Join our live webcast on Google Hangout – Wednesday, March 19, 2014 – RSVP now! "Improving Performance With Enablement Communities/Communities of Practice" http://pages.bravenewtalent.com/BNTLive-19MAR14.html Enablement communities, or communities of practice, are becoming popular for organizations dealing with the pressures of operating a business in today’s fast changing environment. While a multitude of factors are driving change, the impact is consistent; organizations need to respond to stakeholder demands faster, with greater specificity, innovation, and ever-increasing levels of service. Modern organizations are embracing community efforts because they need to distribute the knowledge development responsibility across the organization. Read on to learn more.

1. Enablement communities – or communities of practice, depending on your functional
specialty – are becoming very popular for organizations dealing with the pressures of
operating a business in today’s fast changing environment. While a multitude of factors
are driving change, the impact is consistent; organizations need to respond to stakeholder
demands faster, with greater specificity, innovation, and ever-increasing levels of service.
To keep pace with evolving market expectations,
organizations are developing workforce structures
that are more fluid and dynamic with decision-
making authority. The information required to
make decisions is being distributed throughout
the organization. This change in organizational
design establishes a new competency that
must be pervasive throughout the organization,
that competency is the learn-network-share
competency.
Accelerating innovation, product quality, and
service exponentially without dramatically raising
labor costs requires a workforce that can stay
at or near the forefront of knowledge relating to
their respective professions and industry. As the
front line of knowledge advances with breakneck
speed, organizations are turning to community
efforts, realizing their formal training systems were
not designed to deliver to these new workforce
requirements. Essentially, the ‘half-life’ of
knowledgeisgettingshorter,requiringorganizations
to embrace new technologies to support more
effective life-long professional development.
Modern organizations are embracing community
efforts because they need to distribute the
knowledge development responsibility across the
organization. They need solutions that provide for:
• Capturing and sharing new internal knowledge
• Curating external knowledge
• Identifying and providing networking
opportunities with subject matter experts inside
and outside the organization
• Indexing knowledge to aid discovery and
internal usage
• Evolving the knowledge base using process
feedback
Communityinitiativesarenowhelpingtheworkforce
at many of the worlds leading organizations.
BraveNewTalenthasseencustomerinterestinonline
communities grow rapidly at many of the Global
1000 companies. A good example of this trend
is Zappos, which has just announced they would
attempt to transition to the ultimate enablement
community model, redesigning their organization
as a holacracy.
Best Practices For Building
Online Enablement Communities

2. Learning theory experts have talked about
enablement communities or communities of
practice since the 1990’s. While the terms we use
today may be relatively new, the core structure,
goals, and key activities that characterize an
enablement community have quite a long history.
Before we had online community environments,
professionals captured and shared knowledge
through writings and speaking, and before that,
men and women formed guilds to share knowledge
and translate that knowledge into skilled labor. In
essence,whattodaywecallacommunityofpractice
is, in reality, the evolution of apprenticeships and
guilds. This evolution now enables scaling.
One-to-few knowledge sharing environments
are highly effective at producing skills transfer
in limited numbers, but they are not as great
at driving consistency across large audiences,
fostering innovation, or maximizing labor
force productivity – three things modern
organizations depend upon.
Innovation often occurs when someone is presented
with a challenge or opportunity they previously did
not know how to solve, and either devises a new
method using existing approaches, or conceives of
an entirely new approach. As many organizations
have become larger and more complex, learning
and opportunities to innovate have become far
more distributed.
The vast majority of learning today doesn’t take
place in formal structures: it can occur anywhere
and at any time. Employees today naturally seek
knowledge and advice from individuals and sources
they discover in order to enable them to become
more effective at their jobs.
Learning and the application of newly-acquired
knowledge-to-work-product is happening far more
informally today, and enablement communities
are organizations’ best response to help surface,
aggregate, distill, and share what is being learned
in pockets of the organization with others across
the organization. Without formal effort, learnings
discovered often travel through small networks
within an organization, but rarely reach all of those
who might benefit. Talk to anyone who has ever
worked in a firm noted for sales or customer success
best practice and what you will likely learn is that
those organizations implemented enablement
communities as a key tool used to help surface
the most valuable process knowledge and evolving
thoughts professionals needed to improve their
performance.
