In this episode I talk with my friend Chris Murchison, who is a coach, a facilitator and a talented artist, too!
We talk about his Four principles of Communities of Practice and how building a positive culture within an organization requires, essentially, creating a community of practice. Your team, your organization, is already practicing something…and that practice is either mindful and intentional, or it’s habitual and haphazard.
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something they do and so, have a shared purpose or goal for learning how to do it better…and so, they interact regularly with the intention of continuous improvement of that thing.
An example of intentional practice that Chris shares in the opening quote is what he calls a “Sunset Meeting”, a special, extended, and deeper version of a Retrospective, that asks, not just how did the work go, but how did we do? Stopping to look back and look forward means that the space for continuous improvement is being created.
But without fostering deep psychological safety for people to say what needs to be said, a leader and a team can never get the continuous relevant learning they need from the conversation. How to lead that kind of safety is a whole other conversation, but Chris and I do unpack some of the facilitation skills leaders need to master in order to be able to host these types of continuous improvement conversations.
Communities of practice require ongoing conversations and intentional practices. Chris shares four key principles to help you architect an effective community of practice for your own context:
Meaningful connection (In order to, as Chris says, plant the seeds of trust and safety)
Relevant learning (So people want to be full there AND so the organization benefits)
Purposeful practice (so we’re focused on what matters most)
Sharing and reflection (slowing down to notice and share what we’re each practicing and learning )
Make sure to check out the links and show notes which include Chris’ wonderful Community of Practice Guide and his more general Community Principles & Practices.
AI Automated Summary
9:39
Chris explains his interest in learning and community, and how they led him to the idea of communities of practice
11:56
Chris and Daniel discuss the idea of organizations as communities of practice and learning organizations
15:13
Chris discusses the importance of psychological safety in organizations and how to create a sense of trust and safety for employees to express themselves
19:36
Daniel adds that safety, expression, and learning are all interconnected and that regular intentional practice is necessary to create transformative conversations and communities of practice
41:05
Facilitation skills are important for creating meaningful connections and purposeful practice within a community of practice
47:35
Chris Murchison and Daniel Stillman discuss how building a positive culture within an organization requires ongoing conversations and intentional practices, and how everyone in the organization can be considered part of a community of practice
Links, Quotes, Notes, and Resources
Community Principles & Practices
Minute 1
Chris Murchison:
And the community of practice concept is essentially that. It's just the idea of bringing people together who have a common kind of domain, if you will, share a profession or share something that's of interest to them so they have a reason to be together. And then within that reason there's a sense of connection and community and then there's within that community something that they want to do together and learn together. And so I think I was just so drawn initially to this idea of learning and learning with other people. And so when I came across this concept of communities of practice, it just rang so beautifully for me as something that felt true and youthful and powerful.
Minute 6
Chris Murchison:
In my work within organizations, both as an internal employee and more recently as a consultant, one of the things that I observe and have experienced is a constraint or the difficulty of expression. And oftentimes in organizations, I will experience employees being fearful of speaking up or fearful of speaking the truth to leadership or fearful of, if I say this, I'm going to appear stupid or less intelligent. Or if I say this, I might get reprimanded or there might be some kind of retribution of some kind that I imagine. And it's interesting, and these are all smart people and organizations that support things like showing up authentically and bringing your best self to work, that there can still be this interesting underlying fear.
So I think this relates to this concept of psychological safety and so how do you actually go about building an organization community where there is a sense of trust and greater sense of safety to be courageous and speak more of your truth? I think that's an aspiration and a challenge for many individuals and for many organizations. And so when I think about your question, I think what I would say to a leader is now how do you create ways for people within your workplace community to feel more safe, to feel more courageous, to create the space for people to experiment with expressing themselves more?
And so it might be creating opportunities for people to practice, make these micro practices of connecting. And I mean maybe that's at the root of it sort building the relationships and building enough trust within those relationships across the organization, across your community, so that over time you kind of build a sense of trust and with that, a sense of safety. But then I think allows you to step forward more and to be more courageous in expressing yourself when maybe you have a disagreeing opinion or when you have a piece of feedback that might be more constructive, that you will lean into that because you really trust the relationship and trust that it'll be fine no matter how nervous you might be, that the outcome will likely be trusted and fine. I think also creating some structures to help people begin to practice sharing more. And so I think how do you be thoughtful about creating and you're [inaudible 00:09:25] is creating conversation structures where people are invited to share things.
