54. Communities of Practice (civic solutions #2)

This is my second post about how whole place partnerships might employ civic solutions to tackle wicked problems. By civic solutions I mean:

Emergent strategies that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

My first stab at thinking about what civic solutions might look like in practice focussed on the public innovation literature and ended by looking at the ways in which whole place partnerships might harness collaborative innovation for problem solving.

I want to undertake a similar exercise in this post but this time I am drawing on the communities of practice idea that has grown out of the literature on learning and knowledge management and that is associated with Etienne Wenger in particular. Wenger has provided a general overview of the theory here.  Wenger has also written a book with Richard Mcdermott and William M. Snyder called Cultivating Communities of Practice and it is from this I am getting most of the content for this post.

I first came across the term communities of practice when it was the name of the predecessor to the Local Government Association’s Knowledge Hub. I’m not sure if that was inspired by Wenger’s concept but there are certainly some elements in common.

Anyhow, to business.

Communities of Practice

Wenger et al's definition is as follows:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topics, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

The idea is not a new one; in fact communities of practice are a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be observed throughout history. From the trade ‘corporations’ in Rome to the guilds in the middle ages right up to the tech networks of Silicon Valley in more recent times. We already belong to communities of practice even if we don’t recognise them as such; families, school communities, hobby clubs for example.

At the heart of the communities of practice concept is knowledge management as, according to Wenger et al; ‘knowledge has become the key to success’. Knowledge is collective, a dynamic social process and getting the greatest benefit means finding and utilising the right social structures – and this is where the communities of practice idea comes in. As communities of practice are in some senses natural the way to make them grow is through cultivation – creating the right environment and providing the right resources.

Getting this right can be of benefit to organisations and business in particular. Wenger et al argue that communities of practice have the potential to:

• Connect local pockets of expertise and isolated professionals
• Diagnose and address recurring business problems whose root causes cross team boundaries
• Analyze the knowledge-related sources of uneven performance across units performing similar tasks and work to bring everyone up the highest standard, and
• Link and coordinate unconnected activities and initiatives addressing a similar knowledge domain

It doesn’t take a much of a leap to see that similar benefits would be very desirable in a civic context. Indeed, while the primary concern is with private companies, Wenger et al are also keen to show how communities of practice can be applied to community problems. So, for example, the approach has been used to set up family services coalitions that address the bureaucracy surrounding ‘at risk’ families seeking government assistance in the US. The learning networks that were formed as a result achieved some valuable benefits such as new after school programmes and a dramatic reduction in the forms that families needed to fill out. The point here is that these solutions were emergent and developed from the bottom up – the leadership role was to facilitate the networks not design the solutions.

If we accept the argument of Wenger et al then communities of practice clearly have the potential to provide a means for whole place partnerships to address wicked problems. But what would this mean in practice?

Cultivating Communities of Practice to Tackle Wicked Problems

To help with the task of cultivating communities of practice Wenger et al break them down into three structural elements:

• The domain which creates the common ground and the sense of common identity – affirming its purpose and value.
• The community refers to the social fabric, the relationships and the human interactions.
• The practice refers to the frameworks, tool and ideas, information, stories and documents that the community members share –in order to ‘proceed efficiently in dealing with its domain.

For whole place partnerships these elements can be translated as follows:

• Domain = the outcome they want to achieve or the wicked problem they want to address
• Community = the relevant practitioners, public and politicians
• Practice = day to day delivery of projects, programmes and services

Wenger et al argue that ‘the most important factor in a community’s success is the vitality of its leadership’. In practical terms the role of ensuring that communities stay focussed on their domain, maintain their relationships and develop their practice falls upon the whole place partnership. Building on seven functions that Wenger et al suggest for the role of the community coordinator it is therefore possible to identify the core tasks for a whole place partnership that is seeking to cultivate communities of practice in order to tackle wicked problems:

1. Map the important issues that need to be addressed if the agreed outcomes are to be achieved / wicked problems solved
2. Plan and facilitate community events
3. Promote informal networking between members in the different communities
4. Foster the development of individual community members
5. Ensure that the formal organisations do not prevent communities from functioning – that they give people space, time and flexibility
6. Build resources to support practice such as a ‘knowledge base’, practice events etc
7. Regularly assess the health of the various communities and monitor their impact

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkingdagenhamarchive/7545414066/in/set-72157630518709532

52. Collaborative Innovation (civic solutions #1)

In my post about wicked problems I suggested that the answer to these problems might be civic solutions which I defined as:

Emergent strategies that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

In this post I want to look at collaborative innovation as one possible framework for thinking about civic solutions and consider what this approach might mean in practice for whole place partnerships. 

There is a large and diverse literature on innovation and I’m not claiming that this post is any kind of a review.  I’m going to draw mainly on just one recent paper that Sørensen & Torfing wrote as an introduction to a special edition of The Innovation Journal - it provides a nice overview and is of course well worth a read.

