It takes practice to build a community

Almost a year ago I wrote a small piece on the art of practice. I suggested at that time that one's practice could be quite different from one's job. For example, you could have an auditor studying conflict resolution on the side. It could be closer example with an HR advisor studying and practicing coaching on the side or it could be the wonderful congruence such as the policy writer whose practice and off desk passions include writing and policy research.

Our job is our work our practice is our passion.

Organizations have sometimes been a little slow to appreciate and understand the added value of bringing ones practice more to the foreground in our workplaces.

Not so today.

The pressure is on to manage knowledge and to create a continuous learning culture that will give us the edge in managing that knowledge.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the strongest and so it is with the emerging concept of communities of practice.

One of the leading thinkers in this area, Etienne Wenger, tells us right off the mark that this idea is not really so new. We have had guilds and associations and other more formal models of organization people with a common practice for centuries. Still do.

One of the difficulties with the older models was time. Joining an association sometimes felt like an added burden...one more thing on an already full plate. To days communities of practice try to avoid that structural handicap and have adopted a more informal approach with an emphasis on growing relationships and knowledge sharing rather than commitment to an organization.

The "what's in it for me" principle is strong as people hesitate to join anything these days that piles on. What we did not realize that the "what's in it for me" got people connected and committed but the real benefits were to the whole organization as the community connections started to move the knowledge across the organization as well as up and down.

Think for a minute about where we would find communities of practice.

I like to see them in a geographic context.

For example there may be sixty seven forensic accountants in Halifax. Perhaps twenty three in the federal government, twenty in the provincial government, four in municipal and the rest in the private sector. How many of these forensic accountants know one another even if they live in the same community?

What sort of professional learning, best practice exchange and idea generation would happen even if we could even get one third of them having breakfast together once a month?

How many strategic planners are there in Ottawa? How many know one another? How many language instructors in Montreal. How many budget analysts in Winnipeg. Hey how many meeting planners in your own organization? Are they talking? Do they know one another? Where do they get their information?

One of the fundamental principles of learning organizations is that your best knowledge is in house and on the front lines. Nice to say but hard to put into practice.

Communities of practice become a simple cost effective, learning centered tool to get at these concerns.

So what are some fundamental principles around organizing communities of practice. Well, for a start...

• membership is voluntary.
• structure is informal.
• leadership is critical but must be organic and centered on the community.
• executive and corporate support is crucial.
• communities of practice steward knowledge by spreading knowledge horizontally as well as vertically.
• communities of practice learn different and more important, they become strategic in their learning thus benefiting them as workers but also contributing to the strategic goals of the organization.
• communities of practice attract even more practitioners and the community now starts to provide the juice to attract talent, build loyalty and retain people in the practice.
• a communities domain is that shared area of concern or work.

Today there are hundreds of communities of practice growing across the Canadian public service. For me the light turned on when I recognized the need to find and train new learning organization practitioners. I struggled with the old "train the trainer" model and found it cumbersome and loaded with old style learning methodology baggage.

My colleague Karen Bonner introduced me to the community of practice model and we began to experiment. Today there are over one hundred practitioners located in every province. The organization, the commitment and the learning is completely in their hands as a community. The results are amazing. People do not want to learn in a vacuum. Workshops can be a vacuum. They really start to learn when they find a passion for a subject and then make a real connection to other learners and real time practitioners. The community of practice gives them both...in spades.

Here is the really good news. It very cost effective. The coaching community of practice is off and running in Ottawa and the dent in peoples budgets is just not there. And the really really good news is that if some of us can help it, this will never become a government program. Why? Well first of all we only have so many millions to spend on improvement programs and we can cut into that. More important to those of us in the underground building these things is the fervent desire to keep them away from the program model and try to make them a normal part of the workplace culture. The juice comes from the participants and the support comes from the leadership.

So all you will need to know right now is...

• what is my practice?
• who else doe it?
• how can I get them into a room?
• where can we get a little leadership and coaching to help me grow this thing?

After that you will be introduced to the emerging world of communities of practice online and you will never look back...

...so tell me your story.

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Charters by Chartier... getting it together

A brief history...

Charters are a simple concept but a deep practice. We are all familiar with the ubiquitous workplan. We are very good at "doing" the workplan. We can build them with our eyes closed. We know our work and we know how to plan our work.

However we still need a little more effort on the flip side of the ledger...the "how" we do our work. We generally saved this part for the once in a lifetime vision building day or the universal team building workshop. The how we will get this done together planning never quite gets the same face time as the work we have to get done planning.

What we now call charter building has been done before but usually in bits and pieces. The idea of putting it all together as a team, committee or community effort is relatively recent.

So what is a charter...?

As the name implies, it is a type of agreement or covenant among a group of people based on how they want to be with each other. It is a simple document built by the team that describes the team or community's purpose, values, code of behaviour, skill inventory, business lines, protocols, roles and responsibilities, service standards and improvement goals.

A charter is not an inflexible set of policies or rules but rather a record of a great team conversation on these issues. This conversation continues for as long as the team or community exists and, as well, the charter grows and reflects changing times, concerns and people.

So who builds charters...?

Charters can be built by any group of people who find themselves in circumstances where they have to work together. Operational teams use a charter to build commitment, check assumptions and evaluate continually how they are doing as a team. Short term teams or committees build charters to avoid wasting time down the road dealing with messy process issues that would be better worked out up front. Communities of practice build charters to check out points of connection between members and build long term learning strategies and commitment to practice and the community. Management teams build charters. Mailroom teams build charters. Families and curling teams could build charters should they be so inclined as to have a conversation about what they really want to get done.

So when do you build a charter...?

Right now.

So why build a charter...?

First build it for the big stuff. It is amazing how many teams still do not have their own purpose statement. (Mission/vision if you will) They are relying on the organizations great mission statement, up there on the wall in the cafeteria, to somehow in its big way, take care of the purpose of their and everyone else's team as well. It is not that simple. Teams have a unique purpose and it must be clear to all the members why they exist as a team and how that team purpose fits under the greater good of the vision of the organization. The same goes for the values and standards of your team. Of course the organization has a full set of values and standards but how do they translate into the character of the mailroom, the urgency of the finance committee or the challenges of the management team?

And then there are the more basic ticket items on a team. How we make decisions, communicate with each other, resolve conflict or conduct our meetings. If you have never talked about the all important, how we do it here, then you live day by day in a world of assumptions (mental models) open to all kinds of continual misunderstandings.

And finally you build a charter to establish a cornerstone for your team or community. A keystone agreement of how we would like to be in the best of all work worlds. Now you have established the ability to measure yourselves as a team. With a baseline document you can see how you may have missed some marks last year but you can also see where you may have exceeded your expectations.

Right now most teams cannot really tell you how well they are doing without resorting to fuzzy anecdotal analysis. The charter helps you quantify and qualify how well you are working together and just exactly where you might want to put your next years team improvement efforts.

So how do you build a charter...?

• Decide if it is important. Engage your team members in a "should we build one of these" conversation. Read the guide.
• Take a day, off site if possible, but not necessary.
• Find a facilitator in your organization, if possible, so you can all roll up your sleeves and take full part in the effort.
• Pick out the charter elements critical to your team.
• Get to work. Use tools like the Interview Matrix to get everybody into the conversation.
• Take the draft back to the office. Type it up and share it around the team for edits and word smithing.
• Type it up pretty. Have a signing ceremony.
• Start "working to charter."
• Never, never , never put it in a drawer.

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Take your soul to work...

Can a public servant have soul? Could a senior manager rock? Was Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys the greatest writer producer of the 20th century?

Here is a little story about a senior manager with Health Canada who brought his soul to work everyday and when he left us so fast this summer, he insisted that those at the funeral take something home with them. So he gave them a copy of one of the greatest Beach Boy albums of all time. A take home funeral.

"We all know that the foundation of our soul is built on love." said Chris Taylor. What got to me was that he said it in his own eulogy. "Eulogies are not the easiest things to deliver and much less write." he says starting off his own. No kidding Chris.

