Digging Deeper...
A few weeks ago I was at the Ministry of Testing Cambridge meetup, and had the opportunity to talk about Community of Practice Leadership. I really enjoyed it and at the end I got asked some really engaged and challenging questions, including one that I’ve never been asked before. As its always exciting to think about something for the first time, I thought I would take the opportunity to answer it here as well. Here’s the question…
‘As a leader, is it easier to join an existing community and change the focus, or to start a new one?’
I’ll be honest, this question momentarily threw me and I wasn’t sure how to answer. My immediate thought, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, was ‘why would you want to do that?’.
Through a combination of discussions during and after the meetup, the context of the question became clearer - if someone was part of a community focussed on something (in this case lets say it was software testing), but that person felt the community wasn’t as focussed on a particular type of automation testing as they’d like it to be, would it be easier for them to step up and take more of a leadership role in the CoP and try and steer it towards a more automation focus, or would it be easier for them to start a completely new one?
With that extra context, the question made sense and actually sounds a lot more reasonable. If you feel a sense of belonging to a Community of Practice and are surrounded by like-minded people, it isn’t unreasonable to think that those other members of the community will be interested in hearing more about the thing that you are. After all, that’s why you’re all there in the first place – because you have a shared interest in the subject.
I took advantage of the fact that one of the presenters from the wonderful Testing Peers podcast happened to be in the audience and used the following scenario to try and explain my thoughts on it…
If I wanted to have a successful podcast talking about exploratory testing for example, I think it would probably be easier for me personally to go to the four members of the Testing Peers podcast and beg them to let me join their already successful one. Once I’m in I can insist that we spend more time talking about exploratory testing, and I’ll have achieved my goal much quicker than if I’d decided to start from scratch and set up my own one. The more important consideration here from an ethical perspective is whether this is actually the right thing to do or not. I’ve put my own goals of having a successful exploratory testing podcast ahead of their existing listeners’ need for a more generalised overview of the role of testing, and imposed my will and intentions on them without really giving them a choice in the matter.
To elaborate further, if someone wants there to be a Community of Practice on a particular subject, it is of course easier to find an already established one, join it, and change the focus. You haven’t had to do any of the groundwork, you haven’t had to find an audience - its all there on a plate for you. This happens a lot but is rarely successful. I’ve written before about the perils of imposing a change of focus on a Community of Practice, but its worth repeating that it isn’t the leader’s responsibility to decide what the community is interested in, its to facilitate what the community is interested in. If as a leader I tell my community ‘we’re going to change the focus of this group, from now on we’re going to concentrate on this instead’, what I’m essentially going is performing a hard reset on the community. Each member now has to decide whether this is something they want to be part of, or whether its not really for them. If not, the imposed change in dynamic can cause an up until that point healthy and effective Community of Practice to dissolve remarkably quickly.
Having said all this, I believe there is an alternative. If we look at an effective Community of Practice, there will always be fragments of people within that group who share a keener interest in particular subjects more than others. As its something familiar to me, lets imagine an Agile Community of Practice. This group is healthy, discussion is vibrant and topics are varied and engaging. Within however, there is a small portion of the community who are particularly interested in facilitation skills. They want to concentrate on working on those, learning from each other and from other external sources, but they know that the wider CoP doesn’t share their level of interest and enthusiasm. Instead of trying to steer the CoP to agree with them, they decide to splinter off – the call goes out ‘we want to spend more time concentrating on improving our facilitation skills, anyone’s welcome if they want to join’, and away they go. They meet fast and frequently, they gain value from spending time focusing on their craft and learning from each other.
Then one day, someone in this small group shares something that they’ve learned which is new and different and exciting to all. Something that’s a bit different to what they usually focus on, but is really interesting and something that a wider audience may benefit from. Perhaps let’s imagine someone has been to their first PechaKucha session and has had their mind blown. They all agree this is too exciting for them to keep to themselves, and that the wider Agile CoP would be interested and would benefit from hearing about it too. So they reach out to the leader of the Agile CoP and ask to share it there. Of course the answer is yes, and after the session is run the whole community agrees that they found they were excited to go and try it out.
These smaller splinter groups go by many names; Sub-Groups, Focus Groups, Communities of Interest, Spike Teams (I particularly like that one), but they all serve the same purpose – they allow partial sections of the wider community to do deeper dives into particular areas of interest. Leaders should foster and encourage them as they provide the collective community access to greater depths of experience than it would be able to otherwise explore.
Just a quick final note - the next couple of weeks are going to be unusually busy for me, so my posting schedule may be about to end up a bit more erratic than usual. Don’t worry though – when I get back I’m definitely going to have lots to talk about!