As we know, developing communities of practice is an organic activity. You never quite know what is going to happen or whether it will succeed. This is why a big bang approach is a mistake. To herald to your entire organisation that you are going to develop a community of practice on topic X is likely to cause pain when the initiative fails to gain support. I’ve seen this happen and it even more prevalent when the organisation has just invested in community technology which has forums functionality—”we must get CoPs going so people are using this forum functionality” I hear them say.

Here is the softly, softly approach I recommend people take:

• identify some people with common interests in a domain that is important to the business
• meet with each person separately and ask them about the things that interest, challenge, excite or intrigue them
• common things of interest invariably emerge
• suggest the all of them that they have some interesting things in common and offer to organise a meeting so they can discuss them
• at the meeting suggest they might meet regularly to enhance their learning in the domain

Once the groups starts to develop a rhythm, suggest they think of small tasks to work on together that might improve their practice—here is an approach. Only when the groups says things like, “how are we going to share these documents?” or “can we discuss this online?”, do you investigate technology support. Some groups will get to this point faster than others, and it doesn’t matter one bit.

Finally, keep a look our for indicators which suggest your community is making progress. But whatever you do don’t let management turn these indicators into targets! But that issue is a topic for another post.