How to make a CoP fly?
06-Dec-02
First, we have identified 10 actions items to create a successful Community of Practice. There are 10 fundamental questions you need to ask before starting a CoP:
1- Which Output do you want to achieve?
Communities are not an end in itself but can be a very effective means to some ends - therefore think clearly on the aims of your community - they are the basis for further actions:
- What (financial) impact on your business should the community have?
- Here are some typical benefits a CoP can bring:
- Solutions for daily problems
- Transfer of successful practices
- Focused collaboration of experts
- Faster learning, high knowledge level
- Identification of experts
- Development of new knowledge
- Coordination of cross-BU activities and projects
Synergy effects - Independence of temporary and geographic boundaries
2- Why do you want to start a community?
- What do you miss in your current work / information flow?
- Do you have a business relevant task?
- Is there a need for refreshing the special knowledge permanently?
- Probably you have encountered one of the following situations. If so, we think a community could help you:
- you run a very virtual team and need a suitable room for effective collaboration
- you are working in a special field and need expert input
- you have constant trouble in keeping experience knowledge alive
- you have innovative ideas in a specific area and cannot believe you´re the only one
- you want to approach a topic of great future importance and think there is still much brainwork to be done
- it all works too slow or, even worse, nothing really seems to work
3- Is there already a community that deals with your topic?
- Check out the CoP Landscape
- Check CoPs with similar topics
- maybe you could participate in it or found a sub-CoP
- Contact potential key members
4- Are you willing to invest time and money?
- Depending on the community design parameters you should invest at least 50 per cent of your time to make the community fly.
- You must not save at the wrong ends (training, consulting, trust building, etc.)
- Cost and/or time factors are: knowledge management system, initial consulting, workshops, community meetings, content management and structure, moderation, motivation, training, identity building (layout, logo)
5- What is your topic and your scope?
- The core of a CoP is common interest, common topics.
- Define your topic exactly and communicate it.
- Assure relevance and importance of the topic
- Set the scope narrow enough to interest most members and wide enough to bring in new ideas
- Involve core members to define the scope
- Let the scope change with time
6- Do you know enough potential members?
A community is only interesting when enough people actively participate. You must break the critical mass, which differs. It can be expressed in number of participants or, even better, in the frequency of valuable contributions.
As a clue: Engage at least 5-10 people and ensure at least 1 valuable contribution a day.
Notice: Value is relative. The announcement of a new coffee machine can be even more valuable for the members than an complex market analysis.
7- Are you able to provide „magnet content“?
- Remember the critical mass problem: In the beginning, you need at least one unexpected value for the members every day.
- Keep it simple: Involve your team assistants to feed the community with common interest topics: meetings, training offers, etc.
- Rely on the fun factor: polls and fancy stuff can be motivating and reduce anxieties, especially in the beginning (Imagine a ballroom situation: Who will be the first to enter the dance floor? Nobody may laugh at them - only with them.)
- Content must provide direct and fast benefit for the members
- Make use of the professional content suppliers
Examples: current news, high quality research, general interest (new members, coffee machine, meetings), gossip
- Can you assure the quality of the content?
8- What are the benefits for the members?
Members invest time and energy in the CoP, so they want to see benefits. Possible benefits are:
- They get information faster or exclusive
- They learn things and prepare themselves for future jobs
- It makes their job easier
- They are involved in „something big“
- They become members of something like an exclusive club
- They enhance their CV and speed up their career
- They make themselves a good reputation as experts
- They meet interesting people and widen their personal network
- They have fun
- They may get incentives additionally
9- How are you going to manage your community?
- Define member activities and roles. Basic roles are: Sponsor, Moderator, Supporter, Member
- Be prepared to recruit new members on the run to recruit new members, but prefer quality to quantity
- Let the community evolve
10- Can you secure management support?
- Can you?
- Who will pay?
- Who will support your CoP and why?
Then, we formulated 10 tricks to help managing succesfully a CoP:
1- Actively generate content: You have to achieve a critical mass of content and news. Involve professional information services to provide news and high quality content.
2- Don´t be too strict in judging: New members often hesitate to post requests and upload documents because of the fear of outing themselves as non-experts. Accept their contributions and honor them - they will get better!
3- Create Executive awareness: Convince relevant executives of the necessity of your Community. If there is no necessity you should rethink your idea.
4- Use your own personal network: Check your contacts to find potential members. (Close your eyes, say the CoP´s topic loudly - then call the first 3 persons that come into your mind).
5- Support the snowball principle: Encourage the members to recruit new members by usage of their personal networks and contacts.
