Knowledge Management Thought Leader 118: Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Originally posted 19-Jun-25

Etienne Wenger-Trayner is Co-Founder of the Social Learning Lab and an independent thinker, researcher, consultant, author, and speaker. His seminal work was on communities of practice and social learning theory.

Etienne helps organizations apply his ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops. His work focuses on social learning systems, trying to understand the connection between knowledge, community, learning, and identity. His basic idea is that human knowing is fundamentally a social act.

Here are definitions for five of Etienne’s specialties:

• Communities: Groups of people who share an interest, a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic. Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another
• Situated Learning: The idea that people learn more by actively participating in a learning experience that’s situated in a specific context. It’s based on the idea that learning is a social process that takes place in a community, and that people learn, see, and do things based on their role in that community.
• Social Learning: A process by which people acquire knowledge and skills through social interactions. As opposed to traditional models of learning, it encourages learners to communicate with one another and share experiences in order to retain information. It is based on the concept that people don’t just learn from formal instruction, but also through informal interactions with their peers.
• Systems Convening: Fostering social learning across social landscapes with entrenched boundaries, including different practices, different institutions, different goals, different cultures, and different loyalties.
• Value Creation: A perspective on social learning that reflects the aspiration to make a difference. Social learning creates value to the extent that it is recognized as improving the ability to make that difference.

Etienne created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field. For more about Etienne, see Profiles in Knowledge.

Books by Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Introduction to Communities of Practice: A Brief Overview of the Concept and Its Uses

The domain. A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as “expertise” outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise.

The community. In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other; they care about their standing with each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone.

The practice. A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems — in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The “windshield wipers” engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice.

Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge — Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice

1. Design for evolution

Because communities of practice are organic, designing them is more a matter of shepherding their evolution than creating them from scratch. Design elements should be catalysts for a community’s natural evolution. As they develop, communities usually build on preexisting personal networks. For example, when Schlumberger launched a series of communities of practice in its research division, most people were already part of networks connected through the company’s extensive bulletin board system.

The key to designing for evolution is to combine design elements in a way that catalyzes community development. Physical structures — such as roads and parks — can precipitate the development of a town. Similarly, social and organizational structures, such as a community coordinator or problem-solving meetings, can precipitate the evolution of a community. Which community design elements are most appropriate depends on the community’s stage of development, its environment, member cohesiveness, and the kinds of knowledge it shares. But evolution is common to all communities, and the primary role of design is to catalyze that evolution.

2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives

Good community design requires an insider’s perspective to lead the discovery of what the community is about. When designing teams, we know a team’s output requirements in advance and can design to achieve that output. But effective community design is built on the collective experience of community members. Only an insider can appreciate the issues at the heart of the domain, the knowledge that is important to share, the challenges their field faces, and the latent potential in emerging ideas and techniques. Only an insider can know who the real players are and their relationships. This requires more than community “input.” It requires a deep understanding of community issues.

Good community design requires an understanding of the community’s potential to develop and steward knowledge, but it often takes an outside perspective to help members see the possibilities. Because intentional communities are new for most organizations, members often have a hard time imagining how a more developed community could improve upon their current personal networks or help them leverage dormant capabilities. Good community design brings information from outside the community into the dialogue about what the community could achieve. Sometimes this involves educating community members about the role of communities in other organizations. It might mean bringing an “outsider” into a dialogue with the community leader and core members as they design the community. As a result of this dialogue, the people who understand the issues inside the community and have legitimacy within it are also able to see new possibilities and can effectively act as agents of change.

3. Invite different levels of participation

Good community architecture invites many different levels of participation. Consider the variety of activities we might find in a city neighborhood on any given day: solitary shoppers, people walking briskly to work, friends out for a casual stroll, couples chatting at an outdoor cafe, a crowd watching a street performer. Others are on the periphery, watching the action from the windows above the street. A community of practice is very similar. People participate in communities for different reasons — some because the community directly provides value, some for the personal connection, and others for the opportunity to improve their skills. We used to think that we should encourage all community members to participate equally. But because people have different levels of interest in the community, this expectation is unrealistic.

A large portion of community members are peripheral and rarely participate. Instead, they keep to the sidelines, watching the interaction of the core and active members. Some remain peripheral because they feel that their observations are not appropriate for the whole or carry no authority. Others do not have the time to contribute more actively. In a traditional meeting or team we would discourage such half-hearted involvement, but these peripheral activities are an essential dimension of communities of practice. Indeed, the people on the sidelines often are not as passive as they seem. Like people sitting at a cafe watching the activity on the street, they gain their own insights from the discussions and put them to good use. They may have private conversations about the issues being discussed in the public forum. In their own way, they are learning a lot. In one community, a peripheral member attended nearly all meetings for two years, but almost never contributed. Then he was transferred to another division and, to everyone’s surprise, started a similar community there.

4. Develop both public and private community spaces

Like a local neighborhood, dynamic communities are rich with connections that happen both in the public places of the community — meetings, Web site — and the private space — the one-on-one networking of community members. Most communities have public events where community members gather — either face-to-face or electronically — to exchange tips, solve problems, or explore new ideas, tools, and techniques. These events are public in that they are open to all community members, though they are often closed to people outside the community. Sometimes they include formal presentations, but most often they are informal discussions of current problems and issues. Public community events serve a ritualistic as well as a substantive purpose. Through such events, people can tangibly experience being part of the community and see who else participates. They can appreciate the level of sophistication the community brings to a technical discussion, how it rallies around key principles, and the influence it has in the organization.

