If you have been tasked to set up a Community of Practice (referred to as Guilds in more recent Agile terminology), you could do worse than having a quick read through Pyrko, Dorfler and Eden’s 2017 paper: “Thinking together: What makes Communities of Practice work?” and reflecting on what you actually want your CoP to achieve.
As the title of the paper gives away, “thinking together” is posited as key criteria for the existence of a Community of Practice. There is a marked difference between mere knowledge distribution (e.g. regular one-way presentation of case studies, publication of newsletters, etc) versus setting up a community that actually tackles the hard task of “thinking together” to develop new knowledge and better practices.
There are actually quite a few preconditions required to achieve the former, but the paper makes clear that identifying specific real-life problems that practitioners care about is vital. This particularly resonates with me, having observed CoPs struggle to find their identity and purpose because they had attempted to tackle subject areas that are too broad, abstract or general.
Originally posted on Linkedin