093 – Communities of Practice, Part 1

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a Social Impact Scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi David.

[00:00:14] David: Hi Lucie, what are we discussing today?

[00:00:17] Lucie: Our work as research method support is part of the West Africa Community of Practice of the Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems program, which is funded by the McKnight Foundation. There’s a system of communities of practice, which I find really interesting, the community did not exist before the Foundation became involved. So it’s a community which has been created, which is continually in creation and development. And I think you have quite a big role within that as part of the leadership team for West Africa, or for the West Africa community of practice. And I’d like to hear your reflections on the creation and development process of community.

[00:01:04] David: Of communities of practice in particular, and I suppose this community of practice specifically.

[00:01:10] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:01:12] David: My first time being involved in what has been officially called a community of practice. On reflection, I was involved in other communities of practice beforehand, but they weren’t really officially communities of practice in the same way. And they never really took that formal structure. And the other community of practice that I would argue predates my involvement in this West African community of practice as part of the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems is a community of practice around maths education across Africa.

And that’s something, I suppose, was formalised with workshops a few years ago, these were cross pollination workshops, which brought together people who had been part of this sort of extended network of people who were implicitly sharing, but didn’t really know each other. So that’s another community of practice that I’ve feel that I become part of and that was created around other bits of work.

And those two communities of practice are very different in my mind. And I can mention a few others, but those two really stand out and help me to think about the role in creating such communities, in the value of such communities, and in some of the challenges around it.

In both cases, one of the things which brought them together in some sense was funding. In the West African community of practice, where the nature of belonging to that community is about being part of getting funding as part of the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems. And it’s only really very recently when that community is really maturing, and it’s now over 10 years old, that as a community, it’s really trying to extend beyond the funded part.

And I think that’s really interesting as a model. And I have to confess, it’s been, I think, a very good model. I don’t know many other funders, I know other funders that do build elements of community practice, but I don’t know many other funders that have that longevity to actually really build a community over more than a 10 year period to enable it to mature. Because there is that sense that as a community, I feel, it’s needed 10 years to mature.

I’ve been involved now for 10 years and you feel as a community how it’s matured. I wasn’t involved from the start. I came in when it was already established. I don’t know if it’s the right word, it already existed, but as a community I’ve witnessed it maturing and I may have contributed in a small way to that process.

[00:04:07] Lucie: I’m just wondering, were the communities of practice of the CRFS, the Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, were they always called communities of practice? Were they always defined as that?

[00:04:19] David: Since before I was involved. This is not forever, the program has a very long history, over 30 years in different forms. The communities of practice have different ages in each of the three regions, but as communities of practice they have been recognised as such for over ten years, in each of the regions, which is East and Southern Africa, whether that used to be two communities of practice, one in East Africa and one in Southern Africa, that then joined into a single community of practice, the West African community of practice and a community of practice in the Andes. I’ve some awareness of the others, but I only really know deeply about the West African community of practice.

And when I came into that community of practice, it was still, it felt young, and it felt very much as being something which was related to the funding, that the sort of people who were there were all part of the community of practice because their projects were funded as part of this programme.

Over the years, I feel that elements of that have changed. Of course, people are still part of the community of practice because their projects are funded, but there is definitely more of a sense of the community actually having some real substance of its own right, beyond just who’s funded.

And I think this has played out with certain people, the key members of the community, who had never received a direct grant in the past. And particularly, I can point to a number of people related to farmer federations or farmer groups where they were consistent members of the community and part of it and have for a long period of time, but always as a partner rather than a leader in their own right. But they were recognised for their leadership within the community.

And some of those have now received funding or grants of their own and that has implications therefore about the dynamics within the community of practice. And these are things which are being thought about much more deeply now than I think they were before. And I think for that I must give a lot of credit to Bettina Haussman and Batamaka Some, who are the Regional Representative and the Liaison Scientist, who really coordinate this.

I’ve had the privilege of working with them for many years now and being part of a sort of team with them. Although my role has always been a sort of step removed, as research methods support for the region. I’m helping projects more than actually a decision maker on projects.

[00:07:13] Lucie: So, there’s two things there. One I’m realising that we haven’t actually really discussed what a community or practice is. So you mentioned at the beginning that the two communities of practice that we’ve discussed so far have been created or formalised because of funding.

