Expand your management skills with a best practice process model that enables you to design, start and sustain a community of practice by understanding communities as unique organisational structures: i.e. as living things.

Do you have the feeling that developing communities of practice is not easy and at the same time that the available methods are either too simple or too complicated?

Then this course is just right for you! It is a practical introduction to the development of communities of practice that follows a process model that I have developed from real cases over the course of my professional career. A project for developing a community of practice needs to integrate three essential aspects in its process: 1) project management, 2) the community’s lifecycle and 3) its vital elements. The PLiED approach does exactly this and helps you in doing so to start successful, vital and viable Communities of Practice.

Why Communities of Practice? The business world in which we are living today is a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity: a so-called VUCA world. It is a new world which changes faster than we can learn. In order to cope successfully in the VUCA world, organisations should develop collaborative cultures, embrace collaborative practices and foster knowledge sharing (see IDC, 2016; Venkatraman, 2018). Communities of practice can help organisations to do exactly this and as such, increase the organisations’ performance and enable them to cope with the VUCA world. What makes communities of practice able to accomplish this? It is their unique organisational approach focused on people and specifically focused on suitable social structures that enable community members to learn with and from each other.

This course is an introduction to quickly starting, evaluating and sustaining communities of practice. An advanced course on the same topic will follow, providing a deeper explanation and broader application of the PLIED approach. I look forward to welcoming you to this and other courses that I would like to publish soon.

But let's get to this course for now and familiarise ourselves with the PLiED approach, a perspective on community development that integrates the three essential aspects needed by a project for developing a community of practice in order to be successful.