Another example is a sunset meeting, for example, after a project, rather than getting together and just talking about did you hit your milestones and how did you improve this system or that system and blah, blah, blah, blah, in a typical retrospective, but how do you include in that, how did we do? How did we collaborate? How did we get along? I've sat in many or observed many project teams where there were clear interpersonal challenges or struggles at different points as is naturally human. But how do you create the space for a conversation to also include those reflections on, well, where were those moments where things got a little tricky or hard and how do we reflect on those and how do we learn from those so that we can collaborate better in the future?
Minute 25
Chris Murchison:
And I've been doing a lot of work with art-based coaching recently and learning a lot about it. And one of the things that I find quite remarkable is that sometimes words are just not adequate. And this might be helpful advice for leaders as well, sometimes it might take using a different medium to support people in engaging with their feeling about a topic or a question. And so it might mean engaging in some art-based activity or engaging in a movement activity or taking your team out for a walk in nature to inspire them in a different way in response to a question you're wanting to discuss with them or have with them.
So I think that's really interesting is that sometimes it isn't asking a question and getting words back. Maybe it's asking a question and maybe there's some other medium that you might engage people in that helps them engage that subconscious below the water line kind of level of experience. That might help different words come out eventually, but I think that experience with the art or with nature or even poetry or other mediums can really sometimes help people come up with an even better answer.
Minute 41
Chris Murchison:
I mean, organizations also move fast these days, and so I could imagine people saying there just isn't time to have these kinds of conversations. I certainly have clients who feel that this is a good idea, but we have 10 items on our agenda list, and we maybe have five minutes or some kind of check-in or conversation about how we're doing. So yes, crises require attention, but at a certain point, I imagine a community would want to pause and think about, well, why are we in constant crisis? Or how might we engage and look differently to maybe get out of this loop of constant crisis?
Or how has this experience of being in crisis all the time affecting me and my work or my relationships with this team or with the organization? I mean, being within an organization is a complex experience. And so I always feel like you need time and space to reflect on that experience and to collectively understand what's being developed from that collective experience because sometimes to your point, sometimes that's all it's developing underneath the water line, and it could be developing in positive ways or it could be developing in some destructive ways. And if you don't create the space to understand and allow people to express what they're feeling, you may never know.
More About Chris
My career has spanned the higher education, for-profit, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors. This have given me a unique and diverse perspective on the experience of work and workplace culture.
I have held roles in student services, employee development, human resources, talent and organization development, and more. As a practitioner and consultant, my work is inspired by the research and frameworks of positive organization psychology, art and movement, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, appreciative inquiry, and applied improvisation.
I am constantly learning and evolving my practice. I appreciate multi-disciplinary approaches and the unique solutions that are created as a result.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman:
I will officially welcome you to the conversation factory. Chris, I'm really, really glad we're having another conversation and to be talking about this topic specifically. It's a really rich topic, so thanks so much for making the time for this. As you mentioned in your busy, busy, over busy schedule. So thank you.
Chris Murchison:
You are so welcome. I really enjoyed our first conversation, so have been anticipating this one. I'm looking forward to it.
Daniel Stillman:
There are so many delightful, the designed conversations, the toolkits on your website that I really cannot remember how I stumbled upon, but the community of practice guide and the way you break it down, it's such a rich conversation topic. And I want to start at the origin for you about why you value, how you came to value the idea of a community of practice. Can you take us back and take us to how it came to be something that matters to you enough to put that whole beautiful document together?
Chris Murchison:
Yeah, I think if I were to boil it down, I would bring it to probably two interests that I have. One is learning, and then the other is community. And when I put those two things together, learning in the presence of others or with others, to me that just creates a powerful vehicle for growing together. And the community of practice concept is essentially that. It's just the idea of bringing people together who have a common kind of domain, if you will, share a profession or share something that's of interest to them so they have a reason to be together. And then within that reason there's a sense of connection and community and then there's within that community something that they want to do together and learn together. And so I think I was just so drawn initially to this idea of learning and learning with other people. And so when I came across this concept of communities of practice, it just rang so beautifully for me as something that felt true and youthful and powerful.
