Etienne Wenger Quotes
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Knowledge management will never work until corporations realize it's not about how you capture knowledge but how you create and leverage it.
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Practice is a shared history of learning. Practice is conversational. 'Communities of Practice' are groups of people who share a concern (domain) or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better (practice) as they interact regularly (community).
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Meaningful learning in a community requires both participation and reification to be present and in interplay. Sharing artifacts without engaging in discussions and activities around them impairs the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts makes learning depend on individual interpretation and memory and can limit its depth, extent, and impact. Both participation and reification are necessary. Sometimes one process may dominate the other, or the two processes may not be well integrated. The challenge of this polarity is for communities to successfully cycle between the two.
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The opposite of fragmentation is not homogenization, which is a suspicious form of unity. Who wants blending, anyway? And for what purpose? Blending, somehow, always ends up privileging the perspective of the blade.
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We need others to complement and develop our own expertise. This collective character of knowledge does not mean that individuals don’t count. In fact, the best communities welcome strong personalities and encourage disagreements and debates. Controversy is part of what makes a community vital, effective, and productive.
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Our knowing - even of the most unexceptional kind - is always too big, too rich, too an cient, and too connected for us to be the source of it individually. At the same time, our knowing - even of the most elevated kind - is too en gaged, too precise, too tailored, too active, and too experiential for it to be just of a generic size. The experience of knowing is no less unique, no less creative, and no less extraordinary for being one of participa tion. As a matter of fact, on the face of it, it would probably not amount to much otherwise.
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Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.
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Learning is the engine of practice, and practice is the history of that learning.