Still I was not surprised at this. I feel so privileged to have known and worked with Chris. He was my idea of a really great public servant. He was not one of the grey people. He worked in colour. He wanted to know what you had to offer and how it could work on his team. When you got together he loved to talk policy, then have a little chat about organizational change and then get into the good stuff about Phil Spector and the wall of sound.

If you knew Chris or worked with him you knew he was a collector. He had over 15,000 vinyl albums. Chris prowled old record stores in every town he visited. He had a passion for the singers, the songs and how the music was produced. But what he really collected, I think, was colleagues and friends.

We know that people with passions are learners. People who are learners are also usually great teachers.

I learned a lot in a short time with Chris and I soon became a colleague and a friend. Now I wish I could have spent more time with him. Thinking about Chris lately, I remembered the first time I realized that there could be a secret life to public servants.

I was a young public servant in Dauphin Manitoba. Our young family wanted a place in the country. Go see old Bill in the downtown office suggested a co-worker. Bill was a quiet, somewhat timid accounting clerk who bothered no one, did his job and left no skid marks.

Sure, come out and see the place, he invited. We got there. Bill lived alone with his wife. She was heating up some dog food on the stove as we got there. I could imagine no worse life of desperation. I felt that I stepped into a Kafka novel.

Towards the end of the evening he invited me into his back room. I want to show you something, he said and pulled an old shoebox from under the bed. Please read, he insisted and I began to pull out the most wonderful poems out from that old box. I sat in the presence of soul, of spirit that was dutifully put away each morning as he prepared to go to work and then to open later that night under the light of the back room lamp.

I remember as a young man wondering why we couldn't have had that poet in the office as well.

So, I recognized in Chris Taylor right away...he was the poet that came to work.

He was only 54 years old. He was buried with a copy of the Beach Boys classic Pet Sounds album and he went out as a teacher. He taught us that you can bring your soul into the workplace, you can manage people with spirit and discipline and you can die well if you so choose.

We talk a lot about how we will recruit young people into the public service.

I intend to tell them about Chris Taylor.

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Practice makes perfect...

Written by Bob Chartier
Summer 2002

Almost a decade ago William Bridges suggested in Job Shift that ...."today's organization is rapidly being transformed from a structure built out of jobs to a field of work needing to be done." I am not so sure that we have yet grasped the fullness of this concept. People are still pretty tightly wound to their jobs, their job description, their classification and their turf. In the meantime the public service is changing around us. The industrial model of designing work into pieces, assembly line style left us incredibly vulnerable when the system began to take the hits of downsizing and reorganization which eliminated a certain amount of jobs but left a reduced workforce still facing the "work to be done."

This whole area represents a huge mental model that realistically will take many years to fully change. Still, there is a recognition that we have to begin somewhere and the recent activity in HR would indicate a sleeping giant beginning to stir.

Lately I have been thinking about the concept of practice. Peter Senge used the word in reference to learning organization theory as a critical element in learning theory. Musicians practice, sports teams practice, even pilots practice but managers with million dollar budgets, involved in critical areas of public policy...not much chance to practice. Most of our work is in real time. This is a huge learning deficit. But there is another definition of practice that interests me even more. The word practice can also describe your life's work, your calling as opposed to your job. We used to speak of a doctor building a practice, a negotiator building a practice and so on.

I have noticed that in my own workforce life and in that of colleagues that there is often two streams to our work. The job stream is quite self evident. It is defined through job descriptions, classification, our managers immediate needs and the incessant constraint of the in basket and the e-mail. Given all this, in many of our colleagues, we find that little seeds have sprouted in the fetid soil. Someone in policy develops a passion for large group facilitation. Another in finance becomes fascinated with dispute resolution or a manager in HR becomes intrigued with technology application.