6- Provoke voluntaries: Active contribution seems more a matter of choice than of imperative. Some people contribute simply because it's in their nature. Personal attributes like passion, a desire for recognition, and a sense of obligation that comes from past experience as a "taker" make some people want to give something back to the community.
7- Keep it simple: Start with easy structures and easy tools. Don´t overload!
8- Keep it fresh (first in community): Publish information in the community one day before you publish it on other channels. People will use the community as their first information base.
9- Let it grow before structuring: Don´t waste too much energy on structure - only offer a good frame. People are afraid of „being fitted“ into a narrow role and prefer positioning themselves - but also need a certain guidance in doing so.
10- Rely on the fun factor: High quality content is crucial for the success of a community. But you should also offer „fancy“ stuff like jokesor polls in order to kill reservations and minimize contribution barriers.
Finally, we identified 10 classic pitfalls you have to be aware of:
1-Ignore moods and demands of members: People participate primarily for themselves, not for you or an executive demanding certain results.
Therefore always have an open ear for the members, motivate them to shape their community.
2- Not enough content: You have to reach a critical mass which differs. If there is not enough interesting content, people will work less in the community, contribute less. That´s a real vicious circle!
3- Too strict or too loose: People need leadership but don´t want to be cramped. Due to the voluntary character of communities, finding the right way is a challenging task.
4- No scope: People need room for innovation and creation but also noticeable landmarks for orientation.
5- No aims: Communicate your estimated aims and outputs and be open to discuss.
6- Only technical platform: „First invest in travel and in beer, then in information technology“ (from EFQM Benchmark KM).
7- No Admin response: Assure that people are heard when they have problems and get useful answers.
8- No support (help and training): Effectiveness needs constant support and trainings - especially for the key members.
9- Only extrinsic motivation: It is impossible to achieve quality results when the members don´t have a natural interest and need for these.
10- Bad moderation: Even the best experts need qualified moderation and facilitation.
So, that's our lessons learned anyway.
I do hope you find it useful!
Kind regards
Diane Le Moult
Details
- Author:
- Diane Le Moult
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 06-Dec-02
- Categories:
- Communities and Collaboration, CoPs
- Sections:
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Member comments (10)
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Bingo!
Seems the article has hit the nail on the head. Congratulations to the Siemens ICN folks!
Management Attention
Dear Diane,
I really like your contributions!
What I would like to add is that for communities in a more company-context you need some mechanismen to align the community work to the day-to-day-business of the people. One thing that seems to me from my DaimlerChrysler Experience one of the most important thing is to gain Management Attention and a commitment form the management that working in Communities is valuable for the whole company. That's one of the major conditions to make a community fly in the context of daily work.
A very nice summary
In Solvay, we propose so-called "CoPs checklists" to people who would like to start a CoP and/or regularly assess a CoP.
These checklists named "Basic Questions as guidelines", "Early Progress Checklist" and "Regular Progress Checklist" are also available as pdf files.
Here after you'll find the "basic Questions as guidelines" checklist
=======================
Basic questions as guidelines for building a CoP
Domain as value proposition
• What are the most urgent clusters of problems ?
− What are the capabilities we need to address them ?
• What outcomes do we want to improve within and across agencies ?
− What are the critical factors that influence these business outcomes ?
• What is in it for me ?
− What is the value proposition for members ?
• What focus do we want to start with ?
− What is our learning agenda ?
− Where are low-hanging fruits with visible impact ?
The value of practice
• What knowledge to share ?
− What knowledge do we have ? What kind of knowledge ? Who has it ? Who needs it ?
• What knowledge to develop ?
− What knowledge are we missing ?
• What knowledge to document ?
− What documents, tools and other artifacts do we need ?
• Opportunities for mutual help and thinking :
− What collaboration spaces do we need to interact and build knowledge ?
• Community projects :
− Should we undertake specific learning projects to develop our practice ?
• Managing the knowledge base :
− What repositories do we need and how will they be managed ?
The value of community
• Who are the key players ?
− Is everyone here ? Who else should be ? What types of members ? Where is expertise ?
• Who has the energy and ability to lead ?
− Who is going to organize the community ? What other roles are needed ?
• What would make members want to engage actively ?
− How to make the community energizing and activites useful ?
• How to build strong relationships across boundaries ?
− What will promote energy, presence, trust, belonging ?
• How frequently should we meet ?
− What kind of events ? How frequent ? What kinds of interconnections ? How to promote them ?
Organization
• Sponsorship :
− Who is going to sponsor the community in the organization ?
