My First Post on Substack

"For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn't matter if you're getting the story right" Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc.

Hi everyone

Since abandoning Twitter in October last year, I’ve been struggling to find an outlet for my thoughts and ramblings on Communities of Practice. As I can’t bring myself to return to Facebook and I’m too old for TikTok, I’ve decided to do what all the cool kids are doing and start writing a Substack.

Ok lets start at the beginning - my name is Drew, and I love Communities of Practice. I love talking about them, I love taking part in them, I love learning about them. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject……more like a passionate enthusiast. That said though, I have spent a decent chunk of my recent career working with communities in some form or another, and I’d like to think I’ve picked up a few lessons and learnings in that time. Following a brief and unsuccessful stint training to be a pediatric nurse and a slightly longer but equally unsuccessful stint working in a call center, I found my way into the space where I would end up spending the biggest chunk of my professional career - working as a software tester. Over 14 years have passed since that career-defining interview (“we have two vacancies - a Junior Developer and a Junior Tester. Can you code? No? Junior Tester it is”), and since then I’ve had a number of Manager, Lead, Practice and Organisational Quality roles. Over the past 6 years though I’ve found my real passion is working with Communities of Practice, and I’m lucky enough that by day I now get to do that for a living. 

I want to use this Substack as an opportunity to share some of the lessons I’ve learned as a community builder - some things I’ve done right and some things I’ve done wrong - with a view to providing some of the resources and guidance that I wish I’d found earlier. Things that have really helped refine and define what my core values are as a community leader and builder. I may occasionally talk about other things I like - things like quality practices, self-driven learning, Agile, Lord of the Rings - but mainly it’s going to be about Communities of Practice. 

I’m doing this as a bit of a side project, so my posting schedule is likely to be a bit erratic. I’m not entering into this with the intent to offer a paid subscription…..unless it turns out to be some sort of global phenomenon and just don’t know it yet, this will be just for fun 🙂

To get started I’m going to write a series of articles which I am dramatically calling ‘the seven stages of CoPs’, and I hope to get the first one posted pretty soon. In other news, I run a small but fun Communities of Practice Leadership virtual meetup, or if this all sounds interesting and you’d like to get in touch and talk further you can reach me here.

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