A dynamic project

Banks have had a bad rap of late, so it was a really pleasant surprise to see the work they are doing. It did not seem an obvious home for an ambitious social learning project, but it is what we found there. In less than a year the project has launched about two-dozen communities of practice. They have established a process for starting new communities and a framework for guiding their evolution. They are reaching the stage of forming a community for community leaders.

Focus on people

Again we were reminded of the importance of starting a social learning initiative by focusing on the social first and the technology second. Their Jive platform has opened the door, but they are determined that people and practices will drive the process. This strategic focus on learning is a key element of their success so far.

Score cards and health checks: three-partite conversations

We had some interesting insights in our conversations about community health checks. They experimented with a scorecard approach that resulted in a simple numeric score for a community health and maturity. Community leaders wondered what it meant to be a 2.8 as opposed to a 3.2, especially on criteria that they didn’t necessarily see as important in their context. Numbers can be misleading when they are a substitute for substantive conversations about what a community is doing and achieving. The key insight that came out was that a health check requires the combination of three perspectives:

The perspective of members who contribute to and benefit from the learning of the community
The perspective of sponsors who can see the potential of the community to improve the performance of the organization and develop strategic capabilities
The perspective of the social learning team that has developed a good sense of what a successful community can achieve, what a healthy community looks like, and how to assess and enhance its vitality

Similarly, setting objectives requires a convergence of organizational imperatives, member needs, what can be expected from a community, and the passion of a person or a core group ready to take leadership and deliver on the promise.

Value creation

They started using the value-creation framework early in the project and are publishing the results in a newsletter/report format. The practice of collecting value-creation stories from the start ensures that the initiative is driven by value creation – for the members and for the organization.

Sponsorship

The focus on value creation will help them develop the various forms of sponsorship their communities will need to reach their full potential. Creating clear sponsorship relationships is key to integrating the work of communities of practice into the functioning of the organization. In addition, it was clear that being able to quantify the commercial value of social learning is central for getting the buy-in from all parts of the organization.

A vision

We talked about the vision of “baking” this way of working into the culture of the organization. The focus on value creation is key to this vision of how an organization can function through an emphasis on empowering practitioners to form learning partnerships of all kinds. Their vision combines high aspiration for commercial value with the resolve to make work more engaging and meaningful. This is at the core of how we understand social learning. It is an ambitious project and the team is not daunted by the scale of what they are aspiring to do.

A great team

The results are a reflection of a great social learning team: smart, friendly, informal, very focused, passionate, productive, and an uncanny ability to be frank with each other.

We developed a new friendship, anchored in a true learning partnership. This blend of serious joint inquiry, committed learning partnership, and personal friendship is the kind of working relationship we really enjoy. It’s how we’d always like to do business.

Thanks to John Stepper, Mara Tolja, Eve Eaton, Ann-Marie Imafidon, Azfarul Islam, Emmi Matsunaga, Thomas Olsen, Paul Field and Howard Guess for sharing their work with us at Deutsche Bank. And thanks to Lauren Klein for making the connection.

This article was written by Etienne in 2009 for a textbook co-published by the Open University and Springer. It does two things. It relates the conceptual framework of communities of practice to systems theory and it reviews the career of the concept of community of practice since its inception in Etienne’s work with Jean Lave in 1987.

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Citation

Wenger, E. (2010) Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Blackmore, C. (Editor) Social Learning Systems and communities of practice. Springer Verlag and the Open University.

If facing change, expanding our horizon, and dealing with complexity are all social learning challenges, we live in demanding times. In the context of rapid globalization and incerasing interdependence, we face a threatened environment, economic precariousness and imbalances, the need for better education, ideological conflicts – to name a few of our challenges.

These challenges are neither simply personal nor abstractly global. They require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to communities, to organizations, to regions, to nations, to worldwide learning systems.

Learning capability – or the ability to learn – is a paradoxical aspiration because learning by itself does not guarantee learning capability. Sometimes being successful at learning is precisely what prevents you from learning the next thing. When applied to social systems, learning capability depends on the learning capability of individuals, but in the context of the structure of the system in which they live. Networking, convening new social learning spaces, brokering across boundaries, acting as learning citizens and social artists – these are the kinds of interventions that have the potential to increase social learning capability at a systemic level.

Taking such a systemic view is especially critical at a time when global challenges are placing unprecedented demands on our ability to learn together. Developing social learning capability across sectors may be urgent, but it is still an elusive aspiration. We need a social discipline of learning.

Making sense of social learning capability is the great challenge of learning theory in the 21st century. Learning how to enhance it, accelerate it, and evaluate it is the challenge of the practitioner. Both undertakings are interrelated – and contributing to both is our personal and professional aspiration.

It was exciting for us to introduce the concept of learning citizenship in this context for two reasons: it is a major theme of our joint work going forward, and it also happens to be critically relevant to both the theme of the conference and the work of the Mandel Institute with its graduates. Spearheading such an approach in a place in the world where political challenges (which we would view as social learning challenges) seem quite intractable brings a sharper edge to this kind of thinking.

Learning citizenship is an important dimension of a mature professional identity. It adds the ethical dimension of caring for the learning capability of one’s professional environment, be it an organization, a professional association, or society more broadly.

For the Mandel institute, a focus on learning citizenship is a way to expand its mission toward a broad transformation of the public sector in Israel. It raises the question of what its graduate should do to expand the learning capability of the contexts in which they work. It also raises the question of what the Institute can do to support its graduates into developing their professional identity to encompass the ethics of learning citizenship and to act on it.

At the end of our keynotes, the 250 people in the audience worked at their tables to produce a display of how our ideas could shape their aspirations for themselves and for their community. A group of eight social reporters roamed the tables and summarized their impression of the whole thing. We were impressed by the social energy that the process generated.

Articulating our own trajectory

There was an unexpected lesson for us. We realized that many people probably expected a more traditional focus on communities of practice given our reputation. We need to be more articulate about the fact that our current work on social learning capability, learning citizenship, and social artists is not a departure from our earlier work but an exciting development of it, which encompasses learning in communities of practice, but expands the focus on broader learning systems and the potential role of individuals in enabling learning.

The workshop

Our workshop the next day focused on the nuts and bolts of cultivating communities of practice as an act of learning citizenship. The wiki for sharing resources, introductions and reflections took a disproportionate amount of time to get going reminding us how important it is to start this process before a workshop so people can come with their introduction done.

There was an interesting discussion with an artist about the importance of social artists in developing social learning spaces. It was helpful to view all kinds of artists as shaping narratives through different media.

We were challenged to articulate what learning citizenship looks like inside a community of practice. What kind of modeling is required by leaders to inspire a great learning capability? We talked about the spirit of inquiry, the development of trust, the ethics of mutual responsiveness, the cultivation of high value for time. But what else does it mean to be a good learning citizen in a community of practice? Much more work to do on this.

After our workshop we had a long conversation with an artist who had been inspired to start a community of practice among artists who take on a social mission, such as working with children. She thought that her fellow artists needed a community to explore the deeper meaning of an artist’s involvement in social causes. What a great idea. If our visit to Israel has done nothing else but inspire her to plan this wonderful act of learning citizenship, we can view it as a worthy trip.

A cultural experience

At a more personal level, our trip was also a cultural exploration. We were treated to a visit of old Jerusalem and to the sight and sounds of markets, with sumptuous fresh fruit and vegetables, and the taste of fresh pomegranate juice, humus and halva.

We had rather jokingly been warned by the conference organizers that managing people in Israel is like herding cats so we shouldn’t have been surprised when, during the keynote, we invited people to reflect in groups at their table it was almost impossible to regain their attention. We had to laugh at ourselves although some people, including the organizers, were embarrassed!

This experience contrasted with our conversations about Jewish identity and our participation in collective rituals. Overall we found in Israel an intriguing interplay between a longing for a collective identity and an emphasis on individual independence. Our entire trip helped us gain a more concrete sense of the complexity of the place and its social systems.

Etienne’s work on social learning theory places learning at the core of human existence and assumes that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Learning is the foundation of who we are (becoming). It is social because our human nature is social, not just because (or when) we interact with others or use certain tools.

We are aware of the current trend to focus conversations about social learning on social media. We understand this trend because, indeed, emerging social media technologies are surprisingly aligned with the tenets of social learning theory. We believe that this is precisely why they constitute such an important trend. But it is the social nature of human learning that makes these tools so relevant today, and potentially transformative, not the tools that make human learning suddenly social.

We want to promote this broader view of social learning and base our work on it, whether it is theoretical work on social learning capability or practical work with organizations, governments, and international development projects. All these areas can benefit from taking a deeply social view of learning.

While social learning has never been about social media, we agree that a theory and practice of social learning today certainly can’t ignore these emerging technologies. They open countless new avenues for the social nature of human learning to manifest and in some cases, expand.

