Cultural Stickiness: Developing Communities of Practice

Explicit knowledge is the relatively easy to codify, store and retrieve as knowledge objects using traditional technology.

Another approach to cultivate tacit knowledge that moves beyond organizational artefacts is the notions of communities of practice.

Communities of practice is informal, self selecting groups that are open ended, without any deadlines or deliverables. They exist to serve a number of cognitive and social interest, set their own agendas and elect their own leadership

“ communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, asset of problem, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis”( wenger “ 2002)

Tacit knowledge is acknowledge as embedded in organizational practice and interactions rather than simply in the domain of an individual’s head.

The major interest in communities of practice is they provide significant benefits to the organization than do more formalized forms of activity. In the tacit knowledge, they provide a forum to facilitate knowledge creation through externalization of tacit knowledge, the sharing of knowledge and increasing knowledge flows, enhance creativity and integrations of collective knowledge.

The informal interaction of organization members in communities of practices are considered to encourage reflection of practice rather than simply reworking everyday processes.

Story telling is every each the story has a connection with the certain of practice who are joined together by strong and weak ties. Stories are self perpetuating, creating knowledge that reinforce and renew itself through these connection embedded in work practices.

Some members may be engaged in professional or occupational network outside the organization.

There are number of measures that organization can actively take to cultivate rather than constrain communities of practices.

·         Events- to brings the community  together and tuned to its sense of purposed

·         Leadership – use of the multiple leaders

·         Connectivity- brokering relationship between people to enhance the trust and generate dialogue

·         Membership- critical mass of member but not too large to dilute participation or interest

·         Learning projects – taking responsibility for learning agendas

·         Artefacts- producing documents, tools, stories, symbols and websites.