Building Communities of Practice That Amplify the Flow of Learning Across Orgs

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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.

Office life has changed.

In the last few years, I have often walked into a client’s office that feels like a ghost ship, especially on a Friday. The post-pandemic working world is still figuring out how to operate, and even for those who are back in the office, people don’t get to connect in the same ways they used to; things are just more fragmented, and everyone just seems busier.

And without people connecting, we get silos where

• People aren’t connected
• Teams don’t really know what others are doing
• Collaboration is limited
• Decision-making happens in silos
• Knowledge sits with individuals
• Learning is fragmented
• Opportunities are inconsistent

When we have these silos, we lose the benefits of the wonderful expertise we have across our organisations and the benefits of collaboration.

Engagement and Exploration

Alex Pentland, professor at MIT and author of Social Physics, talks about the need to step out of our immediate space (engagement) to a broader space (exploration) to explore new ideas by connecting with others. This exploration gets us out of the day-to-day and introduces new ideas we can bring back to inform our patterns of action.

Success through social physics: Alex Pentland 

He also says this:

“Engagement with and learning from others, along with the mutual sharing and vetting of ideas, generate a collective intelligence that is greater than the members’ individual intelligence”

Alex Pentland, Social Physics

Together, and connected, we are greater than the sum of our parts.

Humans are wired to connect.

But most organisations are not.

Humans learn the need to connect with others early on; we are born without the ability to look after ourselves, so we need that connection to survive, and that need doesn’t go away throughout our lives.

However, many of our organisations follow hierarchical, siloed organisational charts that discourage people from connecting across them, often split into separate cost centres, budgets and targets. Going against our human nature to connect.

Removing barriers to the flow of learning

For this talk, I wanted to create an easy way to identify the barriers to the flow of learning, to help understand them and introduce practical strategies to remove them.

Opportunity: spaces and situations for people to connect across silos

Trust: the safety and confidence to share openly, and 

Motivation: The conditions where people prioritise learning and sharing.

I’ll go through each of these, explain why they are important, outline practical steps to address them, and, of course, discuss Communities of Practice.

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Creating spaces and situations for people to connect across silos.

To start with, we need to create opportunities for people to connect so that learning, knowledge, and ideas can flow.

Those opportunities can also create the conditions for serendipity, where ideas combine to create something magical.

Here are three ways to create opportunities across organisations.

Example 1. Random Coffee

Random coffee is when two people are randomly paired to chat about whatever is on their minds. Creating the opportunity for “strangers” to meet.

This example from Michigan University is called Innovate Brew, where faculty members spend 30 minutes having coffee and talking about whatever comes up.

They found that pairing people across different faculties allowed them to gain insight into the workings of other departments.

Those people who met realised they faced common issues, brought new perspectives to problems, and created ideas for future collaborations; new projects have even taken root, ones that would not have done so without that opportunity to meet.

Example 2. Taking coffee breaks together

Taking time out together can lead to significant benefits by providing an opportunity to connect and learn from each other.

In Alex Pentland’s book Social Physics, he talks about a case of a bank with 10 almost identical contact centres.

Traditionally, people in teams took staggered coffee breaks, so no one from the same team was on a break at the same time.

They experimented to see whether giving themselves more time to interact would yield a positive outcome. So, they changed the break schedule so that whole teams had their breaks together, allowing them to mix and interact over tea and coffee.

This small change led to a dramatic drop in average call handling time, and they estimated it would realise a $15 million productivity increase.

When people have the opportunity to talk to each other, they share ideas, solve problems together, support each other and learning flows, raising everyone’s effectiveness.

Example 3: Communities of Practice

And, of course, Communities of Practice create opportunities for people across an organisation to get together.

One example from Xerox is where they built grassroots communities of practice that connected people across the organisation.

Previously, managers had assumed technicians needed only detailed written guidance to do their jobs (explicit knowledge); however, what surprised them was that peer-to-peer sharing and conversation (tacit knowledge) proved most beneficial.

“It was the informal notes, tips and war stories traded during breaks and time off that the service technicians found most useful”

Community of practice member at Xerox

Connecting people on a human level is what made their communities of practice successful and led to real organisational benefits.

