As organizational learning takes hold in individualistic companies, employees must learn not only the content and techniques of their domain, but also new ways of interacting in the company—new cultural forms. CoPs are one such structure that promotes learning and at the same time requires its members to learn a new way of behaving.
Communities are houses of intersubjectivity. They are infused with common understanding of both the practice and communal activity. Though community creation, which seeks to create something from nothing, is unproductive, community development, which catalyzes intersubjectivity, the development of social norms, and the determination of the identity of a practitioner group, is crucial to achieving a strong organizational learning strategy.
Building communities, and organizational learning for that matter, is more about removing barriers instituted by the organization that prohibit employees’ natural tendencies to socially construct knowledge, negotiate meaning, and internalize cultural enablers, rather than creating specialized learning programs or processes to codify and distribute all organizational knowledge. Communities are one step toward allowing people to interact naturally.
The work presented here introduces a number of topics for future work. First, as mentioned earlier, these frameworks only treat community startup. How communities evolve and change over a period of time, adopt new members, and adapt to outside organizational changes are rich areas for investigation. Intersubjectivity can provide a key to these activities as well, but research on this phenomenon is also sorely needed. Intersubjectivity literature is primarily philosophical, though many related ideas appear in the psychological and sociological literature. Synthesis of these concepts into a unified genetic conceptual framework and its application to community evolution could be very fruitful.
The continued work on this framework will focus on answering three questions. First, what type of leadership in the organization enables communities to thrive? Second, how can we further design technological solutions to enable intersubjective relationships in communities? Finally, how do the human systems (succession, promotions, and performance management systems) need to change in an organization with highly intersubjective communities? The foundation already created, however, can allow communities to continue to slowly reintroduce missing elements of humanness and belonging to meaning-seeking companies.
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1Many thanks to my community team, Tom Schwen, the CPSquare Consortium (especially Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and Bill Snyder), Marjorie Lyles, Mark Easterby-Smith, and especially my wife Robyn.
2Intersubjectivity derives from the phenomenology of Husserl (1965) and later appears in the writing of Buber (1974) and the existential system of Sartre (1966).
3My study of Reconstructionist Judaism uncovered the three Bs, but I have been unsuccessful identifying the specific source. They may be the work of Mordecai Kaplan, the philosopher behind Reconstructionism.