Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of learning theory and its application to business. He is a pioneer of the "communities of practice" research.
After working as a teacher for many years, he got a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of California at Irvine, and joined the Institute for Research on Learning, where he developed a new learning theory centered on the concept of community of practice.
He is now an independent consultant, researcher, author, and speaker. He works with people interested in developing new kinds of organizational, technological, and educational designs that leverage the synergy between learning and community. He helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, workshops, and public speaking. His clients include Chevron, DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey, National SemiConductor, Shell, the Veterans Administration, and Xerox. He is also a founding member of the Social Capital Group and on the faculty of the on-line Knowledge Ecology University, where he teaches courses on communities of practice.
The interview was held by Patricia from the IAT (Institute for Human Factors and Technology Management) at the University of Stuttgart.

I. The interviewee

We would like to ask you to shortly introduce yourself: For how many years have you been involved in the topic of Communities of Practice? In what notable projects or experiences have you been involved? What would you say is your main field of interest (or point of view) when addressing these subjects?

I’ve been involved in the topic of communities of practice since 1987. At that time the main project was research on the social nature of learning, at the Institute for Research on Learning. It was in that context that we coined the term “Communities of Practice.” We were looking at apprenticeship as a learning system. In most cases of apprenticeship, the learning is not just a “one-to-one” relationship with a master, but a relationship with a whole community of people, with apprentices at different levels. So we needed a name for this thing that we were seeing and we called it a community of practice. Then we started to see these communities in all sorts of contexts.

We came up with this name because what brought all the practitioners together is the practice they have in common. The term turned out to be a good term for this kind of communities, where what the main source of connection among people is something that they know how to do. For KM, the significance of the term is that it places knowledge management in the hands of practitioners. In this sense, it makes a profound statement about what KM is, about who is doing KM. Communities of practice create the horizontal connections that enable the practitioners themselves to become knowledge managers.

II. Understanding different types of Communities

Community participation in large-scale communities: How does the size of a community influence the communication?

I think the size of a community does influence the communication quite significantly. I think you have a very different kind of conversation if you have 15 people than if you have 200. However, when we think about issues of size, we need to think in terms of types of participation. Issues of size for the core group are one thing and issues of size for peripheral participants are another. So if you are a very large core group or a very small core group, that makes a big difference. But you have communities where you have a very small core group and then a very large “lurker” group. The size of the lurker group has much less influence than the size of the core group in that the communication patterns don’t change as much if the lurker group increases or decreases.

Well, we have about 5,500 members in the Knowledge Board Community, and we would like to involve everybody.

The combination of a core group and a lurker group is a pattern we have observed in most communities and I am not sure that you would spend your energy most efficiently by trying to get everybody to contribute in the same way. It is more important to have an energized core group that attracts more and more people into it. And of course you will face the question of size but most core groups that go beyond a certain size naturally evolve into sub-groups. Then it’s a matter of how you connect these sub-groups with one another by having people that act as brokers between the sub-groups, for instance, some kind of co-ordinating groups that make sure that if something important comes up in one group it is also understood by the others; or by having events organised by one sub-group but open to everyone.

If you are thinking of growing the groups, grow them from the inside. Don’t try to pull everybody in; increase the intensity of conversation at the level of the core groups. Now, to find ways to involve new voices is very important. You may want to create an event or encourage some people to take on some new responsibility. Sure, but still, having everyone in one big core group is neither realistic, nor necessarily useful because not everybody has the same level of interest. And if you have 5,000 members who all contribute the same, it will be just overwhelming.

What is from your point of view the major difference between communities emerging spontaneously to solve a common problem/issue/project to communities designed by a management to increase efficiency?

In my experience I would say that this is a distinction that has been exaggerated. In organisations, in the end, any community that is going to be fully leveraged is going to have both real engagement on the part of the people and some kind of sponsorship structure from management.

As far as fully informal communities go, I think it is fine to have them exist. They have always existed in organisations. That’s not something you would have to worry about too much. The problem is to leverage communities to the maximum. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter how they started (as a spontaneous community or at the instigation of management). In the end, the structure that they will require to thrive and really to connect with the organisation is going to be very similar: on the one hand a core group that is really engaged and will drive the community, and on the other, management sponsorship to integrate the community into the organisation, to channel resources, and to listen when a community makes decisions. There are significant differences, for instance, when an organisation starts to channel large amounts of resources to a community or when there is a substantial number of people who are becoming “full-time” members. Then you have differences in the evolution and in the kind of structure you need. But it doesn’t matter how the community started in the first place.