The premise of an enablement community
is simple: deliver the right information and
contacts to the right people at the right time
and in the right place to enable the participant
to advance specific opportunities more effectively.
However, information alone does not make an
enablement community. Human beings have
a fundamental need to socialize and interact
with one another. It is through interaction such
as questioning a colleague, explaining a point,
categorizing examples, and postulating solutions
that information is transformed into applicable
knowledge.
“Holacracy is a system of organizational governance
in which authority and decision-making are
distributed throughout a fractal holarchy of self-
organizing teams, rather than being vested at the
top of a hierarchy.”1
While news announcements
like the one from Zappos are rare, many of the
world’s leading organizations have earned and
maintain their leadership position by empowering
specific populations. The Ritz Carlton Group, for
example, is well known for using a community of
practice –sharing hotel operations knowledge with
service staff in order to enable their extremely high
level of customer care.
Defining An
Enablement Community
1
Wikipedia

3. more project-centric collaboration environments.
When successful, enablement communities are
credited with making a significant difference in the
professional lives of the participants, and they work
for a number of key reasons:
• They leverage the power of the crowd/
communities to filter valuable information from
an information flow to massive for any single
individual or enterprise learning process to
handle
• They combine professionals with varying
degrees of experience and exposure to situations
so that complex applications of knowledge can
be explored collaboratively
• Theyprovideaforumthatisabouttheknowledge
itself, not specific work product, so common
issues and challenges can surface more freely
These two terms are often used interchangeably
and depending upon your past experience you may
prefer to affiliate with one over the other. However,
there are some social distinctions to note that
affect the planning launching, and management
of enablement communities.
In a network, the relationship of one party to
another party is known, and the boundaries that
define the network are clear. Networks may exist
without a shared goal or purpose and survive in
perpetuity.
A community, on the other hand, may contain
individuals that may have no established
relationshiptooneanother.Itssurvivalisdependent
upon it evolving its value to members to warrant
ongoing participation.
Participants in a community are bound together
because they share a passion about a common
subject and a mutual desire to develop one another.
Unlike networks, the members of a community do
not need to actually know each other.
Enablement communities are one solution in a
range of solutions categorized as knowledge
management solutions. The range starts with
team-centric solutions such as brainstorming
and idea capture tools, and typically ends with
enterprise-wide knowledge sharing. Along the
way, you often encounter discussion boards,
Q&A forums, collaboration environments, and
enablement communities.
Enablement communities are typically very
easy to focus, as their intended ROI really
comes down to three measures:
1. Improving time-to-productivity
2. Improving overall productivity (capability
and capacity)
3. Promoting Innovation
Enablement communities are often considered the
building blocks of classic enterprise knowledge
management efforts, but are not the same thing.
Enablement communities have a much narrower
scope and purpose, and serve a specific population;
usually a function within an organization, or
an external customer segment. Enablement
communities are also highly focused on supporting
their membership in the advancement of specific
opportunities or objectives, whereas greater and
lesser knowledge management solutions support a
wide range of non-specific, non-personal objectives.
While similar in some ways to a team collaboration
environment, enablement communities differ
in that they support the continuous pursuit of
knowledge around an evolving topic, versus a time-
centric project or work activity. Members in a team
collaboration environment are far more apt to have
a consistent role throughout the duration of their
participation, whereas members in a community
of practice will assume a variety of roles as their
discussions ebb and flow.
Due to narrower scope and focus, enablement
communities are often far more successful than
Community vs. Netowork

4. an enablement community are:
Time Savings – Communities of practice can
radically reduce the aggregate amount of time
individuals spend trying to find information to help
them do their jobs more effectively. Most studies
peg the typical time savings somewhere between
75 and 95 percent of the total time spent prior to
the community.
Sharing Improvement Across Geographies
Organizations relying on one-to-one and one-to-
few knowledge sharing interactions across a wide
geographic area often see reduced or delayed
sharing, due to the limitation of synchronous
communications. Because enablement
communitiesareonline,expertiseflowsunrestricted
and is allowed to bubble up anytime, anywhere.