[00:07:28] David: Let me just clarify that particularly for the other case that I wanted to mention, which is this sort of cross pollination. The funding there is very different because there is no single funder sourcing it. But, on the back of collaborations, there was a grant that was received from the International Mathematics Union, which enabled the community to come together into this cross pollination workshop.

That little piece of funding, which brought people together from across the continent is what helped to form that community and really solidified the collaborations. Without that bit of funding, the community, I would argue would not exist as a community. I would argue it needs other initiatives to bring the community together, but there is definitely a sense of ownership where there are collaborations within the community, which are peer learning.

And this is, I think, part of what I would argue a good community of practice has. It has those organic interactions which aren’t necessarily directed. That doesn’t mean that the community of practice itself isn’t directed. We’ll come back to the example where I would argue Bettina and Batamaka, and myself to a lesser extent, play a leadership role within the community.

Not that we are leading all the interactions, but the community exists because of some of the work that goes in to making the meetings happening, to having the opportunities for interaction. As a community, it’s true, you need people who actually make the community exist. But a good community of practice, I would argue, is built because of the collaborations that happen, not top down, but peer to peer.

And so part of what I would argue makes a community of practice real is that you don’t just have top down, you also have peer to peer collaborations, interactions, sharing of practice.

[00:09:32] Lucie: Exactly, at its basis, that’s what it is. And then it’s only later in theorizations, let’s say, that it has, become this more created or managed sort of entity, I think.

[00:09:46] David: Well, I would argue the two examples I’ve given are opposite to that. In the example from CRFS, the community of practice as a sort of theoretical entity existed before there was deep sharing of practice. There is now deep sharing of practice within the community and real collaboration happening peer to peer in ways which I find very inspiring to observe.

Whereas in the other example there was clear need or desire for those sharings and there weren’t the opportunities, and when the opportunity presented itself they flourished. There was an element of, again, somebody recognizing the need to bring together people to be able to have that, to create that common practice, to create that sharing.

Now I will take one concrete example from there, where the maths camps that had been happening across the continent, supported by SAMI, Supporting African Maths Initiatives, the groups, giving those in many different African countries, had never met really. And it was at the cross pollination workshop that many of them met for the first time. And I still remember some of the inspiring discussions that happened there, where suddenly they realised, and I’m thinking particularly of the representatives from Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana, who had been running the maths camps for many years in each case, in their own little bubbles.

[00:11:11] Lucie: Okay.

[00:11:11] David: When they were brought together, suddenly they recognised how similar they all were, how different they all were, how much they had to help others, and how much they had to learn from others. It was wonderful to see that sharing of practice. And that’s the thing which I feel quite often we don’t get enough of. And it’s hard, it’s expensive. This is the simple reality.

[00:11:36] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:11:36] David: Some of these sharings, these are expensive to make happen. Particularly when you’re working in the African context where, travel across the continent…

[00:11:45] Lucie: Internationally.

[00:11:46] David: Across borders, it’s just, it’s difficult, it’s expensive. If you think about travel in Europe across borders, it’s relatively cheap.

[00:11:56] Lucie: Very cheap.

[00:11:57] David: Very cheap, maybe too cheap.

[00:11:59] Lucie: Yeah, exactly, cheaper than travel within the country.

[00:12:02] David: Sometimes, yes. Whereas within many contexts, within most African contexts, the travel across borders is just really expensive. So bringing people together for these shared learning can be very expensive.

[00:12:16] Lucie: This is one of the key points in Communities of Practice, I think, which to make them work, they do need regular meetings or interactions.

[00:12:24] David: Yeah. And there is, as you say, some real theory behind this. We’ve taken this sort of monitoring and evaluation that we use as an organisation from the monitoring and evaluations of Communities of Practice in some ways. And there’s some wonderful learnings and research on this. I think this point that for a community to exist there has to be some form of regular meeting or concrete interaction is so important. And I think the importance of physical interaction in this, is… it’s just not the same. You can’t really share and learn from each other in the same way without elements of that physical interaction.

