Community of practice
Based on Wikipedia: Community of practice
Xerox had a problem. Their photocopier repair technicians were supposed to fix machines by following the official manuals, but the manuals kept failing them. The machines broke in ways the documentation never anticipated. So the technicians started meeting informally—over breakfast, during lunch—to swap war stories about the weird problems they'd encountered and the clever fixes they'd discovered. These casual conversations turned out to be more valuable than any training program the corporation had ever designed.
When Xerox finally recognized what was happening, they created something called the Eureka project, a system that let repair technicians across the globe share their hard-won knowledge. That database eventually saved the company an estimated one hundred million dollars.
This is the power of what researchers now call a community of practice.
What Exactly Is a Community of Practice?
The term comes from cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger, who coined it in their 1991 book Situated Learning. At its core, a community of practice is simply a group of people who share a passion for something they do and who learn to do it better by interacting regularly.
That sounds almost obvious when you put it that way. Of course people learn from each other. But Lave and Wenger were making a more profound point about how learning actually works. They argued that we don't really learn things in isolation—by reading textbooks or sitting through lectures—and then somehow apply that knowledge later. Instead, learning happens through participation in social activities. We become knowledgeable by joining communities of people who already know things and gradually taking on more central roles within those groups.
Think about how you actually learned to do your job, whatever it is. Yes, you might have studied relevant subjects in school. But the real learning probably happened when you started working alongside people who'd been doing it for years, picking up not just explicit procedures but also unwritten rules, shared shortcuts, common vocabulary, and hard-won intuitions about what works and what doesn't.
That's the essence of a community of practice.
The Three Pillars: Domain, Community, and Practice
Wenger eventually refined the concept to identify three essential elements that make something a true community of practice rather than just a random collection of people.
The first is the domain—a shared area of interest or expertise that gives the group its identity. This isn't just any topic that happens to interest the members. The domain creates common ground, provides direction for learning, and makes the group's activities meaningful. A group of software developers specializing in machine learning has a domain. A group of neighbors who happen to live on the same street does not, unless they've organized around some specific shared concern.
The second element is the community itself—the social fabric that enables learning. This means actual relationships between members, a sense of belonging, and enough trust that people feel comfortable asking questions and sharing failures as well as successes. A strong community encourages collaboration and makes members want to help each other.
The third is the practice—the specific body of knowledge, methods, tools, and approaches that the community develops and maintains. This includes not just formal documentation but also stories, tricks of the trade, shared experiences, and the kind of tacit knowledge that's hard to write down but easy to pick up when you're working alongside an expert.
How Newcomers Become Experts
One of Lave and Wenger's most influential ideas is what they called legitimate peripheral participation. The phrase sounds like academic jargon, but the concept is beautifully simple.
When you join a community of practice as a newcomer, you don't immediately take on a central role. Instead, you start at the edges—the periphery. You observe. You do simple tasks. You listen to the stories the old-timers tell. Gradually, as you absorb the community's practices and prove your growing competence, you move closer to the center. Your participation becomes more legitimate. Eventually, you become one of those old-timers yourself, and the cycle continues with new arrivals.
Lave and Wenger studied this process in all kinds of settings: Yucatán midwives passing down their craft to apprentices, Liberian tailors training newcomers in their shops, navy quartermasters learning their roles at sea, meat cutters in supermarkets, and insurance claims processors mastering the bureaucratic maze of their work. In each case, the same pattern emerged. Learning wasn't something that happened before participation; it happened through participation.
Consider an apprentice electrician. She doesn't learn everything about electrical systems in a classroom and then go out to apply that knowledge. Instead, she starts by watching experienced electricians work, maybe holding the flashlight or fetching tools. She learns which questions to ask and which ones would mark her as clueless. She picks up on the unspoken rules about safety, about dealing with customers, about when to follow the manual exactly and when to improvise. Over months and years, she takes on increasingly complex tasks until she's the one training newcomers.
