Organisational learning is back with us. But what do we understand about real learning as distinct from ‘training’? Sukhvinder Dhat and Sonia Jewers illustrate the power in practice in learning and especially the power of “Communities of Practice’. People listen to and learn from people they trust, they emulate each other and seek to maintain their ‘membership’ of these informal communities, they try things out together. How can we tap into this rich resource to step up a gear and rise to meet the next level of challenge?

In these times of accelerating change and radical uncertainty, it is not enough to rely on ‘high-performance work teams’ to succeed. Nor do the buzzwords such as ‘knowledge management’ and ‘empowerment’ give us much insight. What the new realities demand is a deep understanding and belief in the ways people actually and naturally learn to act. The CEO’s work in this new economy is to create and support a work environment that nurtures continuous learning. In the past we often substituted training for real learning. In fact, the behaviour one sees in the field would suggest in many cases that managers often think training leads to learning or, worse, that training is learning. But classroom models of training that happen episodically are not how people really learn. They are only part of the picture. At ER Consultants, we study learning in all of its facets and we design for effective learning. We do this in a participatory design approach with key strategic partners, in the world of work. In the area of workplace learning – our focus here – we do collaborative research and design with lots of partners, mostly from the corporate world. Those partners include ACNielsen, Royal Bank of Scotland, Powergen, Panasonic Matsushita Mobile Corporation, Inland Revenue, Department for Education and Skills, Scottish Prison Service and Vodafone. Out of all our projects, we have evolved a set of enduring principles of learning that we consistently recognise in all of our work.

From apprenticeships to ‘Communities of Practice’

We discovered that one of the most important reasons for the success of the old apprenticeship systems was the membership of a cohesive, informal community that went beyond one master or mentor. Wanting to become ‘one of them’ to be accepted into a community, is a powerful dynamic of apprenticeship. Further, we came to understand that newcomers learn best as they become members of these communities. Moreover, they continue to learn as they, in turn, teach, mentor, and participate ‘in the practice’. Continuing to learn, we discovered, is an equally powerful prerequisite for continuing membership in those communities. Communities of Practice are simply those highly informal groups of people that develop a shared way of working together to accomplish some activity. Usually, such communities include people with varying roles and experience. Every organisation has them. Though they don’t appear on ‘organigrams’, they are the largely invisible network of people who get the real work done. They are also the place where people tend to learn the essentials of their job – just as apprentices did – by participating in them. Much of what individuals know depends on their local environment. What an organisation knows, however, is what’s embedded in and among its Communities of Practice. Recently much has been made in business literature of statements like ‘if company X only knew what it knows’, referring to the difficulty of capturing what many individuals know. That does not surprise us, since we have come to understand that much of what any of us know is ‘tacit knowledge’ embedded in the practices we share with others. So, if we want to know what our organisation knows, we should start by identifying our Communities of Practice and see them as the wellspring of what the organisation really knows.

Communities of Practice in Practice

• The ‘beliefs’ also help us to understand why co-location alone does not necessarily help a software team cohere and learn together. If its members have not developed a community out of which a new practice develops, no amount of physical or organisational rearranging will make a difference.

• When a new technology requires both sales and service teams to learn ‘the new stuff’ well and faster, it may not be enough to gain the knowledge; it may also require a change in professional identity in order to succeed with customers or other technicians.

• When a well-designed business process or a new system fails in its implementation, it may be because developing new practices, based upon a whole community’s understanding of the old ones, was not part of the strategy.

These examples make clear that training is not equal to learning and that simply specifying skills or competencies is not enough. They also show that learning does not go in stages, especially when we are exposed to rich environments in real-life situations. Also, simply specifying skills or competencies does not usually provide what people really need to know – and will learn – even if they are placed in the right environment.

Learning is also a question of identity

There is another dimension to the community idea that is seldom discussed but critically important: learning is powerfully linked not just to motivation but also identity. What we choose to learn is often a function of who we are and who we wish to become. Not wanting to be like ‘them’ can be enough to keep someone from learning. That fact seems to hold whether we are talking about company apprentices, graduates, seasoned executives or CEOs and their directors. If those social dimensions of learning are as powerful and enduring as they appear to be, and our work strongly supports such a contention, then this is important news for organisations. Most organisations implicitly know they need to be continuously innovative through continuous learning. However, again, training alone does not even come close to addressing the challenge.

Creating Communities of Practice: The manager’s new agenda

What does all this mean for those who are in positions of leading, coaching, and shaping organisations to compete successfully today and tomorrow?

The new work of managers is all about creating and enabling conditions for continuous learning, which is best done by supporting the informal communities in which it most effectively happens. That requires less control, more listening, more facilitation, and an enormous degree of support for policies and practices that bring the above about. To accomplish the above, managers will also need to shift their focus, perhaps changing their own identities as well. The
shift needs to be:

• From teaching of training to coaching,mentoring and ultimately continuous communities of learning.
• From selling only product to learning from customers and suppliers.
• From a love with building innovative pilot projects – which seldom cross community boundaries – to building on existing pockets of innovation with explicit support to expand what’s already working.
• From ‘delivery’ to natural ‘spread’ and ‘harvesting’ of ideas and innovations.
• Encouraging inquiry and dialogue within communities.
• Listening, observing, and learning to understand existing practices and informal communities are a prerequisite to effective management, change, and management of change.
• Looking at the whole environment in which learning needs to take place – the cultural, facilities, professional and intellectual aspects – as one helps design and creates conditions where continuous learning can occur.
• Facilitating more and better opportunities for those with whom one works with to learn through the communities that already exist. Learning across communities and from one another requires special support, trust , deep understanding and lastly openness.
• Supporting every opportunity for learning and honouring the power of informal learning is essential.
• Above all taking risks and learning from them. Remember the eternal truth of healthy organisations: ‘It is far better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission’.

These beliefs and their implications are essential foundations for helping all of us cope, survive, grow, and thrive. To understand more deeply the issues addressed in this article, start by identifying and supporting the Communities of Practice that exist in your own organisation. Remember, if we do not pay attention to the new management work – and what it demands of us – we face the reality expressed by Powergen Retail CEO, Nick Horler: ‘There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss the moment, and you start to decline.’

Beliefs about Learning

From our extensive experience in the field, ER Consultants has developed a set of Beliefs about Learning that we believe are important markers for organisations. In keeping with the evolving spirit of what we are learning, they are not rules, but simply working practice ‘beliefs’.

• Learning is fundamentally social. While we recognise that learning is the process of acquiring knowledge, it actually encompasses a lot more. Successful learning is often socially constructed and can lead to fundamental shifts in identity.
• Knowledge becomes integrated into communities. When we develop and share values, perspectives, and ways of doing things, we create a Community of Practice.
• Learning is an act of participation. The motivation to learn is the desire to participate and support a community to develop.
• Knowing depends on strength of engagement in practice. We gather knowledge from observations of, and participation in, many different situations and activities.
• The depth of our knowing depends in turn on the depth of our engagement.
• Engagement is inseparable from empowerment. We perceive our identities in terms of our ability to contribute and to affect the life of communities in which we are or want to be a part.
• ‘Failure to learn’ is often the result of exclusion from participation. Learning requires access and the opportunity to contribute.
• We are all natural lifelong learners. Learning is a natural part of being human. We all learn what enables us to participate in the Communities of Practice of which we wish to be a part.

As Ann Gammie (ER Consultants’ Director of Organisational Development), says ‘To allow people the opportunity to do things differently, we need to enable them to see, feel and experience the difference.’ As managers, consider whether these beliefs work in practice where you are. What are the communities of practice that exist and how do you seek to influence them?