Etienne Wenger on
Communities of Practice:
Engagement, Identity & Innovation
by Seth Kahan
published in The Journal of Association Leadership, March 2004 and
including commentary by Jeff De Cagna
More and more organizations are realizing that creating community
is something that executives must address strategically and
thoughtfully.
The association
ecosystem is a series of complex relationships between different
types of communities. Because of this, association leaders are
beginning to realize that the act of creating and nurturing
community is something that associations must address strategically
and thoughtfully. Etienne Wenger, a leading thinker on the
relationship between community building and business and an
originator of the concept of communities of practice, spoke at
length with Seth Kahan about the value communities of practice
offer associations and the reasons association leaders might choose
to cultivate these groups in their organizations.
More and more
organizations are realizing that creating community – not just
networking events and directories, but the real thing – is
something that executives must address strategically and
thoughtfully. Embracing the timeless human capacity for and
intrinsic movement toward community, unique business models
informed by an understanding of community attempt to anchor
associations against the storm of quickly changing value
propositions and members’ ever-changing informational needs.
Etienne Wenger was
one of the first to use the term “community of practice” – groups
of people who together accumulate and share their collective
learning. For example, imagine a tight-knit group of general
contractors that meets every Saturday evening at the bowling alley
to update each other on their trials and tribulations. As they
tally their scores and sip sodas, they discuss new building codes,
dealing with difficult customers, and how best to sink a concrete
pillar in the local soil. They are a community of practice, sharing
what they know and developing and refining it so they can succeed
in their work.
Wenger is widely
recognized as a pioneer and leading thinker in the field of
organizational community. His recent collaboration, Cultivating
Communities of Practice (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) is a
guidebook describing the ups, the downs, and the how-tos for
developing these groups in organizations.
In a recent
conversation with Wenger about the value that communities of
practice offer the association industry, he spoke on the changing
needs of adult learning, the status of affiliation and its
relationship to a member’s professional identity, considerations on
the return on investment in communities of practice, and reasons
association executives might choose to cultivate these groups in
their organizations.
A Profound
Change
On the surface, communities of practice look considerably like what
associations always have offered members: affiliation, access to
best practices, and forums for discussing policy changes and other
important trends. But something else is taking place here –
something that many organizations have yet to fully comprehend and
successfully integrate into their business models. The know-how
being developed in these groups is being generated by the
practitioners themselves, not by a centralized source. This is not
a distinction that deserves only cursory attention; it suggests a
profound change in the role that associations play as sources of
knowledge and is potentially a harbinger of radically new ways they
might conduct business in the future.
According to Wenger, associations that function solely as a
centralized knowledge resource are ignoring the critical role of
active engagement in effective learning and knowledge sharing.
“Learning is best understood as an interaction among practitioners,
rather than a process in which a producer provides knowledge to a
consumer,” he says. “If associations view their members as
consumers of knowledge produced by the association, they are
forgetting that learning means engagement.”
According to
Wenger, many associations have failed not only to consider the role
of engagement in learning but also something even more fundamental:
identity. Wenger asserts that “identity” in the context of how
associations relate to their members means much, much more than
simply “belonging” or “shared interest.”
“A person’s
identity is their engagement in the world,” Wenger says. “This has
not been part of our models. To engage effectively, one must ask
the questions: ‘What will it take for our professionals to really
feel they are learning – to really feel that membership in our
association is transformative? What are the specific kinds of
activities they should be engaged in with one another to draw this
out?’”
Wenger cautions
that there is no universal answer to these questions; every group
has its own nuances, and different methods must be used with each
group to, as Wegner says, “draw out” learners’ identities.
A Question of
Relevance
“When you have engineers, the most wonderful activity to engage
them in is a design problem,” he says. “When you give them a design
problem, it draws the engineer out of them,” he continues, adding
that the key to drawing out members’ identities is through powerful
storytelling.
“What does it mean
to draw somebody’s identity out?” Wenger asks. “This is what a good
story does. When you hear a good story, you say ‘Yes! I can
identify with that!’ This is because it is drawing you out. And so,
this is the key to being an association: to find the activities
that will draw out the identities of engaged learners.”
