Communities of Practice in Government

http://www.ewenger.com/pub/pubusfedcioreport.doc Communities of practice in government:the case for sponsorship

An executive memo
with exhibits

William M. Snyder
Etienne Wenger

December 2003

Executive summary

Government today faces unprecedented challenges, from rising citizen expectations to an expanding breadth and complexity of problems to address. These challenges require an increased capability for learning and innovation as well as a scope of coordination that are not afforded by current structures. Creating large consolidated departments such as Homeland Security is only applicable in a few cases; and even in this case, addressing the problem of security still requires learning and coordination with other entities such as local governments and the private sector.

This study, sponsored by the Council of CIOs, reveals that promising new structural approaches already exist in government. They are peer-to-peer networks of practitioners that we call “communities of practice.” These communities cross formal boundaries to bring together practitioners who are facing a common challenge—to learn from each other, to develop new solutions to problems, to find synergies across organizations, and to coordinate efforts. We argue that it is important to learn to recognize these communities, legitimize their work, and cultivate them more intentionally and systematically.

We describe several communities of practice in the federal government. They bring practitioners together within and across agencies, as well as across government levels. And they produce results. The Rumble Strip community has spurred the widespread adoption of highway safety devices that have saved lives and taxpayer money. The E-Regulation community has accelerated the implementation of a cross-agency effort to reduce paperwork. SafeCities has created new partnerships across a range of disciplines to reduce gun violence on the streets. And CompanyCommand has helped Army company commanders take on the challenges of leadership.

We could have described many more, but we thought these four examples would make the point. They illustrate what these communities of practice are, how they work, what value they produce, and what it takes to make them thrive. But the main result of our study—and our main argument here—is the urgent need for executive sponsorship. This was a theme that pervaded all our conversations with community members. Practitioners unfailingly value the opportunity to learn and coordinate with peers, but they believe much greater results are possible with increased support from the hierarchy. The problem is especially acute when a community crosses agency or government-level boundaries because much of the value of such cross-boundary connections shows up outside the purview of local managers. The importance of executive sponsorship for communities of practice in government parallels the experience of leading organizations in the private sector.

This memo is addressed to leaders in agencies, in the Administration, in Congress, and in cross-sector advocacy groups. Community sponsorship should become an essential role of government executives. Sponsorship for community initiatives should be built into legislative mandates and the management strategies of the executive branch. The purpose of this memo is to make the case that results require sponsorship: We need committed leadership to cultivate strong, vital communities of practice; and we need such communities to build and apply the capabilities required now to get results.

Introduction

A recent press report summarized the results of a joint committee of the House and Senate intelligence panels, which found that “the September 11 attacks were preventable, but the plot went undetected because of communications lapses between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., which failed to share intelligence….”[1] The report itself went even further, arguing that underlying structural conditions of the various agencies that constitute the “intelligence community” (including NSC, CIA, FBI, DOD, CTC, NSA, and the US Military services) left it unprepared for terrorists attacks. Not only were there communication lapses, but the cross-agency community of intelligence personnel was “fragmented, under-resourced, and under-skilled.” (In fact, the report also found that between federal agencies and local authorities, and even within agencies, major gaps in information-sharing and coordination created significant security vulnerabilities.) The report’s recommendations included eliminating “obsolete barriers to coordination among agencies,” improved terrorism analysis, and better training for agency staff.

The 9/11 disaster demonstrates in stark terms the price we can pay for organizational structures and processes that are not keeping up with the complexity and urgency of the problems we face now. Today’s messy civic problems combined with increasing performance expectations are forcing leaders and citizens alike to challenge basic assumptions about organizing government to achieve mission-driven objectives. The current model just doesn’t seem ready to address the step-change in performance demands we must tackle in the 21st century.