• Resources :
− What kind of resources do we need ? Funding ? Time ?
− Who is going to provide these resources ?
• Organizational barriers and enablers :
− What organizational systems are in the way ?
− What changes need to be made ? Who has the power ?
• Cultural Issues :
− What organizational values are in the way ? Who can do something ?
− What organizational values can we build on ?
• Technology :
− What technology do we have ? How useful is it ?
− What additional technology do we need ?
Involving the right people in the CoP is key
Hello
That's altogether pragmatic and great !
One additional comment "from the floor" on question 9 : as you quote, quality of membership is important. I would put more emphasis on that : getting the right people in the CoP is a critical issue. The mixture of their personalities and competencies will determine the results achieved by the CoP.
So before "formalizing" the CoP, it is always interesting to test informally the approach with the people one may intend to get on board...
Best regards
Xavier
Industrial age clash
Thanks Diane for a concise checklist for CoP generation.
Chris points out the inherent roadblock to CoPs - industrial age command and control management philosophy. I agree that CoPs are
counter-intuitive to this philosophy and it
would be a hard road to maintain a CoP under
these conditions. As Diane has detailed,
creating and maintaining healthy CoPs takes
an intensive effort.
Management must see that CoPs provide dramatic
knowledge worker benefit toward major increased performance. But the philosophy stated earlier impedes the purpose of CoPs,
namely to potentially make changes to standard
operating procedures that management wants to
measure. Grass roots participative management
is still rare in companies even today.
We need to aim to get management support so
that participants do not feel they are undertaking illegal practices. Diane I sense
sees no other way to provide adequate support
structures. I fully agree. CoPs mainly face-to-face, must be seen to have a legitimate place
in an organisation for true value to occur.
-Spiro
Very sound advice. Ask yourself these simple questions!
This is an excellent list of questions that every organisation setting up knowledge communities should ask itself. If you then try to answer honestly, you will save a fortune in consultants' fees. My experience is this focus on the practical and business benefit is a key differentiator between succesful and mediocre knowledge initiatives. All too often the focus is on the enabling technology; not surprising as this is what most KM vendors are selling.
Your article has started "weblog travelling tour" :)
Diane,
just let you know: this article is very active in travelling though the weblogs I read :)
I believe that Google will show more during coming days...
Lilia
Perfect
A rousing cheer :-).
This is the common-sense, practice-hardened useable rulebook. Very good indeed.
The document addresses practically everything that should be in a CoP promoter's mind when setting out to work :-). It's the first time I've seen the "baiting" practice put in writing by another person. It even goes into "second step" matters for the long march, such as constant content generation, motivation and participant's moods. And a very practical view of corporate implications and yardsticks.
I usually give a "brief" to the new moderators in Macuarium (they have a big promoter role too). I wish it had been as complete as this. With your permission, it will now be.
Best regards and thanks again,
Miguel
very interesting but one question
This is very practical stuff - the like of which I have not seen in one place before, and I love it.
At the same time , I do have one opposite question. Before CoPs became a subject of investigation - and/or where they arose naturally - is there any evidence that people who developed CoPs were using principles like these or even thinking in this context? What I mean by the last phrase is that the context appears to assume that the person who gestates a CoP is going to be measured against traditional management (business case) criteria. I thought that people who orgiginally developed CoPs often did so as emergent horizontal processes - below the radar of management until they proved their value. By a horizontal process, I do mean one that in many ways has the opposite characteristic of the hierarchical process-and therefore has opposite performing criteria to industrial age management appraisal measures.
As any reader of Peter Drucker knows, the catch 22 is that industrial age management measures are divisive of good knowledge working as he founded and developed our metadiscipline since the 1970s. As yet, these knowledge-counter-productive measures remain in monopoly accounting use except in organsiations that have adopted a second transparent governance system. This lack of transparency has been front cover news this year - eg The Systems Failure article of Fortune.
Successes to Establishing CoP Informative and Instructive
Diane's How to Make a CoP fly was the franework for all those new and into CoP concept and implementation. ASQPC and other institutions are promoting reports and inferring best practices for CoP. Are we inundated with reports? There is a need for a research effort to look at the CoP field and identifying common elements as indicators of "successful" CoP's. But only time will tell if those remain as key factors. Recall Tom Peters book on best companies now after so many years later how many of those companies are alive and "best managed".
I read a bood Witch Doctors which blasted the GURUS of management concluding those gurus made the quick buck and did more harm to management in companies. The quick fix ... I identified 12 management techniques since 1960's as panaceas and where are they now PPBS... recall