In this series of newsletter articles by Hubert Saint-Onge, various issues that relate to strategy and communities of practice will be covered. This month’s segment concerns the business case for communities of practice.

Though communities of practice have existed for a long time, they don’t represent an organizational form that people will naturally gravitate towards. Their creation, development and evolution has to be purposefully and systematically nurtured.

Communities of practice have three levels of impact on the organization:

1. They accelerate the learning of their members;
2. They build relevant knowledge for the organization through the codification of tacit knowledge;
3. They develop the meta-capabilities for collaboration and learning. Communities of practice build the organizational capability to constantly regenerate capabilities at an accelerated pace.

The following points highlight the business case for communities of practice:

• Communities of practice become key to capability development as the pace of the markets keeps increasing and as highly capable people become more difficult to attract to a firm.

• As firms have had to streamline and work in a multi-site configuration, they have found themselves with widely dispersed thin layers of expertise. These individuals frequently do not have the critical mass or the depth required for development to take place through exchange in the workplace. The online nature of communities of practice offers the ideal approach to overcome this challenge. Online communities of practice allow for asynchronous exchanges that transcend both time and distance.

• As clients insist on integrated solutions and as the complexity of knowledge keeps increasing, the need for cross-functional and cross-disciplinary work becomes key to meeting customer needs and maintaining an effective market presence. Development of the ability to learn in communities of practice will provide for an established platform where this can be readily accomplished.

• A key source of innovation springs from close interaction among participants who have developed the ability to have productive conversations. These dialogues, where assumptions are questioned as a matter of course, and where people are committed to build on one another's ideas in a high trust vessel for exchange will contribute significantly to elevating the innovative quotient of an organization.

• Speed has become a strategic imperative for the great majority of organizations. The time required for responses to changes in market trends will determine the extend of the "dynamic advantage" obtained by an organization. This will in turn shape the durability and the profitability of the relationships with customers. On the other hand, a laggard in the marketplace will experience tension with customers who feel they are left a lesser value than what they could obtain from a competitor. When a participant in a community of practice encounters a new situation or a new issue they have not seen before, they can get relevant, contextualized and validated advice that they can readily apply with the shortest delay.

• As business networks emerge with the support of new technology, old style competition is replaced by complex alliances and relationships that link organizations to provide greater value to customers than what could be provided in a simpler one provider / one customer relationship. The ability to form partnerships and to work across boundaries will be key to the choice of partners in the formation of these alliances. Given the strength of these emerging networks, the firm that is left behind will soon experience difficulty in the marketplace. Having extensive experience in setting up and making cross-functional communities of practice work will place organizations at an advantage in the development of these alliances. From this perspective, communities of practice become essential components of the readiness required for competing in the emerging business environment of knowledge networks.

Hubert Saint-Onge's book "Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage", will be published by Butterworth-Heinemann in October 2002.

Email to Hubert Saint-Onge at hubert.saint-onge@konvergeandknow.com