Practice in Community
Want to accelerate the pace of learning? Join a community of practice.
What's crystal clear after 14 years teaching — in classrooms at Stanford and in organizations all over the world — is that the pace and volume of learning is dramatically amplified by gathering a community of practice. Whereas when one person learns in isolation — or even if many learn, but all in isolation — learning is largely linear, when many folks learn in parallel, and come back together to share, the learning curve is exponential:
This could be expressed mathematically:
An individual learning in isolation: 1 person x 1 insight = 1 unit of learning
Many people, learning in isolation: 10 people x 1 insight = 10 units of learning
Many people, learning in community: 10 people x 10 insights = 100 units of learning
YouTube sensation Mr. Beast describes the benefit of such a community: “If you envision a world where you’re trying to be great at something, and it’s just you learning from your mistakes… You mess up, you learn from your mistake; you mess up, you learn from your mistake; you in two years, you might have learned from twenty mistakes. But if you have four other people, who are also messing up, and they are also learning from their mistakes, and they teach you what you learn, then hypothetically, two years down the road, you will have learned five times more the amount of stuff. It just helps you grow exponentially, way quicker.”
Very few people are this thoughtful about their own learning in isolation, let alone their contributions to a community committed to learning together. Very, very few organizations I know cultivate communities as a learning organisms. That’s why so much airtime during my capacity-building programming consist of students sharing their progress with one another: not because I don’t have anything to say, but because students can discover and share much more together, resulting in far more durable learning.
I read once that the shelf life of the learning from most corporate workshops is less than one week. My hunch is that has a lot to do with the way knowledge is transmitted. In my learning experiences, I’m always seeking to craft environments where students themselves both create knowledge, and also share that created knowledge with one another. At my very best, I am merely shepherding the knowledge-creation process, pointing a few notable things out along the way.
A community of practice becomes a learning organism with a life of its own!
If you’re longing to find a community of practice, consider joining the Try Ten™ community. We’ve got ~50 folks committed to honing their creative craft, checking in regularly, sharing tactics tips tricks, and seeking collaboration along the way.
We’ve got our second community gathering today! Folks from Cambridge, Sweden, Texas, Canada, Oregon, Chile — in industries as wide ranging as grocery to elite medical training to executive search to fintech to “global corruption reduction” — showed up for the first gathering last month, and we’ve been sharing inspiration, brainstorming problems, and contributing to one another’s work via WhatsApp ever since.
Related: Find Your People
Related: Craft Constructive Context
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.