Spencer Saar Cavanaugh
Canvas Foreword
The following content is a discursive “canvassing” exercise intended to:
process ideas and prime them for more formal publication;
foreground thought processes in the spirit of auto-discourse;
garner feedback from peers;
establish conceptual provenance for ideonomic archiving purposes.
An organizational form I am seeing across a few overlapping socio-professional spheres lately is the community of practice. Loosely (and so far largely implicitly) defined as an informal and recurring gathering of individuals who share a common occupation or interest, these communities convene primarily to facilitate knowledge exchange, peer feedback, and professional development, all with an underlying emphasis on practice.
Seeing as these communities often coalesce in an entrepreneurial or otherwise enterprising context, be it nonprofit or for-profit, they often default toward a startup-like operational mindset as they navigate opportunities of growth. That said, I wonder whether the organizational modality of the startup, or even of the corporation or shared enterprise more broadly, truly lends itself to the types of value creation and exchange particular to communities of practice.
That is, individuals who find themselves in a nascent community of practice, may feel the need to formally organize along conventional lines (e.g. setting up shared platforms/workspaces/websites, forming legal entities, drafting membership agreements, etc) in order to realize the latent value of the collective talent of the community. In this respect, we can trace the gradual formalization and even institutionalization of otherwise informal or protean social structures.
In my experiences with these nascent communities of practice, this formalization, without realistic prospects of compensation, tends to result in some duration of well-intentioned but uncompensated administration efforts, which tend to burnout and result in the dissipation of the community. This, I believe, is partially due to a disconnect in methodology and language around how these particular social structures are best sustained, wherein we default to pathways forged by more traditional social enterprises with value models which generally don’t lend themselves to communities of practice.
What if the community of practice, as a distinct organizational modality, is better served by non-traditional organizational initialization techniques? What sort of value is created by these communities, who is this value intended for, and what is the nature of the exchange? Below I will list a variety of considerations pertaining to this inquiry, in the interest of informing a practical dialogue around the definition, formation, and sustainability of communities of practice.
The communities of practice I have been a part of (Sensemaking Scenius, Opus Collective, certain aspects of OpenCivics, etc) have been successful in attracting individuals who share my passions and interests, thereby motivating me to stay connected with these groups. In other words, these groups have maintained a high signal-to-noise ratio, in terms of the quality of character of its members, and the degree of alignment between its members.
Naturally, the manner in which the community admits new members is critical to the maintenance of this value. It takes time to get to know new people, to learn about their projects and their needs. If a community of practice is not careful about who they admit into the group, it may dilute the value of involvement for existing members, and this dilution can drive disengagement and dissolution.
Does this mean that communities of practice need to be exclusionary, and is that a bad thing? It depends on what a given community is aiming to achieve, but much of it depends on how the community presents itself to the outside world, and who it effectively appeals to. If the group presents itself in an intentional and specific manner, it raises the likelihood of attracting people who are genuinely aligned with the existing members. From there, the community can limit and process admittance of new members however it sees fit, with some degree of confidence in the average quality of applicant.
If communities are the sum of their composite relationships, communities of practice arguably ought to prioritize the formation of meaningful relationships among its members, relationships built around a common practice. Because individuals have natural limitations around the number of meaningful relationships we can form and maintain, any community attempting to leverage the value of relationships may wish to take a conservative approach to growth. While Dunbar’s number pertains more directly to the stability of social relationships, it is also an insightful concept in the context of the degree of meaning we derive from our relationships.
In light of this, and depending on the aims of a given community of practice, it may be in the interest of the group to limit its own rate of growth. If a community wants to retain some level of intimacy between its members, this does not necessarily mean the group should strictly constrain its growth to accommodate the social bandwidth of each of its members, but it is nonetheless worth considering how the growth of the group may result in the dilution of the average relationship in the group.
Relationships are enriched over time, provided the individuals involved have the will and bandwidth to invest in these relationships. Every time a new person is added to the group, the number of relationships in the group increases superlinearly, which has implications on the average quality of relationship. That said, if the group maintains a healthy rapport, and members continue to find value in participating, the rate at which the social cohesion of the group deepens may permit some rate of growth without diluting the collective chemistry.
In other words, in terms of the rate of change of the social cohesion of a group as a function of its growth, there appears to be a fuzzy threshold, a tipping point at which the social forces shift from centripetal to centrifugal, from promoting enthusiasm to promoting ennui. However, this dilutive effect of growth may be offset by a sustained environment of intentionality and value exchange which preserves the sense of belonging felt by existing members.
In reality, there is likely to be some level of churn among members, with different people exhibiting different levels or phases of engagement, owing to the the particular circumstances and obligations of their lives which demand their attention. This drop-off or intermittent disengagement of members may result in increasing the capacity of the group to admit new members without overwhelming the social bandwidth of its engaged members.
