What if someone said there is a community of practice (CoP) that plays an enormous role in Western Civilization? What if they said these CoP participants meet on a weekly basis, sometimes more, in virtually every country in the world? What if they said the CoP had 1.1B members, is growing, and has been around for about 2000 years?

This person would be talking about the Roman Catholic Church.

It is surprising how little today’s so called management or social media ‘experts’ know about the foundations of their practices. For example, the father of modern management, Peter Ducker, knew most organizational structures are based on the Catholic Church. The ‘Patron Saint’ of Wired Magazine and undisputed thought leader of the social media revolution is, of course, Marshall McLuhan. Marshall was an ardent Roman Catholic and attended Mass everyday. His thinking drew heavily from Mariology.

Much of what contemporary management consultants, community and social media authorities pass-off as original thinking originates from the Bishops of Rome and papal social teachings. Important today, for example, for leadership of social media and communities, are the critical principles of subsidiarity and distributism.

No need to turn to your handy papal encyclical. Just recall subsidiarity is the organizing foundation that activities are handled best by the least centralized competent actors. Of course distributism is the principle that the means of production must be spread as wide as possible. Sounds like a solid strategy for the social enterprise and social business.

Anyway, there are new signs of life that the community and management establishment is getting hip and recognizing the critical foundations of their craft. For example, the well-regarded CPsquare is convening a welcome but overdue confabulation on spiritual and religious communities. Recommended.  

###

We’ve been having a conversation in CPsquare for more than 4 years about communities in religious and spiritual contexts. What is unique about those contexts? What similarities do they have with each other or with other secular communities of practice (e.g., of Java programmers or skateboarders or mothers of newborns)? What could we learn about communities in general by looking at spiritual and religious communities? What could those communities learn from exploring each other using a communities of practice perspective? We’ve decided that it’s time to hold a larger and more organized conference and invite you to join us during July 2011, whether you are only able to dip into one or two sessions or whether you can spend the whole month exploring these issues. Here is why we are doing it:

• We are interested in what we see people learning and what they do to learn, rather than what or how they are supposed to learn. Religious and spiritual communities are interesting examples -- apparently different from the corporate or professional communities that have been associated with the term “community of practice.”
• We are always looking at communities from inside and outside because we are concerned with personal experience and social organization. Many of us actively participate in religious and spiritual communities and find that they inform our work with other communities. It seems important to practice looking at them from the outside a bit more systematically.
• CPsquare is an international and cross-cultural community. We are curious to know more about how “situated” religious and spiritual communities are when they straddle the cultural or national boundaries we straddle or when we can observe them across those boundaries.
• We see communities of practice at multiple levels of scale, tucked away in organizations as well as spanning the globe. We see community of practice structures at the level of an individual congregation (e.g., First Baptist Church or Congregation Beth Shalom), across congregations (e.g., meditation instructors across Shambhala) as well as inside congregations (e.g., self-organizing prayer breakfast at Saddleback Church described in Robert Putnam’s American Grace). What does that imply for those of us who seek to support or cultivate communities?

This is a working version of the conference schedule which is still evolving (mixing scheduled items with a few tentative items). Numbered items are scheduled. Bulleted items are not quite scheduled yet.

1. Opening – Bill Snyder: Communities of Practice: Organizing for Renewal – June 27 (see more detail below)
2. Robert Putnam reading: Prayer request circles vignette from American Grace – June 29
3. Josh Plakoff and Estee Solomon Grey: Isomorphism between Judaism and Communities of Practice – July 5
4. Lisa Colton: the Jewish indie minyan “phenomenon” – July 7
5. Joe Kutter: Community of Practice initiatives in the American Baptist Church – July 20
6. Sr. Maxine and Julie – anunslife.org an online Catholic community – July 21

Not quite scheduled yet:

• Frank Daugherity, “A Christian community ministering to disaster victims in Japan.” Spiritual and religious communities are alive and well in Japan, despite the devastation from the 9.0 earthquake and Tsunami. Frank observes the interactions of several communities during a work mission with http://crashjapan.com/ during the first half of July. CRASH is a group of Japanese Christians that have been doing relief work all over Asia. Frank is an ordained minister and long-time member of CPsquare who lived in Japan for 20 years earlier in his life. How do the several communities show up and how might they evolve in their response to this crisis? Join us for an interview at (TBA).
• Dave Makokwski, “WebEx support for Tibetan New Year in an international Buddhist Sangha.” (TBA)
• A transcription and publication project as community of practice: http://www.unfetteredweb.org/pod/who-and-how

Conference organization

This is an online conference, so we will use our several platforms as we get organized in June and hold the conference in July, 2011. This conference is like an open space technology conference where the conversations are traceable back in history and the community hosting it expects to continue interacting and working on the topic as a whole in the future. (See more about participation in the conference.)

