Building a community of practice
The story of how we established a vibrant content design guild
My super talented colleague Maranda Bodas and I were recently given the opportunity to present on this topic, so we thought we’d also share some of the main points we covered in a short article. Note that while this article tells the story of us establishing a content design community of practice, most of the learning points should be applicable to forming any community of practice.
1) The setting for our story…
Maranda and I both work at a large corporation. And when we say large, we really do mean large:
- Over 350,000 employees, based in over 170 countries
- Many business units, each operating fairly autonomously
- Literally thousands of products, services, and offerings
Whereas in a smaller organization, everyone working on a particular discipline (content, in our case) might know each other, or at least know of each other, in such a large organization, there are often people working in the same discipline but within siloed mini kingdoms that have little or no contact with each other.
2) The challenge…
One of the potential problems with this set-up is that these internal organizational boundaries can bleed through into the overall content experience that our customers have for a given offering. That is, for a given product, a customer might well see promotional content produced by our Sales and Marketing teams, in-product content produced by our Designers, documentation and help content produced by our Docs and Support teams, and so on. Perhaps there’s nothing particularly unusual about this. But problems arise if these different teams are not working closely together, because if not, their different content deliverables — good as they may be individually — can look to the customer as though they were each, well, created by different teams. And this clearly isn’t going to lead to a seamless and consistent end-to-end user experience.
In a large organization such as ours, it’s also not uncommon for different business units to do things slightly differently, which again can cause inconsistency between offerings. Then there’s the fact that some areas will simply be better at or have more specialist resources in certain areas than others, and it’s a real missed opportunity if we don’t share such expertise across the company.
3) The hero(in)es of our story…
Thankfully, we have many fantastic content professionals working across our company. People with strong content skills, who at their best are producing discoverable, reliable, clear, concise, user-centered, action-orientated, and engaging content.
And this band of content warriors has been growing over recent years as our company has begun to value quality content (and by extension, content professionals) more and more. We still have a way to go, but we’re moving in the right direction.
However, what we observed 3 years ago was that many of our content professionals were being assigned to a given project or offering and didn’t necessarily have much natural interaction with other content folks at the company.
We realized that what our content heroes and heroines needed was a way to connect more regularly and meaningfully with each other and to be able to collaborate on all aspects of their discipline and craft (content design, in this case, which back then was still very much a fledgling practice).
4) The formation of a guild…
So, a little over 3 years ago, Maranda and I decided to start pulling together some of the few Content Designers we knew into a small community of practice.
We didn’t have a grand vision at that stage. We didn’t know quite what form our interactions would take, how often we should meet, or what things to focus on first. We just knew that we were feeling fairly isolated and that it would be great to interact more together, to learn from each other, and generally have the opportunity to talk with others practicing our craft.
At our first (virtual) meeting, there were 7 of us. We were basically just a few colleagues getting to know each other, sharing some war stories, asking each other questions, and geeking out about different aspects of content design. But it immediately felt good. We all had that striking sense of having finally found our people.
We decided that we’d hold an online meeting each month and spin up a Slack channel so that we could easily communicate with each other the rest of the time. We also decided that we’d extend an open invitation to anyone else at the company who either worked in content themselves or who simply had an interest in learning more about content design.
Month by month, we had more people join our Slack channel and monthly guild meetings. It wasn’t very long before our Slack channel had 50 members, then 100, then 250 — and today we’re well over 500. This number comprises dedicated content professionals of all sorts (Content Designers, Technical Writers, Content Marketers and so on), but also plenty of colleagues in non-content roles (UX Designers, Developers, Product Managers, and so on) who want to improve their awareness of and skills in content design, which has been fantastic to see.
Over the last 3 years, we’ve used our monthly Content Design Guild meetings to share content skills and tips, run content crits, invite guest speakers, learn about new tools and techniques, and many things besides.
We’ve also forged good working relationships with colleagues leading initiatives in other related fields such as technical writing, UX design, and user research. So, from humble beginnings, we’ve been able to organically break down silos and connect content folks from all over the world who are specializing in everything from conversation design to product documentation to in-app support.
“Deeply-networked people tend to perform better and grow faster than those without strong networks.”
— Gary Chou, Why you should join a community of practice
If you’re thinking of forming a community of practice, here are some lessons learned that you might find helpful:
- Don’t wait to be asked. In fact, don’t even ask for permission. Just go ahead and start bringing people together.
- But don’t try to do it alone. As much as you’re trying to form a community, you will need a small core team (perhaps 2–5 people) to help keep things running. Having a small core team will help you to sustain the effort and enthusiasm over time. (In our case, there are 5 of us who together plan our monthly meetings, host the calls, and communicate important information with the broader guild.)
- Establish a meeting frequency that works for your members. This might be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, depending on the size and availability of your community. Then when you’ve found the right cadence stick to it so that people know what to expect. (Our meetings are monthly, but we use the Slack channel to keep conversations going between meetings.)
- Lower the barrier to entry. Make it easy for people to connect with your community of practice at whatever level they want. While you will no doubt be hoping to have a group of really committed and engaged members, it’s also fine if others dip in and out. As an example, at one point we encouraged everyone to participate in one of several workgroups, but later realized that while this was great for some members, it wasn’t practical for others, so we scraped that expectation.
- Ask your community directly what they want to get from the community of practice and what they can contribute. Then when a few months have passed, ask them again. Unless you are regularly soliciting feedback and input from the community itself, you won’t know whether your plans and activities are meeting expectations and providing value.
- Promote sharing and a culture where we can all learn from one another. Remember: the aim is not to run really polished meetings with super slick presentations; the aim is to build a community. Encourage all members of the community to contribute, to ask (and answer) questions, to share their hints and tips, resources, good and bad examples, and so on.
- Take the initiative to reach out to people outside of your immediate community and look to identify shared goals. For us, this has meant talking to many different colleagues about content and about the value that good content has for our customers. Through such conversations, we’ve formed new relationships with colleagues in other disciplines who now have a growing awareness and interest in good content.
- Retain and develop the passion you have for your craft and your community. It’s so easy to become busy, tired, cynical — but fight against this with everything you have! Your passion and enthusiasm are vital if you’re seeking to lead a community of practice. Others will happily overlook other mistake you make, but lose your passion for your craft and you’ll lose the trust and respect of your community.
- Keep iterating. While we’re absolutely committed to building a community of practice for content, none of the particulars about it are set in stone. That is, we view running our guild as a sort of experiment, or prototype, if you like and we’re always open to trying new ideas. This is how we keep growing and keep our community of practice relevant to our members.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” (African proverb)
5) An ongoing story…
We are by no means “done”. We’re still learning and still experimenting with how best to facilitate a great, vibrant, inclusive community of practice. And we like to think that the best is still to come…
If you have stories about forming a vibrant community of practice or if you have good resources or recommendations specifically related to the content design domain, we’d love to hear from you.
With special thanks to our awesome fellow Content Design Guild leaders: Allison Biesboer, Amanda Booth, and Holly King and to the 500+ guild members who we love getting to know, sharing with, and learning from.
Tom Waterton is a Content Design Lead at IBM based in Hursley, UK. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