“the service technicians reported a learning curve up to three times faster… In concrete terms, this meant that the aggregate amount of time logged for each service call was reduced by 10%.” https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77033133.pdf

So, what is a Community of Practice

I describe a community of practice as:

A group of people connected by a shared passion for something they practice, who collectively improve as they interact regularly.

With these five benefits

Where the supportive network is the underlying foundation that allows for bridging knowledge, growing capability, enabling collaboration, and scaling approaches.

I work with a lot of communities of practice, and here is what members say on the topic of opportunity

“I’m proud of the collaboration between teams that normally have no interaction.”

“The community has broken down ‘barriers’ between the numerous delivery bodies across [our organisation]”

Create opportunities for people to regularly and consistently connect to enable learning to flow.
(Communities of practice are a great 
way to do this).

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The absence of trust is the next barrier to the flow of learning. What Margaret Hefferenan says about trust is that.

“Companies don’t have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other.”

Margaret Heffernan, Forget the pecking order at work

However, many of our current organisational norms don’t prioritise fostering trust.

For example, here is a list of common meeting practices I have recently experienced that undermine opportunities to build trust.

We need trust because

“The levels of risk and uncertainty that are associated with tacit knowledge transfer are reduced by trusting relationships” 

Trust and tacit knowledge sharing and use.

If we don’t trust others, we are less likely to share what we know with them or less likely to accept what they tell us. Learning doesn’t flow.

Back to our Communities of Practice, which are a great way to build trust, and here is how that happens across the maturity phases of a community or practice.

As a Community of Practice develops, the types of learning activities it facilitates increase, from less structured to more structured ones.

Let’s hear from Community members on the topic of trust

“Sharing how you feel in a safe environment is invaluable. Especially when you’re with the people who are best-placed to support you with the tricky parts of your job.”

 “We all support each other and any one of us would do what we could to help another member of the community.”

Communities of practice can enable the trusting relationships that allow learning to flow.

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The third barrier to the flow of learning is a lack of motivation.

We can think about both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators (or demotivators)

Intrinsic motivators: internal drivers that lead individuals to engage in activities for their own enjoyment, interest, or satisfaction.

Extrinsic motivators: external factors that drive a person’s behaviour, such as rewards, money, praise, expectation or punishment.

And specifically on those last two points, organisations really need to actively encourage people, not just say they do, by backing it up with behaviour and recognition, both informal and formal.

To help with that, here is…

The business case for Communities of Practice

To help sell in Communities of Practice to your organisation, here are some useful statements.

Better connected people are more productive, happier, and will stick around for longer.

Saving the cost and effort of hiring new people.

People connected around a passion share knowledge that helps each other.

Saving time and money with the reuse of knowledge and work.

Communities of practice accelerate learning for members and build organisational capability.

Saving money on training and hiring.

Members of Communities of Practice will create better practices that improve the quality of the work.

Making efficiencies in your organisation.

And here are some quotes from community members on the topic of motivation.

“I’ve learnt more from a couple of hours talking with the community than I did in days of reading and researching beforehand”

“Having kindred spirits to bounce ideas off, discuss concerns or explore new ideas with, is rejuvenating. I take my better self to work after our sessions”

Create a culture where Communities of Practice are the norm and they have the time, permission and encouragement to flourish.

Consciously built Communities of Practice can provide these three enablers to the flow of knowldge, learning and ideas across organisations.

Eight steps to building Communities of Practice that accelerate the flow of learning

1. Share your idea
2. Find your first excited members
3. Start by sharing stories
4. Connect regularly to build trust
5. Create opportunities to meet, learn, share and collaborate
6. Shout about your achievements
7. Grow your membership, reach and impact
8. Keep going and turn up the good

And to finish with, here’s my favourite Venn diagram.

Find out more

Take my online course building Successful Communities of Practice: tacit.pub/LearnCoPs

Read my Community of Practice focused website with my writing and tools communitiesofpractice.work

The video

And if you prefer your content over video, you can watch the version of the talk I gave at Fast Flow here