|
Communities of Practice
by Mike Burk
An engineer, thinking that
a colleague may once have confronted a problem similar to one that has just
arisen in a project, stops by the colleague's office for advice. A safety
specialist in an eastern division office runs across some fascinating data
on weather-related hazards and e-mails it to a friend in the Midwest with
similar job responsibilities. This kind of knowledge-sharing is informal,
interactive, and largely independent of the formal structures that organizations
set up to promote communication and data interchange.
Communities of practice
are simply expansions of one-on-one knowledge-sharing. Most people, in fact,
belong to a number of such communities, not all of them work-related. Some have
names, such as the church choir or the neighborhood council, and some may have
no more of an identity than "a group of management specialists who usually get
together for lunch once a week."
While these ad-hoc communities
are valuable knowledge-sharing mechanisms, they have real limitations. Knowledge
passed in e-mail threads is lost when the thread ends. New staff or staff facing
new problems are unaware of the ad-hoc communities and are unable to tap into
their expertise. Lessons learned from experience are lost with retirement. Staff
turnover and restructuring break down the informal networks to the point where
even long-time staff do not know who to call.
Innovative business and
government organizations are formalizing these communities to create new mechanisms
for creating, capturing, and sharing the knowledge that is critical to their
success. With these communities of practice in place, this network emerges as
the chartered source to build and deliver knowledge. By providing structure,
support, and tools, leading organizations have enabled communities of practice
to function far better than their informal predecessors.
Communities of practice
are a crucial aspect of knowledge management. (See "Knowledge Management: Everyone
Benefits by Sharing Information" in Public Roads, November/December 1999.) They
can be defined as networks that identify issues, share approaches, and make
the results available to others. Or, as a recent article in Harvard Business
Review put it, "they're groups of people informally bound together by shared
expertise and passion for a joint enterprise."
At work, communities of
practice can exist solely within an organizational unit; they can cross divisional
and geographical boundaries; and they can even span several different companies
or organizations. They can be made up of a handful of participants or many dozen.
But they all tend to have a core group of participants whose dedication to the
topic provides the energy needed to hold the group together. These core participants
naturally provide the groups' intellectual and social leadership.
Communities of practice
differ from work teams in a significant way. Teams are formed by management
and report to a boss. They have defined membership, deadlines, and specific
deliverables. Communities of practice can be voluntary, usually have longer
life spans than teams (but they only last as long as they have value to their
members), and have no specific deliverables imposed. They are responsible largely
to themselves.
Why is there so much interest
at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in facilitating communities of
practice? First of all, as we've seen, they are highly effective ways for organizations
to continuously learn. New staff and staff in new roles can be productive much
more quickly by accessing the institutional knowledge base. This will become
even more important to the agency in the next few years because a relatively
large percentage of FHWA's technical and operational staff are nearing retirement.
Many of these sharing networks
started and developed without any institutional support or encouragement, and
that attests to the fact that they help people get the job done and serve customers.
Communities of practice can help transportation practitioners share with their
peers the know-how and experience they've gained throughout their professional
careers. Through this sharing, members of communities of practice raise each
other's competencies, and because FHWA can apply the full knowledge base of
subject matter experts to serve its customers, FHWA's customers are the ultimate
beneficiaries of this process. In fact, these communities work best when addressing
pressing needs, such as difficult customer challenges or streamlining regulatory
processes.
Through the use of robust,
effective communities of practice, the technology transfer process may be substantially
changed. The communities provide opportunities for an unprecedented level of
communication between operators, who understand thoroughly the state of the
practice, and researchers. This will potentially speed the application of new
products and procedures and provide a feedback loop. Ultimately, this may enable
FHWA to move beyond traditional technology transfer to a continuous knowledge
exchange that encourages even more innovation.
Communities of practice
can also help FHWA achieve the goals of the President's Quality Award Program,
particularly in the areas of leadership, customer focus, human resource development,
and process management. The program's criteria for evaluating performance excellence
in 2000 lists three major challenges, one of which is "developing, cultivating,
and sharing the organization's knowledge that is possessed by its employees."
FHWA's work to encourage the development of communities of practice is a major
step toward meeting that challenge.
It's unclear who first
used the term "communities of practice," but the concept got its strongest initial
boost from the Institutes for Research on Learning (IRL), founded in 1987 as
an outgrowth of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). One story associated
with the development of the communities of practice concept is that PARC researchers
in the early 1980s observed a group of Xerox repair technicians gathering around
the office coffee machine to exchange tips about repairs and swap stories about
experiences at customer sites. The researchers noted that the technicians seldom
consulted repair manuals or training materials, relying instead on their informal
network to transfer knowledge and solve problems. Interaction with the group,
which had no official recognition from the company, was also the way that new
technicians learned the tricks of the trade, the researchers discovered.
One of IRL's key findings
is that "learning is fundamentally social, motivated by engagement and participation
in practice." This may be somewhat surprising, given the romantic notion of
the lone thinker contemplating the mysteries of the universe or the solitary
scholar almost buried by thick tomes filled with arcane knowledge. But the social
model of learning does seem to best describe the way organizations solve problems
and transfer knowledge.
The Right Environment
Despite their informal and
often spontaneous nature, communities of practice have been nurtured and encouraged
by many organizations, including FHWA. These organizations recognize the key role
of communities of practice in transferring good practices, solving problems quickly
and efficiently, developing professional skills, influencing strategy, and retaining
talented employees. They help the individual to be a more productive, effective,
and satisfied employee.
