Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 118 – Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Etienne Wenger-Trayner is Co-Founder of the Social Learning Lab and an independent thinker, researcher, consultant, author, and speaker. His seminal work was on communities of practice and social learning theory. 

Etienne helps organizations apply his ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops. His work focuses on social learning systems, trying to understand the connection between knowledge, community, learning, and identity. His basic idea is that human knowing is fundamentally a social act.  

Here are definitions for five of Etienne’s specialties: 

• Communities: Groups of people who share an interest, a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic. Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another 
• Situated Learning: The idea that people learn more by actively participating in a learning experience that’s situated in a specific context. It’s based on the idea that learning is a social process that takes place in a community, and that people learn, see, and do things based on their role in that community. 
• Social Learning: A process by which people acquire knowledge and skills through social interactions. As opposed to traditional models of learning, it encourages learners to communicate with one another and share experiences in order to retain information. It is based on the concept that people don’t just learn from formal instruction, but also through informal interactions with their peers. 
• Systems Convening: Fostering social learning across social landscapes with entrenched boundaries, including different practices, different institutions, different goals, different cultures, and different loyalties. 
• Value Creation: A perspective on social learning that reflects the aspiration to make a difference. Social learning creates value to the extent that it is recognized as improving the ability to make that difference. 

Etienne created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field. 

Books by Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Introduction to Communities of Practice: A Brief Overview of the Concept and Its Uses

The domain. A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as “expertise” outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise. 

The community. In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other; they care about their standing with each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone. 

The practice. A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The “windshield wipers” engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice. 

Knowledge Management as a Doughnut

The management side of the term “knowledge management” has been less of a topic of discussion. Yet I believe that it is as productive a term to investigate. If by “manage” we mean to care for, grow, steward, make more useful, then the term knowledge management is rather apt. I will argue that communities of practice are the cornerstones of knowledge management. 

Some principles of knowledge management 

• Practitioners, the people who use knowledge in their activities, are in the best position to manage this knowledge.
• Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do, and who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better. 
• Communities of practice manage their knowledge. If you had enough knowledge to micro-manage communities of practice, you would not need them. 
• No community can fully manage the learning of another, but no community can fully manage its own learning. 

From strategy to performance 

• Domain: You need knowledge to do what you want
  • Translate the strategy of the organization into a set of domains 
• Community: You need people to have knowledge
  • Cultivate the communities according to each domain 
• Practice: You need experience to produce usable knowledge 
  • Engage practitioners in the development of their Practice

From performance to strategy

• Practice revisited: What have we learned? 
  • Translate the learning inherent in activities into refined practices 
• Community revisited: Who should know this? 
  • Broaden the scope of learning beyond its source 
• Domain revisited: Where do we go now? 
  • Think about knowledge strategically 

Rolling the doughnut: Strategic knowledge management 

The full doughnut model of knowledge management requires a number of enabling structures that integrate the work of communities of practice into the organization. 

• Sponsorship Structure 
  • Translating strategic imperatives into a knowledge-centric vision of the organization 
  • Legitimizing the work of communities in terms of strategic priorities 
  • Channeling appropriate resources to ensure sustained success 
  • Giving a voice to the insights and proposals of communities so they affect the way business is conducted 
  • Negotiating accountability between line operations and communities (e.g., who decides which “best practices” to adopt) 
• Recognition Structure 
  • Peer recognition: community-based feedback and acknowledgement mechanisms that celebrate community participation 
  • Organizational recognition: rubric in performance appraisal for community contributions and career paths for people who take on community leadership. 
• Support Structure. 
  • A few explicit roles, some of which are recognized by the formal organization and resourced with dedicated time 
  • Direct resources for the nurturing of the community infrastructure including meeting places, travel funds, and money for specific projects 
  • Technological infrastructure that enables members to communicate regularly and to accumulate documents 
  • Last but not least, organizations that have used communities in a systematic way have put together a small “support team” of internal consultants who provide logistic and process advice for communities, including coaching community leaders, educational activities to raise awareness and skills, facilitation services, communication with management, and coordination across the initiative.