Work Redesign. Reading Ma Addison-wesley

[Lavonna Baldree]

Thecommittee explores how theory, doctrine, accepted wisdom, and personal experience have all served as sources for organization design. Alternative organization structures such as teams, specialist networks, associations, and virtual organizations are examined.

The committee explores the changing missions of the U.S. Army as a case study that has relevance to any organization. Noting that a musical greeting card contains more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950, the committee addresses the impact of new technologies on performance.

This book will be important to corporate leaders, executives, and managers; faculty and students in organizational performance and the social sciences; business journalists; researchers; and interested individuals.

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Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice

In Silicon Valley, a community of circuit designers meets for a lively debate about the merits of two different designs developed by one of the participants. Huddling together over the circuit diagrams, they analyze possible faults, discuss issues of efficiency, propose alternatives, tease out each other's assumptions, and make the case for their view. In Boston, a group of social workers who staff a help line meet to discuss knotty client problems, express sympathy as they discuss difficulties, probe to understand each other's feelings, and gently offer suggestions. Their meetings are often deeply challenging and sometimes highly emotional. The fact-driven, sometimes argumentative, meetings of the Silicon Valley circuit designers are extremely different from the compassionate meetings of the social workers in Boston. But despite their differences, the circuit designers' and social workers' communities are both vibrant and full of life. Their energy is palpable to both the regular participants and visitors.

Because communities of practice are voluntary, what makes them successful over time is their ability to generate enough excitement, relevance, and value to attract and engage members. Although many factors, such as management support or an urgent problem, can inspire a community, nothing can substitute for this sense of aliveness.

How do you design for aliveness? Certainly you cannot contrive or dictate it. You cannot design it in the traditional sense of specifying a structure or process and then implementing it. Still, aliveness does not always happen automatically. Many natural communities never grow beyond a network of friends because they fail to attract enough participants. Many intentional communities fall apart soon after their initial launch because they don't have enough energy to sustain themselves. Communities, unlike teams and other structures, need to invite the interaction that makes them alive. For example, a park is more appealing to use if its location provides a short cut between destinations. It invites people to sit for lunch or chat if it has benches set slightly off the main path, visible, but just out of earshot, next to something interesting like a flower bed or a patch of sunlight. 1 The structure of organizational relationships and events also invite a kind of interaction. Meetings that contain some open time during a break or lunch, with enough space for people to mingle or confer privately, invite one-on-one discussion and relationship building. Just as a good park has varied spaces for neighborhood baseball games, quiet chats, or solitary contemplation, a well-designed community of practice allows for participating in group discussion, having one-on-one conversations, reading about new ideas, or watching experts duel over cutting-edge issues. Even though communities are voluntary and organic, good community design can invite, even evoke, aliveness.

Designing to evoke aliveness is different from most organizational design, which traditionally focuses on creating structures, systems, and roles that achieve relatively fixed organizational goals and fit well with other structural elements of the organization. Even when organizations are designed to be flexible and responsive to their environment, organic growth and aliveness are typically not primary design goals. 2 For communities of practice, however, they are paramount, even though communities also need to contribute to organizational goals. Designing for aliveness requires a different set of design principles. The goal of community design is to bring out the community's own internal direction, character, and energy. The principles we developed to do this focus on the dilemmas at the heart of designing communities of practice. What is the role of design for a "human institution" that is, by definition, natural, spontaneous, and self-directed? How do you guide such an institution to realize itself, to become "alive?" From our experience we have derived seven principles:

Design for evolution. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives. Invite different levels of participation. Develop both public and private community spaces. Focus on value. Combine familiarity and excitement. Create a rhythm for the community. These design principles are not recipes, but rather embody our understanding of how elements of design work together. They reveal the thinking behind a design. Making design principles explicit makes it possible to be more flexible and improvisational.

1. Design for evolution

Because communities of practice are organic, designing them is more a matter of shepherding their evolution than creating them from scratch. Design elements should be catalysts for a community's natural evolution. As they develop, communities usually build on preexisting personal networks. For example, when Schlumberger launched a series of communities of practice in its research division, most people were already part of networks connected through the company's extensive bulletin board system.

The dynamic nature of communities is key to their evolution. As the community grows, new members bring new interests and may pull the focus of the community in different directions. Changes in the organization influence the relative importance of the community and place new demands on it. For example, an IT community that was only marginally important to an organization suddenly became critical as the company discovered the potential of a few e-business pilots. Changes in the core science or technology of a community constantly reshape it, often bringing in professionals from neighboring disciplines or introducing technological advances that change their way of working. Because communities are built on existing networks and evolve beyond any particular design, the purpose of a design is not to impose a structure but to help the community develop.

Community design is much more like life-long learning than traditional organization design. "Alive" communities reflect on and redesign elements of themselves throughout their existence. Community design often involves fewer elements at the beginning than does a traditional organization design. In one case, the coordinator and core members had many ideas of what the community could become. Rather than introduce those ideas to the community as a whole, they started with a very simple structure of regular weekly meetings. They did not capture meeting notes, put up a Web site, or speculate with the group on "where this is going." Their first goal was to draw potential members to the community. Once people were engaged in the topic and had begun to build relationships, the core members began introducing other elements of community structure—such as a Web site, links to other communities, projects to define key practices—one at a time. 5

The key to designing for evolution is to combine design elements in a way that catalyzes community development. Physical structures—such as roads and parks—can precipitate the development of a town. Similarly, social and organizational structures, such as a community coordinator or problem-solving meetings, can precipitate the evolution of a community. Which community design elements are most appropriate depends on the community's stage of development, its environment, member cohesiveness, and the kinds of knowledge it shares. But evolution is common to all communities, and the primary role of design is to catalyze that evolution.

2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives

Good community design requires an insider's perspective to lead the discovery of what the community is about. When designing teams, we know a team's output requirements in advance and can design to achieve that output. But effective community design is built on the collective experience of community members. Only an insider can appreciate the issues at the heart of the domain, the knowledge that is important to share, the challenges their field faces, and the latent potential in emerging ideas and techniques. Only an insider can know who the real players are and their relationships. This requires more than community "input." It requires a deep understanding of community issues. 6

Good community design requires an understanding of the community's potential to develop and steward knowledge, but it often takes an outside perspective to help members see the possibilities. Because intentional communities are new for most organizations, members often have a hard time imagining how a more developed community could improve upon their current personal networks or help them leverage dormant capabilities. Good community design brings information from outside the community into the dialogue about what the community could achieve. Sometimes this involves educating community members about the role of communities in other organizations. It might mean bringing an "outsider" into a dialogue with the community leader and core members as they design the community. As a result of this dialogue, the people who understand the issues inside the community and have legitimacy within it are also able to see new possibilities and can effectively act as agents of change. 7

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