Even so, we want our work on social learning to explore this social nature in its essence, while seeing social media as a recent phenomenon to be explored and leveraged. What makes all this exciting is the convergence of multiple trends: the increasing acceptance of social learning theory, the explosion of social media, the rise of social networks, the need to anchor organizational strategies, public policy, and developmental imperatives in a social understanding of learning, and the globalization of learning challenges.

We are not entirely sure how they do it, or even if there is a recipe for how it is done. But we know that what they do is important. Their work in key to the development of social learning capability at all levels, from small conversations and communities to large-scale social systems.

It is definitely an art form – expressed in many different ways – that can change the way we experience the world and ourselves.  One thing that social artists have in common is that they use their passion and commitment to guide the process and act as exemplary learning citizens. As with artists, they live what they do. Their identity is the wellspring of their ability to create social learning spaces. And as with artists, their contribution often goes unnoticed. We need a language for talking about their art and their contribution. The world will be a better place when their subtle form of leadership is recognized as the key for developing the array of social learning capabilities we urgently need today.

As we participate in different social learning spaces our actions affect those spaces. They also affect the people we interact with. And those people belong to other social spaces. So our own learning behavior can affect the learning capability of a whole landscape of learning spaces.

The notion of learning citizenship brings an ethical dimension to learning. How we decide to act as learning citizens affects the world around. It enhances or decreases the learning capability of the social systems we are part of. Because learning citizenship is anchored in the experience of who we are in the world and uses our identity as source of leadership, we could call it an “ethics of identity”.

Organizations need to start recognizing, fostering, and supporting learning citizenship as a way to increase their learning capability and fostering and spreading innovation. Workers can act as learning citizens when they make decisions that affect the learning capability of their surroundings. Say you are a bridge engineer in a company, and the bridge engineers in your organization are spread all over the world and don’t talk to each other very much. As a worker, you’d say, “I have all this work to do; I don’t have time for anything else.” As a learning citizen, you’d say, “This organization is not maximizing its learning capability. We need to put some energy into making sure we engineers form a community and learn from each other.” We would call doing that an act of “learning citizenship.” That brings a new dimension to the definition of work. But right now it is something that is not recognized in most organizations. There is not even a language to talk about it. We would say, your most valuable employee is your best learning citizen.

That’s what we mean by social learning spaces:

…social containers that enable genuine interactions among participants, who can bring to the learning table both their experience of practice and their experience of themselves in that practice.

Not all attempts to bring people together to learn create social learning spaces! They involve a social discipline of learning, a spirit of learning citizenship, and often the skills of a social artist.

Opening new social learning spaces, when they work well, is a key intervention for increasing the learning capability of a social system.

The Community Directors were very appreciative of our Assessment Framework. They were particularly taken by the value-creation matrix (Figure 7.1, page 39). They liked the idea of integrating quantitative indicators and narratives of value creation and the fact that the usefulness of the framework is both retrospective (what learning a communities has enabled) and prospective (what learning a community may enable). In other words, the framework can be used to account for the value of an existing community and also to imagine the development of a community through potential narratives.

This prospective use of the framework – taken up by several organizations – is different from the retrospective way we had envisaged it, opening up many more opportunities for using it.

We got into brainstorming all sorts of uses for the framework as a way to make sense of the value the company is offering its existing and prospective clients.

This was exciting because we started to see the framework as a meta-learning tool, that is, a tool with which a community learns how to learn. It can help a community maximize its learning capability. By exploring various paths through the matrix, people can see what others are learning from their participation in the community. They can even discover new paths that have not been traced yet. And they can talk to sponsors, both about what people are learning, but also about what learning is possible.

Technology has always been relevant to communities to help members connect across time and space and share relevant resources. Web 2.0 technologies are often associated with new, more “horizontal” ways to connect and share information, networked thinking, and new forms of representation—all uses of technology that are very much aligned with the peer-to-peer learning typical of communities of practice. There are many different tools and for each tool, many different realizations; and there is also a great variety in the ways people and communities use these tools. Yet practically, it is useful to review briefly the potential that these new technologies hold for the learning of communities of practice.

However, the use of these technologies brings up all sorts of delicate community issues. Who has the right to read, edit, or administer a wiki? Who is an author on a blog? How do members keep track of where relevant events are happening and relevant things are stored? Will a collective resource become incomprehensible without some level of coordination? How do members manage the mix of private and public spaces? The new tools emphasize user control and self-organization, but their effective use by communities often entails more coordinating work and development of shared practices than one would expect. Finally, the number of offerings of new and different types of technologies grows so quickly that at least some community members need to act as “technology stewards” staying updated on behalf of the community to spot the best tools to support the community activities without overwhelming the members.