Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger, McDermott, Snyder)

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Chapter 7: The Downsides of CoPs

April 23, 2020

  • Downsides: hoard knowledge, limit innovation, hold others hostage to expertise, exclusive membership
  • What do you think you have to accomplish to be recognized as a leader in UX? (Ex. school, work experience, title, publications, social media following, speaking, recruiting, etc.)

Single Communities: What Can Go Wrong

  • Failed community is still better than no community
  • Can fail in aspects of domain, community, and practice

Domain

  • “Pride of ownership”
  • recognizing / seeing oneself as an expert makes you believe you know all there is to know
  • Imperialism; competition between multiple domains to be more important to the organization than others; instead of working together
  • Do you come across he same UX information (ex. trends) from multiple sources? Are these sources from competing organizations?
  • Formations of “knowledge police” can occur where they must approve information
  • Narcissism – “they pursue their own agenda with little regard for what teams or business units really need in terms of expertise or capability” (143)
  • Marginality – community is not taken seriously, therefore not effective to the organization
  • Factionalism – disagreements are accelerated into wars

Community: Too much of a good thing

  • What kind of UX teams do you think you will not get along with? Ex. “dev-bros”
  • Tight bonds create exclusivity
  • “toxic coziness” can be counterproductive
  • In cliques, “relationships dominate other concerns”
  • Needs meaningful interactions, include new generation members, apprenticeship, mentorship, multi-membership

Practice: The Liabilities of Competence

  • Practice places members on a closed paradigm; this makes me think about how all designers speak about their work as if they’re going to save the world…
  • How do you describe what you do to others? What do you have to consider about who you are speaking to before describing what you do as a UX designer?
  • You can get stuck in “documentism”; repository is used but not screened for quality; creates “information junkyard”
  • Have you ever had to solve the same problem from scratch?
  • These downsides occur naturally in CoPs; in order for CoPs to succeed, they must be recognized and solved

Constellations of Communities; What Can Go Wrong

  • Problems occur across multiple communication in and outside of the organization
  • Boundaries of practice STICKS and LEAKS
  • Stickiness:
    • Jargon, methods, customized environments makes it hard for outsiders to join
    • Moving knowledge across disciplinary boundaries is difficult; knowledge does not necessarily apply to other communities
    • What is it like to talk about UX design requirements to a team member who is not a UX designer?
  • Leakiness:
    • It’s easier for practitioners in competing organizations to gain expertise than different departments in your own organization to gain understanding of specific products
    • “Firms in alliances often find they can gain knowledge faster from the practitioners they know in other firms than from their coworkers in other business units of the same firm.”
    • This is possible when shared practices happen across organizations (something which I can expect occurs for UX designers)
    • Why is it important for UX designers to experience working in multiple companies?
    • Why is it common to see UX designers move around different organizations early in their career?
    • How do you learn about the way other organizations do UX design?
    • When proposing a new project, how does your team describe your UX capabilities and services?

Managing Boundaries

  • Knowledge is TIED to practice (sticky)
  • As long as practice moves, knowledge moves also (leaky)
  • Boundary crossing = “deep kind of learning”
  • “Learning potential of an organization lies in this balancing act between well-developed communities and active boundary management”

Organizations: What can go wrong

  • Organizational barriers:
    1. Irrational politics; communities are seen as a threat/rebellion
    2. Short term focused and tangible outcomes leads to mediocre execution of ideas
    3. Anti-learning culture only focuses on individual contributions; organization cannot exploit the community
  • Rigidity and agility; Successful methods / practices develop from community might lead them to close-in on that practice only
  • What types of UX design problems would be inappropriate to bring up to your design team, and why?
  • When you are given a task, can you picture what the end result would be? What are some examples of when this occurred? How were you able to imagine that result?
  • At what point of the project’s development are you able to flesh out the look and feel of the final product?

Conclusions

  • Organizations need to let communities grow bottom-up first, and then apply the applicable management procedures top-down
  • “…it takes organizational leadership to provide an environment that is both supportive and challenging.”
  • What kind of impact / influence do you bring into your UX team?

Chapter 7 Notes