Why Organizations Care About This
You might think communities of practice are just interesting sociology, but they've become a major focus in the field of knowledge management, and for good reason. Organizations have discovered that these communities can dramatically improve performance in several ways.
First, they shorten the learning curve for new employees. Instead of fumbling through official training materials, newcomers can tap into the accumulated wisdom of experienced colleagues who've already made all the common mistakes and figured out the workarounds.
Second, communities of practice help organizations respond more quickly to customer needs. When you can quickly find someone who's dealt with a similar problem before, you don't have to reinvent solutions from scratch.
Third, they reduce redundant effort. That phrase "reinventing the wheel" exists for a reason—organizations constantly waste resources solving problems that someone else in the company already solved months ago. Communities of practice help prevent this by making knowledge findable.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, they generate new ideas. When people with shared interests but different experiences come together, unexpected combinations emerge. Innovation often lives in the spaces between established categories, exactly where communities of practice tend to operate.
The Difference Between Knowing That and Knowing How
Studies have found that workers spend about a third of their time searching for information. And here's the kicker: they're five times more likely to turn to a colleague than to consult an official source like a manual or database.
This isn't laziness or technological incompetence. It's wisdom.
There's a crucial distinction between what philosophers call propositional knowledge and procedural knowledge—or more simply, knowing that versus knowing how. A manual can tell you the specifications of a machine. It cannot tell you that this particular machine in this particular factory has a quirk where it overheats if you run it for more than three hours without a brief pause, and that the best way to handle the overheating is to prop open the access panel with a folded piece of cardboard that everyone keeps behind the supply cabinet.
That kind of knowledge—tacit knowledge, as it's often called—lives in people, not in documents. It's context-dependent, experience-based, and incredibly valuable. Communities of practice are the natural habitat for tacit knowledge. When you ask a colleague for help, you're not just getting information; you're getting interpreted information, filtered through someone who understands your situation.
Virtual Communities in a Connected World
For most of human history, communities of practice required physical proximity. You had to be in the same village, the same guild hall, the same factory floor. The Xerox technicians meeting over breakfast could only share knowledge with whoever happened to be nearby.
The internet changed everything.
Virtual communities of practice now span the globe. Some of the largest and most successful examples include Wikipedia, where an enormous community of editors has collectively developed sophisticated practices for writing, citing, and debating encyclopedic content. There's Healthcare Information For All, a network that connects health professionals across countries to share medical knowledge. The Sustainable Sanitation Alliance brings together practitioners working on sanitation challenges in developing countries.
These virtual communities can achieve things that local groups never could, drawing on expertise from different contexts and enabling people to participate who would otherwise be isolated. A midwife in a rural area of one country can now learn from practitioners in dozens of other countries, something that would have been impossible just a few decades ago.
But virtual communities also face unique challenges. The trust and rapport that develop naturally through face-to-face interaction are harder to build through screens. Something called social presence—the sense that you're really connecting with another person—affects how willing people are to participate and share. Without that feeling of genuine connection, virtual communities can struggle to generate the rich exchanges that make communities of practice valuable.
The Invisible Architecture of Participation
Not everyone participates in a community of practice in the same way, and Wenger argues this is not only normal but healthy.
At the center is a core group that participates intensely, driving discussions, taking on projects, and providing leadership. These are the people who show up to every meeting, who answer questions at all hours, who care deeply about the community's direction.
Around them is an active group that participates regularly but less intensely. They attend, they contribute, but they're not steering the ship.
And then there's the peripheral group—often the majority of any community—who participate more passively. They read without posting, attend without speaking, observe without doing. But here's the important insight: they're still learning. Lurking, as internet culture calls it, is a legitimate form of participation. These peripheral members are absorbing the community's practices, even if they're not visibly contributing.
A healthy community needs all three levels. Push everyone to participate intensely and you'll burn people out. Dismiss the peripheral participants and you'll lose your pipeline of future core members.