How often do we think of the learning opportunities associations
provide in such a way – as venues not just to provide knowledge but
to do something much more profound and transformative: to draw out
and engage the very identities of those we serve? If association
leaders were to find ways to accomplish this, imagine the drawing
power of such events and, more important, how valuable they would
be to association members.
Affiliation and
Engagement
Associations have long provided affiliation to their members, but
the need for affiliation has attenuated dramatically with the
advent of the Internet. People jump in and out of highly
specialized groups all the time, securing the know-how they need,
when they need it, from those who can most easily provide it – not
necessarily those, like associations, whose reason for being is to
provide it.
The dramatic
escalation in the use of the Web as a knowledge-gathering
instrument led many association executives to fear an erosion of
relevance for their organizations. The question of relevance is
something that remains at the forefront of associations today, and
it’s difficult to have a conversation about relevance without
mentioning the Internet. The Web signifies a fundamental change in
the way people obtain knowledge. This shift has affected all
institutions of identity, which include associations and, even more
broadly, nations themselves.
“Look at our major
institutions of identity,” Wenger says. “They are all losing
ground. It is not just associations that are losing ground. In
spite of the resurgence of nationalism, nation-states are
struggling to be a source of identity. Certainly big companies have
lost completely.
“The organization
man of the 50s is pretty much gone,” he continues. “Very few
companies have the paternalistic ambition to be the source of your
identity for the rest of your life. Institutions of identity are
failing. They are being replaced by something that is much more
dynamic and engaged in the world.”
What’s replacing
them, Wenger says, is something that embraces a more complex view
of how identity is created.
“[The idea of]
identity is shifting today,” Wenger comments. “People have multiple
sources of identity. They have multiple ways of connecting. If you
propose a simple identity merely through affiliation, you are going
to lose out. Affiliation is becoming less important as a component
of identity than it was in the past.”
Identity as Fuel for
Innovation
“Being engaged to
the fullest of one’s identity is the source of creativity required
for participation in a knowledge economy,” says Wenger. “The
engagement of identity, if you will, replaces the whip of the early
industrial model,” he adds wryly. “In the industrial model, you
told people, ‘Forget your identity. Leave it at the door! Leave
your sense of meaningfulness at the door. Instead, do what I tell
you to do. Then, when you are done, you may go back, put your
identity back on, go into the world, and do whatever you want.’
That’s the industrial model. In the new model, you can’t do that,
because the identity you want people to leave at the door is
precisely the resource they have to be creative.”
Not only did the
industrial model force employees to leave their identities – and
therefore, their creativity – at the door; it also denied the
social nature of people, destroying any chance for collaboration
and interaction among peers: something that many executives now
consider a beneficial component of organizational culture.
“We are
fundamentally social beings,” Wenger says. “Our participation in
human practices is how we become who we are. Learning in the
context engagement, identity and innovation of communities starts
within our little family and then moves into broader and broader
circles. … In this sense, the whole notion of social practice is
fundamental.”
If Wenger’s
notions are correct, then communities of practice could be
considered successful vectors of learning and knowledge sharing in
part because they are driven through social interactions.
“Communities of
practice are flourishing because they provide support for this kind
of learning,” he says. “They are an expression of their members’
will to make them exist. … They are not driven by institutional
fiat. They are more in line with these more subtle forms of
identity that derive from engagement with the world and engagement
with peers and others.
“To provide
anchors for identity is still very important,” he comments. “It is
not that the issue of identity is disappearing. On the contrary, it
is becoming more intense a concern than in the past. But what
serves people’s identity is no longer simply providing affiliation
and information. … Information is now a commodity. To be a source
of information does not provide something unique. What provides
something really unique is the ability to interact with interesting
groups of people that mean a lot to you. People do not want to have
the identity of an association. They want to experience their
identity as professionals engaged in meaningful learning, alive in
knowledge creation.”
New Models for
Learning
Many associations recognize that the old model of learning is
fading. Professionals often resist attending old-style learning
events that promise a lineup of the latest gurus dispensing
knowledge. People can find this information for themselves in
books, tapes, CDs, over the Internet, and in a variety of other
media. So what kind of learning are today’s professionals looking
for?
