Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 59, by Joe Podolsky:
From: JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 96 11:25:46 -0700
Subject: Our Town
I have the privilege of talking both to groups of employees in various internal classes and also to many HP customers. At some point in almost every one of these meetings, we discuss HP's culture. We know that our culture is an asset; in the past few years, we've even tried to document it in various booklets and video tapes on the HP Way. But, when describing it to others, I still struggle, because what I see as the essence of HP is vague and tenuous, a feeling of connectedness, a web of sharing. At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, I think the spider web is a good picture for our culture. We depend on it for our sustenance; its exact shape is completely variable, depending on where it's built, yet it is recognizable anywhere. It's fragile; sticks and stones can break a piece of it. But it's robust; the web can continue to function even though partially damaged. And it has intrinsically pleasing form; webs are beautiful. The August 5, 1996 issue of _Fortune_ magazine, Thomas Stewart devotes his column, "The Leading Edge," to "communities of practice." Stewart defines this term by quoting from Brook Manville, the director of knowledge management at McKinsey & Co. Manville says that a community of practice is "a group of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common set of problems." It's not a new term. Stewart says that it was first publicized in 1987 by the Institute for Research on Learning, here in Palo Alto, a spin-off from Xerox PARC. IRL operates on the principle that learning is an essentially social process, that group learning is far more effective than solitary study. And they call those groups, communities of practice. Like the spider web, we managers can not create communities of practice, but we can destroy them. Etienne Wenger of IRL says that communities of practice draw together with three common traits: first, they have a history, shared experiences over time. Second, a community of practice has "an enterprise but not an agenda; that is, it forms around a value-adding- something-we're-all-doing... Third, the enterprise involves learning...a way of dealing with the world they share... No one owns them. There's no boss... People join and stay because they have something to learn and to contribute." While managers can't force the creation of communities of practice, managers can plow the ground and sow the seeds. They can recognize the importance of such groups. They can give people minimum resources, a conference room, permission to put some refreshments on the expense account, unquestioned use of communication technology like e-mail, Lotus Notes, and the Internet. Managers can destroy communities of practice by denying resources, by being skeptical or snide, by insisting that communication follow formal structure. Interestingly, Stewart quotes another consultant, Valdis Krebs who points out that managers can also kill these communities by giving them too much resource. "Fund them too much," he says, "and you'll start to want deliverables. It won't work. You'll get (only) what the community wants to deliver (not necessarily what the manager wants)." I wonder how or if we can apply the usual plan, do, check, act cycle to communities of practice. (With almost mystic coincidence, as I'm typing this, a spider is crawling across the floor of my cubicle, clearly lost, clearly out of place. I'll leave it alone to find its own way.) In HP's culture, communities of practice thrive. For example, we have formal ones called the Work Innovation Networks, organized by the Change Management Team in Product Processes Organization, but totally run and funded by participants. HP Quality has built several Customer WIN gatherings. Focused groups such as the Women's Technical Conference are essentially communities of practice. HP communities live on Lotus Notes and on the Web. They meet in cafeterias that serve ice cream until 3 pm to fuel the chatting. Hopefully, these jottings, among other things, help form a community of IT and quality practice. Especially in HP, a global company where place and time are shifted for all, IT is an essential resource for building and maintaining community. But, as with a web, such a structure is fragile. As Stewart puts it, "information wants to be free" in communities of practice, and IT efficiency and issues of security and privacy often conflict with that freedom. These issues become especially tough when we extend, as we must and as we do, our communities of practice to non-HP partners, to customers, to suppliers. In the end, communities of practice, and HP's culture, are based on that most fragile of all concepts, on trust. As I look around my cubicle, I see on my wall another web-like structure, a stick bent in a circle, with light string stretched around a bead and feather, filling the circle. It was made by a student at the Stanbridge Academy in San Jose, a private school for special children. It's a Native American artifact called a dream catcher. What a wonderful, optimistic metaphor for communities of practice. What communities of practice are you part of? What ideas have you seen for building and maintaining them? What cautions might you share with us? Joe