What is a community of practice? Definition, examples and how to run one
What a community of practice is, how it differs from a team or a network, and how to start one, run it, keep what it learns and see whether it works.
A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and who learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. This definition comes from Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner. Etienne Wenger is one of the two researchers who created the term. Three elements make up a community of practice: a domain that brings the members together, a community in which they help each other, and a shared practice of experiences, tools and cases.
It is not a team. People usually take part by choice, it does not deliver a project, and it lasts as long as its domain matters to its members. This guide explains where the term comes from, then how to start a community of practice inside an organisation, how to run it, how to keep what it learns and how to tell whether it works.
Where the term comes from
The anthropologist Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger created the term in Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991), while they were studying apprenticeship. People usually picture an apprentice alone with a master. Lave and Wenger saw that apprentices learn mostly from journeymen and from more advanced apprentices. They called this group a community of practice: it works as a living curriculum for the newcomer, who starts at the edge with simple tasks and slowly becomes a full member.
Wenger then moved the focus to the workplace. In Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998), he studied office work by following a group of clerks who processed medical insurance claims. In 2002, with Richard McDermott and William Snyder, he wrote Cultivating Communities of Practice for companies, with examples from DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey, Shell and the World Bank. This book gave the three elements the names used today: domain, community and practice.
A 2009 review in the journal Implementation Science describes this change: a theory of learning became a management tool. The review calls one tension perhaps the most contentious: between the growth of the people involved and the results the organisation expects.
The three elements: domain, community and practice
The 2023 guidebook by the Wenger-Trayners, Phil Reid and Claude Bruderlein links one question to each element. The Wenger-Trayners' introduction to the concept (2015) adds, for each element, something that looks similar but is not enough on its own.
| Element | What it is | The question to ask | Not enough on its own |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | the area that brings members together and gives them a shared competence | What is the community about? | a network of contacts |
| Community | members who interact, help each other and care about their standing in the group | Who should be at the table? | the same job title, without interaction |
| Practice | a shared repertoire: experiences, stories, tools, ways of handling recurring problems | What should members do together? | a shared interest, such as liking the same kind of film |
The three elements together make a community of practice, and you cultivate one by developing all three at the same time. Members are not always aware of their practice. The authors describe engineers at a car manufacturer who work on windscreen wipers and collect their tricks in a knowledge base. Nurses who have lunch together in a hospital cafeteria, by contrast, may not realise that these conversations are one of their main sources of knowledge about patient care.
Community of practice, team, task force or network?
The 2023 guidebook compares a community of practice with other structures in an organisation:
| Structure | What holds it together | In a community of practice |
|---|---|---|
| Team or project group | a task, a project or a function; it delivers a product or service and ends when the task is done | it develops a capability, and lasts while the domain stays relevant |
| Task force | a broad problem; members represent their unit and negotiate a shared position | members take part as learners, even when they come from different units |
| Training | a curriculum set by experts, over a fixed period | practitioners choose what to work on, based on the problems they face |
| Network | connections between people, with no shared identity; easy to join and leave | an identity built around a domain, and a commitment to improve the practice |
As the Wenger-Trayners note, the same people take part in teams and in communities of practice. An engineer works in a project team and meets colleagues from other projects in the community of their profession. This is how the community's learning reaches the team's work.
What communities of practice do
The Wenger-Trayners describe typical activities with a sentence a member might say. Some of their examples:
- solving problems: "Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I'm stuck."
- seeking experience: "Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?"
- reusing assets: a proposal written for one client last year, adapted for a new one
- building an argument: learning how other countries do it, to convince a ministry
- documenting: "We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all."
- finding gaps: who knows what, what the group is missing, and which other groups to connect with
Communities come in many forms. Some are small and some are very large, often with a core group and many members at the edge. Some meet face to face and some mostly online. Some stay inside one organisation and some bring several together. Some are formally recognised and have a budget, and some are informal. Not all of them are called communities of practice: some are called learning networks, thematic groups or tech clubs.
How to start a community of practice
- Check that there is a reason. The 2023 guidebook starts with a few questions. Are there people who would gain from talking but rarely do? Is there an informal network already? Is the organisation missing a capability? Then the most direct one: why would members give their time?