[00:13:09] Lucie: In you saying that, I’m also thinking of in terms of within a company, because I think there’s the same sort of thing a company tries to create in a way a community of practice. I think that there’s been discussions after COVID, especially when people were working from home, that they missed the opportunities and the new ideas and the sharing that came from just being in person and bumping into a colleague as opposed to having a scheduled meeting with them. I was going to ask you about that, perhaps within IDEMS, what your thoughts are on that as a sort of, not as a sort of manager, but as a manager of IDEMS.

[00:13:43] David: I’ll take the title of sort of manager! [Laughs]. No, I think there’s a, it’s interesting you bring that up as a parallel because I recognize that a lot of my management style within IDEMS has been learned from my experiences with, and I think I’ve got to give credit here to CRFS and McKnight in particular of just how much of the exposure to the ideas around community practice, about principles, about so many different areas, where it’s become part of now how I’ve tried to build IDEMS.

So I have tried to build IDEMS more as a community of practice than a company. I don’t know whether companies should be built as community of practices, but I do know that we’ve tried to build IDEMS more as a community of practice than as a company. And this is where we have the team meeting once a year, where we try and bring everyone together. And that team meeting is really, it’s not focused around the nitty gritty details, it’s focused around the big ideas, what brings us together, the common practices, learning from one another.

[00:14:49] Lucie: I hadn’t seen that parallel. There’s yearly community practice meetings with the CRFS, and yeah, we have the yearly meetings too. I hadn’t seen that parallel.

[00:15:02] David: Well, it’s not just that the parallel is there in terms of the fact that’s yearly, the nature of the meetings, everything I’ve learned about how to run the IDEMS meeting has come from actually how I’ve observed communities of practice being built, this sense of common practice, the sense of common purpose. There are differences, of course, but a lot of my learning on this has come out of this. And yes, I think there is and there can and there should be a parallel.

And I think you mentioned this fact that in companies, there’s this sort of comment that if you’re not running into people in the corridor, you’re not having certain discussions. I think that’s absolutely true. But I think there’s also an element of the fact that actually working remotely you can be embedded in your own life in different ways. So there is another question there about work life balance. Where are you wanting to embed? Do you want to be in your bubble of the company? Or do you want to actually be in the bubble of a community and actually engaging in community in different ways? And what does that mean? What does that look like? I don’t know.

So while I know when I’ve lived and worked in contexts where you are in a community and you’re bumping into people every day, you gain so much from that, I love that. But I’m not trying to replicate that in IDEMS because actually what I would like is I’d like different people, maybe not creating these communities, but living in communities around them. And then the IDEMS community is not happening at that level. It’s like a community of practice where you’re bringing people together out of this.

That’s, I think it’s a different way of approaching it and I think it’s something where I’ve thought quite a lot about that. And I think that for us, a remote community by default, which comes together regularly and builds itself as a community, this is correct for what we want to achieve, which is not isolation from the communities that we live in, but actually the sense of service of communities. I want people to be in their community, exposed to different communities, seeing different things, bringing different perspectives. That’s really important to me.

If everybody was together, it is a problem that when you’re all together, if you’re physically together, at work, then you’re probably also physically living in similar environments, and therefore you’re experiencing similar things rather than experiencing different things. We’re getting less different perspectives. As a small company, that’s not what we need. We need to have the diversity of perspectives that come from the diversity of experiences that people get.

[00:17:44] Lucie: That’s really interesting. And then just one final question. So in a community of practice which doesn’t necessarily have as many opportunities to meet, or as many scheduled opportunities to meet, how do you encourage that sharing beyond those actual, official meetings, whether it’s in the CRFS, whether it’s IDEMS, the maths education?

[00:18:08] David: For that it’s the maths education community that I can point to, that as a community it exists because of the relationships between people within it now. Although there have only been a couple of physical meetings, and both of those were constrained by funding, by opportunity, as a community, there is still a real sense of community around that where people think about and call on each other for different things. They’re aware that the common practices, they’re aware of the value that each other brings.

And so for that community of practice, and let me be clear here, this is certainly not an ideal situation because I think that community of practice would gain immensely if it met more regularly, if it had more in common. But for that community of practice, I think it’s the personal relationships that have got built, really peer to peer, which mean that as a community, it continues to grow and evolve, even without the regular meeting. And I think that a number of people will feel a sense of ownership to that community, and in some ways, are building the community by building their own communities.