Daniel Stillman:
One of the things as we were just having our planning conversation, the thing you mentioned blew my mind, the idea of thinking of an organization itself as a community of practice. This seems to connect to the idea of learning organizations.
Chris Murchison:
Absolutely.
Daniel Stillman:
What organization should not be intentionally connecting people to learn, to grow, to create rituals of connection.
Chris Murchison:
Absolutely. I think that's definitely an aspiration. I think what many organizations are searching for or experimenting with are what kind of structures really support being a learning organization. And yeah, there might be ways of looking at it through the lens of training and development or learning and development or lens of organization development to think about how to build a learning organization. I love this idea of community. And so when I was in my last organization, Hope Lab, this is something that we kind of stumbled upon was what if we think about ourselves as a community rather than as a culture? And the focus for in recent years for organizations has been how to build a strong culture, how to build a positive culture, which is definitely a good thing. But I found myself thinking about what if you took that a step further? What have you thought about the organization as a community and a community within which you practice building culture and sustaining culture?
And there was something deeply resonant in that idea for me because if you think about the idea of community, to me it sort of signifies certain kinds of behaviors. But then the community, you participate, you are a citizen of that community, you feel like you have an obligation to support that community and it's growing over time. You're a part of it. You're a what builds it and makes it happen and sustains it. And for me, within that idea, I thought, well, culture fits within that as a culture isn't necessarily something handed down to you. It's something that I think you build within community together and you create this thing that we call culture and then that evolves over time and molds based on leadership, based on the individuals within the organizations and how they relate to it to each other and the kinds of behaviors and rituals that they build with each other intentionally or unintentionally sometimes as well.
Daniel Stillman:
If you were talking to the leader of an organization who knows that they want to improve their culture, who's thinking about having a more learning oriented, growth oriented culture, it is a really interesting shift to think about coming at it from a, well, I don't want to fix my culture, but I want to grow our community. How does the approach shift for them? What would you want them to be thinking and doing and being? How would you want them to be showing up differently to lead a community rather than trying to develop or shift a culture?
Chris Murchison:
In my work within organizations, both as an internal employee and more recently as a consultant, one of the things that I observe and have experienced is a constraint or the difficulty of expression. And oftentimes in organizations, I will experience employees being fearful of speaking up or fearful of speaking the truth to leadership or fearful of, if I say this, I'm going to appear stupid or less intelligent. Or if I say this, I might get reprimanded or there might be some kind of retribution of some kind that I imagine. And it's interesting, and these are all smart people and organizations that support things like showing up authentically and bringing your best self to work, that there can still be this interesting underlying fear.
So I think this relates to this concept of psychological safety and so how do you actually go about building a organization community where there is a sense of trust and greater sense of safety to be courageous and speak more of your truth? I think that's an aspiration and a challenge for many individuals and for many organizations. And so when I think about your question, I think what I would say to a leader is now how do you create ways for people within your workplace community to feel more safe, to feel more courageous, to create the space for people to experiment with expressing themselves more?
And so it might be creating opportunities for people to practice, make these micro practices of connecting. And I mean maybe that's at the root of it sort building the relationships and building enough trust within those relationships across the organization, across your community, so that over time you kind of build a sense of trust and with that, a sense of safety. But then I think allows you to step forward more and to be more courageous in expressing yourself when maybe you have a disagreeing opinion or when you have a piece of feedback that might be more constructive, that you will lean into that because you really trust the relationship and trust that it'll be fine no matter how nervous you might be, that the outcome will likely be trusted and fine. I think also creating some structures to help people begin to practice sharing more. And so I think how do you be thoughtful about creating and you're [inaudible 00:09:25] is creating conversation structures where people are invited to share things.
