning value.

Of course, if a community is very small, members will likely have heard each other’s stories and opinions after a while. Without new blood or more people, interactions often become stale, unless the domain is extremely dynamic and presents new, exciting challenges all the time.

If a community becomes very large, intense interactions will be more difficult. The community will tend to spawn smaller subgroups based on specialized interest or geographical proximity. But if one considers different levels of participation, as long as an active core group sustains enough engagement, there is no limit to the number of people who might benefit from the learning that takes place (especially with new technologies that enable peripheral participation across time and space).

In general, it is much better to let participation be voluntary. This way, communities of practice live on because they create value for members, not because of an edict or a box to check. It does not mean that one cannot strongly encourage participation or even request that someone run an idea by the relevant community. But making participation compulsory more generally runs the risk that communities become just another meeting to go to and survive. This is likely to deflate the very social energy that makes healthy communities of practice places of meaningful learning.

Communities of practice that have high expectations about what they can achieve tend to be energized. And yet misplaced tasks and expectations can also make the community feel like just another job to do. So the question tasks and expectations hinges on a key distinction between energizing and de-energizing tasks and expectations:

Obviously, this distinction is a subjective matter and the same task or expectation can have either effect depending on the circumstances. Still, we have found the distinction useful because it seems to matter much more than where the task or expectation originated. The critical issue is not whether a given challenge was initially self-generated or suggested from the outside. A technical question from the CEO can be energizing; and a member’s suggestion to review the literature de-energizing. The critical issue is energy. The source of energy in community participation can be an instrumental benefit such as saving time, but just as often, it is learning, excitement, and professionalism. A hallmark of a mature professional identity is a desire to make a difference.

Communities of practice can be propelled forward by energizing tasks and expectations; they can be killed by de-energizing ones. We have seen it happen. Communities of practice can be viewed as a convenient resource to perform tasks for which there is no funding. No matter how much you care about a domain of knowledge, if participation in your community inevitably results in hours of undesirable homework, you’ll want to stay away. If an organization is going to ask communities of practice to perform tasks that are not energizing, but for which they are uniquely qualified, then it needs to fund these tasks explicitly and offer logistical support.

Wouldn’t communities become a threat to the organizational hierarchy?

Existing across an organization’s formal structures, communities of practice rarely derive much power directly from positions in formal hierarchies. But communities do not usually seek positional power, with its control over resources and accountability for investments—tasks for which communities are not well suited. They do seek the power of voice, however: the power to be heard, to make a difference, and to have their practice-based perspective matter. In the knowledge economy, the power of voice becomes just as important as the power of position.

In an organization where the power of voice is acknowledged, managers would routinely ask: “Have you checked with your community about this? What was their reaction?” The one time we saw a community really angry was an occasion when its opinion had not been sought. The company had gone ahead with an acquisition in the domain of the community and the acquisition had not turned out well. Members of the community’s core group were furious that their community had not been consulted. The community, they were certain, could have foreseen the problems. Interestingly, they were not asking for the responsibility to make the final decision. They did not care for the politics associated with such responsibility. But they wanted their voice to be included in the debate.

Executives who sponsor communities bridge between these two forms of power. A sponsor uses positional power to help communities find a voice in the organization. This integrating function is a new and sometimes uneasy role for executives to assume, because it does not identify power with control. Still it is a critical role, whose importance will increase with the growing emphasis on knowledge—and with it on the power of voice.

Knowledge is indeed a source of power; but hoarding knowledge is not necessarily the best way to benefit from its power, especially in the context of communities of practice.

With reciprocity and reputation combined, sharing becomes a major vehicle for realizing the power of knowledge. But it is often important that this process extend beyond the community and become an aspect of the integration of communities in organizations. This calls for mechanisms to translate community contributions and reputation among peers into organizational recognition, such as a rubric in performance appraisal for community contributions and career paths for people who take on community leadership.

Organizational culture can work against communities of practice, if it is individualistic, competitive, and focused on the short term.

Changing organizational culture is very difficult. Change initiatives to address cultural issues have had mixed results at best. One of the problems of these change initiatives lies in their scale: they have to happen in lockstep across the organization. As a result they remain for the most part distant from people’s daily concerns.

Communities of practice are very sensitive to culture because of their voluntary nature and their basis in identity. But for the same reason they are also a locus for the creation of culture. Each community inherits the culture of the organization, and needs to build on what the culture offers. But being self-governed, it can to some extent choose to produce its own culture. This process does not even need to be deliberate.

Cultivating and integrating communities of practice is therefore likely to lead to a kind culture change in the long term, but one that takes place a community at a time. It is therefore less controlled and less uniform than traditional initiatives. But being in the hands of practitioners increases its chances of “taking.”

Participation in communities of practice is rarely a person’s main activity or job, so expected levels of participation should reflect this reality. Mainly they should reflect the level of relevance of the domain to the main activities of members. This means that levels of participation will likely be quite different for different people. It is not unusual to have a smaller core group of members who identify very strongly with the community and contribute most of the activity—with concentric bands of participation from very active members to merely passive observers (or so-called lurkers on the web). This disparity is usually not a problem as long as it reflects personal interest in the domain and not some other distinction, such as headquarter versus field or language fluency. In a healthy community there is usually a flow of people moving across these levels of participation.