Discussion—Some Key Learnings from Applying the Model

Communities provide an enabling context for knowledge creation. The organic and informal nature of the environment needed is often different from that which exists in American corporations today (Wenger and Snyder, 2000). The clashing of the new model with old and entrenched ways of working results in three major issues that should be specifically highlighted in the development and nurturing of CoPs:

• Creating communities is an emotional endeavor driven by passion in an environment that generally suppresses emotions.
• Communities thrive on responsibility; organizations drive through accountability.
• Communities hand control to the practitioners; management is often expected and seeks to control.

These are not independent issues, and to overcome them requires significant adjustment in the organization and in management’s attitudes toward the structures within those organizations.

Communities and commitment

According to Von Krogh et al., the ‘key quality of knowledge workers is their humanness’ (2000: 12); the goal of organizational learning, therefore, is to bring out this humanness by creating the proper ba (see Nonaka, 1998, for a treatment of this concept). Humanness arises in our relationships with others through communities. Dewey (1916) defines this relationship in this way:

[People] live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common. . . . What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding. . . . The communication which insures participation in a common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions—like ways of responding to expectations and requirements.

(Dewey, 1916: 4)

As mentioned earlier, the pathway to this sense of intersubjectivity is an emotional, social, and intellectual endeavor. Common understanding of aims and beliefs is achieved through emotional commitment, active empathy, personal responsibility for the self and others, honesty, and trust.

Unfortunately, though corporations are often good at reaching cognitive consensus, their recognition of the primacy of relationships and the importance of emotional connection is lacking. Humphrey and Ashford (1994) have shown that many organizations possess a set of ‘feeling rules’—procedures for addressing emotional issues within company guidelines that suppress the individual’s expression of personal emotions. Thus, public expression of frustration and enthusiastic celebrations are taboo and are often taken as signs of weakness or lack of control. At the same time, corporations invest significant funds in digital infrastructures assuming that relationships can be built and enhanced through computer networking. Yet, ‘information systems are of limited usefulness in facilitating a group’s commitment to a concept, sharing emotions tied to tacit experience, or embodying the knowledge related to a certain task’ (Von Krogh et al., 2000: 27). So, to create this environment, a corporation must change some of its fundamental beliefs about the relationships between workers and what is acceptable and not acceptable in the workplace.

Responsibility versus accountability

What drives the current environment differs significantly from what drives communities. Companies operate under an individual accountability model. For the pay that each individual receives, he or she is expected to deliver a certain amount of production for the corporation. To foster this accountability, corporations have developed and implemented a system of rewards and punishments, of monitoring and feedback. This carries forward the same accountability model inherent in the school system in which children are educated as well as the Judeo-Christian religious frameworks that are infused in many cultures. Management’s role is to monitor and enforce this accountability and to ensure delivery of the desired product (thus meeting their accountabilities) for the management above them.

Accountability is a control system that enforces with fear from without. Responsibility, on the other hand, is commitment established through caring and passion from within (for a description of the difference between accountability and responsibility, see Dunne and Legge, 2001). Unlike the accountability model, individuals driven by responsibility feel an emotional tie and commitment to other individuals or entities in their joint enterprise who, in turn, have the same emotional tie. They are driven by a common objective and intersubjectivity, which determines their coordinated actions.

What many companies do in their implementation of CoPs is turn to what they know best, and overlay an accountability model on the community, tying participation and performance in the community to organizational performance metrics, to end-of-year evaluations, and to salary increases. While this may build accountability to the organization, it creates a conflict for the community members and an inability to fully develop a sense of commitment and responsibility within the community. In imposing these systems, management often tries to make explicit the commitments and relationships with the hope of measuring their contribution to the company and use the results to evaluate the individual. As Baumard points out, however, ‘commitment cannot be reduced to its explicitation’ (1999: 204). In support of this thesis, he describes two examples of companies that created commitment of groups of employees from another corporate culture not by lecturing them about compliance, making their agreements explicit, or insisting on changing their behaviors, but by allowing them to work through their own choices, through discussion. While this approach is critical for the development and nurturing of communities, it often creates discomfort for corporate management.

Leadership and management

The implications for management of the two issues previously covered are profound. In this new community model, management must remove the control hat and put on a hat of facilitator and environment creator. The accountability for the deliverables associated with the department lies in the hands of the management, but the responsibility for the practice that determines how those projects are achieved lies in the hands of the practitioners. Management must trust the wisdom of practitioners and ‘work for those practitioners’ in creating a knowledge-enabling environment that nurtures communities, encourages and legitimizes, but does not require, participation, and values direction setting at all levels.

Some companies have tried establishing a new position called global practice leader—an individual, generally an executive, who is accountable for the performance of the practice at the company. This role can prove problematic for two reasons. First, a title attached to a role in the corporation immediately creates a different relationship between practitioners at the individual contributor level and the holder of the title. It creates an accountability relationship that has all the trappings of a reporting relationship. This relationship often stifles risk taking, challenges to establishment, and creative thought, since there is fear of being perceived as confrontational, incompetent, or emotional (see above). Second, it prevents commitment and responsibility from being established at the level of the practitioner, which would more likely produce effective results. What this position does is confuse organizational leadership (the vertical plane in Figure 10.2) with community leadership (the horizontal plane).

Leadership in a community of practice is distributed and takes two forms. The first form is administrative leadership. The tasks undertaken in this type of leadership ensure the continuity of the community from a tactical point of view—setting up meetings, distributing information, setting agendas, and facilitating gatherings. It does not carry with it the ability to reward or punish, and feedback is provided solely to enhance and enable community function. The second form is leadership by mentoring. In this role, those who step up to leadership in the community lead by encouraging participation in the community, connecting individuals who need knowledge from each other, transitioning new members and members on the periphery into the core of the community, and being a spokesperson or advocate of the community outside its boundaries. Leadership must be examined carefully in an organization seeking to develop a community culture.