I love to read. Reading is my preferred means of learning, and if I won the lottery my dream job would be to set up a library of my own. Every time I start a new job my question on day one is ‘where’s your library?’ and if they don’t have one, I start one. As I was a bit short of ideas this week I thought it would be easy to go full Buzzfeed and write a list of my favourite books on community (you wont BELIEVE number 3!), but it turns out that it was actually pretty difficult. I’ve done my best, hope you enjoy!
As far as I’m concerned, This is THE book for anyone looking to start a community of practice. I remember being handed a copy of this on my first day by a former boss who told me ‘you might find this useful’, and I have read it dozens of times since. Every time I’ve started a role at a new company since I make sure to have my copy with me, and as soon as possible get them to buy a couple of copies for their tech library (see above).
For those unfamiliar, Webber talks through all the basics and complexities of how communities form, how leaders can support them, and ideas from experience on how to get and maintain support for a community of practice. I find both the maturity model for communities of practice and the visualisation of community lifecycle vs leader visibility particularly useful, both of which of concepts that I find myself bringing up again and again.
As a related unrelated aside - Emily Webber has iterated on this and produced a course about it. I’ve not been able to do it yet, but I friend and former colleague has and she has done nothing but rave about it since so I feel confident recommending it!
I work away from home quite a lot and when travelling, I tend to listen to audiobooks. I picked this up on the off chance, and it’s the first time that I’ve stopped halfway through and audiobook and gone out and bought a paperback copy so I can read it more slowly and meaningfully. Eastwood is a Performance Coach of Maori decent, and has worked with some of the biggest sports teams and organisations around the world. In it, he discusses the Maori concept of Whakapapa – the belief that each member of a tribe is part of a chain reaching back generations, a chain to which they are welcome and will always belong to and be remembered by. This incredibly powerful sense of belonging is used to elevate teams to unbelievable levels of achievement, and help individuals feel part of something much bigger than just themselves.
This was the last book I read that made me think ‘this is going to fundamentally change how I go about doing things’, and although that change is coming slowly, its impacting the way that I choose to lead communities. So far I’ve only been able to start encouraging belonging ceremonies and ways of welcoming new members to the group, but there is so much in here that I can’t recommend it highly enough.
As the name suggests, this is a guidebook on building communities of practice, hewn from the collective experience of Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner. Its proved very useful to me over recent years as it gives a lot of detail around the specific definitions related to various parts of a community of practice. This book provides an excellent level of detail. Alongside this guidance, the book tells the stories of two different organisations (JP Morgan-Chase and CCHN) and the different but equally effective ways that they have effectively built communities of practice.
A book that introduced me to the concept of decentralised organisations, and taught me to question (and then rethink) my beliefs on what a community leader is and should be responsible for. The premise is fairly simple – if you take a spider and chop it in half, you have a dead spider. Its brain is in the middle and centrally controls its legs. If however you took a starfish and chopped it in half – as it has multiple brains in each leg – what you end up with is two starfish. By decentralising control, ownership and responsibility, communities and organisations can thrive in incredibly resilient ways. Throughout the book Brafman cites numerous examples of where this has been demonstrated – from Alcoholics Anonymous to Napster – and goes through the structure that helps them succeed. The learnings I took from this help remind me that I don’t need or want to be the very centre of a community, or to try and position myself as the command and control leader.
For those not aware of Menlo Innovations, they are an American tech company that does things differently – regularly voted as the best company to work for, this book’s predecessor Joy Inc details their journey of building a workplace that people love. Although both are written by CEO Richard Sheridan, Chief Joy Officer is arguably a more in depth and personal account as Sheridan talks in more detail about his own personal experiences of why he chose to look for an alternative to the traditional ways of running a business, and attempt to build somewhere that allowed teams to bring their whole selves to work every day. The book talks about the importance of relationships and their belief that relationships can only be built by spending time together – something that hits right to the heart of my own core values of community building activities. Pre-covid they were a proudly in-person business and, as the world has changed over the past couple of years, they have been remarkably (but not surprisingly) open and candid about their fears, the changes they have made and the successes they have found. If you’ve not heard of them, you’re in for a treat!
Not strictly about communities of practice, The Art of Gathering goes into a lot of detail around the different reasons that people come together, how they are meaningful in different ways to different people, the written and unwritten rules of any gathering, laced together with examples of different types of community. Reading this helped reinforce the value of certain actions and ceremonies within a community gathering, which in turn has helped me explain and articulate the purpose of them to those outside the community more effectively.
Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee 🙂