Jeff Stamps has taken the time to reply at length and in depth to Mike Gotta's response to my post on Teams of Practice. Here's Jeff's thinking:
Mike, this is a terrific post on "Teams of Practice". I'll take a crack at it in the knowledge management context in which we coined the term.
At a high level, we see KM in three phases of collaboration.
Phase 1 is the capturing, storing, and making accessible knowledge objects generated elsewhere in the organization, the Knowledge Base, for shared use.
Phase 2 added Communities of Practice to source knowledge directly from people. CoP systems of conversation follow Etienne Wenger's observation that people pass practices, their "how-tos," along informal pathways of tacit knowledge exchange, propelled along by questions and answers and held together by social relationships of community. Here, the conversation itself is the knowledge base.
Phase 3 adds Teams of Practice to source knowledge directly from teams. We mean to capture both what "a team of practice" is, and how they inevitably connect as "teams of practice," a network of ToPs.
Teams are the working units of the organization, both strategic (executive) and tactical (line) teams at all levels. The team context allows people to collaboratively pursue concrete goals, test ideas, make decisions, develop and execute tasks, and produce output. As teams go online, they create and capture knowledge objects, generate focused conversations, and produce a wealth of contextual "how-tos" in agendas, task lists, time lines, etc. Hence, knowledge captured in the context of an online team room is the actual tacit practice of the organization.
Organizations are inherently networks of teams, starting with the hierarchy, which is a network of interlocked management teams of direct reporting relationships. Today, many more types of teams are added to that basic set of groups to get the work of the organization done. All these teams are producing output used by other teams in the organization in a sequence of upstream-to-downstream and supplier-customer relationships feeding teams delivering to the organization's ultimate customer(s). The horizontal connections among working teams are the ones that produce large-scale organizational results. This network of teams exists whether recognized or not, and is not a stage on the way to a CoP of individuals.
What's historically new to us as a species long familiar with the complexities of small groups, as with the first two phase of KM, is the online part, the externalization of memory and learning in the global cloud of virtual spacetime. As more of a team's daily life occurs in or passes through online places, more concrete practice is captured in its natural, role-based, context. This is increasingly happening whether the team is collocated or not.
However, teams are jumping online in all manner of KM containers, most groups happily isolated from one another. The challenge is to network them in the meaningful pattern of their work, not just randomly (i.e., search across team spaces). Teams of practice would not only share across teams, but enable learning and problem-solving at the teamnet (network of teams) level of producing organizational results.
