Organizational learning
Communities of Practice
Tianlong Services defines Communities of Practice (CoP) as an organized group of professional people who share the same interests in resolving an issue, improving skills, and learning from each other’s experiences.
What is communities of practice?
Communities of Practice are one of the building blocks of most Knowledge Management Frameworks. Communities of practice develop around things that matter to people. As a result, their practices reflect the members’ own understanding of what is important. Even when a community’s actions conform to an external mandate, it is the community that produces the practice. In this sense, communities of practice are self-organizing systems.
We define a community of practice along three dimensions
- What it is about: Its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members
- How it functions: The relationships of mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
- What capability it has produced: The shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.
Our CoP Services
Tianlong Services can support you in building and sustaining your Communities of practice through the following services.
Community Launch
We help you get your Communities of Practice off to a flying start through facilitating a launch program. We do this by introducing the structure and theory of the CoP and related discussions around key topics.
Community Maturity Assessment
We examine and monitor the wellbeing of your CoP by implementing maturity assessment structure as a benchmark for measuring development and identifying key factors that require the much-needed attention.
Community Leaders Training
We train your Community leaders as well as their facilitators on how to deliver value to the business and to be operate their CoPs effectively using a combination of theory, case studies, and exercises related to your own Community of Practice subjects.
Community Leaders Coaching
We can coach your Community leaders and facilitators in building and sustaining their Communities of Practice. We offer support to the Community Leaders either through regular coaching visits, or through remote coaching through online tools, such as email and skype.
Providing Support Resources
Our company-wide team will be assigned to nurture community development that can help address various needs. We provide resources to support your CoP through external experts, travel, meeting facilities, and communications technology.
How Can We Help?
Communities of practice do not usually require heavy institutional infrastructures, but their members do need time and space to collaborate. Since no community can fully design the learning of another and no community can fully design its own learning, we are ready to help you kick start the process.
Contact us today for a free consultation.
