No but seriously - what ACTUALLY makes it a community of practice?
Hi everyone – sorry its been a while since I’ve written anything, I’ve been on holiday for the past few weeks and before that I was actually feeling pretty burned out. Although I love my job, I realised that these past few weeks have been the first time in about four years where I’ve been able to completely switch off from thinking about work and just relax.
In an attempt to immediately burn myself out again, I’ve decided to start work on one of my life’s ambitions and write a book. In all likelihood it will take a long time to write and then even longer to be happy with it, but at some point I’ll get there. The reason I mention it is that its going to be based on leading communities of practice, and the first question that I ended up asking myself is what ACTUALLY counts as a community of practice? We are all familiar with the definition originally put forward by Gene Lave and Étienne Wenger Trayner in their 1991 book Situated Learning…
“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”
…and the reason we’re all familiar with it is that it just works. Its neat, its concise, its easy to understand. So I have to ask myself, why is it that I spend so much time being asked to define what makes this group or that group of people a community of practice? I think its because the more you think about it, the more complex and nuanced that question becomes. Example - I used to play a lot of rugby when I was a teenager, and the other members of the team were all passionate about what we did and learning how to do it better – were WE a community of practice? When I was at school the only subjects I really enjoyed were history and English Literature, and when I was in those classes with the other students we were there coming together regularly to learn more about those subjects – were WE a community of practice? More recently when I’ve been part of a scrum team delivering software, we loved working together and would work hard to learn new ways of doing what we did better and more effectively – does that make us a community of practice too? What about book clubs? Conferences? Training sessions? Religious congregations? Where is the line? IS there a line? Does there even need to be a line???? Why all this talk of lines?!
I’ve been working hard on this to try and refine and define my own personal definition here, and I think I’m at the point where I can share it with you. I’ve applied a definition towards three different types of community or group scenario, which I think covers all the ones I can think of. By the way, these aren’t in any particular order – all the different types of community/groups listed below are valuable in their own way to the people who are part of them, but for context’s sake it seemed to make sense this way when I wrote it.
Learning Partnerships – Another term I learned from Beverly and Etienne Wenger Trayner, learning partnerships are those groups where people CHOOSE come together to learn SOMETHING from SOMEONE. These can range from classroom situations where a teacher teaches a class of students, a conference where an audience attends to hear from a particular set of speakers, or a sports team where a coach (or team of coaches) helps the players become better as individuals and as a team. Both parties have a role to play in this partnership and must enter it willingly in order for it to work effectively – one party is there to teach, the other is there to learn. This could be considered a transactional relationship, but I think that particular framing sounds quite negative and would be a little unfair. Is it wrong to value someone’s expertise and recognise that you might grow personally and/or professionally by learning from them? Similarly, is it wrong to recognise the fact that you have something that you can offer to others that may benefit them? I hope not – I mean, I write these articles as it gives me a creative outlet, but I do it in the hope that they benefit whoever reads them in some way. Its not entirely altruistic of me to sit and write this stuff, but I do hope that it actually offers something of value to the reader beyond a display of my own ignorance. Some of the most valuable coaching relationships I have with people are based around this principle – I know that I benefit from spending time with them and I get better as a result of it, and they take satisfaction in helping others realise their potential.
Communities of Interest – I think of these as groups of people who come together informally around a single or particular problem or subject. Informal is another somewhat ugly term, but it doesn’t have to be – what sounds like more fun, being swept up and joining a crowd dancing at a concert or being swept up and joining in dancing with a flash mob in a shopping centre?
A book club is a good example of a community of interest. People come together to do something and discuss something that they enjoy together, without the expectation of learning or growth or advancing the overall craft of reading. They do it because its something they enjoy and, whatever their own personal motivations may be, they get gratification from doing it with other people. Another example might be a parenting group or knitting group, or a maybe a gadget or coding club. It doesn’t need to be anything more than a group of people who come together with the sole purpose of doing something they enjoy with other likeminded people.
Communities of Practice – To me, a community of practice differs from a community of interest in a few key ways, but most significantly so in that it has a purpose. The members of the community commit and invest themselves and their time towards that purpose not only because they enjoy doing so, but because by doing so they elevate themselves as practitioners and (hopefully) the craft they are practicing as a whole. A community of practice differs from a learning partnership in a number of key ways too, but again most significantly in that it isn’t a single transactional relationship. It is not enough for any member of a CoP to be only a consumer of information and learning, they have a responsibility to act as a contributor as well. This is part of the reason that I wouldn’t consider every tech meetup that I attend to be a community of practice, simply because I can turn up, consume information and then leave without ever giving anything back. Its useful and I value being part of it, but it isn’t a community. A community of practice may organise itself by applying some formal structures to make this relationship clearer, like having a documented mission statement or a members charter that calls these expectations out explicitly, or even having a designated leader to facilitate those structures. Alternatively it might not – it might have a clear and strong culture that can survive on unwritten rules because they are so ingrained in the behaviours of the membership. The point is, everyone should feel responsible and should feel like they contribute to a community of practice, and all members benefit from the inclusion of the other members
I don’t pretend anything that I put together is either perfect or correct, but from experience this feels right. I would like to proof test it a bit more though, so if you have any questions, challenges, or examples that either agree or disagree with this proposal I would love to hear them – please feel free to comment on this and let me know what you think!
Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee :)