A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
Posts about communities of practice
In the new edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice, I share insights into community size and interactions. I’ve been using this theory with clients to create nested layers that include communities of practice that serve as a model for their organisation.
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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.
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On Thursday, 5th February, 25 people who normally mostly meet online, travelled to Liverpool to meet in person. It was a brilliant couple of days connecting with people and ideas. Here’s what happened.
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This post is the write-up of a talk I gave at Fast Flow Conference in October 2025, about Communities of Practice through the lens of learning, knowledge, and ideas flow.
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Following last years’ IRL get together, members of the Agile in the Ether Community spent another sunny Friday in Liverpool connecting and sharing ideas. Such a brilliant way to brighten up February.
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I have been running Agile in the Ether for over five years; this year, we had a face-to-face event for the first time. It was wonderful and proves you can make real connections over video. In this post, I’ll talk briefly about the intention, the approach and what happened.
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I have been working with, writing about and speaking on communities of practice for many years now. That content is scattered in various places, like this blog, my company website and other platforms. So, I’ve brought it all together in one place.
Check it out at communitiesofpractice.work
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Ok, this title feels like clickbait; it’s such a common question I get asked and will likely entice some people and annoy others. So in this post, I will share some tactics and approaches to help your communities thrive while giving those putting pressure on you something to make them happy.
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***Post updated 29th Sept 2023 with new name***
I have recently relocated to a new area, and I’m starting another new meetup*.
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** updated 11th June 2024 to clarify some definitions **
I have worked with Communities of Practice in organisations for many years. One recent trend I have seen is people using the term community when they mean the more formal construct of a profession and vice versa.
When organisations overlook the attributes of a community, they miss out on what makes a community of practice magic.
When they expect a community to fulfil the role of a profession, people get left behind. This post will explain some of those differences.
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Another day, another Miro template. I have now published my Community of Practice Kick-off Canvas on the Miroverse.
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I gave a talk at SEACON recently building on top of my previous blog post about assisted serendipity. I wanted to share the ideas in that talk here as it is very relevant to the current times. This long post covers why serendipity is essential and how we can create opportunities for it to happen, both in the workplace and while distributed.
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A quick post to share something that makes me smile. A slack* channel, yes another one, but it is one worth having.
Many of us are working from home, one of the challenges that come with this is leaving the house. It’s important to get outside to take a break, get some air and move our bodies. I find making public commitments a big motivator, so I started a slack channel in one of the communities I run called #daily-outside-photo. The point is to get outside, while there take a photo and share it with the channel. I love this channel. I love seeing people’s pictures and short comments. It brightens up my day.
Continue readingCommunities of practice have a significant impact on organisations for all the reasons which I have spoken about in my book and many times on stage. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to explore the correlation between communities of practice and natural human communities with evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. This led to a paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, co-authored with Dunbar.
What it shows us is that the business world has a lot that it can learn from evolutionary psychology and natural social communities.
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We have some of the best conversations when they are unstructured and happen by chance. That moment when you bump into someone when you are out and about, and they happen to mention something that really helps you. Or you sit down to lunch with a work colleague, and it sparks a great new idea.
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A little while back I wrote a post on skills and capability mapping with communities of practice, I have been developing this work further into an organisational-wide approach, under the name of Capability Profile Mapping.
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Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement
Helen Timperley and John Hattie
Many of us facilitate workshops or agile habits regularly and we know if a workshop has gone well if the outcomes are useful. There are also lots of elements of facilitation that we don’t often get feedback on. So here is a tool I use to help think about and frame facilitation feedback.
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Update, the posters are no longer available, but you can learn more about communities of practice in my book and you can download my community of practice tools and templates here.
If you regularly read my blog, then you will know that communities of practice are my specialist subject and core to a lot of the work that I do. I help lots of organisations who are building their specialist skills in digital and agile delivery and those communities form an essential foundation for just that.
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That might sound like a bit of an odd title on my blog but bear with me. I have spent the last year making some changes in myself, and I’ve used everything I know about how people work, approaches to change and experimentation in order to do that. This post talks about how I went about it and what has happened so far.
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I first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice.
Skills and capability maps help organisations identify gaps and where to invest in skills development. So it makes sense that many want to create them.
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I’ve been running a friendly, low-tech, lunchtime Agile meet up in a park since Nov 2014, if you want to know more about it, have a look over here.
One of the things that we’ve done since the start is to give our lovely attendees badges. And not the same badge, it’s a different design every time.
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Update 2026, there is a new edition of the book. You can find out more and purcuase it here https://hellotacit.com/publications/
As you may know from previous posts, I’ve been busy writing a book called “Building Successful Communities of Practice: Discover How Connecting People Makes Better Organisations”.
The book is now ready and you can now buy it both on kindle and as a paperback (print on demand) book.
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As I mentioned in my last post, I have been writing a book called ‘Building successful communities of practice: Discover how learning together makes better organisations’, which is due to be published in early 2016. I wanted to share more about how I have gone about writing it using agile tools and techniques.
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I have been very busy recently writing a book (currently) called Building successful communities of practice: Discover how learning together makes better organisations. It’s been in progress since September and I’m planning on publishing it early next year.
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Recently I blogged about the Agile on the Bench conference, a minimum viable conference in a campsite that I ran with David Lowe. It happened last Saturday, 25th July and it was an awesome day. The speakers and audience were fantastic and, much like our lunchtime events, the sun came out, despite the heavy rain the day before. In my last post I talked about what we were trying to achieve and here I’ll talk about the successes, what we learnt, where we could improve and share the conference budget.
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