Moving CoPs ahead

What are the next round of challenges for communities of practice?

There is general agreement that CoPs have gained recognition as a worthwhile (perhaps dominant?) KM strategy. Companies have appointed CoP stewards, written CoP charters, formalized their processes for CoP formation, recognition, reporting and budget allocations, even collected CoP best practices and ROI templates.

We have seen CoPs fail, some that mature, some stagnate and others follow a trajectory to an end-point as a center of excellence, business intelligence group, super helpdesk, continuous learning center or some CoPs just fly beneath the corporate radar altogether.

Most 'cook books' give recipes for:

* Roles
* Competencies
* Policies
* Interventions
* Community governance
* Best practices
* Measurements & returns

Some offer guidance on software choice, list the artifacts a CoP can (should?) build, contain, develop, define & suggest ways to move expertise across CoP boundaries, or elaborate on ways to maintain energy, ensure diversity and encourage LPP (legitimate peripheral participation).

Current issues

* How to make CoPs scale and assess their 'health' or maturity
* Management of cross-organizational & global CoPs (language, distance, culture)
* Working the boundaries between CoPs - a zone of stress, complexity and innovation
* How to capture and put a value to the CoP activities and expertise - to placate bean counters

What next?

Think it is time to return to CoP basics. We need to take CoPs to the next level by increasing their participants learning, awareness and innovation potential. This is the crux of the issue and the real source of value.

* helping CoPs capture and manage their exemplars, cases, stories and examples
* gather experience and expertise, e.g. crafting, using and refining patterns and connecting these in a pattern language & informal ontology
* assist CoPs with environmental scanning, intelligence gathering and networking so they can make their members more 'aware', open and alert to impending changes
* find new ways to balance the tension between local specialization and maintaining cognitive diversity - keeping porous boundaries
* lift the level of discourse by working with distinctions, finding subtle symptoms, capturing useful heuristics, learning from failures and surfacing deep assumptions.

Returns from governance, policies, formal charters and measures are likely to pale in comparison to bootstrapping a CoP's ability to reflect, discover new concepts, test interesting emergent solutions and form a 'lingua franca'

Comments

[diamond rings]

nice