What Makes Communities Thrive—or Die
Wenger identified several principles for cultivating successful communities of practice, and they reveal how counterintuitive good community management can be.
First, design for evolution, not permanence. A community's interests, goals, and membership will shift over time. Trying to lock in a fixed structure is a recipe for stagnation. The forums and tools you create should accommodate change, not resist it.
Second, create spaces for both open dialogue and outside perspectives. The knowledge within a community is its greatest asset, but insularity is dangerous. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from people who approach the domain from a completely different angle.
Third, welcome different levels of participation. Not everyone needs to be a power user. The lurkers matter too.
Fourth, balance public and private spaces. Communities typically operate in shared spaces where everyone can see the discussions. But sometimes members need to coordinate one-on-one, to ask questions they'd be embarrassed to ask publicly, or to work through conflicts away from the group. Both modes of interaction are necessary.
Fifth, focus explicitly on value. Communities of practice should regularly discuss what members are getting out of participation. This isn't navel-gazing; it's how you ensure the community continues to serve its members' actual needs rather than becoming an empty ritual.
Sixth, combine familiarity and excitement. People need the reliable, expected learning opportunities that drew them to the community in the first place. But they also need surprise, challenge, and the occasional questioning of conventional wisdom. All routine and the community becomes boring. All novelty and it becomes exhausting.
Seventh, find a sustainable rhythm. Communities need regular activities—meetings, events, check-ins—that give members opportunities to connect. But the pace matters enormously. Too slow and the community loses momentum. Too fast and it overwhelms people. The goal is a cadence that feels alive but manageable.
The Tensions That Never Quite Resolve
In his later work, Wenger became interested in the tensions that exist within communities of practice—dualities that can never be fully resolved, only managed.
There's the tension between participation and reification. Participation is the living, breathing interaction between members. Reification is what happens when you try to capture that in documents, procedures, or tools. You need both—the dynamic conversations and the stable artifacts—but they pull in different directions. A community that's all participation and no reification loses its institutional memory. A community that's all reification and no participation becomes a dead archive.
There's the tension between designed and emergent. Some structures need to be deliberately created, but the most valuable aspects of communities often emerge spontaneously. Heavy-handed design can kill the organic energy that makes communities special. But total formlessness leads to chaos.
There's identification versus negotiability. Members need to identify with the community, to feel that it's theirs. But they also need the freedom to negotiate their own meanings, to disagree, to push back. Communities where everyone just agrees on everything are probably communities where no one feels safe to voice dissent.
And there's local versus global. Communities develop rich local knowledge that works beautifully in their specific context. But they also need to connect with wider networks, to import ideas from elsewhere and export their own discoveries. Too much local focus leads to insularity. Too much global focus dilutes what makes the community distinctive.
The Glue That Holds It Together
Wenger describes three dimensions of practice that give communities their coherence.
Mutual engagement is what happens when members participate together over time. They build relationships, establish norms, and develop shared ways of interpreting ideas and events. They create inside jokes and technical jargon that would baffle outsiders. These relationships bind the members into something that feels like more than just a collection of individuals.
Joint enterprise refers to the goals the community pursues together. Members may have different motivations—some are there for career advancement, others for intellectual stimulation, others for social connection—but they negotiate a shared purpose. This negotiation also creates mutual accountability. Community members hold each other to standards, both explicit and unspoken.
Shared repertoire is the communal toolkit that develops over time. This includes literal tools—documents, templates, software—as well as intangible resources like routines, concepts, stories, and ways of doing things. A new member joining the community has to learn this repertoire, which is part of how they move from periphery to center.
The Roots Run Deep
Although Lave and Wenger gave communities of practice their name in 1991, the phenomenon itself is as old as human learning. People have always gathered to share their experiences through storytelling. Guilds, apprenticeships, professional societies, hobby clubs—these are all variations on the same ancient pattern.