Many would say
that – in addition to having access to relevant, timely information
– people also want an “experience,” and that experience often
involves feeling like an integral part of a community rather than
feeling like a student attending a lecture. The answer to how
associations are creating community within their ranks vary, but
one thing is unwavering: Associations cannot ignore members’ need
for genuine community; they must address it in their core
benefits.
According to
Wenger, “Communities of practice may be a core business offering to
members. To [offer communities of practice] effectively, you must
have an understanding of the knowledge that is meaningful to
members. You have to learn what kind of community activities would
allow them to engage their professional identities in the processes
of knowledge sharing and knowledge creation,” he adds.
Considerations
Wenger is a champion of the potential use of communities of
practice, but he is not a cheerleader: He is forthright about the
considerable effort required to cultivate and effectively use these
groups to an organization’s advantage. He is especially clear that
the effort to build such a community will never succeed if it is
undertaken half-heartedly.
“If I were talking
to a CEO, I would say to him or her, ‘If you choose to build
communities of practice for your members, understand that
significant communication and nurturing will be required,” he
comments. “These communities are completely voluntary. If
your communities don’t create value, people will vote with their
feet. … Don’t just open a few discussion boards on your Web site.
You have decided to cultivate something that is alive.”
Wenger poses that
associations offer engagement to their members through sustaining
year-round, focused communities of practice punctuated by broader
learning events where the communities are exposed to other
practices.
He says, “As an
association, you want to offer your membership a good mix of
in-depth engagement with very specific communities of practice that
are meaningful to them … where people can free themselves from the
focus on their own practice. People want to be exposed to new
things in an active way – in a way that engages them, because
passive encounters with outside practices is something we have so
much of, with the Web and television. On television we can see
court proceedings; we can see open heart surgery; we are exposed
passively to a lot of practices to which we do not belong. To be
engaged actively and constructively is much more difficult.”
Vindicating the Idea of
Boundaries
As business
thinking has evolved to include the synthesis of multidisciplinary
information, an emphasis – especially in the United States – to
think in terms of the absence of boundaries has become common. Not
recognizing boundaries, Wenger says, is a mistake.
“On a day-to-day
basis, associations may enable people to really get into their
community: deep engagement,” he comments. “But there is always a
price to the depth of the community. It tends to create boundaries.
The term ‘boundary’ has a bad rap in English, in the American
tradition of ‘no boundaries’ and ‘no limits.’ But, in fact,
boundaries are part of life. They are unavoidable.”
According to
Wegner, these boundaries serve not as barricades but as agents of
context and equilibrium.
“When a physicist
interacts with a biologist, they experience their boundaries,” says
Wenger. “As learners we need a balance between core learning – that
is, learning at the core of our own practices – and exposure to
related practices. Often, innovation occurs at these boundary
interactions. To be learning productively as professionals, we need
a balance between depth and boundaries.”
Communities of Practice in Internal
Knowledge Management
In addition to
building communities of practice outside the organization, many
associations may want to cultivate and better manage their internal
knowledge. Wenger states, “A CEO may wish to think of communities
of practice as a vehicle for managing the knowledge in the
association itself, among employees and volunteers who are working
for the association. Internally, associations have similar needs to
any company. They need to understand the critical domains of
knowledge needed to be successful in their business. They need to
be in contact with the practitioners who manage that
knowledge.”
Nurturing
communities of practice is a significant strategic decision. There
are many factors to take into consideration. Consider this passage
from Cultivating Communities of Practice:
“Executives
and managers need to appreciate the strategic value of communities
of practice and the role of management, but they also need to trust
that they can rely on robust practices of community development.
People in charge of knowledge resources need to know how to run a
broad initiative, but they also need to understand in some detail
what it takes to start communities and support their leaders.
Community coordinators need to understand the developmental stages
of communities and the specific actions they can take to help their
communities evolve, but they also need to reflect on their work in
the context of strategic objectives and organizational
transformation.”
How Do We Measure
Value?
When we talk about
strategic objectives, it is critical to address return on
investment. Wenger comments, “The value of a community of practice
usually manifests outside that community and not inside the
community. In most cases, the practitioners have other places where
they engage in the practice. Often it is not primarily within the
community of practice – it is on their teams, in their business
units, in their practitioner worlds.” In defining the value of a
community of practice, Wenger again turns to the importance of
storytelling.
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