Teams of practice

We've been hanging out at the collaboration bar for a bit of time now, which means that we've seen a few different customers take stools, saying *theirs* is the only drink to order. They down a few and poof! they're gone.

Some have stuck. For at least a decade and a half, communities of practice have held their seat. Ever since Etienne Wenger (hello, old friend) coined the phrase in his and Jean Lave's 1991 book, Situated Learning, savvy organizations have been promoting their use. Among the first was Bob Buckman, then CEO of Buckman Labs, the specialty chemical company, who turned his entire organization into one gigantic global community of practice years before most reading here even had email accounts. We documented Bob's story in Virtual Teams--and, perhaps more importantly, he documented it himself in Building the Knowledge-Driven Organization.

Not long after people in the collaboration community (which will have to be a subject of another post someday) started to use the term "communities of practice" came its partner-in-crime, knowledge management, whose history Karl-Erik Sveiby, the Swedish writer and consultant, has been tracking for years.

Comes then a whole sector of the tech industry focused on making it easier for people to "manage" their knowledge, a concept that bears reflecting upon elsewhere (is knowledge manageable as, say, people are? - I'll let that one go for now). Also comes then all manner of upstart efforts within organizations to swap learning as fast as possible, often without their employers' imprimaturs.

Among these were two majors in the US Army, Nate Allen and Tony Burgess, who, without sanction or budget or business plan, started Companycommand.com. There soldiers could exchange, well, war stories. A good summary of their experience is documented in the Government Executive article, "Managing Technology Linked in the Fight," which was laid out in detail in the 2005 book, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Professional, which the two majors along with two others co-authored with Professor Nancy Dixon.

All of which is a windy introduction to the fact that the US Army has a long, rich history in communities of practice with now probably tens of thousands of online forums where soldiers of every rank can exchange information in a timely way.

So it was that the Army held its 3rd Annual Knowledge Management Conference last week, where we, along with Dr. Dixon and others, gave talks, ours titled The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams. Lots of discussion about communities of practice, knowledge sharing, semantic webs, and all the other topics that IT professionals, learning experts, and the top brass, whether those with stars on their shoulders or big paychecks, worry about.

OK. What's next? Jeff and I came away thinking about this: perhaps the era of the community of practice needs to morph a bit. Aren't we now in the time when teams, not just amorphous communities or lone-ranger individuals, need to share practices? And isn't the technology up to the task, what with virtual (or, if you prefer, global) teams exploding everywhere and wikis for teams going up on the web faster than their IT departments can track them? Teams, we think, are the way to work (without diminishing the genius and creativity of the individual), the hope for solving the seemingly intractable problems that sometimes make it hard to get up in the morning.

Thus, we invite a new customer to the collaboration bar: Teams of Practice, the title of this post.

Comments

[Rick Morris]

Your comments resonate. Networked teams, and teams of teams, strike me as the pivot. Their prime purpose is performance, and the central measure of their effectiveness is the product or service they deliver. But their secondary purpose is learning, with perhaps a triple MOE, growth of team capability, development of individual expertise through social learning, and support of organizational learning through team problem solving, peer assists and best practice. In the long run, the contribution to learning and innovation may outweigh deliverables in organizational and social impact.

[jessica lipnack]

Thanks for this, Rick. We're still such neophytes at teams, aren't we, even though they've been our modus operandi forever. What is/are MOE? Another acronym I don't know.

[Rick Morris]

Thank you for your superb intellectual leadership. The theme of teams is so broad, deep and significant that it will take collective genius (practical and theoretical) to plumb all its implications. However, it takes facilitative genius like yours to catalyze and focus the conversation. An MOE is a measure of effectiveness (I should have put MOE in parentheses right after I first used the term). For example, the team customer would surely provide the measure of effectiveness for the team product or service, and probably for team capability. The role of technology-enabled teams in leader development, knowledge creation, decision-making, innovation and learning is critical to both competitive advantage and cooperative effects. Working through this role has to be high up on the agenda of any organization that adapts an aggressive knowledge strategy, faces intense competition, or alternately has to build collaborative capability across organizational and cultural divides.

[Joe Koskey]

I too am inclined to agree that we are at a nexus where the shift from individual to team practices can occur. You and Rick are the geniuses behind it all...I'm a mere mortal trying to let it absorb. I'm not sure where it's got to go next but know intrinsically that there's something there. Then there's the saying "the sum of the parts is greater than the whole". Would that infer that the next evolutionary (?revolutionary?) stage is from individuals contributing to the team's total worth to teams of teams strengthening the total network? The question of MOE/MOP (measures of effectiveness/performance) is even more critical. What gets measured?

[jessica lipnack]

Rick, thanks for the TLA (3-letter-acronym) explanation...and for the compliments. Any time you want to drown out my self-doubts, you are welcome to scream and yell :)

And, Joe, you're welcome to make noise too (thanks for *your* nice words) ... and ... good question about what gets measured. We've come across a ton of proposals around this over the years that all revolve around performance reviews - contribution to the organization's goals, contribution to team's goals, contributions to own goals, etc. But good as that is, methinks there's more to it as together we do things that we can't do alone, qualitatively different things. Need to keep chewing on this.

[Mike Gotta]

Jessica, An interesting concept. I typically have drawn a distinction between co-located teams, virtual teams and far-flung teams as well as between communities of interest and communities of practice. This idea of networks between team entities seems like a natural dynamic to acknowledge.

Some clarifing questions:

- are you saying a team itself is a team of practice or are you saying that teams (as an entity) connecting to other teams form team nets and thus, teams of practice

- Are all teams defacto teams of practice (how does one become a team of practice)?

- when are teams of practice *not* a community of one sort or another. Are team nets merely a transitory step towards a community or are they fixed and do not coalesce (in which case are these group clusters within a broader social network)?

Good brain food and right before Thanksgiving...

[jessica lipnack]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Mike. In between conference calls and making stuffing, I will think on this and come back with a reply worthy of yours.