I love communities of practice (definition). But a few different people have talked to me about some drawbacks that can happen with them and I 100% recognize what they’re describing. Here’s a collection of ideas we talked about….
A challenge
Communities of practice (CoPs) are excellent, a lot of companies struggle to get them off the ground – it’s one of those “important but not urgent” things that’s always the first to get skipped. They do such good for making people feel supported, spreading knowledge and good practice, onboarding and upskilling new people. My current organisation has really active ones, it’s a big part of why I like the place.
But there’s only so much time outside of “the day job” on your product team that people can spare — so if there’s a strong CoP for each role, it can lead to silos. Roles get really into seeing the world from their point of view. Shared understanding across the disciplines can really start lacking.
So, what can help?
You’ve probably seen Emily Webber‘s work, she’s got fabulous talks / book / all kinds of stuff about making them effective. Her maturity model is really good for pointing out some things that might be missing. Items about outputs and involvement across the organisation are interesting to focus on, like:
- What would one community want everyone outside it to know about / care about?
- What does it fear is getting missed by other roles?
- Can you make clearly-defined spaces for that kind of thing to be shared?
It’s easy to read / watch these things when starting a community, when the focus is all internal, and to forget to come back to them later when it’s time to think about these outward-facing aspects. I’ve certainly fallen into that trap.
In general, when I think “damn I thought we’d cracked this, now it’s not working – can’t we get it right?” about a topic, there’s a few models that help me feel better and talk it through with people:
- Ecocycle planning helps recognise the cycles that things go through, and identify where things that were helpful have moved into traps and should be moved on.
- Core quality quandrant helps think through what strengths we really value, where relying on them too much can lead to pitfalls, and find ways to address the balance.
Both of these help remind me that the problem isn’t we made the wrong choice, or focused on the wrong thing. It’s more that we need different focus over time, and that leaning too heavily into any one thing has drawbacks that need to be addressed. Even before I get ideas about answers, I already feel better about the situation.
Looking outside the CoPs
Something else I talk about a lot: often the teams are multidisciplinary but the people the roles report into are really distant from each other – this means individuals on teams hear different concerns and goals. I keep coming back to a great John Cutler article: Self-similarity and Manager/Leader Accountability.
In general, leadership around teams should behave more like teams. We’ve learned that checking in regularly, doing retros, paying attention to shared goals and seieing things as the team’s work rather than individuals’ work matters a lot – but then tend to ignore all that at the more senior levels. These are things that make humans work well together, everyone’s still humans no matter how senior they get.
A classic book (which includes exercises to try) is 5 dysfunctions of a team – if the heads of role (who can inform what the CoPs focus on) work on that stuff, they should be able to give direction to the CoPs to help them focus on things that matter to the organisation as a whole rather than fragmenting into their own silos.
Last comment
All of the above is stuff I’ve had some success with and am continuing to try, not a definite winning formula! I’m going to continue working on ideas.