The document discusses accelerating knowledge transfer at scale through a case study of the Growth Network community. It describes how the community grew rapidly from several hundred to over a thousand members. This posed challenges around maintaining quality knowledge sharing and engagement as the community expanded. To address this, the Growth Network implemented several strategies, including multidimensional onboarding, listening tours, shifting to topic-based groupings, introducing foundational content, developing ambassador and peer-led groups, and focusing on members' whole-person needs. The results were a suite of executive-led groups, advisory councils, a hybrid conference model, and recurring wellness programs, allowing knowledge to scale across the larger community.

1. Accelerating
Knowledge At
Scale: A mini case
study
Vanessa DiMauro
March, 2021
@vdimauro https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessadimauro/

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Hi! I am Vanessa
DiMauro
Using a case study approach,
examine the impact rapid
scale has on knowledge
transfer
Explore unintended outcomes
of applied network effect
Share lessons learned
• I spent my career founding, running, advising and
funding online communities. 30 years.
• Guided the strategies for over 100 communities
• Published 41 academic studies about community /
network theory
• Cited in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall
Street Journal, The Economist
• Faculty– Knowledge Management - Columbia
University, Babson College – MBA, Stanford
University
Today’s Agenda

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Community Background
The mission of the Growth Network is to
accelerate business growth and leadership
excellence for our companies through unique,
peer-peer knowledge exchange and
collaboration.
All executives and staff of Georgian portfolio
companies can join our community, the
Growth Network.

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COMMUNITY SERVICE EXECUTIV STAFF
Growth Network Platform -
resources, and discussions
✅ ✅
Peer Mentoring Program ✅ ✅
Webinars ✅ ✅
Workshops and Training ✅ ✅
Special Interest Working Groups ✅ ✅
Annual Conference ✅ ✅
Private Working Groups ✅
Curated Vendor Discounts ✅
Annual Retreat ✅
Custom Research ✅
Executive Coaching ✅
Community Strategy Consulting
companies that have a product
community)
✅
From Theory to Practice

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Building Community on a Solid Foundation
• Building a trust triad
• Reflecting a shared purpose
• Creating a safe space
• Developed group norms and rituals
Vukotich G. (2010). “Building a Culture of Trust” Information Age Publishing p. 3-10

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March 15th 2020
SNA map of tweets about Covid-19 in early 2020. It has nothing to do with this talk, but I thought you all would think it is as
interesting as I do! How We Tweet About Coronavirus, and Why: A Computational Anthropological Mapping of
Political Attention on Danish Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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How to Scale a Network Quickly… The Burning
Questions
“Knowledge has to be
improved, challenged,
and increased
constantly, or it
vanishes.”
― Peter Drucker
How can the
community grow quickly
without diminishing
quality?
How will this dense
community adapt to
such a large diameter?
(The closeness
centrality is now
annihilated….)
How should the
engagement model be
redesigned to
accommodate a varied
constituency?
How to increase
findability of information
as the volume of
information shared
increased?
Can we codify the
knowledge fast
enough? (and what the
hell just happened to
my beautiful
taxonomy?)
How to achieve scale
with a limited
staff/resources?

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Would we change from a CoP to a Shop Talk
community?
Source: DiMauro, V & Gal, S (1994). Use of telecommunications for reflective discourse of science teacher leaders. Journal of Science Education and Technology June 1994, Volume 3, Issue 2, pp 123-135

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How we tried to solve for the scale problem
• Multidimensional onboarding program to increase familiarity (us-member,
member-member welcomes, new member mixers)
• A chain of listening tours
• Shifted the taxonomy from role based to topical
• Introduced more fundamental content to span a wider membership base
• Developed a volunteer ambassador group
• Crowdsourced peer-led groups to achieve scale despite resource constraints
• MOST IMPORTANT: Took care of the whole person

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The Results (to date)
A full suite of exec led groups
Advisory counsels steer the community strategy
A hybrid annual conference
A shift to experiences over spots in time
Recurring mind/body programs for members
A refined community metrics dashboard with clear KPIs
A (currently) stable, beautiful community where peer-peer knowledge sharing crosses traditional boundaries

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EXTRAS

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