The problem with big organisations and innovation

At Company X ¹ every second Friday of the month used to be Digital Friday – a day set aside for peer-to-peer learning and ‘innovation’. My guess is that the originators had it in mind to create an environment where a learning culture would take hold, ultimately leading to the creation of a learning organisation. ²

There is a name for this phenomenon, and it is called a community of practice (CoP), a concept originally coined by the educational theorist Etienne Wenger. Company X is not unique in doing this, other companies are doing it too, and on the Web networked CoPs thrive. Wenger lists a number of concepts that characterise a CoP:

self-governance, voluntary participation, personal meaning, identity, boundary crossing, peer-to-peer connections, ³

but Digital Friday was in trouble – a new manager stepped in and Digital Friday was the first thing to go. This is not a disaster – community making continues online. But what is regrettable is the loss of sponsorship for a ‘designed’ learning community from a senior manager.

Wenger writes that CoPs don’t fit easily into hierarchical organisations and that many ‘designed’ CoP fail or die early:

The concern is that their informality and the difficulty to measure their value lets them fall through the cracks and lose priority. The word ‘community’ itself sometimes arouses suspicion of clubs or unfocused groups. A manager declared that a series of self-organised groups sounded too much like chaos.

But out of chaos comes order – probably nowhere more so than in digital culture ⁴ – and fronting up to this takes vision and courage.

Initiatives like Digital Friday are important. Peter Senge writes why:

As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex, work must become more ‘learningful’. ⁵

At Company X, attempts to nurture the emergence of a digital community – as a learning culture – are now superseded by self-styled ‘digital experts’.