- Start with people, not with a tool. The UK government's community development handbook, updated in 2023, gives this order: first the members and their needs, then a programme of activities, and only then the platforms.
- Talk to future members before any launch. For the guidebook's authors, a launch event comes after the work has started: it confirms what earlier conversations have prepared.
- Or start without a launch. If a colleague has an urgent problem, invite a few peers to discuss it. Do it again with another case, then ask the group whether it wants to continue.
- Find a sponsor. This is a manager who recognises the time members spend, makes sure the community is heard and finds resources, without trying to control it.
The 2023 guidebook also describes the roles. They are often taken on by volunteers, alongside their main job:
| Role | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sponsor | a manager who gives the community legitimacy in the hierarchy and recognises members' participation |
| Community leader | keeps the community active day to day, stays in contact with members and checks that they get value from it |
| Core group | a few committed members who help the leader; depending on one or two people may work at the start, but not over time |
| Active, occasional and peripheral members | each person takes part when the topic concerns them; this is normal, and newcomers often start at the edge |
| Support team | when an organisation has many communities: trains leaders, finds sponsors, helps with launches and tools |
How to run a community of practice
A regular rhythm matters more than frequency. Some communities meet once a year, others every quarter or every month. The 2023 guidebook recommends regular meetings that fit members' schedules, with a format that repeats. The UK handbook suggests telling newcomers what this rhythm looks like, for example a few new messages a day and a monthly meeting where members show their work.
Meetings are for interaction. The guidebook advises against one-way presentations, which can be recorded instead. A typical format is the case clinic. A member brings a real challenge, if possible an urgent one, with a precise question, and the group works on it for about an hour. The member gets the group's ideas, and everyone learns from the discussion.
Low attendance at one meeting is not a reason to worry. Participation has peaks and quiet periods. Send a summary to the people who missed it, and they will be more likely to come next time. Between meetings, let real needs drive the exchanges. The guidebook's authors find that discussions started only to keep the community busy rarely work.
How to keep what a community learns
The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission surveyed the Commission's communities of practice to write a playbook published in 2021. The survey found that keeping knowledge was a weak point: what communities retained was shallow, and so was its use at work. Yet the communities saw the pooling of ideas as one of their strengths.
A useful conversation leaves nothing behind if nobody writes it down. The guides above suggest three practices:
- record sessions, or at least share notes and conclusions with people who could not attend;
- give someone the role of editor: the UK handbook lists "creating clear documentation members can use" among the community manager's tasks, along with encouraging members to own that knowledge;
- document the practice together: in the 2023 guidebook, the community agrees on an outline, one member drafts a section, and the group discusses it until it is ready. The author often stays responsible for keeping that section up to date.
What this work produces takes familiar forms: answers to recurring questions, case studies, tip sheets and lessons learned. When the community agrees on a better way of working, it can become a procedure, with an owner and a review date. Our guide to standard operating procedures explains what a procedure needs to contain.
How to tell whether a community of practice works
The 2023 guidebook uses a value creation framework that the authors developed in Learning to Make a Difference (2020). It has four basic types of value, each with its own indicators:
| Value | The question | Example indicators |
|---|---|---|
| Immediate | Is the time spent together worth it? | feedback at the end of a meeting, members who return, level of activity |
| Potential | What does the community produce? | documents, tools and promising practices, and what members think of them |
| Applied | Do members change how they work? | follow-up on actions, members' own reports, surveys |
| Realised | Do results change? | indicators the organisation already tracks: turnaround time, client satisfaction, system downtime, staff turnover |
Four more types of value complete the framework: strategic (conversations with decision makers), enabling (resources and better facilitation), orienting (knowing what happens elsewhere) and transformative (changes beyond the members' own practice).
An indicator alone does not show that the community made the difference. So the authors add stories, built on four questions to members: what was your experience in the community, what did you gain from it, what did you do with it, and what was the effect?
Rigorous evidence is limited, at least in healthcare. A 2023 systematic review included 50 studies of communities of practice in healthcare. Only 11 used statistical methods that could show an effect, and only one was a randomised trial. That trial, run in 2010 and published in 2015, covered 122 hospitals of the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Half of them got support from an existing heart failure community of practice to join a national quality programme. After five months, 54% of the supported hospitals had enrolled, compared with 10% of the others.