They now have a choice. They can grow their passion and thirst for more knowledge of this stuff outside the office or they could sneak in some learning in down moments inside the office. They are liable to get variations or two types of reaction from the workplace. The first goes along the lines of, 'that stuff is not connected to your real job and if I find you doing that sort of thing in must mean you do not have enough real work to do. Or, they are praised or their initiative. "This is great. How can we help you learn more and start to gain some real advantages from your new skills and knowledge?"

It is obvious which reaction would more conform to a learning organization. It is also painfully true that for many employees the first reaction is often the norm. Consider a young manager that I spoke to recently. He had been invited out of his province to speak at a convention on youth initiatives in public service. He is a young, successful manager and they offered to pay all his expenses. He was shocked when his manager flatly refused to let him go saying she needed him in the office those days and his work was here not there. His appeals went nowhere. He ended up in his own office on those days, no crisis, everyone else there as well. That young person is now with another department and I am sure the old department wonders why he left. For every one of these type of stories there are tales of managers not only encouraging people to work outside the cubicle but who actively promote a more corporate approach to staff deployment.

I would like to think of this outside passion as our individual practice. I do not believe it has to be in conflict with our job but in many ways it enhances our jobs and in many cases provides the sanity and motivation to keep us sharp in our real jobs.

For me the practice was building learning organizations. My real job was in Executive Services. My practice started very small. A workout here, an Open Space there. My manager Sandy Thomson, would encourage me to keep working on the practice stuff. Soon the credibility of the practice started to reflect back on our team and the Department. This was later viewed all the way up to the top as a good thing. Still is....

For some the practice will always remain a small part of their work life...for others it may take over and become their work life...for still others, their real work is their practice and are they not blessed. I believe there are thousands of public servants out there who have either thought about practice (perhaps not using the word) or have begun to build practice. Sometimes the practice is close to the real job like the accountant who is fascinated with forensic accounting as well as her job. They can be quite dispirit such as the file clerk who is taking a night course in mediation.

We are going to have to come to grips with this phenomena of practice. If we remain stuck in the traditional organization, we will see it as a threat to our work our team and our department. If we can begin to see it from a learning organization perspective, we must begin to see it as an enhancement to our work, credibility team depth and most important a real corporate contribution to the public service at large.

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"Gift Words" from Robert Frost

March Column 2002
Bob Chartier

Last month Chuck Jones died.

You may or may not know who Chuck Jones was, but I'll give good odds that you know his work. Chuck Jones was one of the great animators of our generation. He gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner and many more including my all time favourite, Pepe LePew.

The night after he died, Charlie Rose ran a repeat interview with Chuck Jones. In it, Charlie Rose asked Mr. Jones if he considered himself an artist. Chuck Jones looked up at him and said without equivocation, "No, I do not consider myself an artist, let me tell you a story." He then told the story of a young man coming to visit the poet Robert Frost. Upon introduction, Robert Frost asked the young man what he did for a living. The young man replied, " I am a poet, Mr. Frost."

Robert Frost looked intently at the young man and with a firm tone advised him that he could not possibly call himself a poet. He could perhaps be a writer, a scribbler or some such thing, but the word poet was a "gift word" That is to say, you cannot bestow the word on yourself, it must be given by others. So, in effect, he was teaching the young man that the honorable thing was to work a being the best you can at your work. If your work is writing, then write hard, write long and write well. But alas, it must be others who will decide if your are a poet or an author. Paint every day, study your palette and make many pictures, others will decide if you are an artist or not.

Perhaps we all should take a deep breath, and go back to Frosts wise words and check it against our great hurry to adopt new words for the new organization. Take, for example, some of the more popular words in the past decade. I am thinking of words like leader, mentor or even the ubiquitous word team. If we were to check these against the perspective of Robert Frost's gift words, we might understand some of the frustration many of our people are feeling at the disconnect between the words and the reality.

Lets face it, someone calling themselves a leader just does not quite ring true. Try calling a leadership meeting instead of a management meeting. Check the comfort level in the room. You can't mandate leadership. You can't implement leadership. If someone says they are practicing leadership, we can feel the chill. Much more realistic is to have you work hard, do your job well, support your people, take a risk and if you do well, there is a good chance you will get called a leader...a gift from all of us. If you don't do your job well...sorry but all the leadership seminars in the world won't change things help.

