Communities of Practice and Innovation

When you have a question about how to do something, who do you turn to? Sometimes it is someone people would call an "expert" who works formally as a coach, teacher, advisor or consultant. But probably even more often you turn to someone who is working in a situation similar to yours and is likely to be dealing with a similar question - a colleague, work-mate, someone maybe at another organization. The first type of person usually brings more knowledge from across many organizations, and experience from diverse settings that are often conveyed in frameworks and theories. The second type of person is more likely to bring in-depth knowledge from detailed work applied over a long period of time in a smaller number of settings.

People, domain and practice are the building blocks of iScale Communities of Practice. Passion and interest are the cement. The outcome is not just increased competency, but networks and relationships to support your on-going development.

iScale Communities of Practice bring together both of these types of people who are working on common problems. They are working in a field or domain of activity where similar questions and challenges are raised. iScale defines these domains around particular competencies that people and organizations must possess to scale change for impact.

iScale stewards robust Communities of Practice, each with a particular suite of tools and strategies for enabling people to interact and learn. This includes community face-to-face meetings, blogs, wikis, e-conferences, site visits, and telephone meetings where participants share knowledge, coach each other, work on common projects and identify key learning priorities. The community can decide how formal these activities are - we have relaxed discussion groups, ad hoc issue meetings, simple question and answer notice boards, more traditional seminars and papers, workshops, as well as large multi-year projects.

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• Impacts Community of Practice