Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger, McDermott, Snyder)
Chapter 4: The Early Stages of Development
Note: This chapter seems most useful for someone planning to initiate a CoP
Case study: Shell Oil and Turbodudes
This is more applicable to study CoPs in large multi-national organizations
Do you gain knowledge from people you know? Do you peronally know people in organizations where you get the latest trends in UX?
The Stages of Community Development
As a community develops, the type of activities change
Each stage of growth has its own challenges and tensions
Potential – Discover / Imagine
Coalescing – Incubate / Deliver immediate value
Maturing – Focus / Expand
Stewardship – Ownership / Openness
Transformation – Let go / Live on
Stage 1: Potential
CoP core members are individuals tat start the CoP and contributes most
Is there a single influential designer you follow? How do you follow?
What do you consider as knowledge important to UX design? (ex. specific software skills, trend reports, etc.)
What kind of UX design knowledge catches your attention? What kind of UX knowledge would you subscribe to?
Strategic Intents of CoPs
Helping Communities Solve everyday problems and share ideas (in forums). The intent is to make peer-to-peer connections
Best-practice Communities Develop, validate, disseminate specific practices. They use a specific process to verify (vetting process)
Knowledge-stewarding Communities Organize, upgrade, distribute knowledge that members use everyday. Ex. insight reports, trends, newsletters, etc.
Innovation Communities Cross disciplinary boundaries / mix members to share different perspectives to foster new unexpected ideas.
This above framework of Strategic Intent can be used to categorize the types of UX CoPs and the type of knowledge that designers are seeking.
What kind of information do you look for? Best practices, specific answers to problems, methods, innovation, day-to-day trends, seasonal reports, etc.
“Thought leaders” – Do you have any thought-leaders? Who do you consider as a thought-leader in UX and why? Do you know them personally? How did you find them?
CoPs have a structure – I need to identify the “straw model” of the CoP to understand how it works.
How would you describe the structure of the organization where you access the latest information on UX? Is there a clear hierarchy? Is it informal? Can you identify the contributors? Is it corporate? Open access? Grassroots? Local? Secret?
Stage 2: Coalescing
Coalescing stage is difficult because it requires a lot of energy in the core/CoP to launch forward
Have you ever tried to start an information repository within your organization? What helped move it forward? What caused it to fail?
How is information shared? Email, text, forum, word of mouth, formal meetings, etc.
To use GTM, don’t go in with an assumption of how UX information (knowledge) is shared.
Success to coalescing is achieved through community coordinators (“nurturers”) that “walk the halls“
Community Coordinators:
Deliver immediate values
Launch the community with a dramatic kick-off
Hold knowledge meeting events
Keep it routine
Responsible for early start to documentation
How do you document important information that you come across as useful?
Conclusion
Steps to plan, launch, nurture community in its early development sets a working structure
Stages have tensions
All organizations go through growth stages differently