Another example is a sunset meeting, for example, after a project, rather than getting together and just talking about did you hit your milestones and how did you improve this system or that system and blah, blah, blah, blah, in a typical retrospective, but how do you include in that, how did we do? How did we collaborate? How did we get along? I've sat in many or observed many project teams where there were clear interpersonal challenges or struggles at different points as is naturally human. But how do you create the space for a conversation to also include those reflections on, well, where were those moments where things got a little tricky or hard and how do we reflect on those and how do we learn from those so that we can collaborate better in the future?
Daniel Stillman:
I love so many things in that response, I drew this little triangle of learning, requiring safety to express. And unless we have all of those pieces there, if a leader is not creating the conditions, this is the way I define leadership, is that creating the conditions for a transformative conversation for people to say what needs to be said. If we cannot create the conditions to say what needs to be said, we won't express what needs to be expressed and what I think maybe if I were to put something at the center of that triangle, it's practice not for nothing. That's what a community of practice, this is our topic of the day is how do we actually create regular opportunities for people to intentionally practice these things? And that doesn't come for free.
Chris Murchison:
No. And it's not necessarily easy. So I mean, acknowledge that that can be really hard.
Daniel Stillman:
That's when I say it doesn't come for free that's my general bucket for what we used to say in physics, non-trivial. There's no trivial solution for this. It takes money, time, effort, focus.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah. Takes all of those things. Definitely. I had a thought and it's flown out the window.
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, that's wonderful. What color was it? Let's see if we can follow it.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah, it might have been orange.
Daniel Stillman:
I'll look for an orange streak in the sky. Well, while you're remembering what you forgot, I have a card here on the four principles of communities of practice from one of the resources from your website, meaningful connection, relevant learning, purposeful practice, and sharing and reflection. And I would welcome you speaking either to all of them as a whole or to one that you think is highest value and highest leverage for a leader thinking about creating these conditions. I'd love to peel the onion of what does it take to actually create these opportunities for regular expression of relevant meaning.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah. Well I first, I remember that thought that went out the window. The orange one with the-
Daniel Stillman:
He's big in orange. He's come back in.
Chris Murchison:
Which I think relates to what you were just asking.
Daniel Stillman:
That's amazing.
Chris Murchison:
So people oftentimes use the iceberg to describe culture, organizations. And so above the water line you might see all of the observable things, artifacts, behaviors within an organization, values, observable practices, et cetera, but beneath the water line and as we know with icebergs, what's beneath the water line as often bigger than what's above. So beneath the water line might be all the kind of unexpressed values or the implicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, the routines and things that are more quiet or underground, less expressed or on sidelines, on unexpressed emotions, feelings, even ideas and thoughts might live below the water line.
And so I think if you think about communities of practice within an organization, I think your question speaks to how do you create the environment within which the waterline lowers and you're creating greater opportunity for people to express all of those things that might be beneath the water line and bringing them to above the water line. And so I do think connection, as we were just talking about before, I think connection plays a big part. So the quality of your relationships, the quality of your connection with each other can really support your sense of safety or trust within that space, within that community. And with that hopefully builds your courage to be able to express more, speak more.
Daniel Stillman:
What structures, because you mentioned... Oh, sorry, go ahead. You were taking a breath now. Keep going.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah, I was thinking about your other points, your four points that you were sharing. Sharing a reflection was the fourth one of the four that you described. I do think structuring opportunities for people to practice sharing, how do you maybe create structures within meetings that invite people to share and maybe pose questions to them that are really thoughtful questions that really invite people into them. And so not a question like, oh, how was that? But a question that really takes it to a deeper level. What was your experience when you... So really I think that kind of a question invites someone to step into it and hopefully speak with some truth rather than the larger broad question, which might even overwhelm people because they don't really know how to answer it.
Daniel Stillman:
So this comes to a point of one of the other things I wanted to poke at was, I loved your check-in deck because I love recipes, but we're really talking about rituals, structures that as you said in that document, supporting people feeling welcomed, which is a value for you that comes from how you were raised from your life experience, that it's important to welcome people and use the word invite, which is one of my favorite words. We're really trying to create powerful invitations for people to really say what needs to be said. How can a leader who's listening to this tap into that power of invitation to make people feel welcomed, to ask questions that actually help people feel comfortable, to peel just a little bit more?
