Communities of practice: Interview with Martin Dugage

There is an interview with Martin Dugage available in the May issue of IK magazine, I found it through his blog. It is one of the few descriptions of French experiences I've come across and very practical.

He started KM initiatives at a company called Schneider by putting a toolkit for creating communities together, adapted to th company's culture. Soon he was contacted by a senior vice president who said it was wat he needed to support comptence centres he was building. Then each country was asked to build a glocal community around its domain of expertise. To support this they organised worldwide meetings where each leader had to explain the objective in one minute. The success almost killed it, as the same vice president wanted to speed up the initiative. Dugage: 'when you want communities to move faster they morph into project teams'.

And one thing which resonated with my experiences: HR, country managers and IT must convey consistent messages to employees. If experts from a country receive conflicting information, nothing will happen. (but from my experience, it is sometimes hard for them to see that they send contradictory messages, and even what they say and do may be contradictory). So managers: if your staff is not innovating and taking initiatives as you'd wish, try to get feedback rather than assume they are slow and without ideas.