The public and private dimensions of a community are interrelated. When the individual relationships among community members are strong, the events are much richer. Because participants know each other well, they often come to community events with multiple agendas: completing a small group task, thanking someone for an idea, finding someone to help with a problem. In fact, good community events usually allow time for people to network informally. Well-orchestrated, lively public events foster one-on-one connections. As one coordinator said, “I like to see who walks out of the room together, who hangs around and talks. The more new connections I see, the better the meeting was.” The key to designing community spaces is to orchestrate activities in both public and private spaces that use the strength of individual relationships to enrich events and use events to strengthen individual relationships. 10

5. Focus on value

Communities thrive because they deliver value to the organization, to the teams on which community members serve, and to the community members themselves. Value is key to community life, because participation in most communities is voluntary. But the full value of a community is often not apparent when it is first formed. Moreover, the source of value often changes over the life of the community. Frequently, early value mostly comes from focusing on the current problems and needs of community members. As the community grows, developing a systematic body of knowledge that can be easily accessed becomes more important.

Many of the most valuable community activities are the small, everyday interactions — informal discussions to solve a problem, or one-on-one exchanges of information about a tool, supplier, approach, or database. The real value of these exchanges may not be evident immediately. When someone shares an insight, they often don’t know how useful it was until the recipient reports how the idea was applied. The impact of applying an idea can take months to be realized. Thus, tracing the impact of a shared idea takes time and attention.

6. Combine familiarity and excitement

Successful communities offer the familiar comforts of a hometown, but they also have enough interesting and varied events to keep new ideas and new people cycling into the community. As communities mature, they often settle into a pattern of regular meetings, teleconferences, projects, Web site use, and other ongoing activities. The familiarity of these events creates a comfort level that invites candid discussions. Like a neighborhood bar or café, a community becomes a “place” where people have the freedom to ask for candid advice, share their opinions, and try their half-baked ideas without repercussion. They are places people can drop by to hear about the latest tool, exchange technical gossip, or just chat about technical issues without fear of committing to action plans.

Lively communities combine both familiar and exciting events so community members can develop the relationships they need to be well connected as well as generate the excitement they need to be fully engaged. Routine activities provide the stability for relationship-building connections; exciting events provide a sense of common adventure.

7. Create a rhythm for the community

Our everyday lives have a rhythm: waking up and preparing for work, commuting, checking e-mail, attending meetings, commuting home, engaging with kids’ activities, enjoying quiet time. Although there are different rhythms for different people, most of our lives do have a rhythm, which contributes to its sense of familiarity.

Vibrant communities of practice also have a rhythm. At the heart of a community is a web of enduring relationships among members, but the tempo of their interactions is greatly influenced by the rhythm of community events. Regular meetings, teleconferences, Web site activity, and informal lunches ebb and flow along with the heartbeat of the community. When that beat is strong and rhythmic, the community has a sense of movement and liveliness. If the beat is too fast, the community feels breathless; people stop participating because they are overwhelmed. When the beat is too slow, the community feels sluggish. A community of library scientists had an annual meeting and a Web site with a threaded discussion. Not surprisingly, six months after the conference there was very little activity on the Web. An engineering community, on the other hand, held a biweekly teleconference as well as several focused, face-to-face meetings during the year. In this community there is typically a flurry of activity on the Web site just before and after the teleconferences and meetings. The events give the community a beat around which other activities find their rhythm.

Knowledge Management as a Doughnut

The management side of the term “knowledge management” has been less of a topic of discussion. Yet I believe that it is as productive a term to investigate. If by “manage” we mean to care for, grow, steward, make more useful, then the term knowledge management is rather apt. I will argue that communities of practice are the cornerstones of knowledge management.

Some principles of knowledge management

• Practitioners, the people who use knowledge in their activities, are in the best position to manage this knowledge.
• Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do, and who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better.
• Communities of practice manage their knowledge. If you had enough knowledge to micro-manage communities of practice, you would not need them.
• No community can fully manage the learning of another, but no community can fully manage its own learning.

From strategy to performance

• Domain: You need knowledge to do what you want — Translate the strategy of the organization into a set of domains
• Community: You need people to have knowledge — Cultivate the communities according to each domain
• Practice: You need experience to produce usable knowledge — Engage practitioners in the development of their Practice

From performance to strategy

• Practice revisited: What have we learned? — Translate the learning inherent in activities into refined practices
• Community revisited: Who should know this? — Broaden the scope of learning beyond its source
• Domain revisited: Where do we go now? — Think about knowledge strategically

Rolling the doughnut: Strategic knowledge management

The full doughnut model of knowledge management requires a number of enabling structures that integrate the work of communities of practice into the organization.

• Sponsorship Structure

1. Translating strategic imperatives into a knowledge-centric vision of the organization
2. Legitimizing the work of communities in terms of strategic priorities
3. Channeling appropriate resources to ensure sustained success
4. Giving a voice to the insights and proposals of communities so they affect the way business is conducted
5. Negotiating accountability between line operations and communities (e.g., who decides which “best practices” to adopt)

• Recognition Structure

1. Peer recognition: community-based feedback and acknowledgement mechanisms that celebrate community participation
2. Organizational recognition: rubric in performance appraisal for community contributions and career paths for people who take on community leadership.

• Support Structure

1. A few explicit roles, some of which are recognized by the formal organization and resourced with dedicated time
2. Direct resources for the nurturing of the community infrastructure including meeting places, travel funds, and money for specific projects
3. Technological infrastructure that enables members to communicate regularly and to accumulate documents
4. Last but not least, organizations that have used communities in a systematic way have put together a small “support team” of internal consultants who provide logistic and process advice for communities, including coaching community leaders, educational activities to raise awareness and skills, facilitation services, communication with management, and coordination across the initiative.