Chris Murchison:
Well, I think I can connect this again back to the four points that you mentioned earlier, connection, learning, practice, and sharing and reflection. I mean, I think the idea of coming from this check-in deck that I produced, but the idea of drafting or structuring exercises that invite people into conversations that support them learning. And so a good question can also inspire people to think at a meta level about how they're engaging with their work or how they're engaging with each other and what are they learning from that engagement and how might they want to improve that the next time or build upon that the next time or within their work tasks.
Really thoughtful questions or activities can help people be really meaningfully reflective on what risks they took, how they tried something, maybe it didn't work out as well as they wanted to, or what have supported them reaching their goal or what got in the way, what might they try differently? So I think through thoughtfully structured questions, thoughtfully crafted even activities for a team can really help group reflect and to learn together from their experience. And that's how you also build your practice together. So if you're a team that's focused on collaborative collaborating to work on a project together or you share a common practice across an organization, being able to come together and reflect collectively allows you to improve upon that practice as well.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's funny, when I was writing down these four principles from your own document, I wasn't thinking, when I put that together with this idea of an organization as a community of practice. Those become leadership principles. Let's lead meaningful connection so that we feel safe to express. Let's make sure that we're providing relevant learning to feed purposeful practice so that we can actually get better at what we're trying to do here. And I think that's one of the core issues of psychological safety is its we can't do it all the time. It's absurd to think that we can do it all the time. There is always going to be learning and practice and sharing and reflection so that we can continuously create that loop of becoming better at what we're doing together.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah. And it's a virtual loop. So the more we're willing to extend ourselves to try things, to be courageous to experiment, the more we're able to reflect on those actions that we took, then that feeds our learning. And when we go back to do that thing again, we have the wisdom that we've just garnered that we can apply to the next round and then hopefully the next and the next and the next in this upward beautiful upward spiral.
Daniel Stillman:
It is a virtuous loop. I think it's very well said and something I'm looking at the iceberg that I sketched while you were talking about it and just being aware that there is a line and that there is something below the line, I feel like creates some more empathy. One thing I post reposted this or someone reposted this of that I wrote way back, the gap between the amount that we think, the pace at which we can think and the pace at which we can talk. And I think it's very... I'm curious what you think and how you would respond to this perspective. I think it's a very easy to have the expectation that people say and are saying all that they can say that when somebody says what they've meant to say, we've heard everything that they can say on it.
But there's always a very huge fundamental gap between all that we can think about something, all the things that we might say about something and what we actually did say in the time that we had, it's very easy to just assume as a leader, well why wouldn't somebody just say everything that they meant to say and what they've said is what they've intended to say and there's nothing below the line because why would there be? I just asked them a question and they gave me an answer. Let's keep going. Let's move on with the conversation. But it takes, I think, a real shift in empathy and also willingness to slow down to go below the line because it's not easy to go below the line. It's much easier to say, "Okay, thanks for your answer, let's go."
Chris Murchison:
Yeah, I love that. I think I came across that same piece of data recently, and it seems so true that, I mean similar as you were just describing with the iceberg model for us as individuals as well, that we have these thoughts that we can share quickly perhaps with our words or we say something with our words in response to a question. But to your point that there's only so much our brains can pull together and express with our mouths, but there's a lot more-
Daniel Stillman:
It's so true. Just can't pull more together in the time of us.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah, there's so much more happening I think in our belts experience in the subconscious that to your point, takes more time to understand and to connect with and to be able to express and your earlier metaphor of an onion. I mean, there's probably many layers to the onion when we think about a question. They're probably, if you sit with it long enough, there might be many different ways to answer that question or how I answer it now might be different to how I would answer it tomorrow morning or next week. And I think there's definitely power to allowing enough time to in a way mine all of the perspectives that can come if we give people the structure and the time to get below the water line into their more different kind of their deeper feelings or emotions or thoughts about a topic.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah.
Chris Murchison:
I think this has an introversion extroversion element to it as well. I mean, I know as an intro introvert, I oftentimes need more space. I mean, I can say something, but whatever I say in the moment quickly never feels satisfactory. I know if I had more time to think about it, that there's probably a better answer or a different answer or a deeper answer. And in a similar way, I think everyone can benefit from more time to sit with the question and fully grasp it and fully grasp the different ways they might think about it.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's the thought, the thinking, talking, intention, Venn diagram might be shifted differently for people who self-identify as introverts versus extroverts. But I think the fundamental math of we can think at 4,000 words per minute and we can only speak at 125 means that the physics is against us.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
There's just no way we can say everything that we intend to say. No one can.
