Communities of Practice (COPs) bring together people with knowledge and experience in a given subject. COPs tend to emerge and grow organically. Tendrils form between people; like seeks out like, and a network forms. COPs are self-organized and self-managed.

By contrast, when organizations try to bring together a concentration of knowledge and expertise they create Centres of Excellence (COEs). These are resourced by management, which sets goals and channels the thinking of its members. COEs tend to be exclusive. COPs are inclusive. Guess which work best as catalysts for innovative ideas and for accelerating learning.

Karl Moore, Professor of Management at McGill University, is exploring a third organizational form that leaders may find more useful than Centres of Excellence; a form that embraces the feeling that the best ideas emerge from the kind of voluntary sharing that is a feature of a Community of Practice, and cannot be as effectively mandated from on high, as with Centres of Excellence.

Moore's new idea is Accelerated Communities of Practice (ACOPS, inevitably), which are a synthesis of COPs and COEs. (Still with me?)

"ACOPs combine aspects of COPs and COEs and operate as a middle stage between the two," claims Moore, who is working on helping global organizations identify which COPs have the potential to morph into COEs and then on how to make it happen. He feels ACOPs may be the halfway stage that will lead eventually to Centres of Excellence that have grown organically out of COPs - emerged, in other words, with a little massaging - rather than created top-down.

Since emergent change benefits from a groundswell of power whereas top-down change mostly fails, I look forward to seeing how Moore's experiments work out.

Source: Peter Fisk, who is great at spotting emergent ideas, has, on his Marketing Genius website, an article by Stuart Crainer from Business and Strategy Review, looking at what business thought leaders are working on at the moment. It's about a year old now but, hey, a lot of it is news to me.

Labels: knowledge

That's a headline from the Ironic Times this week, referring to the great 'known unknown' of being sacked:

It's a reference, of course, to his widely-lampooned musing a few years ago in answer to a journalist's question, about what we know and don't know. It went something like this:

The Unknown
"As we know, There are known knowns: There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns: That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."

I think I know where he stole it from - Fernando Flores, the Chilean senator, philosopher, former transformational business consultant, father of a number of very important ideas in computing (action workflow and others) and former political prisoner under Pinochet.

If my guess is right, it's a perfect example of how original thought from a first class mind can come across as rubbish when mis-applied by a Rumsfeld mind.

Here's where I'm guessing some researcher at the Department of Defense found this original thought, passed it to his boss so he could maneouvre around the 'terrorist information' problem and had it translated into gobbledegook for his troubles:

"...The World According to Flores exists in three realms. The first is the smallest -- and the most self-limiting: What You Know You Know. It is a self-contained world, in which people are unwilling to risk their identity in order to take on new challenges. A richer realm is What You Don't Know -- the realm of uncertainty, which manifests itself as anxiety or boredom...But it is the third realm of Flores's taxonomy to which people should aspire: What You Don't Know You Don't Know. To live in this realm is to notice opportunities that have the power to reinvent your company, opportunities that we're normally too blind to see. In this third realm, you see without bias: You're not weighed down with information. The language of this realm is the language of truth, which requires trust. "

That's from a 1998 article by Harriet Rubin in Fast Company magazine on Fernando Flores

Technorati Tags: Donald+Rumsfeld, Fernando+Flores, known unknown, knowledge, leadership

Labels: Fernando Flores, knowledge