The word team has somewhat the same history. How many groups for years were called units, sections etc and then one Friday after a leadership seminar the manager comes back to the office and announces that as of Monday, they are now going to be the Northwest team. What happened between Friday and Monday? No changes in culture, attitude or learning, just a new unearned name. Imagine if team were a gift word that you had to earn. "Hey those people are a great team!"

Mentor is just one of the latest. Frost I would bet would call mentor a gift word. You can't take a mentor course or be a mentor for one afternoon a week. What you can do is be a hard working teacher on the job, an available coach, a learning advisor or a supportive boss. Do these things well and perhaps one day someone will say, "That woman was a huge mentor to me." You can't buy that in a mentorship course or a curriculum binder on mentoring

It's a gift... and really should be earned to be appreciated.

Anyway, its just something I'm thinking about.

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At your service, with pride

Maclean's Article
Over to you
January 14, 2002
Written by: Bob Chartier

I am a public servant. In the 30 years of my career, there have been more times than I would care to admit when I was not very comfortable saying that out loud, much less in print. However, like everyone lately, my world has been rocked. The embassy bombings, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and the Sept. 11 images of public servants – police officers and firefighters – running towards the horror instead of away from it will stay with us forever. I have had to recognize that many terrorists target governments and, as we know, public servants are the front line of governance.

For years, public servants struggled with a "poor cousin" image in the workplace. It was insinuated that the brightest and the best would always go into the private sector. The rest of us, for many different reasons, made the decision to spend our lives teaching your kids hooking up your intravenous, protecting your border, checking the maintenance record on the aircraft taking you to Cancun and responding to 911 calls.

Oh, we have heard your snickers over the years.

We have heard your comments about road crews leaning on their shovels, striking nurses, mindless clerks processing paper, lazy teachers and cops in doughnut shops. And this was the tame stuff. I believe it's time to rethink our views on public service. First of all, understand that we do the things no one else really wants to do and that there is no real money in it. Try to buy police services from a street vendor. What price would the market pay to find an illegal immigrant? Ask a major private-sector company to write a new fair-trade policy. Try to shop around for a good deal on a passport.

The private-enterprise capitalist system is fine by me. It is adept at doing those things it is supposed to do, but it can't do it all. When it comes to writing good policy on parole violations, we don't freelance the contract, we ask a public servant with a weighty academic background, a wealth of experience and an ear to the street to compose it. When we need protection, high standards in our goods, food and water, we again look to the public servant. Whoa, let's stop right there. On that water thing. You're right. We have Walkerton and North Battleford to consider. I grew up in North Battleford and, as a working government guy, I was appalled that, for decades, city workers there drew drinking water a kilometre downstream from the spot they dumped the sewage. Let's be honest. Public servants make mistakes. Big ones, little ones and some really stupid ones. But so does the private sector. Our trouble, as public servants, is that our mistakes can cause a lot more grief.

It is true, we are notorious for our red tape, our obsession with paper and our slowness. But we are working really hard. We can and will be just as fast, as effective and as quality-minded as the private sector, even more. We have many masters, however, and sometimes when we try to cut the red tape we get beat up for what is then called a lack of accountability. It's always hard for us to know whom we really serve – politicians or citizens. But I believe we can serve both and do it with accountability and effectiveness.

So what have we got here? Well, we have jobs that have no market value. We are under constant public scrutiny. We get paid what citizens, not the market, think we are worth and we provide always essential but often hidden services. And most of us really like our work. We love your kids, we feel for you in the intensive-care unit, we want to find the bad guys and we are driven to develop policy that reflects Canadian values.

Public servants may now feel even more like a target for evil, but they will go to work every day. They will be here for us, the first to run into the trouble and to lead in the rebuilding. The war on terrorism will not be fought in the market, it will be defended at the border, in policy-making decisions on privacy and in the day by day readiness of emergency workers. And that is why I serve the public with pride.

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