Chris Murchison:
And some things are just difficult to express in words at all. And so I've been doing a lot of-
Daniel Stillman:
Makes my heart just melt, just it's so true. I feel that.
Chris Murchison:
And I've been doing a lot of work with art-based coaching recently and learning a lot about it. And one of the things that I find quite remarkable is that sometimes words are just not adequate. And this might be helpful advice for leaders as well, sometimes it might take using a different medium to support people in engaging with their feeling about a topic or a question. And so it might mean engaging in some art-based activity or engaging in a movement activity or taking your team out for a walk in nature to inspire them in a different way in response to a question you're wanting to discuss with them or have with them.
So I think that's really interesting is that sometimes it isn't asking a question and getting words back. Maybe it's asking a question and maybe there's some other medium that you might engage people in that helps them engage that subconscious below the water line kind of level of experience. That might help different words come out eventually, but I think that experience with the art or with nature or even poetry or other mediums can really sometimes help people come up with an even better answer.
Daniel Stillman:
It's so interesting because I assume you've been exposed to the Johari Window at some point in your work, and I'm thinking about one of the check-ins in your check-in deck and your artwork. So the random box of objects where people just pull out a random object from a box and basically confabulate, say this object connects to the core challenge or my key insight from this because blank and people just make something up, right? They literally make something up because that's what we do as humans. We confabulate, and I'm thinking about your collage work and how it is a way to tap into that quadrant of the Johari Window of the unknown unknowns. It is to tap into the subconscious or the collective unconscious in some way.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
I'm just freewheeling here, but I feel like there's a connection between what you just said around peeling back layers and getting into the unconscious and using unexpected approaches to try and get people to express and some of the things that you're clearly attracted to in your own work, some of your own expressive modalities.
Chris Murchison:
To me, there's different modalities, are just a different way of expressing, and I find it quite powerful. I know that when I have brought in kind of unusual activities to help a group think into the future or begin to envision the future of the organization or to think about themselves in their personal development in five years, or to think about some complex dynamic that they might be experiencing in a team or with a coworker, sometimes again, it's hard to find the words or saying the words might feel a little scary even.
But to be able to use a different source to help channel those emotions and those feelings and eventually those words. So again, finding a poem that somehow captures the essence of your feeling. That could be amazing and beautiful and allows you to express what you're feeling in a different way. Or for me, with collaging, thinking about a question or a situation and being able to piece together quite intuitively images that seem to express how I'm feeling about that situation or that person. It just allows me to express myself in a different way and sometimes in a more honest way than if I were just using words.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah. I think if you also think about centers of intelligence, I mean, we are in our heads so much, and so it's helpful for me as well to get out of my head. And by using other methods like art or again, poetry or other things, it kind of takes me out of my head and draws upon other kinds of wisdom that I have. It might be more emotional wisdom or physical wisdom or creative wisdom, but it gives me different kinds of information than I'm just coming at a situation or a question from my head. And I find all of that information, all of the sources of wisdom really helpful. And so if we can balance them all as we think about how to respond to a question, to me that's beautiful. That's powerful.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. And this goes to... Sorry, was there something else that you wanted to-
Chris Murchison:
Well, I was going to say, to me, to loop it back to communities of practice, I mean, to me that's the beauty of intentionally building a community of practice, whether that's an organization as a community, and thinking about that body as a group that elevates its own practice and learning together. Or if it's in designing a group of people to come together and to meet regularly for the same purpose of learning together, connecting with each other and elevating or improving your practice together. I think that at the core of that is creating that structure that really supports people in having a successful experience.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Well, that actually connects with one of the cards that I have not talked about that I'm curious about, because you mentioned the power of facilitation skills to when you think about creating meaningful connection and these opportunities for purposeful practice and your value of supporting people and feeling welcomed. It is a skill to host these kinds of spaces, to provide the structures that make it happen within one instance, but also to facilitate it as a cadence of conversations because a community practice doesn't mean wants, right?
