Maturing UX, CX, and Innovation Through Communities of Practice

Q: What are the most critical aspects, values, and tenets of a community?

Krystal: “Critical aspects of a community include psychological safety, trust, inclusivity, openness, communication, shared goals, and continuous learning. Our CoP thrives on shared expertise, disruptive thinking, and the relentless pursuit of excellence.”

Daniel: “The most critical values are as follows:

• a safe environment—First and foremost, a community must be a place where people feel safe to share their thoughts and ideas—no matter how well or thoroughly formed. Too often people feel they need to express fully prepared, well-articulated thoughts and come off as perfect before speaking or sharing, which limits their ability to engage. Instead, a community should be a place where people can speak freely without judgment, fear of what others think of them, or anxiety about messing up their words. It should be a place where people recognize that others may stumble as they work through their thoughts or may misspeak—and that’s okay.
• a learning mindset—A community must be a place where everyone seeks to grow their knowledge and learn from each other. People recognize they don’t know everything and have opportunities to learn themselves. Having that open mindset and willingness to learn helps a community be one of support rather than a venue for trying to prove one’s intellect.
• engagement—A core part of the community is relationships and hearing from people in the community. For that to happen, the community members should be engaged because they want to be, they see benefits, and enjoy the back-and-forth discussions. It’s difficult to have a community when just one person talks.”

Magda: “Trust, the currency of community; shared spaces, our modern-day watering holes; safety—no one can build connections while looking over their shoulder; medium-strength ties that are not too hot, nor too cold, but just right; and the magic ingredient: repetition. Like a good sitcom, it’s all about the reruns and the ability for the community participants to keep coming back to a shared space.”

Q: How have you structured your community and why?

Krystal: “Our community is structured with regular sessions, consistent communication through various channels, frequent requests for feedback—and transparency when sharing how co-leads have chosen to react to that feedback—and a mission statement that serves as our guiding principle to keep us rooted. Co-leads also meet regularly to plan the next steps.”

Daniel: “The Design CoP has gone through different iterations to land on the best format. It started as a smaller group for just one design team within the company, with the goal for that design team to learn more about what each other is working on. We realized the value of the meetings and wanted to include others in the company—not just design teams but those interested in design-related topics. With that, we expanded the community to all employees at Rockwell. At first, it was difficult to get topics and engagement. We started by asking for volunteers to share ideas, which worked for a short bit, but it was often the same people volunteering and they ran out of topics. We adjusted to have each design team share on a regular cadence, which helped increase engagement, topics, and the feeling that all teams are partners in the community. Even with that, there’s still a need for a community organizer to check in with the different design teams to share topics, invite new people, and grow the community.

For meeting cadence, the meetings used to be biweekly, but then we moved to weekly as we started with many good topics that we wanted to get through. The challenge of a weekly meeting is that it may feel like overkill for some individuals—even though attendance is voluntary—and keeping the topics flowing can be more challenging. But, it has the advantage of keeping designers and design thinkers connected continuously and building up the community. A bi-weekly or monthly meeting makes it difficult to build those relationships and establish the feeling of safety. It can be done, but it takes a bit more time and effort than a more regular meeting.”

Magda: “I’ve contributed to creating three different communities of practice, and Jon and I will delve more deeply into my past experiences in an upcoming column. My current focus at Rockwell has been leading monthly, hour-long meetings with curated content. The meetings target Customer Experience (CX) practitioners—professionals who might not have CX in their job title, but who contribute to customer experience through their projects and decision-making. Through careful observation and interviews, we’ve identified that our community members come from diverse business units, but share three core needs:

1. They want visibility into cross-functional initiatives.
2. They want to develop new skills.
3. They want to build their internal network—because in an organization of 30,000+, sometimes knowing who knows what is often more valuable than knowing what.”

Q: Have you considered other ways to structure the community?

Krystal: “I love the Aha! moment when I can learn from other community structures, seeing what works or needs improvement or where there’s overlap and we can join forces. I believe in adapting our structure when necessary such as trying new formats, holding discussion forums, and rotating leadership.”

Daniel: “Yes, one method was to have people from different groups volunteer to lead the identification of topics. It helped to have multiple people involved, but not everybody was as engaged to help find topics, and it was difficult to schedule time to meet and review the topics. Lesson learned: regularly check in with volunteers to see if they still want to help. Sometimes people have the desire, but not the time and that is okay. We readjusted to have one person lead overall, then scheduled different teams for regular cadences to share in the community. This has helped in getting other teams involved and those teams don’t have to be as involved in identifying topics throughout the year.

We’ve considered doing more of a town hall with multiple topics and teams presenting each time, but have not gone down that path because town halls don’t tend to foster collaborative, engaged communities.”

Magda: “I had indeed. While we often think of communities as intimately local or broadly global, I’m also curious about creating intimate, local-feeling communities that can be scaled globally through carefully designed blueprints. An example of such an approach is Stone Soup—an Experience Design camp with distributed execution. Everyone who has been through the camp at least once can become an organizer of the Stone Soup camp and uses the template co-created by experienced designers from around the world.”

Q: What challenges have you faced in building a community?

Krystal: “Keeping consistent engagement can be challenging as people often view such communities as nice-to-have over need-to-have. There are also times when you think a post or a session will be a hit, and it totally flops. Figuring that out can be tough.”

Daniel: “One challenge has been getting topics to be shared, even when there’s much interesting content going on within our company and outside related to design and Design Thinking. It’s difficult to get people to identify those topics and volunteer to share them. It can be challenging to presenters as they feel the burden to prepare a presentation and want to come off as very professional when they share, which can limit the number of people willing to share in a community meeting.

