Are you familiar with the term "Community of Practice" (or CoP)?

It's relatively new to the business world, but CoPs are certainly as old as medieval Euro-pean guilds and probably as old as mankind itself. The Communities concept has been in practice at many successful companies and organizations. Communities provide the foundation and the tools that can help employees grow and succeed, and they can help to accelerate business cycles to outpace the competition. Basically, a CoP is:

• A group of people who work together over a period of time and develop a common sense of purpose and a desire to share work-related knowledge and experi-ence.
• It can be a professional affiliation that shares a common discipline or interest, which exchange ideas, develops knowledge, and creatively solves problems.

High quality CoPs strive to create, maintain, and share the wealth of knowledge within their community. The CoP mission is to enable the people of the organization to collabo-rate and share knowledge in pursuit of our business objectives.

Are they necessary?

Launching Communities of Practice are important for growth and quality performance. CoPs serve as knowledge-bases or hubs that become focal points facilitating corporate change. In some companies they're called "learning communities" or "best practice groups." Regardless of their name, it's their work that is most important. A Community of Practice has a common interest, a passion for their purpose, and a desire to share their knowledge with the community at large.

A Community of Practice offers opportunity.

CoPs not only operate within businesses groups, they span across company lines as well. Within our organization, a Community of Practice is a network of people from all levels, different functional areas who share a common interest or discipline. When functioning effectively, they have four "I's" in common: Initiate Ideas and provide Information and Inspiration that can be cross-fertilized across the enterprise.

For additional information on Communities of Practice, contact Doug Wells at 248-840-3131 or email at doug@wells.net