Cultivating Communities of Practice

Cultivating a Community of Practice

Etienne and Beverly Wegner-Trayer refer to the 3 crucial characteristics of a successful community of practice as the domain, the community, and the practice. Let’s explore these further.

THE DOMAIN: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by sharing a domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore is shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it). The domain is not necessarily something recognized as "expertise" outside of the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of dealing with their domain: surviving on the streets and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other even though few people outside the group may value or recognize their expertise" (Wengner-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015).

What Does This Mean: Members have a shared common interest that will guide their learning and growth.

THE COMMUNITY: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other; they care about standing with each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members if a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015).

What Does This Mean: Members will learn together, share information on their topic of interest and begin collaborate on problem solving and innovation.

THE PRACTICE: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest-people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, way of addressing recurring problems - in short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The "windshield wipers" engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contra

st, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015).

What Does This Mean: Members will take their collaborative strategies back into their respective practices and report back to their community of practice. 

Wenger-Trayner, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. https://www.wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1998-EWT-Article-for-the-Systems-Thinker.pdf

Wenger-Trayner, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses. https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice