Welcome to issue #44!

For the latest digital publication issue of Offbeat, Anamaria Dorgo joined me to tell the story of L&D Shakers and share the lessons they learned while building a community of practice. I found it so inspiring and useful I thought it deserves another shot.

She started by showcasing some definitions of communities of practice. The one I found both easy to understand and right to the point: "A CoP is an informal group of people bound together by a shared commitment to a domain of knowledge that they care about and similar work activities (Millen, Fontaine, & Muller, 2002). Members’ primary purpose is to develop their skills and capabilities by building and sharing collective knowledge (Wenger & Snyder, 2000)."

The reason you should think about how to support communities of practice in the workplace is that it supports learning in so many ways. Theories such as Constructivism, Social Learning, Action Learning, or Experiential Learning all back up this idea.

Along the way, Anamaria shared the lessons they learned while the community was growing. Some of them:

• Identify early on who are the community drivers: those members that will keep the momentum and nurture the community by orchestrating events, shepherding initiatives, and engaging with the other members meaningfully and regularly;
• Thinking together about real-life problems that people genuinely care about constitutes the core of a community of practice. Knowledge is collectively built rather than simply transferred from one person to another;
• The community doesn’t belong to one person, and it belongs to the members that want to get actively involved and shape the space where they plan to learn new skills and expand their practice;
• Create the opportunity for co-creation as often as possible. Brainstorm ways to add value, whether through events, networking, collaborative projects, community optimization, and so on;

If you want to read the full story, you can find it here.

Meanwhile, stay safe and keep learning,
- Lavinia