Communities of practice are loosely knit

A product team has clearly defined deliverables, joint accountability, and an evenly distributed workload—it’s a tightly-knit organizational unit. Communities of practice, on the other hand, are loosely-knit organizational units:

• While the community might have a coordinator, participation will vary across team members. Some may contribute very actively, while some may lurk at the outskirts. This is also very likely to change over time (e.g., junior members will start participating more as they develop more knowledge and confidence to contribute to the group).
• Communities of practice usually have no clear deliverables. Instead, they are built around identity: the community exists because its members identify with it and actively contribute. The value created by the communities is the natural byproduct of these contributions rather than a goal defined a priori.
• In a community of practice, each member’s mission, relationships, and status are defined mainly by their contributions rather than by an org chart. The community develops organically (communities-of-practice-form-organically) over time rather than according to a fixed roadmap.

On the one hand, this “volatility” makes communities of practice harder to maintain than a product team, which has clear responsibility and accountability and is constantly pulling away at people’s time.

On the other, the focus on identity makes communities of practice a much more permanent “organizational unit” than the product team and one of the best ways to spread information across business units. This is why Communities of practice combat cross-functional silos.

References

• [[the-systems-thinker-communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system-the-systems-thinker|The Systems Thinker – Communities of Practice Learning as a Social System - The Systems Thinker]]