Chris Murchison:
Right.
Daniel Stillman:
I'm thinking about what's the minimum viable structure, the minimum viable community of practice. How should someone really get started? Obviously meeting once is a good start, obviously psychological safety, having that ethos and the empathy to look beneath the water line is important. But what are the structures that you'd like to see more organizations putting into place to get started in creating more shots on goal for meaningful connection and purposeful practice?
Chris Murchison:
I think facilitation is needed and important. I used to think that groups could be more self-initiated, self-sustaining, and I think that's possible if you have a purely skilled group of participants. But I would say in my experience that my experience in groups has been if you don't have someone who is holding the space for that group, helping that group keep organized, it doesn't have to be a heavily managed kind of organizing or facilitating, but I think it has to be a gentle enough kind of herding and shepherding, if you will, to keep the group focused and moving forward together. And so in my facilitation of communities of practice, whether that's in an organization or outside of organization, to me, one of the first things out the gate is establishing connection. And so if you have a group of people who are coming together, I think initially you want to create a strong foundation of relationship.
And so what can you do, what can you structure to support people engaging with each other, beginning to share information about each other, getting to know each other in a way that feels meaningful so that you begin to plant those seeds of trust and safety within the group. And also not just trust and safety, but also people begin to care for each other. They begin to be curious about each other, hopefully beginning to be interested in each other and what they're practicing, what they're doing in the world. And then that creates a kind of energy of excitement of wanting to meet with these people. So I think once you've established that foundation, then you can move into that sphere of what we want to learn together. And so I think that also requires some facilitation to help the group surface kind of what's important to them. What's something that they can agree on that they want to spend their time together discussing or learning together.
And it's not as easy as you think, sometimes in a group people are bashful and it can be hard to... People might be willing to go along with what Sally says or what Joe says. And I think that's a part of the dance of building enough trust in the group that people are willing to put out there what it is they're interested in so that you're able to see the full kind of menu. And then the group can decide what priorities they want to tackle first. Then there's the question of how, once you identified topics, I think there's how do we want to engage in these topics. And again, if you've built up enough of a strong foundation, the group can participate in kind of co-creating, well, do we want to just have an open discussion or do we want to bring in a speaker or do we want to read something together? I mean, there's so many different ways that you can engage learning and building your practice that ideally you want the group to all weigh in on deciding together collectively, both the what and the how.
Daniel Stillman:
That is a lot of work.
Chris Murchison:
It's an investment in the beginning, maybe that's true of most things they tackle in life. Make that initial investment to get it started. And hopefully once it's off the ground, you've got enough momentum that it can begin to move more easily on its own. Maybe people begin to volunteer to help with different sessions, or you develop a structure for the meetings, which carries itself from meeting to meeting to meeting, or you begin to develop rituals. And so people come knowing what to expect in a meeting. So I think it's yes, an investment in the early part to establish those structures, and then some gentle support and facilitation ongoing to keep it moving.
Daniel Stillman:
One thing that I'm hearing is that leaders should expect that it's going to take some time and some investment to get a return on a community of practice that is not a chocolate bar, a quick fix, it's not a sugar rush, it's a long arc.
Chris Murchison:
It is. Well, I think if you're talking about communities of practice outside of an organization, like a group of professionals, for example, who come together or they want to form a cohort and meet together, focus on their practice together, that can have a lifetime or a lifespan of its own. It could last for six months or a year. It depends on a number of factors. Within an organization, that's an interesting question because by the sheer nature of this group of people working together, they're probably in the same environment, in the same community for some time whether or not this community of practice idea takes off or not. But I think maybe it depends a little bit on what the goal of the community of practice is. And so if the goal is a more broader, how do we build community within our workplace?