Innovation is a contested term insofar as there are a number of different ways to define it.  While the literature has historically been concerned with innovation in the private sector in recent years there has been a growing interest in public sector innovation to the extent that this now represents a field of research in its own right.  It is, however, important to understand the difference.  As Hartley argues in this paper in Public Money and Management:

... there is an important difference in innovation between private and public sectors. In the private sector, successful innovation is often seen to be a virtue in itself, as a means to ensure competitiveness in new markets or to revive flagging markets. In public services, however, innovation is justifiable only where it increases public value in the quality, efficiency or fitness for purpose of governance or services. Moreover, in the public sector at least, innovation and improvement need to be seen as conceptually distinct and not blurred into one policy phrase.

Sørensen & Torfing define innovation like this:

Innovation is a dynamic process through which problems and challenges are defined, new and creative ideas are developed, and new solutions are selected and implemented. It is a complex process with many jumps and feedback loops. Innovation can be seen as an intentional, learning-based practice that incorporates occasional chance discoveries. It brings about qualitative change as it breaks with conventional wisdom and well established practices. Innovation is not always based on an invention, but may also involve identifying, translating and adjusting new ideas and solutions from other countries, policy fields or organizations.

Innovation in this context is an emergent strategy process that depends on bottom up and frontline activity rather than top down planned solutions.  It is about recognising where public services need to be delivered differently, working through options ans implementing changes.   As Sørensen & Torfing suggest, the greatest public value is generated when innovative processes are collaborative, not just limited to individual organisations:

... we propose that public innovation can be further enhanced by bringing together different constellations of social and political actors in collaborative processes that involves a constructive management of difference . A constructive exchange between different kinds of actors helps to identify and define problems and challenges in ways that capture their complexity and to develop new, viable strategies for dealing with this complexity. Collaborative interaction facilitates trust-based circulation and cross-fertilization of new and creative ideas, and ensures a broad assessment of the potential risks and benefits of new and bold solutions and the selection of the most promising ones. Finally, the implementation of the new solutions is facilitated by resource exchange, coordination and the formation of joint ownership.

Hence collaboration is a civic process in the sense that it involves public, politicians and professionals.

But what does collaborative innovation mean in practice for whole place partnerships wishing to employ it as a means of tackling wicked issues?

Again we can turn to Sørensen & Torfing who have mapped out the different roles that managers will have to perform if they are to overcome ‘the different barriers to interaction, collaboration and innovation’.  They argue that managers must act as conveners, as mediators and as catalysts.  Below I attempt to translate each of these roles into a set of concrete tasks for whole place a partnership. 

 

Convening

 

Sørensen & Torfing suggest that:

...in order to create well-functioning interactive arenas with active and committed actors the managers must act as conveners. The convener motivates, empowers and brings together the actors, creates and frames the interactive arena, sets the initial agenda, clarifies the process and ensures a mutual adjustment of the expectations.

For the whole place partnership this could mean:

• Identifying the wicked issues and setting out what is expected to change
• Identifying the people who need to be involved in the collaborative process and inviting them to participate
• Designing the innovation process i.e. as a one off event or a longer term project, determining the method that will be used
• Securing resources; perhaps buying in external support
• Investing in and managing collaborative events as part of the agreed process
• Reporting back to participants at the end of the process
• Giving account, for example to scrutiny or external auditors

Remember, the expectation here is that the process will not be hierarchical; the partnership has to trust participants in the process to design and implement solutions.

Mediating

According to Sørensen & Torfing:

...in order to encourage and facilitate collaboration between the stakeholders the managers must act as mediators. The mediator aims to create or clarify interdependencies, manages the process by dividing it into different phases, builds trust and resolve disputes by aligning interests, constructing common frameworks and removing barriers to collaboration.

This is an interesting point to reflect on – it is important to recognise that conflict (even if it is with a small ‘c’) will exist in local governance and will need to be managed.  Sources of tension may include; competition for resources, funding relationships, issues of legitimacy between the elected and the non-elected; and tensions between organisational and partnership priorities. 

The partnership tasks might include:

• Recognising and understanding tensions and conflict 
• Defining what is shared in terms of values, vision, outcomes etc - but these must real for participants - they cannot be imposed top down
• Managing conflict through the design of processes – using appreciative processes for example
• Using overarching plans to provide a common framework
• Intervening where strategies and plans overlap or are in conflict
• Actively giving people permission to participate where they might otherwise feel constrained

Catalysing

According to Sørensen & Torfing:

... in order to spur innovation, the managers must act as catalysts. The catalyst exercises an entrepreneurial leadership that encourages re-framing of problems, brings new knowledge into play, explores existing and emerging constraints and opportunities, manages risks and encourages transformative learning and ‘out of the box’ thinking.

The point to reflect on here is that while members of the partnership cannot do everything, they certainly can be involved in the flow of the work and show ‘leadership by doing’.

This might include:

• Getting directly involved as a participant inside and outside of events
• Taking ownership of small projects
• Acting as a sponsor / champion to encourage others
• Talking up innovation and showing that they are relaxed about failure
• Enthusiastically communicating to reinforce and appreciate successes

External facilitation might be good in this context as it gives members of the partnership a chance to act and be seen to act as participants rather than leaders.

Photo credit: Jon Fravel