Accelerating Time-to-Productivity – While
learning curves in general have shortened, new
employees joining complex organizations or
changing roles within an organization often
struggle for some time gathering the information
needed to perform their job at an accepted
level of productivity. Enablement communities
can significantly reduce time by aggregating
information into a single, dynamic environment
– helping employees become autonomous much
faster.
Reduction of Rework – Enablement communities
quickly bring to light many interactions between
a more knowledgeable individual, and someone
whose work product often leads to rework.
Throughout organizations, interactions that lead to
rework happen daily and often these interactions
are repetitive and dispersed. The community allows
SMEs to answer specific questions and demonstrate
practices; posts shared can be accessed at any
time and more efficient than replying to multiple
requests via email.
It is often said that an enablement community can
be launched in mere minutes. While it has become
much easier to deploy technology tools that form
the online home of enablement communities,
launching one is still something that requires
effort.
Being successful will require assembling the right
team of participants, including:
Community Sponsor – A community sponsor
that is passionate and that has the professional
capital necessary to pull together resources, recruit
collaborators, and motivate other to participate is
essential. The community sponsor does not have
to be an organizational leader, but they need to be
a leader
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – Successful
communities of practice need more than one
subject matter expert to periodically chime in on
conversations and help make sense of complex
information. In an ideal world, this pool of
individuals would be made up of individuals from
both inside and outside the organization
CommunityManagers–Whenacommunitystops
providing value, members leave and they rarely
return. While many believe that communities
self form and auto-regulate, the truth is it takes
community management to keep the value
evolving. Community managers live and breath in
the community, they make an active efforts to get
to know all or certain segments of members, they
help pull in content from members, they facilitate
conversations and they promote successful
interactions
The ultimate goal of an enablement community
is to improve workforce productivity, The most
common benefit components in an ROI formula for
Benefits of Establishing an
Enablement Community

5. outside to participate is key to creating valuable
destination that can capture interactions from
other environment that already support this level
of cross organizational thinking, namely e-mail
and individual web searches.
Lead by Example – It might sound a bit cliché, but
leaders need to set the tone for their communities
bydemonstratingthroughexamplethattheactivity
of regularly sharing knowledge is both needed and
apt to be acknowledged.
Communicate Purpose – Communities that
launched with a well-formulated purpose that
participants could buy into were far more apt
to be successful than communities that were
launched to simply share knowledge. Simple, non-
purposeful sharing is something that routinely
happens networks. What elevates sharing in
enablement communities is the common drive
across community members to specifically achieve
or improve something.
Constant Reinforcement – Having a dedicated
communitymanagerthatcanacknowledgedesired
activity as close to the point of creation as possible
and drive both visibility and further interaction
with the sharing is essential.
Make Participation Feasible – Communities
often launch without making participation a
possibility for the intended participants, who need
to dedicate regular time in order to learn. The 90-9-
1 concept is an observed social norm (in a crowd of
100, 90 will consume the interactions of 9 around
the contributions of a single individual). In a
smaller enablement community, low participation
levels lead to stagnation. Incentives can influence
greater participation, move the ration more in the
range of 60-30-10, which can be accomplished by
makingthecommunitytheplacetoexecuteroutine
process learning, i.e. the home reusable document
libraries, support communications, brainstorming
sessions, product feedback loops, etc.
Reinvigorating Team Performance – Learning
in private offers far fewer rewards and recognition
than learning in in a social environment. Online
enablement communities provide interactions
that produce gains in team performance and
allowing for greater public recognition of pivotal
contributionsbyteammembers. Thepublicpositive
reinforcement also creates motivation among
others in the team to share. Reward schemas that
mix tangible and intangible rewards can help spur
growth and reinvigorate it periodically throughout
the lifecycle of the community.
Launching an enablement community is one of
the best ways to improve productivity for workforce
segments which require an evolving flow of
knowledge to be more effective. While launching
a community takes time and effort, with a
passionate leader and the right people supporting
the initiative, any organization can begin surfacing
phenomenal learning from the ‘crowd’ that is the
workforce itself.