Why communities of practice fail
The guides above and the 2023 review list several causes:
- Starting with the tool. It comes first in the UK handbook's list of common mistakes. A community can exist without dedicated software, and members often avoid tools that make their work harder.
- Thinking that opening a space is enough. Software, a logo and rules do not attract members. Someone has to invite them and encourage them, especially in the early days.
- No time. In the 2023 healthcare review, lack of time was the barrier reported most often. As the 2023 guidebook says, being in a community is almost never a person's main job.
- Depending on one or two people. Without a core group, the energy leaves with the leader.
- Turning meetings into presentations. The agenda becomes a list of topics instead of work on real problems.
- Turning inward. Silos, a consensus that nobody questions, and a few dominant voices are three of the risks the 2023 guidebook lists.
- No recognition. For the Wenger-Trayners, the organisation usually needs to recognise the value of taking part, or members will not bother. Good facilitation helps, but it is not the main reason people take part.
Examples of communities of practice
The 2023 guidebook describes Ignite, the community of practice programme in the technology division of the bank JPMorgan Chase. It began in the Glasgow office, a software engineering centre where colleagues were sometimes solving the same problems in isolation. Most earlier communities there had faded because they lacked visibility, support and legitimacy. With Ignite, anyone can propose a community on an internal website. Colleagues join or volunteer with one click, and the proposals that attract the most interest get support to launch, sometimes within a few days.
In the public sector, the Wenger-Trayners' 2015 introduction opens with a community of internal auditors from public administrations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. When the authors described it in 2015, the group had met 34 times in seven years. Its members wrote manuals and other publications that they felt their profession was missing.
Some organisations give each community its own space. At our customer Bouygues Construction, the human resources (HR) function opened community spaces on career development, mobility, diversity and temporary work. HR professionals create these spaces themselves, and employees and managers comment and ask questions next to the HR policies.
This is what we build with Elium: a space for each community, with its members and its articles, an owner for each article, and a review date when it needs one. For the difference between sharing knowledge and managing it, read knowledge sharing vs knowledge management.
Common questions
A group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and who learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The definition comes from Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner. It rests on three elements: a domain, a community and a shared practice.
The domain: the area that brings members together and gives them a shared identity. The community: the relationships that let them learn from each other. The practice: the shared repertoire of experiences, tools and cases they build over time.
Members solve problems together, ask for information, look for someone who has faced the same situation, reuse each other's work, discuss new developments and write down what they learn. Some produce toolkits or guidebooks for their profession.
Internal auditors from public administrations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia who, by 2015, had met for seven years and wrote the manuals their profession was missing. Or engineers at a car manufacturer who collect their tricks for designing windscreen wipers in a knowledge base.
Organisations use names such as learning network, thematic group or tech club. The name matters less than the three elements: a shared domain, members who interact, and a practice they develop together.
A team forms around a task, delivers a product or service and ends when the task is done. A community of practice forms around a domain, develops a capability and lasts as long as the domain matters to its members. The same person often belongs to both.
Where to start
Look for a question that people in your organisation ask again and again, and that several of them each handle alone. Bring three or four of them together around a real case, and write down what you learn from it. If they want to meet again, you may have a community. To see how Elium gives each community its own space, book a demo.
Sources
- Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William M. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice, Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
- Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Introduction to communities of practice, 2015.
- Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Phil Reid and Claude Bruderlein, Communities of practice within and across organizations: a guidebook, second edition, Social Learning Lab, 2023.
- Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Learning to Make a Difference: Value Creation in Social Learning Spaces, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Li L. C. et al., Evolution of Wenger's concept of community of practice, Implementation Science, 2009.
- Government Digital Service and Central Digital and Data Office, Community development handbook, updated 29 November 2023.
- European Commission, Joint Research Centre, The Communities of Practice Playbook, 2021.
- Noar A. P. et al., The aims and effectiveness of communities of practice in healthcare: a systematic review, PLOS ONE, 2023.
- Heidenreich P. A. et al., Facilitation of a multihospital community of practice to increase enrollment in the Hospital to Home national quality improvement initiative, Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 2015.