Communities of Practice

The article, Creating and Facilitating Communities of Practice, focuses on the unstructured organizational form that have been emerging in organizations called communities of practice (CoPs). According to the article, these CoPs have the ability to create competitive advantage through knowledge sharing, learning, and change, but have one central weakness. Management cannot control the focus or content of CoPs.

This makes CoPs a double edge sword. It can boost your organization's performance and efficiency, but also can lose focus. This seems to question the importance of management within knowledge organizations. In my opinion, it is not a matter of lack of manageability--the issue at hand is the lack of knowledge involving how to manage these communities. My hypothesis is that effective management of communities of practice should be based in leadership, rather than in management. A manager tends to demand control and performance, while a leader can influence people in a positive way in order to generate the same performance. Organizational leadership is a skill that needs to be developed in order to promote CoPs, which in turn promotes effective knowledge management.