Communities of Practice

A community of practice is a group that shares a real domain of work, meets because they care about it, and builds up a shared repertoire of ways of doing it, and Wenger's point is that most useful ones already exist informally before anyone names them.

Domain, community and practice sit as three cards side by side, and a real group only counts as a community of practice once all three are in place together.

Wenger's three elements - a group only counts as a community of practice if all three are present.

Reach for this when…

The same problem gets solved from scratch by different people in different parts of the organisation.
A one-off training session had good energy but nothing persisted afterwards.
People with a shared craft are scattered across teams or sites with no way to compare notes.

How to run it

Check whether a community is already meeting informally before creating a new one.
Name the domain: the specific shared area of work, not a vague topic.
Recruit the community: the people who actually care about that domain, not everyone adjacent to it.
Set a practice rhythm: regular meetings, a shared resource, a way of showing each other real work.
Make the value visible to the organisation - what the community produces that leadership actually cares about.

A worked example

Situation. Beatriz Costa leads learning and development for Costa Flores, a flower exporter with five farms around Porto, Portugal, where each farm's agronomist was solving the same pest outbreaks alone, months apart.

Applied. She didn't start a training programme. She named the domain (integrated pest management on cut flowers), got the five agronomists onto a monthly call, and set up a shared photo log so a fix on one farm was visible to the other four within a day.

Result. The second and third outbreaks of the same pest were fixed in under a week instead of a month, because someone had usually already solved it and the log said so.

Rift Valley Blooms' community started with recruiting the five agronomists who already cared, before any rhythm was set.

The catch

A community of practice can't be mandated into existing - forcing attendance kills the thing that makes it work, which is that people show up because they get something from it. It's also slow: the payoff is in the second and third repeat problem, not the first meeting.

If leadership has to chase attendance, it isn't a community of practice yet, it's a meeting.

Origin: Etienne Wenger, with Richard McDermott and William Snyder (Cultivating Communities of Practice, 2002)

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