Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge [Hardcover]

Communities of practice, according to the authors, have three essential focal points. The first is the "domain" which is essentially the topic area or subject that people gather around to discuss, learn, and improve. Next is the "community" which includes the people who want to learn, share, and engage one another. In the words of the authors, these communicating people are the "social fabric of learning." Finally you have the "practice" which is a specific set of frameworks, tools, information, language, stories and documents that the community shares and produces with one another. All communities of practice must address the domain, community, and practices if they are going to be successful and meaningful.

With this framework in mind, the authors go on to discuss how communities of practices move through five idfferent stages--from potenital to transformation--as they mature. The majority of the book discusses the opportunities and obstacles that we face when working with a community of practice throughout the five stages. Many key ideas emerge in these chapters. Stewrdship seems to be more important than management. We cannot expect communities of practice to only solve the problems we face (which they can), but we must also expect them to create problems of their own. Building connections and aiming to add value to each community member should be an early priority. These statements are just a small sample of the ideas discussed.

Finally, the book ends by discussing how you might measure the value added and how community-based knowledge initiatives can help an organization improve its overall learning and performance.

No doubt the addresses a "soft" topic. My reaction is that effectively stewarding a community of practice requires a fairly unique person who is able to work for the good of the group and has particularly strong networking and opportunity identification skills. That said, the authors do a superb job of helping us see exactly what skills are needed for growing our own community.

This is a highly practical and easy to read book. I read this cover-to-cover in a single day. The theory of communities of practice is largely limited to only essentials and most of the time is spent helping the reader see how communities operate. If you are looking for advice about how to form a learning or discourse community around a particular issue or topic at work, or if you are interested in forming a collegial group that shares and learns about a topic, then this book is for you. This book is very much about life long learning in a professional context. It presents the community of practice as a nice alternative to the formal team or ad hoc committee. In short, this is a users' guide for meaningful and productive knowledge management groups and learning communities.

The approach to "cultivating" and nurturing communities, as opposed to "managing" them, is also explained so that managers will hopefully resist the urge to try and control them using mechanistic mental models. At last, the question of measuring value creation for organizations is addressed in convincing and, again, practical ways.

There is also some wisdom in this book. The "dark side" of communities of practice is also addressed. If unproperly managed, communities of practice can indeed create isolation, collusion, or tensions, which can be quite destructive for community members and sponsoring organizations.

This book is an essential reading for any leader in today's knowledge economy. It will undoubtedly remain as a reference for all of us practitioners who want to develop communities of practice for the benefit and long-term success of organizations and their employees.

Cultivating Communities of Practice is and excellent handbook for anyone involved in the setup, participation or stewardship of "communities of practice" within a corporation. I would though suggest that the emphasis is on "corporation", which in some cases implies individuals having some predetermined alignment (presumably with the interests of the corporation). There is some very good discussion at the end of the book covering communities of practice outside of the corporation with and some review of supply chains and 3rd sector examples, although very limited coverage. It was noted that the focus has been on corporations as this is where there are solid examples of these practices. Hopefully a future book will address this area in more depth.

This book is identified as "A Guide to Managing Knowledge", and it does fit this description well. If you still believe that technology can be the primary component of a knowledge management strategy, then you need this book to better understand the nature of knowledge management in terms of communities of practice.