Talking about communities of practice can be pretty tricky, straining the patience of the action-oriented folks if it goes on too long and making the analytical types anxious if conversations get too loose.  These communities face a raft of issues about leadership, technology, boundaries, and purpose.  In a couple of these meta-communities I’ve introduced the concept of regular “experiments”, borrowing an idea in Derby and Larsen’s Agile retrospectives. (They aren’t talking about communities of practice, but in a way that’s what their book is about.)  Collective experiments are a useful activity no matter what a community’s domain might be, but with a CoP meta-community the can be especially helpful.

Here are some of the questions that come up in meta communities, all of which are in some way a matter of balancing opposites:

• What exactly are our goals as community leaders?  Is it legitimate to find new goals as we go and if so, how do we do that?  Could we develop richer and more useful frameworks to evaluate our selves and our work?

• If we’re trying to “improve our practice as leaders” we have to figure out what, exactly, our practice is.  How do we do that?  Compared to what other roles do we define ourselves?

• How do we get into the nitty gritty of making comparisons between practices and experiments of different members — so that we dig in enough without getting too personal?

• Can we simultaneously stand inside and outside of our practice?  We want to be critical enough without too much navel-gazing and without getting mechanical about what we’re doing.

The point about experiments is that none of these questions need to be answered in the abstract or “for ever.”  They need to be answered in practice, for the moment.  Swapping stories is obviously a core practice in this kind of work, but that can be too sloppy and too informal.  Charlotte Linde’s discussion about places and occasions for remembering and telling stories suggests to me that “experiments” are a great umbrella to get the right stories out.  Just as Jerome Bruner talks about how the law is all about formalized stories, I think that “experiments” are a nice framework for formalizing stories about community leadership.

From that perspective the whole art of community leadership might come down to providing good occasions for practitioners to remember together what works and what doesn’t.  It applies to meta-communities as well as garden variety communities of practice.

—- References:

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, Agile Retrospectives; making good teams great (Raleigh, NC: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006) http://isbn.nu/0977616649

Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  http://isbn.nu/9780195140293

Jerome Bruner, Making Stories; Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)  http://isbn.nu/9780674010994

Jean Lave (1996) “Teaching, as Learning, in Practice” Mind, Culture, and Activity
3 (3), 149-164.

http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2

On page 156 she says:

“[Martin Packer] asked [what a theory of learning consisted of] because he already had an answer in mind: At minimum, he proposed, a theory of learning consists of three kinds of stipulation: a telos for the changes implied in notions of learning; the basic relation assumed to exist between subject and social world: and mechanisms by which learning is supposed to take place.”Telos: that is, a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as goal directed activity),”Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as learners and things to-be-learned),”Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.”

1. Telos: that is, a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as goal directed activity),
2. Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as learners and things to-be-learned),
3. Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.

To me this is an almost exact match for the good old Buddhist three-fold logic of Ground, Path and Fruition, although it’s usually used in a different order:

1. Fruition: direction of development (not just what you are teaching but what people are learning for themselves)
2. Ground: context, social-network, world-view assumptions
3. Path: mechanisms, activities, and processes for the negotiation of meaning

I actually like “fruition” over “telos,” the Greek word for “end” because fruition reminds us that it’s only a partial end in that it contains the seeds of the next cycle. Learning certainly is that way. Anyway, I’m resolving to use three-fold logic as I explore what it is I’m doing as a coach. I’ve been thinking a lot about who exactly it is that I think I’m helping and how. I think that thee-fold logic applies to individual sessions as well as at larger scales of interaction. It’s a handy meme.

To encourage anybody who’s interested to read the article, here’s a snippet from the introduction:

Theories that reduce learning to individual mental capacity/activity in the last instance blame marginalized people for being marginal. Common theories of learning begin and end with individuals (though these days they often nod at “the social” or “the environment” in between). Such theories are deeply concerned with individual differences, with notions of better and worse, more and less learning, and with comparison of these things across groups-of-individuals. Psychological theories of learning prescribe ideals and paths to excellence and identify the kinds of individuals (by no means all) who should arrive; the absence of movement away from some putatively common starting point becomes grounds for labeling others sub-normal. The logic that makes success exceptional but nonetheless characterizes lack of success as not normal won’t do.

She’s radical.

Teaching certainly is an object for analytical inquiry, but not an explanation for learning.

Reasoning by analogy we wouldn’t say that coaching is an explanation or a cause of improved performance, would we?

One of the main findings of the project I did with Lauren Klein and Theodora Fitzsimmons was that there is some kind of spectrum between coaching and mentorship. We put the slides from our presentation at the C&T Conference on slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

I just had a look at a previous posting on defining a coaching relationship, which still makes a lot of sense to me.

References:

Jean Lave, “Teaching, as learning, in Practice,” in Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(1): 1996, pp. 149-164.

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• Technology for Communities
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• Coaching community leaders (a new one, for a workshop on June 28th in East Lansing, Michigan, as part of the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies)

A consequence of this ease is that abandoned blogs will proliferate in the future.