Another challenge is to have engagement from community members and in meetings. The best meetings are those where people speak up, ask questions, share their thoughts, and get the conversation flowing. It can be difficult for that to occur. It has helped to have at least one person start the conversation and encourage others to join in. It feels like there’s that initial barrier of engagement that just needs to be overcome, then other people feel comfortable jumping in.”

Magda: “The primary challenges cluster around workload management, member participation, and need identification. It’s a delicate balance. If you want to create a successful community, you need to be authentically engaged yourself and have a core team that’ll help you execute. If your emotions and passion are not there, you won’t be able to share this excitement with others. And that usually requires a lot of time and energy.”

Q: What has worked well in building a community?

Krystal: “The most important thing is to set clear goals through a mission statement. I was introduced to CoPs as things that can ebb and flow but should never outlive their usefulness. Don’t be afraid to take a close look at what is and isn’t working so you can make smart decisions and adapt as the community grows or winds down. It’s also really important to celebrate achievements and foster a culture of openness.”

Daniel: “Having recurring time slots for different teams to share has helped to increase engagement and give teams enough time to prepare for sharing. Keep the community rather informal where there are no strict requirements or standards for presentations and sharing. This makes it less of a barrier for people to share and helps provide a safe place to present. Ensure at least some folks will be engaged in meetings, which helps the broader community open up and engage, too.”

Magda: “The most successful strategy has consistently been understanding your audience very well and what community members seek through our meetings. Recognizing what will be the driver for engagement comes not from assumptions, but from careful observation and direct feedback.”

Q: How do you keep the community engaged?

Krystal: “Make the community useful—live by what’s in it for me? (WIIFM) from their perspective. Ask for feedback, then ask for more feedback. Let them know how you plan to adapt to their needs and show them that you’re making that reasonable effort. Keep the community engaged between calls through regular updates on various channels. During calls, interactive events and discussion-based topics have gotten the best engagement. It’s really important to set clear expectations, offer multiple ways to participate, and recognize contributions along the way. Additional helpful tips include the following:

• Provide regular updates.
• Set engagement expectations. Some people prefer to know what to expect or even to prepare some commentary instead of thinking and speaking on the fly.
• Give people options to speak or write their responses.”

Daniel: “Helping different teams and people to share in the design community has increased engagement. As they participate and lead sessions, it then helps them to be more engaged in the future. It also helps to broaden the variety of topics, which improves engagement, too. To help with this, we have different teams presenting in a recurring schedule, which gives them enough time to prepare and involve others in their presentation.

During the meetings, what has helped to increase engagement is keeping the meetings rather informal and casual, which helps people feel more comfortable to speak up. As a host of the meetings, I also ask questions and throw out some discussion questions for the presenter. That then helps the rest of the attendees speak up. Once you get a few people to start participating and asking questions, it often builds up from there. Another area to increase engagement is to help the community better know what the topics will be. Adding information about the topics to the meeting invitation beforehand and sending out emails prior to each meeting helps attendees know what to expect and come in with some interest already, which then causes them to be more engaged.”

Magda: “To me, community engagement relies on five key elements working together:

1. Personalized interactions that demonstrate understanding of member needs
2. Compelling benefits that deliver both expected value and surprises
3. Facilitated networking opportunities
4. Facilitating professional and personal development of community members
5. Two-way communication and co-creation of community rules and interactions

Success comes from thoughtfully orchestrating these elements to create meaningful experiences that keep members invested and returning for more.”

Q: What positive results have you seen from the community?

Krystal: “The community has led to new connections, a stronger sense of belonging, and a space for collaboration that builds skills useful in our day jobs, too. The natural benefit from this is stronger professional relationships and skill development.”

Daniel: “People from different teams have connected on similar topics—either realizing that they’re working on similar solutions they can collaborate on or realizing there are knowledge subject-matter experts that others can rely on for help and support. As people engage on topics, it helps expand people’s knowledge and awareness of the topics, how others are handling those topics in their products and teams, and being able to apply those learnings to themselves.

New relationships have formed with designers and others connecting across teams and establishing long-lasting relationships that help across the company and ultimately help our customers.”

Magda: “The community has become a catalyst for customer-experience excellence. Creating a shared vocabulary and mental models enables us to break down silos and create shared understanding around customer experience. This has enabled cross-functional collaboration at scale, empowering employees across departments to contribute to and champion customer-experience initiatives, regardless of their formal role.”

Q: If someone were interested in starting a CoP, what advice would you give them?

Krystal: “Start with a clear vision, gather feedback early and often, and focus on what benefits your audience. Stay curious, be open to saying you don’t know, and always strive to find out together.”

Daniel: “Don’t overthink it or overformalize it. Keep it simple, invite people in, and maintain a safe place for people to connect and talk. Be prepared though, to help with the conversation and find others who are good conversation starters to ensure good engagement.”

Magda: “Success in community building requires three fundamental elements:

1. Deep understanding of your audience
2. A dedicated core team to help drive initiatives
3. Balance between being loyal to the essence of the community—its brand and flavor—and innovative evolution

Start small and focus on creating value for your early members. Establish clear community values and be prepared to maintain them. Most importantly, maintain authentic engagement and a consistent presence—your genuine commitment to the community’s success will be your strongest asset in building lasting connections.”

Conclusion

At Rockwell, we’re seeing our CoP efforts pay off in the form of increasingly larger, more diverse attendee groups from many parts of the business. The people participating in these communities of practice bring their learnings back to their various business units and project teams, who are in the best position to execute on any learnings or ideas that are relevant to the products or solutions they’re deploying to customers—the ultimate beneficiaries.

Have you started a community of practice? Do you have thoughts on what works well in relation to communities of practice? If so, please share your thoughts in the comments!

In an upcoming Enterprise UX column on UXmatters, Magda and I will delve deeper into some fascinating things she’s learned from her experiences creating communities of practice, including CoPs for the science community.