Do you know some interesting cases of communities in the social security and the governmental sector? What is characteristic for communities in that sector?

Yes, as a matter of fact, we have been studying communities in the government sector in the USA and in Canada. Bill Snyder and I have just completed a report on sponsorship for the US government. Also, I’ve just finished a case study of a community in Health Canada among people whose practice is “public involvement.”

When Health Canada is developing new policies there is an increasing emphasis on involving the public through a consultation process. So they have practitioners within the organisation who are working to create this connection with the public. The first move was to start a formal secretariat focused on consultation—the traditional government approach to an issue. But as the team went on, they decided to adopt more of a community of practice approach by involving practitioners in the design of a toolkit and in regular meetings. So what is happening there now is that there is something like a centre of excellence, but its main function is to act as the hub of the community, as the coordinating mechanism for the community. It is working quite well. It started as a formal mandate with support from the organisation and it has evolved into a community of practice.

This is something we have observed in the public sector, the importance of mandates. The communities that seem to survive are the ones aligned with a mandate within the organisation. Public-sector organisations don’t have the same kind of market-based evaluation of the work you find in private-sector companies. As a result, legislative and executive mandates seem to be quite important. A good example of a community we found in the US Federal Government had been formed among people who were doing e-government things, creating forms on the web that people can fill in to comply with certain regulations. So again this community worked very well across agencies because each agency had the same mandate by Congress to reduce paperwork in government and to move to the web. Learning how to respond to that mandate became the driving force of the community. Such connection with mandates seems to be a crucial success factor in the public sector. We have seen some communities that really struggled because they were not aligned with a mandate. These mandate dynamics are what makes communities strategic in such organisations.

III. Knowledge sharing in communities

Do you have some advice about overcoming language barriers in– at worst case virtual – communities? I am the leader of the KB Zone ‘KM in Central and Eastern Europe’ and there you have really language barriers. I have student assistants from all Central and Eastern Europe to translate things in ‘strange’ languages to overcome this but that can’t be in the end the solution.

Well, I don’t think that there is any easy solution to the language problem. The only solution that seems to work is the same as the solution addressing size: sub-groups connected by brokers. As soon as you engage in conversation, on the web, on the phone or face-to-face, language can become a very important barrier to communication. That’s a real issue for global communities and I guess in Europe especially because there are so many languages in such a small area. Of course, the way that most corporations are addressing this problem is by making English the official language. But this tends to marginalize certain participants.

This is a really hard problem because communication is so central to the very existence of communities of practice. There are also some technologies that attempt to address this problem, for instance conversation boards that will translate automatically. But I’ve never heard of them being used successfully for other than trivial exchanges. I think this currently works for only the most simple conversations. As soon as the conversations become subtle … it may still come, but for now you need sub-groups connected by brokers. And the role of brokers is not to translate everything. You just convey the most important elements.

What kind of methods would you recommend for writing down tacit knowledge? We are looking for some methods and ideas applicable in businesses where most of the workflows running are based on the knowledge of some experts and their practical experience. The basic idea is that this knowledge can be reused by colleagues who aren't expert, and can do the job as well, without making errors. Do there exist k-languages, certain methods, tips & tricks which can help?

I am not sure what you mean by a k-language, but I think we have to be a bit careful about this obsession with writing things down. People learn only so much from reading. Communities of practice are an approach to knowledge management that says that not everything can or should be written down. We need to have people talk to one other, solve problems together, discuss specific cases so that they learn both the tacit and the explicit aspects of knowledge. They have to experience knowledge. So this idea that the purpose of KM is to write everything down, for me, is mistaken. I agree that it is important to distribute knowledge, but there is only so much of that you can do by writing things down. Writing down is important: documents, toolkits, methods have a key role. At DaimlerChrysler, the EboK (Engineering Book of Knowledge) is an important aspect of how communities of practice function. It gives the discussions a sharper focus. What people say can become part of a chapter in the EboK. This has a focusing effect: We’re going to write something down. But it is not a replacement for the community; it is something that lives within the community.

If there is a “trick” to writing down, it is: Make it part of a community. Don’t try to write down everything as a substitute for the community. To me this was one of the mistakes of the first wave of knowledge management. They were trying to document things, to put knowledge in knowledge bases, as a substitute for communities. Now we still have to do this but inside the life of a community—knowledge as a living thing. It helps a community to create some documents because it focuses its discussions. But in a community, there is no claim that documents are what knowledge is.