Whether it takes the form of money, equity, or a sense of personal development or belonging, compensation is necessarily for a healthy collaborative environment. And while personal fulfillment is important, while labors of love can be rewarding, most people need a more economically tangible form of baseline compensation to justify major commitments of time and energy.
Arguably all forms of collaborative enterprise, whether operationally intensive like a startup or more passive like a community of practice, require some form of facilitation or administration, and this means work. Seeing as communities of practice, at least the sort explored above, tend not to involve financially lucrative prospects of value exchange, but instead operate more as nexus for mutual development, any commitments made to administrative work should be made in light of realistic expectations of compensation.
In other words, because most funding sources, in anything approximating normal market conditions, will not be financially motivated to invest in communities of practice, and unless said communities can manage to appeal to nonprofit funding sources, it is arguably in the interest of such groups to dial back their administrative overhead to accommodate more realistic commitments of bandwidth.
More specifically, if the prospects of financial compensation for administrative work are slim, and the form of compensation is more likely to consist of some sense of personal fulfillment, it is in the interest of the group to temper its collective ambitions wherever administrative work is involved. Then, as the affordances of the group’s collective bandwidth increases, and as the group encounters funding opportunities, this administrative overhead can be expanded to accommodate a greater scope of operations.
What is important is not that this administrative scope is minimized at all costs, but that it is only expanded in response to realistic prospects of adequate compensation. While some degree of administrative burden may potentially be abstracted in the form of protocols (see Notes on Extitutional Theory and Progressive Protocolization), there will likely always remain a need for social processes to facilitate some portion of collective action.
Another factor which contributes to the burnout of these communities, is the undue concentration of work allocated to particular individuals, often tacitly or by default.
In more traditional enterprises, operational responsibility tends to revolve around centralized agency, and often for good reason. A unified sense of direction can, if handled properly, minimize the risk of wasted or redundant efforts, and ensure that all constituent efforts of an enterprise amount to something compelling and coherent.
Even if a good portion of such centralized direction consists of efficient and incisive delegation, it still involves a considerable amount of administrative effort and executive complexity. Again, this all amounts to more work. In situations where prospects of compensation are modest, the workload tolerance should be as well.
One operational approach which may lend itself to communities of practice, is a joint model of do-ocracy and consent-based voluntarism. Do-ocracy is a mode of collective agency whereby individuals are empowered to take action with minimal need for group consensus.
Naturally, the virtue of do-ocracy is circumstantial, and mostly pertains to actions which are minimally consequential with respect to other members, and which are easily undone if the group reactively decides to undo them. If you conceptualize the whole sphere of operations required to sustain a given collective enterprise, some portion of those tasks can be considered conducive to do-ocracy. As an applied form of governance, do-ocracy often amounts to the path of least resistance, and its efficacy ultimately depends on the average discretion of the individuals involved.
With respect to the portion of tasks which do not lend themselves to individual discretion, some degree of consensus is required. Various consensus models can be employed to facilitate this phase of decision-making, but what is especially relevant to out present inquiry is not the decision-making process itself, but the execution of the decision.
It is here where this notion of consent-based voluntarism may apply, at least for some subset of tasks warranting group consensus. In this scenario, the person who suggests a project or undertaking is the person who ultimately administers said project or undertaking, provided consensus is reached. The objective of this approach is two-fold: firstly, to distribute executive agency among the group; and secondly, to reduce the rate at which people suggest actions which they themselves are unwilling to execute.
This latter phenomenon can be seen as a chronic yet often unrecognized factor contributing to scope creep, collective fatigue, and ultimately burnout. It is much easier to support the idea of some project, and to support the idea of someone else in the group handling it, than it is to volunteer to handle it oneself. Instead of promoting a culture where members passively suggest action items with the assumption that other members will volunteer for it, communities of practice may wish to promote a culture whereby action items are owned by those who suggest them.
The purpose of this shift in expectations is to encourage members to duly consider the importance of the actions they suggest, and to diminish the amount of unimportant work which tacitly falls upon the group facilitators to handle. By adopting a culture wherein whoever suggests an action is the one expected to execute it, we may expect to not only filter out some of the less important actions which clog up collective bandwidth, but beyond that also to distribute the more important or interesting projects among those with the capacity to suggest and execute them.
Communities of practice can provide a sense of belonging and an opportunity to learn from peers in an environment of mutualistic development. However, their organizational character arguably sets them aside from the more traditional approaches to bootstrapping collective enterprise. Thankfully, the unique purposes they serve can be fulfilled in low-overhead manners, provided members take a careful and conservative approach to administration and growth, bearing in mind the groups limitations. The considerations highlighted above will hopefully serve to inform generalized, yet operationally viable, protocols for communities of practice.
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