I was in Kenya recently as part of the second African STACK Conference, and I would argue that is a community which has been built from the cross pollination community. There were a number of connections that were made, that have come out of that, where this was something which has grown as part of this and with this. So that’s the sort of thing where it’s not about a community.

But I want to now come back to, maybe, the best formal example that I have, the one that I’ve been learning from through my experience with it, is really the community of practice, which has come from this funded program. This program supported by the McKnight Foundation, by the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, which really the membership of that community is, to be a grantee, to be receiving funds, and then you can come to the yearly meetings.

But, and this is what’s so exciting, that community as a community is now starting to spread its wings. The last couple of years it’s had people within the community meetings that weren’t previously part of the community, that aren’t funded. And it’s invited people in who are coming in from different ways with different perspectives, welcoming them into the community, but the community is strong enough that it’s somehow, it isn’t threatened by that.

On the contrary, it’s, I believe, ready to have those interactions beyond. And so what’s so interesting for me is that this is probably only really in the last few years. That maturity for the community has really been there. Now that’s particularly surprising because of course there’s always people coming and going from the community as their grants no longer exist or whatever, but there’s enough continuity, and this is what’s so powerful there, that actually that sense of identity of the community is really formed and strong.

I don’t make any deep claims to knowing how to achieve this or what this will lead to. But I have felt, and I know that a lot of the credit for this does need to go to Bettina and Batamaka for how they’ve led the community in many different ways, and it’s certainly not been without its challenges. Every community will have its challenges.

But there is certainly, in my observation of this as a community, a sense that the community is more than the sum of its parts. People recognise that together, they actually have a louder voice. They have the ability to do more than they could do on their own, to be part of something bigger. And they are learning from one another in ways where there’s enough cross pollination happening within the community to be able to then also welcome others from the outside and say look, these are the things we’re working on and this is what we’re doing within, and then what are you doing and does that relate and so on?

And so I think there’s some really interesting, I want to say learnings but it’s not just learnings. There’s a really interesting dynamic which is emerging out of the length of time it’s taken to build this community, and to support it, and to allow it to evolve naturally. Naturally is maybe not the right word, but to allow it to evolve in a way which is sort of patient to have a community which grows and which builds, and where of course there’s an ambitious want and need for this community to have impact on the ground. The need is huge.

But there’s also the patience to accept that actually this is originally a research program with one research for impact, but still research and research takes time. Learning takes time.

[00:23:45] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:23:46] David: And I think one of the things which has come out, I think quite often is the people who have stayed within the community for a long period of time, they’ve evolved. People who came in fully formed and haven’t changed, they’re no longer there. Everybody who’s there has grown with the community in different ways and has been flexible to evolve as part of it. And that’s something else which, if I’m observing the power of these communities of practice, I think part of it is the journey.

So it’s not just the fact that there was a community of practice of something. It’s that there is a community of practice which enables its members, whoever they may be, to go on a journey together and become more together and to…

[00:24:36] Lucie: Or to learn, to share and to learn from each other. And it’s that need and that motivation which encourages people to be part of it, as in people who don’t have the openness to learn, that’s why they haven’t necessarily stayed within the community. Whereas those who are interested in learning and are interested in developing with others, that’s how it becomes a community because of that shared learning, and those interactions.

[00:24:59] David: And I think one of the things that I’ve really observed on this is that actually, saying we need a community of practice for this doesn’t make sense for me.

[00:25:07] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:25:07] David: It’s actually saying that, okay, these people can form a community of practice, and they could achieve more by becoming a community of practice, that I understand.

[00:25:17] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:25:18] David: And so it’s not the what, it’s the how, I would argue, in terms of how you actually get into that and how you create those connections.

[00:25:27] Lucie: That’s what I would like to discuss in another episode.

[00:25:30] David: I look forward to that. That sounds good. So this is hopefully one of multiple episodes then on this topic as we dig in further. Thank you.

[00:25:38] Lucie: Great. Thanks, David. Speak to you soon.

[00:25:42] David: Cheers.