Communities of Practice

The term “communities of practice” was coined to describe a kind of social participation that is crucial for “learning to be.”^{[11 ]}The argument is that learning any line of work is a social process in which we become active participants in the practices of a social community, constructing new identities in relation to this community and its members. Apprentices do not learn a craft by going to school to learn abstract, textbook knowledge; rather, they learn to function as a part of a community in which their initial participation is legitimate but peripheral. We change careers in the same way.

William Bridges, the best-selling author of the book Transitions, was a professor of English for twelve years before he became a consultant, lecturer, and writer on topics related to personal development. By his own account, it took him several years of experimenting to define a next career. Not surprisingly, Bridge’s intimate circle did not encourage him to explore alternatives. His friends and family were voices for stability. Bridges started building his escape route by way of small experiments. But what really allowed him to make the break was the community of practice that became his new home base.

“It took me a couple of years to work up my courage to leave teaching,” he stated in an interview with management thinker Tom Peters.^[12]

And then it took me two or three years of experimenting after I had done so to find a path that was a real replacement. It was a five-year process. My experiments started when I was still teaching. I pushed literature courses farther and farther away from literature and toward self-exploration. I, for example, taught a course in autobiography. Which really was a pure and simple excuse for having people search their own lives to find a path for themselves, where they were going. That was one exploration. But I was scared to leave teaching, so I pushed the boundaries of what I was doing as far as I dared.

The actual crossover point came rather serendipitously. I got involved with a group of people who were starting a counseling center in Palo Alto and I got in the training program for lay therapists. There was an experiment to have nonprofessionals actually trained as therapists and to do therapy under the direction of a therapist. I was doing this in my after-hours life. It was very exciting. There were six families in which one or the other partner was in the training program. We were meeting together after these training sessions; we really liked each other. And we talked about living closer together and so on and the upshot of it was that we decided to form an “intentional community.” Not a commune, in one house, but a community.

We started looking for property and finally found eighty acres near the Russian River in California. This thing which had nothing to do with my original purposes for leaving teaching was the precipitating event that finally got me to quit. Mills College, where I’d been teaching, was too far away. I couldn’t keep teaching. I didn’t really want to anyway, but I used that as an excuse to make the break. . . . I came from a long line of teachers and the idea of leaving not only a tenured position, which I had, an endowed professorship, was scary. . . . These voices in my head, which were largely, I think, family voices, said, “This is insane, this is crazy. What is it you’re going to do?” Of course I didn’t have an answer yet. . . . This dialogue was going on in my head and I think finding this community group really helped me.

Just like guiding figures, new communities play a number of important roles: They offer inclusion, provide a safe base, and replace the community that is being lost. Communities of practice are an integral part of the test-and-learn method because we need a context in which to learn both the substance and style of the new self we are trying to become. Some of us, like Ben Forrester, are lucky enough to find a guiding figure who can also teach us the tacit knowledge of the occupation we are trying to enter; more often than not, however, we have to learn by doing and participating in whatever limited way we can in the life of the group we’d like to join.

Consider how a person moves into a career the first time around, as a young adult. Apprentices work with their mentors and learn craftsmanship by observation, imitation, and practice. Newcomers to a profession or organization are socialized by old-timers, meaning that they are taught not only the required skills and rules but also how to acquire the right look and feel—the social norms that govern how they should conduct themselves so as to become true members.^[13] In the same way, reinventing oneself as a member of a new occupational world is a process of becoming an insider to that world, learning its subjective viewpoint, language, demeanor, and outlook. But since apprenticeships and internships typically exist in institutional form for only the young, at midcareer we are left to our own devices when it comes to picking up the tacit knowledge of the new work we wish to do. It is up to us to create or find our own community.

If we are free to try out any identity we like, it is also true that we must rely on others to complete the picture of which we are only allowed to paint certain parts.^[14] The desired identity remains incomplete and tentative without the stamp of approval of a new peer group, mentor, or community. It is important to conduct our “role rehearsals” outside our usual circles because the old audience tends to narrowly typecast us.