Large and complex problems such as homeland security, education, or the environment require widespread collaboration among various governmental and non-governmental bodies. Citizens expect to have these problems addressed in their terms, not in terms of the division of labor among agencies. The efficient use of taxpayer funds can only be achieved by leveraging synergies and sharing practices across the entire government. New issues arise that require adaptive responses. Addressing these complex problems requires an unprecedented level of learning, innovation, and coordination among large and disparate groups of practitioners. Such collaboration must happen along several dimensions: within agencies and departments whose employees are distributed throughout the nation; across agencies and department boundaries; across levels of government, local, state, and federal; and in partnership with private-sector and non-profit organizations.

The purpose of this executive memo is to outline how network structures that we call “communities of practice” can be used to tackle urgent, complex civic problems. We focus especially on what federal executives can do now to increase the number and influence of such communities in order to strengthen our government’s ability to fulfill its mission.

Structure of the argument

Our argument for executive-level sponsorship for community-based knowledge networks can be summarized as follows:

·  The complexity of problems faced by governments today requires an increased capacity for learning, innovation and professional development—at levels beyond what traditional structures alone can provide.

·  Indeed, no formal structure can fully address problems that are too complex to predict or standardize. Moreover, these problems invariably require a configuration of disciplines and resources that are rarely contained in any one agency, level, or sector. This calls for the explicit cultivation of knowledge-based, boundary-crossing structures such as communities of practice to complement formal agency and program structures.

·  These communities contribute to the work of agencies in multiple ways, by developing capabilities at both individual and organizational levels, and by coordinating activities across boundaries.

·  Despite their clear benefits, cultivating communities in bureaucratic organizations can be difficult because the investments of time and effort and the value produced do not fall cleanly within organizational structures.

·  One of the main lessons learned in a decade of intentional initiatives to cultivate communities of practice in leading organizations is the need for executive sponsorship. Executives need to understand the role of sponsorship and the forms it can take.

·  Community sponsorship should become an institutionalized dimension of government leadership roles. Sponsorship for community initiatives has to be built explicitly and systematically into the work of government, both in the design of legislative mandates and in the management strategies of White House and agency leaders.

Intended audience

Without strong leadership from senior government officials, community initiatives will not take root or fulfill their potential for strategic impact. This memo thus targets a number of audiences, including congressional leaders, agency executives, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, the President’s Management Council, and citizens who ultimately pay the price—as both investors and customers—of government services and legislative policies. These various leadership audiences can be categorized at three levels corresponding to their primary areas of responsibility: those whose focus is agency-specific performance; those with a cross-agency mandate; and those whose interests cross agency, governmental, and sector boundaries.

·  Agency leaders should review their top strategic objectives and identify areas where stronger cross-boundary collaboration and knowledge sharing—within and across agency boundaries—could significantly enhance results.

·  Congressional and Administration leaders need to consider how programs will be administered without limiting their assumptions to specific agencies or departments. Formal approaches as well as informal, peer-to-peer mechanisms should be considered to foster coordination across agencies, government levels, and sectors.

·  Citizens and advocacy groups need to learn more about how organizing approaches—not merely changes in laws, policies, and funding levels—can increase their capacity to share the influence and responsibilities of civic stewardship.

It is important for stakeholders in various roles to see the connection between our organizational capacity and our ability to achieve the results we aspire to—whether within, across, or beyond the boundaries of federal government agencies. It is especially important for senior executives to recognize these opportunities and understand their crucial role as sponsors of these initiatives.

Organization of the memo

This memo is organized into five sections addressing the following topics:

1. Four representative communities of practice in the federal government
2. The value that such communities can bring to organizations
3. The leadership structure required to support communities
4. The crucial role of executive sponsors of community-based initiatives
5. Recommendations for next steps

To keep this memo short, we have focused on the argument for sponsorship and put more detailed information on cases and concepts in separate exhibits. These exhibits are referenced in relevant sections of the memo and are also listed on page 16.

