Communities of Practice - by George Por

Article adressing Communities of Practice for Leadership and Evolutionary Leadership

Communities of Practice

By George Por

To boost collective intelligence to the level required to meet the extreme challenges of our epochal transformation, we must team up and form learning communities, partnerships, and networks, and we must do it rapidly if we are to outpace the trends toward fragmentation, waste, and breakdown.

We learn both faster and more deeply when we can share our questions and quests with others—not to mention that it is also more fun than the solitary mindset of the time that we are still spending in the illusions of a separate ego that makes us think we should figure it all out by ourselves.

Evolutionary leaders are expert learners, continually looking for ways to accelerate their learning curve and the further development of their consciousness, compassion, and competence to absorb complexity.

The newest of those ways—"evolutionary leadership" communities of practice—is also one of the oldest.  Communities of people who learn together from engaging in shared inquiries into issues of their shared practice is as old as humanity itself. It is just that now we are becoming conscious of it.

Developing new individual and collective capabilities together, we also develop friendships that, in turn, provide the emotional energy of sustained and generous attention to one another.  When that attention is there, the joy of shared discovery and understanding flows freely among friends and through the community.

Communities of practice are self-organising and self-governing groups of people who share a passion for the common domain of what they do and who strive to become better practitioners. Community-based approaches to organising work and developing our capabilities are gaining momentum in many organisations.

"Many successful companies are finding that relinquishing some control—specifically by creating the conditions that enable employees to self-organise in virtual communities—is an effective strategy for responding to market pressures. These informal communities—commonly referred to as 'communities of practice' or 'communities of interest'—are steadily proliferating in the workplace today. Organisations that create an environment that supports their formation are gaining significant benefits in the areas of knowledge transfer, response times, and innovation…"1

Leadership Communities of Practice

There are many kinds of communities of practice, and they come into being in many different ways. In organisations, they frequently develop along the lines of management disciplines, such as R&D, sales, project management, and mentoring.

There are also communities where leaders learn to become and sustain their highest potential, supported by one another. The same as other communities, leadership communities of practice organise themselves around the shared learning agenda of their members. It may cover one or more leadership territories such as coach/mentor, decision-maker, strategist, communicator, net-worker, visionary, administrator, and so on.

No matter which territory is the focus of the community's learning agenda, an unintended but positive side effect of participating in leadership communities is that members improve their collaborative learning skills, thus becoming more fit to promote a collaborative culture by example.

Evolutionary Leadership Communities of Practice

If we as a species are to meet the challenge of galloping "complexity multiplied by urgency" (Douglas Engelbart), we need to find ways of rapidly developing large numbers of leaders in business and society who have the courage and competence to engage with that challenge.

We know from experience that the development of new capabilities is the most effective, effortless, and enjoyable when it happens in communities of peers — in networks of mutually supportive relationships among colleagues.

Leaders who step up to the challenge of this critical decade, need one another's company. Only then they can increase their responsiveness to the need for the shift to a new level of personal, organisational and social evolution. Evolutionary leadership is not a speciality, and hopefully, it will not become a corporate "function". It is an exercise in our capacity to take responsibility and initiative for creating conditions—in every human institution—that favour life's basic patterns of evolution: self-organisation and emergence.

Another factor that will influence the impact of evolutionary leaders on their organisation is how good they are at creating conditions that empower the self-organisation of all communities. The key to that, it seems, is creating conditions for community-enabled strategic results to occur by challenging and supporting all of the organisation's communities of practice and liberating their innovation potential.

Evolutionary leaders may form learning communities centered around various areas of their practice, including self-knowledge and self-transformation, re-inventing organisational design for the 21st century, or tending personal and shared knowledge gardens. The boundaries of their membership can span business units, organisations, industries, and countries.

Those communities will differ and be defined by their chosen domain of practice. What will be common is that they all contribute to evolutionary transformation of whole systems, bringing them into alignment with the requirements of an era very different from the one in which they were born.

The wider the range of fields on which evolutionary leadership is practiced by members of the community, the more potent their combined pool of evolutionary competences and their knowledge ecosystem.

A domain of practice which has a particularly strong influence on the organisation's evolutionary fitness is the "natural design" referred to earlier, the art of applying all of what is applicable from the lessons distilled out of millions of years of biological  evolution to facilitating the evolution of our social systems.

Natural design promotes community-enabled strategic results from self-organisation, and vice versa. It can happen both ways if leaders commit to liberate the innovation potential of all communities of practice in their organisation, by providing them with appropriate challenges and support.

How effective will they be, the champions and stewards of the Shift into the new, conscious phase of human and societal evolution?

How rapidly can they develop the new capabilities required by the ever-renewing challenges of their transformative work? Our future history depends on the answers to these questions.

Where to Start

If you are an evolutionary leader and have not yet joined or formed a community, I hope that what you have read so far makes you wonder where to start. A good place is where you are. Compare it to where you want to be, in terms of developing your evolutionary leadership competences. Then think about whom else you know in more or less the same stage on their journey. They will be your natural learning partners.

Another good starting point is the "Itch", a felt dissonance with an old way of doing things, followed by the stages of Needs Check and Chaordic Design outlined earlier in this chapter.

Whatever gives the primary impetus for community formation, in the early "potential community" stage, you need to:

Discover your common ground
Recognise your real passion as a worthy domain
Find enough potential members to imagine a community
Understand what knowledge is valuable to share or develop2

Right after that, you need to build the capacity for creating the community's technical support system to enable its social and knowledge architectures. You need to resource the community. To do so, you will have to learn to generate, facilitate, and connect a network of productive conversations in physical and virtual environments.

The competence of designing convivial, vibrant, and life-affirming virtual environments where people can work and grow together, free from constraints imposed on those processes by restrictive bureaucracies, is not a technical skill. It is too important to leave it to technologists alone. It is a core competence of evolutionary leadership communities of practice. Not all leaders will know all it takes to design communities capable of matching the complexity challenge. It is a collective core competence of a leadership community; to support evolutionary transformation, leadership communities must develop expertise in community design.

"Communities of practice need to be nourished with many different resources. They require ideas, methods, mentors, processes, information, technology, equipment, money. Each of these is important, but one great gap is that of knowledge, knowing what techniques and processes are available that work well. For example, they may be leading a community development process, yet know nothing of new means to engage the whole community, or new processes for valuing all of a community's assets. Without this knowledge, they either reinvent the wheel, or latch too quickly onto whatever process they hear about, even inappropriate or substandard ones."3

The processes of community and knowledge development can and should be enhanced by all the leverage that they can get from the new generation of personal publishing and social software.

However:

“Technology's lifesaving and life-changing gifts only make sense when cradled by a network of human conversation, a robust conversation that forms a parallel human network just as powerful as our computer networks, holding any technology to standards
of sense and meaning, ethics and personal freedom.”4

Does all this raise more questions than answers about the next steps that you need to take in developing the consciousness, compassion, and competence needed to elicit and stage profound transformation? We hope it does and you will visit the interactive website of this book, where you can connect, learn, and collaborate with your peers in other organizations, who may have the same questions.