Focus issues

Because CPsquare is an ongoing community, we don’t mind tackling issues that are larger than what we can handle in one conversation or one conference. Here is the beginning of a list of issues that we could discuss or investigate:

• Many religious or spiritual communities are examples of long-standing, highly evolved communities of practice. At the same time we find young, very recently formed communities that are attempting to address age-old issues in new ways. Communities along the whole spectrum are of inherent interest to us in the CPsquare community.
• Religious and spiritual communities are interesting examples of communities of practice that:
  • occur at all levels of scale, from the smallest, self-organizing minyans (Jewish prayer groups that are often lay-led) to very large and formal institutions,
  • are embedded in very diverse social, cultural, technical and economic contexts,
  • create a kind of “mycorrhizae” stratum (to use Engeström’s metaphor) that creates a beneficial context for other communities.
• Migration and social changes cause religious communities that evolved separately to now exist in social settings that are very different from where they originated (and now they live right next to traditions with very different origins), presenting new challenges as well as opportunities.
• A social learning perspective is useful in that it allows religious communities to look at themselves in such a way as to consider the relevance of insights, innovations or difficulties faced by other communities.
• From a social learning perspective new technologies presents opportunities for spiritual communities such as:
  • reaching larger peripheries (including proselytizing),
  • for supporting or teaching teachers,
  • technology also presents challenges because it can facilitate multi-membership and “religion as an identity game” that’s superficial, or a needlessly confrontational “issue”.
• Communities always face interesting issues about how to organize themselves, how to grow, and how to sustain themselves. How they fund themselves and fund their ongoing evolution is always an important theme.

Schedule overview

Religious and spiritual communities conference schedule overview
The public, overview schedule will be updated as the conference takes shape. The official and more detailed conference schedule is inside the CPsquare community space.

CPsquare conferences are open but intimate. We examine a particular subject within our general field of communities of practice in greater depth across several days or weeks. Our conferences are primarily by and for CPsquare members. Membership is open and you are invited to join us. (Dues are low enough so that a year’s membership costs less than many other conferences.) In addition to members, some people participate as guests during the conference:

• Guests of the conference who are making a presentation (and are invited by the conference organizers)
• Guests of an individual CPsquare member (who join as “a friend of CPsquare” and designate the individual as “sponsor” on the membership form). The expectation is that sponsors will help their guest participate and become acquainted with the CPsquare environment)

CPsquare conferences usually combine synchronous and asynchronous elements, making participation possible from anywhere in the world.  (See the times in the password-protected community calendar). We will typically use more than one of our several platforms for our interactions in a conference.

A provocative proposition to launch the conversation

To give a flavor of our conversations, here are a few of the provocative propositions that William M. Snyder, co-author of Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) with Etienne Wenger and Richard McDermott, has offered to kick off our conversations.

• The superordinate purpose of the church is the ongoing discovery and fulfillment of the Mission of God
  • This provides a context for setting expectations and priorities at global, diocese, and congregation levels
• As “the Body of Christ,” the church is built on human faith and relationships as well divine inspiration
  • Thus the church, like any community or organization, is affected by personal and social dynamics
  • This means attending to issues such as power, conflict, and personalities as well as scripture, sacraments, and spirit
• Many faith communities do not demonstrate capabilities required to engage and energize members to fulfill their mission
  • Key capabilities include leadership, community-building, and practice-innovation and -development
• We must dramatically increase our learning capacity to thrive: technical learning for improvement and transformational learning for sustained vitality and influence
  • Much to learn about learning from organization experience in other sectors
  • There is a growing repertoire of learning-related concepts, methods, and structures to draw on
• A key strategy for learning is cultivating generative relationships undefined across congregations as well as within them
  • Mutually supportive relationships among peer practitioners are key for generating ideas and getting them shared and applied
  • “Communities of practice” foster learning, innovation, and collaboration
• The church is a unique organization with distinctive capabilities undefined and barriers undefined for transformational learning
  • Large-scale, systematic change is not easy for established organizations, particularly ones (such as the Church) with a deeply embedded hierarchical structure and ideological buffers that obscure market forces
  • Yet the Church also has distinctive advantages: members’ faith and their communal commitment to embody the love of God provide an openness to the Spirit and a trustworthy foundation to build on
  • The Church’s “witness of hope” to the world also inspires internal renewal