While the definition of success is largely derived
from the initial goals that led to the community,
the desired behaviors required to enable it are
consistent. The following enablement community
success factors have been observed within
organizations around the globe:
Leverage Curated Content – Many organizations
try to build their enablement community by
relying solely on internal content. This practice
fails to acknowledge an already existing learning
behavior the organization needs to tap into, all that
a person needs to learn about does not come solely
from internal resources. Pulling content from
outside the organization and allowing experts from
How To Measure And
Deterimine Community
Success

6. At BraveNewTalent we often say we are the
most experienced at what not to do in building
communities. Fail forwards is one of our company
values. Failure is acceptable as we learn from it
and move forward. In fact, failure often needed for
innovation to take place. However, its important to
understandandlearnfromwhereothershavefailure
in their community building efforts to maximize
the chances of success of your community.
BraveNewTalent has observed that communities
need the 3 C’s in order to succeed:
• Content – In any form of digital format
• Context – Relevant to all of the community
membership profiles
• Connections – Between members within
each community
BraveNewTalent has observed the following points
failure:
Penalizing Participation – Sounds like common
sense, but many organizations inadvertently do
exactly that. Many professionals are overburdened
and already report virtually no time for self-
development or learning, so expecting participation
without understanding that some priorities may
need to flex from time to time in unrealistic.
Many managers also talk about support for open
discussion, but then publicly attack, disparage
or retaliate against individuals that initiate
frank debate about touchy subjects. Online
communities thrive when a difference of opinions
lead to interaction/debate. Communities devoid of
differing opinions rarely thrive, so it is important
that all participation be welcomed, acknowledged
and engaged with.
Not Understanding Calls for New Behavior
Teaching others and sharing what you are learning
is not a normally observed behavior among most of
the population. Not understanding that your new
Broader Participation – While communities of
practice are much narrower in scope that other
knowledge management approaches, they often
benefit from a wider range of participants to
drive diversity of thought and perspective into
the community. Consider inviting a number of
participants from outside the organization and
outside the function. Walking upstream and
downstream from the community purpose can
also help drive diversity of perspective i.e. a sales
enablement community can benefit from limited
customer and upstream vendor participation.
Don’t recreate the wheel – Adding an enablement
community to an already complex array of
resources and communication channels available
to an individual is a sure fire way to achieve very
little. At BraveNewTalent we try to deal with the
challenge of scarcity of attention by enabling
members to access all the content from the
communities they belong to in a single learning
stream. If you attempt to add to destinations that
compete for your audiences attention, without
displacing other destinations, you will have an
even smaller faction of your members attention.
Tie into existing events – Online communities
that gather in person from time to time often thrive
more so than communities that never convene in
person. When launching a new effort, try to time
the launch to coincide with a large gathering.
Throughout the year, use the community as the
online home of meetings and events.
Seed, Seed, Seed – Launching an empty
community is like inviting a bunch of people to visit
the future home of a planned community where
the only thing visible are utility lines and roads,
it is hard to envision value! Planned residential
community builders realized a long time ago
that sales launches were far more effective once
buildings for community services were in place
and model homes complete with landscaping and
furniture were in place. Online communities need
to be seeded with content and model interactions
to both demonstrate value and set the tone for
interaction.
Community Points of
Failure

7. in unique ways. Treating all community members
the same simply doesn’t work.
Non-effective Content Filtering – Not all content
isshare-worthy. Ablogpostforexamplecanexpress
someone personal views on a professional subject
but include no actionable learning information.
Failing to filter effectively when priming a
community with content and failure to help
members filter can produce an online community
with as much if not more distractive ‘noise’ as an
individual’s web searches, robbing the community
of the value proposition afforded through filtering.
This is the Context part of BraveNewTalent’s 3 C’s of
community.
Not Establishing a Regular Cadence – Many
individuals need elements of the world around
them to demonstrate some regular cadence.
