What’s a Community of Practice and Why Does it Matter
Etienne Wenger, one of the pioneers in this line of work defines Communities of Practice (CoPs) as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
People form communities of practice because they value learning with and from one another, and building something together, in an organic and collaborative way. CoPs are integral because we live in a complex world facing an ever increasing number of adaptive challenges that cannot be solved in traditional ways, by following an existing blueprint or checklist. These problems have no definitive, fixed solutions, and can’t be solved simply by tapping into an expert’s wisdom.
CoPs connect people in meaningful ways so that we can learn and share with one another, in a particular domain or topic area, to build everyone’s knowledge and capabilities so that, individually, we are better at what we do, and collectively we achieve real, tangible and enduring social impact.
What are some key lessons in building impactful communities of practice? Continue reading here and stay tuned for the next blog post in this series.
This blog post is part of a series on building effective and vibrant communities of practice. For more on the topic, check out this Communities of Practice (CoP) Toolkit I co-developed with colleagues at the World Bank Group, consolidating years of practice and work with 300+ internal and external facing communities.
Zarko Palankov works at the intersection of leadership, learning and community building. He activates potential by bringing people together and enabling individuals, teams, organizations, and communities to discover and unleash their latent abilities in order to re-imagine how they learn, grow, collaborate and lead. Feel free to contact Zarko at zarko@lead-in.co or learn more about his work on LeadIN’s website.