Once you agree with this approach there are also tips and tricks that we can talk about to help a community create documents. Some companies hire someone like a journalist to help people or communities create documents (not everybody likes to write). The World Bank has done some interesting experiments with what they call “the knowledge dump.” They have experts tell stories of what they have done in their careers, and then they connect that story to documents that exist inside the Bank. This way they create a sort of a hypertexted narrative of what an expert has done. So narratives are an important part of how you convey knowledge. And it’s nice to have a narrative connected to documents and things that you can go look at. It brings the story to life.

How would you characterize the relation between insiders and outsiders of a Community of Practice? Where are possible areas of conflict?

Well I think that insiders and outsiders is too broad a distinction. First of all when you think of insiders you have to think of many different kinds of insiders in their relationships with communities. They might be people in a core group, people who are just participants, or experts who may or may not be in the core group.
And similarly when you talk about outsiders you also have to think of different kinds of outsiders. There are people who need the knowledge of the community for some reason: they are like customers or “consumers” of the community’s knowledge. There are newcomers who want to become full members and thus have a very different kind of a relationship with the community than the consumers who might use the community to get some help for a problem they have. Newcomers want to become practitioners.

And then there are sponsors, who have a different kind of a relationship to the community in that they take it under their wing to give it resources and voice. There is also a support team that helps the community with logistics and process. And finally, there are the outside experts, in universities for example. They may have a connection with the community at the level of exchanging expertise or being a consultant to the community That question is too simple the way it’s posed because you have different kinds of insiders and different kinds of outsiders and you have conflicts and tensions and possibilities of collaboration that are specific to each different kind of insider and outsider relationships: the interests of newcomers and oldtimers, of experts and knowledge consumers, of core members and sponsors.

A conflict that will arise almost inevitably in many of these relationships concerns time management. Who is going to find some time to help consumers who are not members of the community? Who will induce newcomers into the practice? Who will document some aspects of the practice in ways that are accessible? Is the community going to get some resources for this kind of work?

And then there are tensions about the definition of the community. Where is the community going? Who can decide? Do sponsors have the final word or do internal leaders? What kind of authority does one get for spending a lot of energy on the work of the community? Can the community impose what it considers to be “best practice” to people outside the community or to business units?

IV. Trends

What major trends will we have to consider within the next 5 years concerning collaboration?

Well, I think that there are a number of trends I can see. First there is globalisation – collaboration across distance, across countries, national cultures and different languages.

Another big trend is the whole notion of a knowledge organisation. What does it mean to be a knowledge organisation, to really integrate communities of practice in the way the organisation is run while respecting their integrity. This include the whole question of the relationship between the formal and the informal—the power of hierarchy and the power of knowledge.

Another trend is thinking cross organisationally – industrial clusters or cities, and even transnationals and NGO’s. We have a proliferation of organisations of all kinds. And how do we think of those communities as a way to connect these organisations? For instance, in Australia the government is using communities of practice to develop a national vocational education framework by connecting stakeholders in the voc ed sector. You have vendors who develop educational modules for electricians, as well as colleges that offer curriculum of courses and companies that have apprentices. They are forming cross-organisational communities of practice around different occupations (musician, healthcare, web design, horticulture) to explore what education for these professions need. These people compete in the market but now the government is asking them to become communities of practice together.

We’ve already paid a lot of attention to communities inside organisations (even though I believe we are just at the beginning of understanding what they really mean in this context) but we need to pay attention to the potential of communities across organisations as well.

Where do you see the need for applied research?

I think languages and national cultures are a domain where we really need to deepen our understanding. In big organisations like DaimlerChrysler, Siemens and others you have the power to expect people to speak English. We need to investigate how knowledge communication, collaboration and communities can function across languages, national cultures, and then professional cultures as well. Much research is needed here. What are the issues? What are good cases? It can be subtle. We did an experiment in an online course with an “International Café” where we translated everything into four languages and it was interesting. Some people had this reaction “maybe it’s simpler for me to speak English because I want to learn English anyway” (even for those who couldn’t speak English too well). This whole issue has to do with the relation between globalisation and local cultures—a notoriously thorny question of gaining and losing power. I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done there.

We also need to understand better the nature of large-scale learning system. How do communities function in broader learning system? How do you manage boundaries among communities? It is often at the boundary among communities that you find really innovative things coming out. How do you orchestrate a learning system in terms of core and boundary activities in communities of practice?