A New Communities of Practice Model for Organisational Maturity

I have been busy working on the second edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice. As it’s 10 years since the first one, there is a lot of new content, including a new communities of practice organisational maturity model, which I have just made available for download.

I created this model to complement my existing Community of Practice Maturity Model, with a focus on communities of practice at scale rather than individual communities. This view is something I increasingly need, as organisations I work with look for ways to evaluate their initiatives through an organisational lens.

This new model focuses on communities of practice at scale, with five levels of organisational maturity from low awareness to self-sustaining and setting standards across six dimensions (structure, culture, collaboration, support, technology and impact). It will be useful for people leading and facilitating cross-organisational communities of practice initiatives.

Individual Communities of Practice vs Communities of Practice at scale.

My existing model focuses on the maturity of individual communities of practice, while this new organisational model takes a step back to consider the wider environment: whether the structures, culture, and support systems across an organisation are in place to enable communities of practice to thrive.

One helps you assess what’s happening inside a community, the other helps you understand what’s enabling or hindering it from the outside.

You can download a pdf copy of the Communities of Practice Organisation Maturity Model here.

You can also sign up to receive updates about the second edition of the book Building Successful Communities of Practice.

Or check out the Building Successful Communities of Practice online course

And see the whole set of community of practice tools on the Tacit website here.