How do we make sure we're mindful of culture and building all the practices and processes that support our positive culture? Yes, that's an ongoing thing. Everyone in the organization could be considered part of that community of practice. And so therefore, you would want to be really thoughtful about how you craft conversations at your staff meetings or your team meetings or supervision meetings or your performance conversations or onboarding. And it kind of permeates everything. But how do you be thoughtful about all of those different conversations to make sure that everyone's engaged in this idea that building culture is a practice, it's an ongoing practice, and how do we collectively support that practice and improving it over time.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. In a way, this sense of we are a community together and we are continuously co-creating our culture through the conversations we're having, the ones we are, the ones we're not, and the quality of the conversations we're having. And it sounds like in a way, regularly reflecting and sharing and practicing intentionality around what are the conversations we want to be having more of and less of, really keeping our eye on that ball.
Chris Murchison:
Absolutely.
Daniel Stillman:
It's a big vision and it's really powerful. What else? There's more there.
Chris Murchison:
I mean, organizations also move fast these days, and so I could imagine people saying there just isn't time to have these kinds of conversations. I certainly have clients who feel that this is a good idea, but we have 10 items on our agenda list, and we maybe have five minutes or some kind of check-in or conversation about how we're doing. So yes, crises require attention, but at a certain point, I imagine a community would want to pause and think about, well, why are we in constant crisis? Or how might we engage and look differently to maybe get out of this loop of constant crisis?
Or how has this experience of being in crisis all the time affecting me and my work or my relationships with this team or with the organization? I mean, being within an organization is a complex experience. And so I always feel like you need time and space to reflect on that experience and to collectively understand what's being developed from that collective experience because sometimes to your point, sometimes that's all it's developing underneath the water line, and it could be developing in positive ways or it could be developing in some destructive ways. And if you don't create the space to understand and allow people to express what they're feeling, you may never know.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Where are we rushing to? Or I think there was a check-in your deck about what is my relationship to busy? What is busy winning us right now? What kind of busy do we want to be? Really investigating in busy. Speaking of busy, I'm going to assume that, well, I know you're busy, so we have a little bit of time left. What haven't I asked you? What have we not expressed? What is still below the line that should be above the line? What have I not asked you that I should have asked you, Chris, on this very, very rich topic that clearly we couldn't bring to full expression in the time we have, but is there anything else that we haven't said that should be said?
Chris Murchison:
Yes, I have been very delighted by some of the work done by a couple names, Beverly and [inaudible 00:43:33], [inaudible 00:43:33] Trainer. They actually live not too far from me here in Portugal, but they've done decades of research and work about social learning and developing this concept of communities of practice. And if you go online, maybe we can link to it in your podcast, but they have some beautiful writing about what they have seen as the core elements that create a community of practice, the core principles that support them being successful, the common things that communities of practice tend to discuss or the kinds of things that help people feel that the time is valuable in a community of practice.
But I think their work is particularly useful in thinking about the possibilities coming out of communities of practice. I think the idea, we started out with this, but the idea of thinking about communities of practice as something an organization can be, can inhabit is a little unusual and different. I love the idea and I think I'm really happy that we had a chance to play around with that thinking a little bit, but I think it's interesting to apply it to an organization setting and the idea that an organization as a community can be a community of practice. I love that.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. I mean, definitely from my experience, communities of practice that exist organizationally or where people are showing up as an individual, there's high investment, each individual's bringing a lot of juice from their own passion to get better. But the other piece that we're talking about, an organization, seeing themselves as a learning organization and investing in the skills that they want to invest in, it's a very different problem, and I think people do show up differently in those contexts. I'm happy to include a link to the work of these folks that you were mentioning. If people want to learn more about all things, Chris Murchison, where else can they go on the internet to learn more about the things? I'm happy to link to all of the resources we've talked about today as well.
Chris Murchison:
Well, I did courageously create a website last year that is available. It includes some of my musings about the workplace. It includes some of my artwork. It includes some of the products that I've designed and built. You've mentioned one, the check-in deck. It also includes a document produced with the University of Michigan's Business School about building communities of practice specifically for groups of people who are practitioners of positive organizations, psychology. So yeah, my website is a good source. I wouldn't say that's all things Chris Murchison.
Daniel Stillman:
We know there's more below the line.
Chris Murchison:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
There's parts of you that will be forever unknowable. Well, I really appreciate you making the time to express and elucidate these really, really important pieces of your work and this work that is creating communities where people can get better at the things that they really, really value together. So thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Murchison:
Thank you.