Luckily, nearly all successful communities develop
a rhythm. Work communities have standing
meetings, family communities have set family
time, and community organizations like churches
have scheduled services. Online communities that
do not tap into the rhythms of their members often
fail to garner traction. Integrating community
interaction into the cadence of a professional
audience’s daily life is a balancing act, try for too
much and you end overwhelming, try for too little
and community seems inactive.
Not Focusing on Value – Communities only thrive
when they deliver value to their members and when
that value grows in relation to other competing
interests. Participation in most communities
isn’t forced; while it may be encouraged most
communities depend upon their members making
aconscientiousefforttobeapartofthecommunity.
Rarely will members fully understand the full
value of a community the moment they join, but
if they do not discover it soon, or the value fades
quickly, then so too will participation. Successful
communities pander to the needs and contextual
interests of their members. Moving interactions
about problem solving, future planning, product or
Not Understanding Call for...(Cont’d)
community teaching others and sharing what you
are learning is not a normally observed behavior
among most of the population. Not understanding
thatyournewcommunityinitiativeisaskingpeople
to behave differently than they have or may feel
comfortable doing is a common mistake. Effective
change management focuses on establishing
desired behaviors up front, positive reinforcement
throughout, and tying desired behavior into
as many routine processes and interactions as
possible.
Not Supporting Persona Differentiation –
‘Personas’maysoundlikeamarketingterm,butthe
idea of supporting individuals with different needs
(use cases, activity patterns, etc.) is found in most
professional disciplines. In online communities,
personas are often used to distinguish members by
their activity pattern and role in the community.
In every community, there will always emerge a
small minority that creates the vast majority of
the original content shares. Within that core group
you could have SMEs who speak from a macro level
perspective and practitioners who develop and
educate on best practice using knowledge garnered
from these experts. You will also then have another
minority audience that captures the vast majority
of interactions from shares from your core group.
This category of members are your active audience.
With BraveNewTalent communities, this audience
can be further segmented by competency or
experience level, geography, etc.
The majority of members in an online community
fall into a persona category that many have
termed as ‘passive lookers’. This persona category
is not passive at all. Studies have revealed that
this audience often formulates opinions and
responses to shares in a community, but opts
not to share themselves. It’s a normal behavior
that makes increasing community participation
a real challenge. Communities that thrive use
community management tactics that recognize
the different personas and service/support them

8. Not Focusing on Value (Cont’d.)
tool support into a community often provide
organizationswithbothamethodandamechanism
todetermineandcapturewhatcontentisbeneficial.
Successful communities focus heavily on tagging
and indexing shared resources to surface the value
when needed.
Failure to Evolve – The entire premise of
enablementcommunitiesrestsuponanindividual’s
inability to stay on top of changes in their world
because it is evolving so quickly. Communities
that fail to evolve as quickly as their members need
them to lose their value and therefore engagement.
As an organic entity launching and managing a
community is about influencing the community in
a needed direction versus forcing a static design.
As new business issues arise, new members join,
popular events occur, etc.; the community will
evolve if allowed to. Protectionism however is
common, many community sponsors/leaders/
managers take pride in what they have built and
fight against change.
Failure to Excite – Once community members
settle into a routine and incorporate the
community into their cadence of life, there is the
risk for the community to become boring even if it
continues to provide value. To keep the community
alive and flourishing, community managers need
to periodically shake things up, throw something
unusual into the cadence, spark controversial
discussion – take something away that is often
used and ask how to evolve it when people cry out.
Community growth via member referral usually
only happens when members are excited about
what is going on in the community.
For a detailed brief of an enablement community
in practice, please read our solution brief,
“Enablement Communities In Action: Lockheed
Martin Military Connect”, attached as a companion
to this white paper.
If you would like to discuss the observations
made here about building successful
enablementcommunities,orlearnmoreabout
how BraveNewTalent supports professional
knowlege sharing across the workforce of
the organization, please visit contact Master
Burnett via email, at
master@bravenewtalent.com.
BraveNewTalent
1020 Kearny Street
San Francisco, CA
94133 USA
+1 415 738 8000
Website: www.bravenewtalent.com
Twitter: @bravenewtalent
For More Information
Master Burnett, Director of Strategy
Enablement Communities
In Action