The concept has intellectual roots in American pragmatism, particularly the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's idea of a "community of inquiry"—a group committed to pursuing truth through collaborative investigation. John Dewey's emphasis on learning through occupation also anticipated Lave and Wenger's insights. Education, for Dewey, wasn't about passively receiving information; it was about actively doing things in social contexts.
What's remarkable about Lave and Wenger's contribution is not that they discovered something new, but that they gave us a vocabulary for understanding something we'd been doing all along. Once you have the concept, you start seeing communities of practice everywhere: in hospitals and law firms, in open-source software projects and parliamentary budget offices, in parent groups and fan communities, in sports clubs and research laboratories.
Learning, it turns out, is not primarily what happens in your head. It's what happens between people who care about the same things and are willing to share what they've figured out.
The Barriers That Block the Flow
Not all communities of practice succeed, of course. Many struggle to generate the knowledge exchange that makes them valuable.
Sometimes the problem is ego. People guard their expertise jealously because their knowledge is tied to their professional identity and status. Sharing everything you know can feel like giving away the very thing that makes you valuable.
Sometimes the barrier is scale. A community can grow so large that it becomes overwhelming. The intimate discussions that sparked real learning give way to noise and repetition. No one can keep up with the volume of interaction.
Sometimes it's simply time. Participating in a community of practice takes effort, and that effort competes with all the other demands on people's attention. If the value isn't immediately obvious, participation drops off.
Personal attacks and toxic dynamics can poison a community fast. Once members feel that engaging is risky—that they might be mocked or criticized or have their contributions stolen—they retreat into silence. And a silent community is a dying community.
Why People Share Anyway
Given all these barriers, why do people contribute to communities of practice at all? What motivates someone to take time out of their day to help a stranger solve a problem?
Research suggests several factors at play.
Some people view knowledge as a public good. They believe that sharing benefits everyone, including themselves in the long run, and they're willing to contribute even when there's no immediate reward.
Others feel a moral obligation. They remember when they were newcomers, struggling to learn the ropes, and someone took the time to help them. Now they pay it forward.
Many are motivated by community interest—they care about the group and want to see it thrive. Their identity is wrapped up in the community's success.
And there are more self-interested motivations too: building reputation, demonstrating expertise, maintaining relationships that might prove valuable later. These motives aren't necessarily at odds with genuine generosity. Most human behavior is driven by tangled combinations of reasons.
Interestingly, studies have found that more experienced colleagues tend to foster more collaborative cultures. Expertise, rather than making people stingy with knowledge, often makes them more willing to share. Perhaps they're secure enough in their status that they don't feel threatened. Perhaps they've simply had more time to recognize how much they've benefited from others' generosity.
Beyond the Original Vision
Since Lave and Wenger published Situated Learning, the concept of communities of practice has taken on a life of its own. It spread first through learning theory, where it challenged assumptions about formal education. Then it migrated into knowledge management, where organizations eager to capture and leverage employee expertise seized on it as a framework.
Not everyone is happy with how the concept has evolved. Some scholars argue that organizational appropriation of communities of practice misses the point. The original insight was about how learning happens naturally, organically, through participation in authentic activities. Trying to engineer communities of practice from the top down can produce hollow imitations that lack the spontaneous energy of genuine communities.
There's also debate about how broadly the concept should be applied. Is any group that shares knowledge a community of practice? Or does the term have specific requirements that many so-called communities don't actually meet? Academic debates about terminology might seem like splitting hairs, but they matter because loose usage can dilute the concept's power to illuminate.
Still, the core insight remains valuable: we learn by participating in communities, and those communities develop rich, often tacit knowledge that can't be captured in any database or manual. The Xerox technicians knew this intuitively, swapping stories over breakfast. Lave and Wenger gave us a way to understand why those conversations mattered so much.
Whatever form communities of practice take in the future—virtual or physical, organic or designed, professional or hobbyist—they'll continue to be where people turn when they want to get better at something they care about. Because in the end, learning is not a solo activity. It's something that happens between us.