(1995-11-30) Brown The People Are The Company

John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray: The People Are the Company. Revolutions start in the most unexpected places and with the most unlikely heroes. Who would imagine that the conventional wisdom of the Industrial Age would be challenged by copier repair technicians - "tech reps" - at Xerox?

The story begins in the 1980s

Here's what the anthropologist saw: Tech reps often made it a point to spend time not with customers but with each other.

The tech reps weren't slacking oV; they were doing some of their most valuable work.

Like most work, it involves a community of professionals. The tech reps weren't just repairing machines; they were also coproducing insights about how to repair machines better. (community of practice)

So Xerox turned conventional wisdom on its head. Rather than eliminate the informal conversations in pursuit of corporate efficiency, we decided to expand them in the name of learning and innovation. Using the Denver area as a pilot project, PARC distributed two-way radio headsets to the tech reps. The radio frequency over which the tech reps communicated became a "knowledge channel" through which they asked each other questions, identified problems, and shared new solutions as they devised them.

But the headsets had limitations. For one thing, no one captured the knowledge

So we took the tech rep experiment to the next level. In France, working with Rank Xerox, PARC recently unveiled Eureka, an electronic "knowledge refinery" that organizes and categorizes a database of tips generated by the field staff. Technically, Eureka is a relational database of hypertext documents

The tech rep experiments offer important clues about working and managing in the Knowledge Era. Companies today face a landscape littered with ambiguity

the ability to make meaning out of still-emerging patterns.

Three principles bring this perplexing environment into focus:

Processes don't do work, people do.

Look closely at the inner workings of any company and you'll discover gaps between official work processes - the "ideal" flows of tasks and procedures - and the real-world practices behind how things actually get done. These gaps are not problems that need fixing; they're opportunities that deserve leveraging

We're not arguing against business processes per se. The challenge is to keep them elegantly minimal - to underprescribe formal procedures and create "elbow room" for local interpretations and innovations.

...showing the researcher their "real" manual. It was the standard book - but highlighted, dog-eared, filled with scribbles in the margins and annotated with notes and reminders. Each tech rep was keeping two sets of books: the formal and the informal, the official and the improvised.

Learning is about work, work is about learning, and both are social. Two ideas shape how most companies approach learning and knowledge: (1) learning means individual mastery, and (2) everything that is knowable can be made explicit. The more you explore real work, the more you appreciate the power of a different kind of knowledge: tacit knowledge.

Recognizing the tacit and collective dimensions of work has big implications for learning. From this perspective, learning is less about absorbing information than it is about becoming part of a community.

Think about product designers. At National Semiconductor, a community of engineers who specialize in phase lock loops (PLLs), a critical technology in some of National's most important products, has begun to conduct joint reviews of new chip designs.

But these engineers can't simply publish their "rules" and teach the rest of National how to do design reviews. They can't create a library of PLL designs and urge the rest of National to use them. The practice and knowledge is embedded in the community that created it.

At the heart of participation is the mind and spirit of the knowledge worker.

At Xerox, for example, the goal of developing reusable software code seemed unattainable - until a group of young engineers, working outside official channels, organized themselves under the banner of the Toolkit Working Group

Like the organizations we are all part of, these principles aren't clean and neat.

How can we begin to convert these principles into action? With communities of practice (CoPs) - the critical building block of a knowledge-based company.

At the simplest level, they are a small group of people (in this case, about 20) who've worked together over a period of time. Not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorized or identified group.

They are peers in the execution of "real work." What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows.

real-world competence - a sustained capacity to outperform the competition - is built as much on implicit know-how and relationships as on tangible products and tools.

National Semiconductor has gone further than any other company in promoting and catalyzing CoPs.

A new CEO, Gil Amelio, arrived in 1991 and began a process of restructuring and rationalization. Now the agenda has changed from cutting costs to growing - and from commodity manufacturing to product leadership.

Communities of practice are playing a central role in this redefinition. At one level, they energize and mobilize the company's engineers - the critical people for a company in transition from slashing headcount to pioneering markets. They also shape and enact strategy. A CoP focused on communication signal processing (an application of mixed-signal technology) includes engineers from a variety of product lines

In May 1994, after a first-ever gathering of key technologists across National's product lines, this loose group became a recognized community of practice

The PLL community does not "report" to any business unit or product line; it is of, by, and for its members. But it is not a debating society or an aYnity group. It exists to perform real work and to provide a vehicle for collaboration and interaction among technical people

National wants to extend the success of the PLL community across the company. (There are now four recognized CoPs at National, with several more on the horizon.) It has created a CoP Council to provide advice on communities of practice, offer technology support, and lobby for funding for community projects

The challenge for National is the same challenge facing any company that wants to tap the latent power of its emergent communities: How do you achieve scale? CoPs seldom grow beyond 50 members

Part of the answer comes from technology - a fourth principle of competing in the Knowledge Era

New digital technologies will enable companies to engage their employees and energize the emergent.

Consider Project Jupiter, now in operation inside Xerox. Jupiter is "virtual social reality"

success in the Knowledge Era is as much about the spirit of the enterprise as the economics of the business; as much about the positive energy it unleashes as the positive cash flow it creates. We also know that the most valuable knowledge often resides where we are least able to see or control it: on the front lines, at the periphery, with the renegades.