Stage Two: The Spark
In the second stage of Communities of Practice, we'll look at an imagined but somehow familiar situation that leads to the birth of a new fledgling community
Last time out we met Dave. Following a successful Agile transformation Dave now finds himself working as part of a multi-disciplinary team delivering products to customers in an iterative and product focussed delivery cycle. Dave is happy that he now feels like he is genuinely delivering something of value - as opposed to just being a step in the chain as he was before - but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s lost something important along the way. He misses being part of the Test Team, where he was surrounded by other like minded people focussed on mastering their craft; performing their role as effectively as possible. He’s growing lonely from being the only one who thinks the way he does, the only one who sees a problem the way he does and worse - his learning and support network has been taken away leaving him alone, isolated and stagnating.
In short - Dave has lost his sense of community.
This is a very common problem for businesses that have gone through an Agile transformation. There is often the caricature figure of the grumpy old programmer who doesn’t like any of this new (lol) fangled Agile nonsense, and doesn’t see any reason why they should have to take their headphones off to talk to testers about their code or discuss planning or requirements with anyone else. ‘I write code, you leave me alone’. This concept of the rockstar developer is as dated as it is tedious, however as we can see with Dave, there are other forces at play that we need to be careful of. How we ask our people to work may change but their core needs as human beings do not, and its important that a business recognises this. As we’ve said before, a Community of Practice will generally thrive at the nexus point of three needs - where people are looking for others who share an interest in a particular domain, who are practicing a common task or skillset, and are looking for a community of other like-minded people. Dave used to have these needs met in the Test Team, and for perfectly valid business reasons they have been taken away from him. Its only natural therefore - as someone who is proud to do their job well - that Dave begins to look externally.
One day, Dave travels to a conference. He’s never been to one before, as his learning and development needs were being met by the business and his own ability to advance his skills within his task focussed team. Now though, he’s looking for opportunities to learn new ideas and ways of improving his skills as a professional that he simply can no longer find within his team.
This point right here is the moment where Dave discovers the spark. For the first time in forever, Dave finds himself in a room brimming with other like minded people. Professionals who are there with the single focus of learning new concepts that will help them get better at what they do. He hears from people who speak the same language as him; people who see the same problems that he sees, who are hammering against the same walls as he does. He hears new ideas and approaches from informed and passionate speakers, gets excited about the potential possibilities that they could have if he took them back to his team, and then looks around to see the same look on the faces of others around him. The sense of belonging to part of a collective once again washes over Dave’s flagging motivation like a waterfall, and as he heads home at the end of the day for the first time in months he feels like he can’t wait to get started back to work tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes and, somewhat inevitably, 98% of the passion and enthusiasm that he had the day before has gone by the time he’s pouring his 11am cup of coffee. No longer turbocharged by the collective enthusiasm of those around him Dave tries to slump back into his routine, but there’s now a nagging feeling in the back of his mind. A feeling that he’s missing out on something. That there is an opportunity to do more that he’s letting go to waste.
This is the moment where new Communities of Practice are born. There is a tipping point where the desire to be around others who care about the same subject, to learn from others who understand and empathise in the same way we do outweighs the comfort of the status quo and the fear of being the first to put our hand in the air. Dave goes back to his desk and sends an email to all the testers in other teams - ‘hey, I went to a conference and I learned this really cool new approach. Would anyone want to hear about it?’
For the rest of the day the email trail grows longer and longer as one by one his former Test Team colleagues reply saying yes definitely/I’d love to hear about it/I’ve heard about that and was curious about finding out more, and one lunchtime the following week Dave finds himself sharing all about the ideas he was so excited to learn about. Not all his former Test Team colleagues are there - actually some of those who said they were interested weren’t there either - but interestingly the BA from one of the teams and two of the Developers from another had heard about it and decided to come along. When he was done there was an excited buzz in the room and as everyone was starting to clear away their rubbish, someone speaks up…
‘I’ve really enjoyed this - shall we do it again?’
‘Yeah I’d like that - actually we’re doing something really cool with automation in our team, would anyone like to hear about it next time?’
‘Ooh that sounds really interesting - yes please let’s do that!’
This is how many Communities of Practice originally come together - all it takes is for someone to be prepared to be brave, put their hand up and say ‘hey is anyone else interested in this?’ and a potential community comes together. At this stage however, it is still only a potential community. Many of these types of sessions are a one-off and wont come to anything in the future, and many have the desire to go further but lack the organisation/coordination to do so. As we’ll see in the next edition, even having the goodwill and desire is not always enough to guarantee success. Next time we will learn about the trials of nurturing a fledgling community and approaches that can be successful, as well as a few that have been tried and failed. Some fairly spectacularly!
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 :)