Community of practice and metacapabilities

Continuous reinvention of the organization through learning is a key feature of knowledge management (KM). Responsive change requires the development of organizational structures, processes and cultures that foster the capability to create and learn new knowledge, while abandoning dated knowledge and business processes no longer appropriate to the business environment. The business drivers of past success risk promoting complacency and failure to adapt responsively to environmental change, making the strategic quality of continuous responsive adaptive change a critical and elusive business success factor. On-going adaptability requires the learning and synthesis of a set of capabilities, or metacapabilities that contribute the kinds of skills and knowledge that underlie the process of change and core competency building. Merging metacapabilities with a value chain-specific core competency will allow all three strategic qualities – value creation, difficult to imitate and responsive adaptive change – to be satisfied. In very complex and dynamic environments management should pay consideration to the structures that facilitate the development of a learning culture capable of redefining functions and organizational purpose in response to the environmental changes. What is required is a learning structure that allows for the questioning of the organizational paradigm relative to the business environment, stimulates and supports the development of metacapabilities while providing the larger aligning supportive context that is process focused at a system level. Community of practice, a key KM application, may be one potentially useful metaphor for describing such a structure.