A community strategy for building government capability

The knowledge-based, network structures that government needs today are not new. To the contrary, they have always existed on an informal level wherever practitioners—whether farmers, artists, or engineers—have gathered to swap stories, solve problems, or just hang out together. In recent years, however, these structures have been deployed aggressively and systematically in a growing number of leading global organizations (such as Proctor & Gamble, Shell Oil, McKinsey & Company, the World Bank, and DaimlerChrysler). They are getting particular attention in the private sector where organizations depend on such strategic community initiatives to compete in a hyper-competitive global economy. For them “knowledge capital”—skills, methodologies, and innovation capabilities—drives results. We call these knowledge-based networks “communities of practice” to emphasize the role of practitioners in taking charge of knowledge issues and we believe they provide an essential new structural tool that can dramatically increase government’s capacity to fulfill its civic mission on a number of fronts.

Examples of communities of practice can be found throughout the federal government today. Some are thriving and some are struggling. Some are based in one agency, others span several agencies, and some even cut across levels and sectors, involving state and local governments as well as private-sector and non-profit organizations. Here is a brief description of four representative communities. More extensive descriptions and analysis of each community can be found in the Exhibits section.

An agency-based community: the Rumble Strips Community

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) had set a strategic goal to reduce highway fatalities by 20 per cent nationwide in the 10 years between 1998 and 2008. Leaders of FHWA’s Knowledge Management (KM) group worked with agency executives to design an initiative to accelerate the diffusion of rumble strips—a proven road-design innovation that significantly reduces run-off-road crashes. Their challenge was to go beyond disseminating information, which was having little influence, towards more compelling ways to engage state safety engineers and policy makers to implement rumble strips as a smart investment that saves lives as well as tax dollars.

Rumble Strips

Sponsor / Federal Highways Administration
Domain / Installing rumble strips to prevent highway crashes and fatalities
Members / 100+ federal and state agents nationwide, industry, civic groups
Activities / On-line access to research, vetted written and video descriptions of methods, directory of members; coordinator for Q&A and expert referrals
Outcomes / Acceleration of adoption across states; reduction in highway fatalities

8  See Exhibit 1, page 17, for the full story of the Rumble Strips Community.

An inter-agency community: the E-Regulation Community

A number of regulatory agencies had to respond to a legislative mandate to offer online access to compliance forms for their customers. Bill Bennett, the person leading this initiative at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), decided to seek out his counterparts at other agencies to explore best practices for meeting that mandate. The Federal CIO Council was aware of his activities and through its Knowledge Management Working Group invited Bennett to coordinate a pilot community of practice involving a number of federal regulatory organizations. This community would serve as a forum for learning from each other, finding synergies, establishing standards, and coordinating with key entities such as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

E-Regulations/E-Records

Sponsor / Federal CIO Council
Domain / Developing electronic compliance and records management systems
Members / Professionals in IT, KM, and Records Management from: FERC, DOD, GSA, SEC, NRC, IRS, NARA, Interior, Agriculture, Transportation
Activities / Face-to-face meetings, sharing agency approaches, joint project
Outcomes / Faster learning about methods across agencies; phase one of an initiative to establish on-line access for citizens; new community to design e-records system

8  See Exhibit 2, page 20, for the full story of the E-Reg community.

An inter-level, inter-sector community: SafeCities

Reducing gun violence on the streets of America is a goal that is shared by many governmental and non-governmental organizations in cities across the nation. The National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) office responded to a report from the Attorney General’s office that highlighted an opportunity for cities to learn from each other about how to reduce gun violence. A core group of managers from several federal agencies convened a community of practice that included practitioners from federal agencies, mayoral offices, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as citizen groups, faith leaders, school administrators, business executives, social workers, and others. The SafeCities community fostered learning across its member cities as well as collaborations among players at local, state, and federal levels.

SafeCities

Sponsor / Vice President’s Office/NPR, Departments of Justice and Treasury, White House Office of Management and Budget
Domain / Reduce gun violence nationwide
Members / Justice (mostly the Office of Community Policing), Treasury (mostly ATF), local law enforcement, social services, faith leaders, etc.
Activities / Teleconferences, listerv, website, visits, face-to-face conference, projects
Outcomes / Joint efforts between police and faith leaders that spread innovative policies and practices to new cities; and increased collaboration among ATF, FBI, US Attorneys, and local law enforcement

8  See Exhibit 3, page 25, for the full story of SafeCities.