A great story of community of practice development
I heard this story from the New Yorker was circulated among senior Defence staff in Canberra and it unnerved them. I think it’s a fantastic story of how people with a need will share what they know and the role of management is to harness it—or even better, cultivate it.
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This is a fascinating account of what the US Army is doing to communicate lessons learned / good practices and collaborate. It was quite exciting to see how our soldiers are using the Internet to teach themselves how to fight the war by horizontal sharing of information. The comments in this article indicate that a top down sharing of information is ineffective as it is too sterile and too late. Horizontal sharing of (almost) real-time information among those with common interests (don’t get killed!) has been the most effective, i.e., a Community of Practice. Good read for those of us interested in knowledge management and the technology to enable it.
PDF Link
http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/2005-01-17_newyorker_battle_lessons.pdf