Communities of Practice: a new lever for value creation

Faced with turbulent markets and increasingly demanding employees, companies have to find innovative and ever more effective ways of rallying their teams (at every level of the organization and hierarchy) around their development objectives...

There are no standard or miracle formulas, but there is one system that is gaining ground and deserves a closer look: the community of practice, which is emerging as a new lever for mobilizing teams in support of the company's strategic objectives.

Communities of practice: collaborative systems that are gaining ground within the company

The notion of "community" is as old as humanity itself. Widely studied by ^19th-century sociologists, it has come to the fore again in recent years...

In the corporate world, "communities of practice" have their roots in the guilds of the Middle Ages and, more recently, in the Compagnonnage system.

Today, they are generally defined as groups of professionals who, in a given field, exchange knowledge and experience, solve problems, propose innovative ideas... In short, collectives that develop their knowledge and professional practice in a reticular manner and through confrontation with everyday realities.

Communities of practice are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate world. But this hasn't always been the case...

For much of the ^20th century, they were relatively peripheral phenomena in the corporate world. Generally confined to organizations in certain sectors (e.g., in the medical-social field, through practice analysis and supervision mechanisms), communities of practice were sometimes present in other sectors simply by virtue of their porosity (e.g., through inter-company professional associations, which bring together experts in a given function or sector, but whose exchanges are limited by employees' duty of confidentiality).

In the 2000s, with the boom of the Internet and the knowledge economy, they began to attract the interest of managers. Initially perceived as knowledge management solutions (notably via online social networks), they are increasingly seen as a lever for team mobilization and management, in response to the growing complexity of matrix organizations subject to the dual imperatives of agility and creativity.

Communities of practice are now in vogue and spreading rapidly throughout organizations.

They can take a variety of forms and are generally aimed, on a one-off or longer-term basis, at :

• Managers, to enable them to share the company's direction and develop their leadership skills.
• Professionals from the same sector (both in so-called support functions and in core business functions), to ensure a balance between the dissemination of the sector's strategy and its local appropriation within a logic of subsidiarity.
• Experts from a variety of disciplines working together on a complex project (communities at the frontier of project mode).

Communities of practice: real gas pedals of value creation... under certain conditions

Communities of practice can be real gas pedals of corporate value creation.

When the conditions for their success are met, they have the advantage of reconciling the challenges of management in terms of company development and the expectations of team members in terms of working methods and collective dynamics.

In fact, they enable general management to develop team commitment to company priorities, to promote common practices to counterbalance the harmful effects of geographical dispersion or organizational entanglement, and to easily identify innovative ideas... And all this, while offering employees the opportunity to solve their operational problems through collective intelligence, to better understand the workings of the "real" organization beyond the organizational charts, to fluidify exchanges with their colleagues, to feel recognized by their peers and invested by their management or, again, to work on challenges that go beyond day-to-day continuous improvement by acting as a collective proposal force to help the company better anticipate changes in its market.

The potential benefits of communities of practice are numerous, and make perfect sense in organizations facing strong imperatives in terms of business development, operational excellence or mobilizing their key players (i.e. their teams, but also their partners or customers).

Nevertheless, as is always the case when it comes to working on the human dynamics of a company and animating the people who embody it, the success of a community of practice is not self-evident...

First and foremost, it depends to a large extent on the ability of the management team to give meaning to the scheme, and to avoid committing to it simply out of fashion or out of a desire to show off the "employee experience". How can this be done? By defining, from the outset and with a few key players (who will be the Community's first ambassadors and animators), a clear and aspirational vision that meets the company's challenges, but also the real needs of the populations it addresses:

• A raison d'être and an ambition translated into tangible, precise objectives
• Shared values
• Rules of reciprocal commitment (both between network members and between the Community as a whole and company managers)

Secondly, you need to strike the right balance between on-line and off-line, and not rely entirely on virtual platforms and digital applications! Machines, however fun and ergonomic they may be, aren't everything: successful communities rely on a mix of remote exchanges and face-to-face work... Physical meetings and collective ritual events are essential to cement the community and maintain its momentum, especially in the start-up phase. And, if exchanges can only take place via tools, the key lies in striking the right balance between synchronous communication ( live via digital devices linking participants scattered over thousands of kilometers) and deferred communication (when everyone expresses themselves "in their own time", alone behind their screen).

In addition, fine-tuned management is required throughout the process, to find a subtle dynamic between two complementary movements: community self-organization (to empower its members and encourage creative emulation) and managerial guidance (to maintain the initial course and ensure the creation of value for the company).

Finally, it's important to progress on a " test and learn " basis, to support initiatives with flexibility, and not to forget that driving a successful collaborative approach requires a high level of commitment and congruence on the part of management...