Building internal communities that create real value

Organizations often struggle with the same question: How do you turn internal groups – whether called Community of Practice (CoP), Guilds, Learning Groups or Task Forces – into engines of innovation and value creation? Experience shows despite good start they fail to deliver lasting impact, stay engaged and focused.Beitrag lesenBuilding internal communities that create real…

Here is a solution proposal…

At this year’s Ada Lovelace’s Festival, I had the pleasure of co-hosting a community session on „Building internal Learning Communities: Overcoming the Most Common Mistakes“ with Dr. Kimo Quaintance, Chief Product Officer at ada. The internal Learning Communities are crucial for the concept of ada fellowship, as they leverage the learning from the fellows into the organization. Kimo is driving the activities together with Eva Degener to create lively communities within the partners organizations and for ada as a whole. As former Fellowship Lead I experienced how hard it is to keep the motivation of fellows high and foster their engagement to share the gained knowledge.

Based on our combined experience in transformation and community building, we shared crucial insides about fostering effective learning communities within organizations.
In the presentation we laid out what the basic believes are regarding communities, how we can actually measure the success and what solutions exist to overcome common mistakes.

Most importantly we invite you to join our ada Community Builder group to elaborate on playbooks and the special ada Fellowship Lead CoPilot, helping to establish successful corporate business communities.

register here …

The Common Challenges

Across organizations, regardless of industry or community type, we learned about the same type of challenges. This is highly interesting and raising questions to the researcher in us:

Why is it so hard to demonstrate the Return of Invest (RoI) in time or even money to stakeholders?
Build a community is an easy job, why is it hard to keep it alive?
Isn’t learning an intrinsic motivation?
A learning community of selected professionals can self-organize – why does it not work for us?
Why is it so hard for assigned fellows or members to focus on learning, and leveraging the knowledge in our company.
Our corporate culture fosters learning, so why do we need to invest so much energy, money in it?

Common mistakes

Uncertainty and unclear understanding of roles …

The roles of a Fellow, Fellowship Lead, Sponsor and the ada teams are not often understood and agreed. This may lead to wrong expectations who is doing what and how.

For example, we might expect that the ada team is „running the show“, however for our internal community to flourish they do not have the contacts. And at the same time the Fellowship Lead needs more than just 10% of capacity to keep the learning fellows engaged. It is a constant journey.

Not accessing the energy of choice (esp. in role selection) …

The way we involve people into the community has a direct impact on their own behavior and involvement. Members who have an intrinsic motivation and pro-actively ask to join, are more likely engaged and willing to invest the additional energy needed.

We can leverage this to encourage these members to drive e.g., topic groups of their interest and influence more colleagues to learn about these aspects of our modern work.

Community activity focus on control over learning

In a classic industrial environment we try to measure simple aspects such as the completion degree of learning. Ada provides various matrices for these purposes allowing us as Fellowship Leads to understand the current state.

Within the learning community this creates a focus on their own achievements and completion status (output) rather than the intended impact in the organization (outcome).

Little understanding and no willingness to learn what your community actually needs

A corporate community is always a special group of people. Without understanding their needs it is hard to get them working together. Often this is a side-project and staying engaged or even contribute to a bigger picture is an additional effort.. As stakeholders and Fellowship Leads it is essential to learn about your community to give the required guardrails, inspiration and support needed.

The current organizational culture and what ada fellowship is driving

There are various models and descriptions about a corporate culture. Based on what your foundation and current focus is, learning becomes an integrated or additional part of work. Ada Fellowship program drives for a very self-motivated and forward thinking culture of innovation. In case this is in contradiction to your corporate culture it will become very hard to leverage the opportunities of the program and be successful.

How do we measure

The Sense of Community Index 2 (SCI-2) is one of the scientific research papers on communities. It integrates various kinds of communities and allows them to be judged based on a structured questionnaire. The resulting spider web radar gives you a very good overview of the state of health for your community, especially when you compare it over time. It is not a strict measurement tool, to understand the needs and also implications for the community it is a suitable solution.

What we learned – ada fellowship & partner setup

One of the relevant observations is that the understanding of „who are the members of a community“ is a very delicate and complex issue in the setup of the ada fellowship program.

Due to its nature, there is the wider ada fellow community that meets during expert lectures or other events. At the same time there is the inner circle community within the partners organization.

For any fellow they will always make the distinction between this wider and inner circle, especially when it comes to questions regarding „When I have a problem, I can talk about it with members of this community“ or „This community has been successful in getting the needs of its members met.„

Both of these dimensions apply more to the inner corporation community than to the wider ada community. Also laying out why these results are the core area of focus for ada Fellowship Leads.

Solution scenario – the donut network

Based on Kate Raworth and Agile Organizations from André Häusling,

Drawing inspiration from Kate Rawoth model, we’ve developed the „Donut network“ approach.

The stakeholders of the internal ada fellowship program (e.g. executives, HR, content leaders) and the Fellowship Leads would build the center (of gravity) in the middle. They ensure from inside that the groups will work within the general guardrails and stay together. Also in case one of the topics becomes in-active, they would encourage and influence new groups to be formed to ensure balance and leveraging of the investments.

In the circle around, each fellow creates a team (sometimes called a mob of not more than 5 people). Each of them dedicated to one topic (e.g. society 4.0 or sustainability). With the fellow being the content driver he/she would leverage the ada knowledge and skills to 4 more people inside the corporation.

The internal customer is outside of this donut network. Each team will actively work with their customers and try to apply the gained skills and experience. They drive the communication and measure their own impact to the organization.

In a classic hierarchical setup the communication about the learning topics flows from the leaders to the people. In relationship to the ada learning, the result would be that either all the leaders would need to join the ada fellowship program, or that the impact would first circle from the learners to the leaders and then back to the people. Which of course is a waste of time and resources.

The advantage of the donut network is that both sides benefit from the topic teams. As stakeholders and leaders you get crucial insides and first hand feedback about the topics and internal customers are giving direct feedback to those who are engaged to share their new skills. To close the loop stakeholders and leaders can observe (doing Gemba) how the behavior of the organization changes.

Summary and call to join us

Based on the festival feedback, there is a demand for further support to create and run internal learning communities. Therefore we start one for the Fellowship Leads with the purpose to create relevant playbooks and a special CoPilot for Fellowship Leads. The intend is to help any corporate community to leverage their full potential. Independent if we speak about a technical guild, a community of practice for a process or method or a learning community focused on artificial intelligence.

So if you read until this point it seems to be relevant for you. Therefore please join our ada Community Builder group. And contribute to bring together research, experience and corporate insides generating lasting value out of internal communities.