But if communities of practice
are self-directed and outside the organizational chart, what role can management
play? After all, some experts warn that too much official scrutiny, even if
offered with the best intentions, can cause communities of practice to wither
and die. It is inarguable that some environments are more conducive than others
to the development and retention of healthy, active communities of practice.
Communities can be impeded by turnover and restructuring. Information technology
systems may not suit the way the community works, which could lead to frustration.
Reward structures may not be supportive of informal collaboration. Also, communities
of practice can suffer because they lack the legitimacy, not to mention the
budgets, of established departments and teams.
Communities of practice
existed within the transportation community even before the current industry
focus on the concept. An example is the informal network of transportation professionals
who communicate via an e-mail list maintained by FHWA's Kentucky Division. They
use this list to post problems or seek information. Informal networks for finance
and computer specialists exist as well.
FHWA is now pursuing an
aggressive initiative to foster communities of practice. For example, three
communities — they could be termed external communities — have public Web sites:
rumble strips (http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/roadway_dept/rumble/index.htm),
roadside safety (http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/roadside),
and the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov).
A visit to these Web sites can help illustrate the potential of the Internet
in providing a virtual meeting place for communities of practice that transcend
geographical and institutional borders.
Also, a Web-based community
resource in response to the National Environmental Policy Act is being developed.
This community will be designed to engage customers and partners in critical
environmental streamlining issues. In the process, FHWA is developing a more
robust knowledge-sharing tool that will be replicated for other areas.
Developing a Community
of Practice
Also under development is
a virtual meeting space for FHWA's quality coordinators. Margie Sheriff, quality
coordinator for FHWA's Infrastructure Core Business Unit, explained that quality
coordinators had been getting together for formal meetings a few times a year
to discuss best practices and share information on problems and procedures.
"It became obvious that meeting just those few times a year wasn't enough interaction
to do our jobs," Sheriff said. "We felt it was better to maintain those ties
a little bit more closely and more frequently. So, we thought that a virtual
community of practice would help keep information flowing back and forth."
The main difference between
a community of practice and a series of formal meetings, Sheriff said, is "the
spontaneity of getting help when you need it in real time. Information that's
shared at a meeting might not be needed at that time, so you kind of stash it
away. With a community of practice, you can tap into that at any time."
An informal telephone network
might have developed anyway among the quality coordinators, Sheriff acknowledged,
"but with a community of practice you can start to document and organize things
to build a resource base so you don't have to keep calling people.
When you try to call, often
they're not there or they're not available. This is a more systematic and reliable
approach to creating a network of people." Under the approach that Sheriff's group is taking, individuals who could be
thought of as knowledge associates take on the responsibility of logging on
to the community's intranet work space to post information and respond to inquiries.
"You need to touch base
with the community of practice on a regular basis — a few times a week or even
more frequently — to make sure you're helping the other group members and you're
there to solve each other's problems," Sheriff said. "We're trying not to reinvent
all these different ways of doing things but to reuse our resources as much
as we can."
Sheriff acknowledged that
creating a community of practice from scratch can be a delicate — and difficult
— undertaking. "It's
really a new way of operating, and it takes an actual change in behavior," she
said. "If you try to force it and make it an artificial rather than a natural
evolution, you can stifle it." By the same token, though, the community requires
a "level of maintenance" that Sheriff worries it doesn't always receive. "But
we'll keep trying," she said, "and I think as new people come and we get them
interested and they can contribute, it can help."
Depending on the Members
It's not surprising that
communities of practice develop and operate at different rates. The key to their
effectiveness, after all, is that they function in ways that best suit the interests
and working styles of their members rather than adhering to some inflexible
operational model.
In the words of Etienne
Wenger, author of an influential book on learning organizations, "Communities
of practice develop around things that matter to people. As a result, their
practices reflect the members' own understanding of what is important. Obviously,
outside constraints or directives can influence this understanding, but even
then, members develop practices that are their own response to these external
influences. Even when a community's actions conform to an external mandate,
it is the community — not the mandate — that produces the practice."
To help communities of practice
grow and flourish, FHWA is providing models — the well-established rumble strips
community is a prime example — and technical support for communities of practice.
Web-enabled software can offer online discussion, both real-time and asynchronous;
document sharing and storage; community member information; group e-mail lists;
e-mail notification of new information; and online meeting spaces. FHWA also
provides management support for communities of practice, championing the concept
of communities and helping to create an environment that supports and encourages
them. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, it will be the community members
themselves who determine to what extent FHWA's corporate culture will be influenced
by communities of practice.
Communities of practice
are not the latest management trend or some alternative model for organizational
development. Instead, they're a way of describing how people in organizations
teach and learn. The challenge for FHWA, as it is for all companies and organizations
trying to prosper in the information age, is to take full advantage of its most
valuable resource — the knowledge that its people possess. By facilitating the
development and operation of communities of practice, FHWA can help ensure that
this resource finds its highest and best use.
Mike Burk
is FHWA's senior knowledge officer. He is assigned to the Corporate Management
Service Business Unit. He has more than 25 years of experience with FHWA, and
he has served in several headquarters' and field offices. He has a bachelor's
degree in civil engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
and he is a registered professional engineer in Virginia.
Articles & Departments
The First Issue of Public Roads
IDAS Integrates ITS Into Planning Process
Turbo Architecture
Communities of Practice
Middle School Students Design Future Cities
The Partnership Initiative
An Australian Road Review
Advantages of the Split Intersection
One Mile in Five: Debunking the Myth
National Transportation Week
Annual Index
|
