There Be Dragons....
How communities of practice empower members to take advantage of their skills and have greater impact - told through the medium of Middle Earth...
My favourite book is The Hobbit. I wanted to share a passage from it with you – this is the tale told by Thorin Oakenshield of why and how Smaug the dragon attacked and stole the city of the dwarves from them, and its far better than anything else you’re going to read in one of my posts!
"Long ago in my grandfather Thror's time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map…Anyway they grew immensely rich and famous, and my grandfather was King under the Mountain again, and treated with great reverence by the mortal men…Kings used to send for our smiths, and reward even the least skilful most richly…So my grand- father's halls became full of armour and jewels and carvings and cups, and the toy market of Dale was the wonder of the North.
"Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically for ever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value…There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug. One day he flew up into the air and came south. The first we heard of it was a noise like a hurricane coming from the North, and the pine-trees on the Mountain creaking and cracking in the wind. Some of the dwarves happened to be outside…well, from a good way off we saw the dragon settle on our mountain in a spout of flame. Then he came down the slopes and when he reached the woods they all went up in fire. By that time all the bells were ringing in Dale and the warriors were arming. The dwarves rushed out of their great gate; but there was the dragon waiting for them. None escaped that way. The river rushed up in steam and a fog fell on Dale, and in the fog the dragon came on them and destroyed most of the warriors. Then he went back and crept in through the Front Gate and routed out all the halls, and lanes, and tunnels, alleys, cellars, mansions and passages. After that there were no dwarves left alive inside, and he took all their wealth for himself.
Now I am certainly no J.R.R. Tolkien, but I’ve had a go at retelling this story in the style of a modern and (thankfully) more familiar environment…
Jane is a software developer. Only a few short years into her career she works hard every day, writing and testing and deploying code to meeting the feature requests that fall to her team each sprint. One day she reads a blogpost about a new development tool and decides, as it is a relatively quiet sprint, that she will take the opportunity to try it out in the sandbox environment. Immediately she sees the potential – its making tasks easier to complete, it was really easy to pick up, and its helping her have the capability to do things that otherwise she would have really struggled with. In the sprint retrospective she tells the rest of her team how exciting an opportunity it is; she demo’s it and they can all see how good it is. They encourage Jane to continue using it into the next sprint, and see how much potential there is and what she can achieve with it.
The Scrum Master is particularly impressed. He tells his fellow Scrum Masters at their next scrum of scrums that Jane is trying out this new tool and how the early signs are really exciting. The news ripples through the different teams until word reaches Brian, one of the Senior Developers and SMEs amongst the broader development team. Having not heard about the tool before he reaches out to Jane, saying he’s heard that she’s been trying it out and would she mind showing him? Of course Jane agrees, and they spend an hour together later that week where she shows him the progress and efficiencies that she’s made. Brian is impressed. He also sees the potential, and recognises that this could make a difference across all the development teams across the whole company. He tells Jane that this is great work and he’d like to explore it further, and to keep up the good work. Brian goes away with the intention of working with Jane to deploy this on a much wider scale.
Brian identifies real world scenarios where this can be used across the company. He pulls together slide decks and meets with leadership to encourage them to back the usage of the tool across all teams. He produces the necessary training material for onboarding the wider software developer community and delivers that training to teams across the business.
Meanwhile, Jane carries on using the tool within her team. She doesn’t have the dedicated exploration time that Brian has built into his role and his diary, so she tells herself that she’s making a difference in her team, and is just happy that the whole company is using the tool that she’d initially discovered.
Then as end of year appraisals come around, Jane references the fact that she’s made a difference in her role and in her team by discovering and using this new tool. She is congratulated and recognised for trying new things, and encouraged to think about how she can influence beyond her own team in the future. Brian meanwhile references the fact that he spotted the potential in the idea used in one of the teams, influenced the leadership and led the deployment across the whole company. He is recognised for using his business acumen and his ability to lead and deliver company-wide initiatives, skills that attract the attention of the senior leadership and mark him out as someone who will go far.
These are of course fictional people in a fictional company (and spoiler alert – The Hobbit is also fiction), but the story itself is not so deep in the world of fantasy. This happens all the time, and businesses often structure their organisations and role profiles/expectations in a way that promotes this kind of behaviour. We expect our senior people to make more of a difference. We give them additional time to go off and explore and be creative and to try new things in the hope they stumble on something that will help drive the company forward. This could and should make sense, but as we see in the above (admittedly fictional) scenario, sometimes it doesn’t. We create the conditions for our senior and subject matter experts to become dragons. Jane has discovered something exciting and valuable, but has a well-intentioned dragon SME sweep down upon her and her team and snatch away the potential to do something valuable for her career. And Brian hasn’t done this spitefully – he’s just doing what he’s expected to.
Why am I talking about this? Because one of the most powerful traits that are brought about by communities of practice is the way they offer a platform for all members to be equal. To decentralise responsibility for growth, for new ideas, and for bringing potentially revolutionary ideas to the business. If Jane could have brought her discovery to a community of practice and her peers across the company, Brian’s role would have become supplementary and complementary rather than unempowering. His job is still to find and deliver these new business-wide changes, but now it is Jane who has been given a platform to share it with the wider business. Its Jane who gets recognised for doing so. And Brian can point to the support he gives to Jane as evidence of him delivering change for the business, but doing it by delivering through others. This is important for many reasons – its not only empowering, its not only a way of building the leaders and senior team members of the future, it promotes diversity. It provides a route for those who may not otherwise get the opportunity to demonstrate their skills to a wider audience, and to get and take advantage of the opportunities that they make for themselves. Communities can democratise he responsibility for improving the business, and give everyone regardless of role or rank the ability to make a difference.
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 :)