4 Key Challenges for Success in Building an Organizational Community

Two hands shaking in front of a digital globe. Businesspeople sit in a meeting room below, with city lights in the background.

We present a particularly interesting review on knowledge sharing through communities, written by Richard McDermott, PhD, president of the global company McDermott & Co., specializing in knowledge solutions for organizations. This review in our publication is a condensed translation of the full article. Enjoy!

Limitations in Knowledge Management

In recent years, companies have discovered that the true value of knowledge management is not just in distributing and cross-referencing information but primarily in sharing the ideas, insights, and thought processes that led to its creation. This aspect of knowledge is elusive and difficult to describe, hence the name tacit knowledge.

For example, Software developers in a certain company wanted to share this knowledge by documenting their files in a shared repository. However, they quickly realized that the "dry" information in the documents was inefficient, and what was interesting was the rationale behind things. Why did a programmer choose one software over another? How is one strategy preferable to another? In a car company, development engineers discovered in the information database that another group had already researched and rejected their ideas. Still, they couldn't find the reason why these ideas were rejected.

So far, attempts to externalize tacit knowledge through typical knowledge management methods have resulted in empty information repositories, or despite being full of information, appearing as the organizational "garbage bin." Summarizing an idea seemed to knowledge contributors as "missing the point," and consumers felt the information was too general and lacked "substance" to derive benefit from it.

Intellectual Momentum Through Organizational Communities

A community is a group of people who share knowledge, insights, experience, and tools on any common topic: professional information, skills, or specific subjects. Communities have always existed as part of the organizational structure. Initially, they formed spontaneously through people seeking help and exchanging ideas in problem-solving, and over time, they evolved and became formal. Some argue that communities have always been the true way to disseminate knowledge. The means have changed, but the idea remains the same. Ironically, this ancient community concept is the key to innovation for leveraging tacit knowledge.

A community typically forms around topics its members have invested significant time and resources in and are passionate about.

But the community is more than a celebration of shared interests; it focuses on practical issues and everyday problems. Members participate in activities because the community adds value to their work. Sometimes, praise from a community member is valued more than praise from a manager because community members share in the difficulty and wisdom of the solution more than the manager. As a result, workers sometimes identify more with the community than with their broader organizational unit.

Although each community operates uniquely, all communities are generally similar, so we'll demonstrate community activity by presenting the Turbodudes community. The Turbodudes deal with a unique geological structure called turbidites in the Gulf of Mexico. The community attracts various people from the field of geology—geologists, geophysicists, geo-engineers, and more.

The community operates through a community manager, experts, external lectures, and a website. For two years, the community has been meeting every Tuesday for an hour-long discussion, and despite the turnover, there is a core of 10 people who set the tone. The meetings appear very informal: the manager allows participants to raise topics for group discussion. On the "side" sits a typist recording the discussion. The next day, a forum summary is distributed on the website. However, these meetings are much more formal than they appear. Throughout the week, the community manager "walks" among the participants, connects people with shared interests, collects questions for the next meeting, and summarizes topics from the previous meeting. To ensure that the forums interest everyone, a group of experts in the forum updates new participants with information from previous meetings so no one starts from scratch and joins the discussion from where it currently stands.

And how does all this relate to leveraging tacit knowledge?

In the community, there is an important dynamic where members request and offer help daily in addressing topics and problems. They are not afraid to expose their "soft underbelly" in the "public space." Managing honest and supportive conversations on real issues builds trust and connection. Community members develop a shared way of doing things, and by integrating, community members become a cohesive group with mutual trust. This is how tacit knowledge rises to the surface, and the community becomes an ideal place to nurture and preserve it, turning one person's experience into a resource for many and the entire organization.

Critical Factors for Community Success:

Although communities have been part of organizations for many generations, only recently have we begun to understand their dynamics and try to develop them proactively. Because they exist only due to the value and sense of togetherness they create, they are very different from other work teams. Therefore, the factors for their success and prosperity are also different.

Here are 4 main challenges in establishing and maintaining a community capable of sharing and leveraging tacit knowledge:

The Management Challenge:

Knowledge management has recently become the new "craze" in large company management. Professional staff have already learned that if they keep a low profile, they might escape the additional work. How can employees still be convinced that this is an important step?

Here are four tips for conveying the message that knowledge sharing is a supreme value for success: Establish communities around the organization's core topics.
Choose a community manager who is respected and valued by its members and has the community at heart (professionally and socially).
Time is one of the most limiting factors in a community. Ensure that employees have time and encouragement to enter the community.
Accept knowledge sharing in the organization and adapt it to its values without changing its culture.

The Cultural Challenge:

The greatest danger to a developing community is losing momentum, developing apathy, and leaving all the work to the community manager. If the manager moves on to other things, the community may disintegrate.

The greatest danger to a successful community is that it becomes so entrenched that it is not open to changes.

Several factors can help a community stay sharp:

Involve important opinion leaders in community activities from the early stage.
Nurture interpersonal relationships between community members to create a sense of "togetherness" - without it, no document will help...
Create think tanks in face-to-face meetings to formulate a community development plan.
Nurture and activate a core of participants who are passionate about the subject and will be the main knowledge contributors.

The Technological Challenge:

There are so many good technological solutions for knowledge sharing that it's easy to get carried away and focus on their functionality. However, the real challenge is to design the social side of information technology.

Important points to consider when choosing technology:

It should allow community members to communicate with each other, contribute, and use existing knowledge easily.
It should connect to work processes and daily routines rather than being an "additional system."
It should prevent as much resistance or operational difficulty as possible - as difficulty increases, usage decreases.
It should be able to contain the organizational taxonomy.
It should be designed for user convenience.

The Personal Challenge:

The greatest value of the community comes from problem-solving events, not case descriptions. However, the challenge is to make participants feel comfortable presenting a "half-idea" or managing an open discussion that doesn't come naturally to them.

Advice for solution: Relationships form during discussion, not in presenting successful solutions. It is important to create an open dialogue on the hottest topics in the community; the community manager should initiate discussions until community members feel comfortable enough to raise such discussions themselves. If the process doesn't happen independently, it needs to be "helped" by directly approaching participants and encouraging them to raise topics.

Conclusion:

Communities represent a new or old entity in the organization. On the one hand, they have always been there on the informal side of the activity. However, to increase their value, they need to be nurtured and made formal, and as such, they are the newest development available.

Global experience in nurturing communities is still in its infancy. Managers know how to deal with formal organizational units, but the challenges are different for "living, breathing" communities. Too much support will be considered interference, which reduces motivation for activity, and too little intervention will cause them to fade or become unfocused.

Ironically, just when technology enables us to share knowledge with any place in the world, only the "human touch" will make it happen.