Community leadership enablement with Drew Pontikis

Today I am talking to Drui Plentykis about his role as the Head of Social Learning at PWCUK. We had a great chat about valuing communities and how come it's so hard to measure it especially on an individual level. On the other hand, the collective benefits brought by knowledge exchange across the organization as a result of communal practice are much easier to spot and capture. I also love Drui's so-called "spark of inspiration" also known as the first "price step" and how all our community needs to start is one person that is grave enough to ask, "This is how I feel. Does anyone else feel like this as well?" This is the last conversation of the second mapping ties season. So here I am inviting you to our live online celebration session on July 29th. We'll take August off to rest and recharge and we'll find you in September with more stories of togetherness at work. Hey Drew! Hey, how are you? Welcome to mapping ties. It's a pleasure to have you here. Hiya, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. And I want to get one thing out of the way, which is a big congratulations to you of passing to hundreds of subscribers for your Let's Talk and Me as a Practice newsletter. How does that feel? Thank you. It's bizarre. Frankly, there are that many people who want to talk about it. So yeah, it's. Yeah, thank you. It's. I'm very proud of it. We will link it in the show notes and have our listeners go check out your essays. I really try to keep up with everything you're putting out there. It's very thoughtful and in depth and interesting. So, another great resource for everyone listening. Yeah, well, before we kick it off and we go into the weeds of your role, let's start there. Tell us a bit about who you are and how did you end up doing the work you're doing today. Sure. Okay, well, my name's Drew and I am the. I lead the Community Practice Enablement Team at PWC in the UK. My background has mainly been in software testing and there is different quality leadership and agile sort of type roles. Always working in the tech space, really. But this is my first role where I've been solely dedicated to working with communities and communities at practice. But I have, over the past five, six, seven years or so, been working with and building communities at various different organizational levels and out, you know, out just for learning communities as well. I suppose I first got into building communities from discovering the first community that really actually meant something to me and spoke to me on a sort of personal level, which was as part of the Ministry of Testing, which is a global. Do you recognize Ministry of Testing? Rosie? Rosie, Rosie's here. Yeah. Rosie's here, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so many years ago, my first interaction with communities was actually going to one of their test bashes in Manchester. And I found myself surrounded by people who weren't just there doing their jobs and being, you know, doing a test because it paid the bill, doing it because they cared about what they were doing. And, you know, I just felt this is something I need more of this in my life. I need to be more involved in this in absence of anything going on around me. I thought, well, if I want this, I'm going to have to start it myself. And that's kind of where I first sort of got involved in sort of starting up, what I now think of as communities of practice and sort of taking and sort of building from there. And once I find once you have it, you can't do without it. So everywhere I've been, I've been, I've been building it. But yeah, I've been at PWC now for about two years and I was very lucky to get the role that I'm doing now within our, within our COPN Abelment team. I described it at the time as my perfect job. So and I still describe it as my perfect job. So I'm in a happy place. I love that. And thank you for sharing the origin story and how I love when people start building like good communities, build other communities because members see the value and they go and they kind of are like, okay, I need that somewhere else. And I keep on spreading. And that's a wonderful testament of the Minister of Testing and how awesome they're doing, they're doing the things around there. Now, but as I've been in context through before we go into your tasks, tell us a bit about, because I know that you're leading several communities, so I, but there's a bit of a, you know, more complex structure there. So give us the context of how many communities are you overlooking and also how are they structured? Where does your role come into place in that hierarchy or structure? And give us the birth I'd view. Okay. We at PWC, we have lots and lots of communities. So I've, I reckon that last count is there's is probably in the hundreds where we put names on things. So these are things that we might call a community of interest. Things where people are working with in the certain area or in a certain field of interest where they are passionate and they care about it. As an organization though, we've put in place firm wide technologist focus communities of practice. And to anybody within the firm who wants to join wants to be part of them, they are spread across the whole firm. So they, you know, we have a reach of many thousands of people across the UK. In many cases, we're looking towards how other international members of our network firms as well. So we support 10 firm wide communities practice. And those are picked out and have continued to be picked out so far as areas that are strategically important to us as a firm and to our people. So areas that we want to develop it and they fall into three types of pools. So things which are specific to a particular type of technology, we might spend time thinking about how we optimize our use of that technology. The practitioners spend time sort of focusing on sort of optimizing and achieving excellence in those areas. And we have a slight, we have those were just slightly broader areas. So things like they might spend time look rather than focusing on a specific tool for a solution. They might spend time actually thinking about the slightly broader landscapes. Okay, well, how do we solve this problem? What are the right tools for us to be using to solve these problem? What are the right techniques? Those kind of ways. And then we have the more the broadest sort of communities and those fall into capabilities. And you know, that's where all my historical background is in things like testing and things like agile. Things where it is a perhaps a more role focused space and you know, well, we will talk about things like use cases, things like frameworks and those kind of areas as well. Now all of the communities will do a similar sort of thing, but some will focus on particular activities more because it just kind of suits them that little bit better. One of the things that we do is that all of our communities of practice have a designated lead associated with them and that lead is a is what I call a proper job. You know, it's not something that we want people doing side of desk. It's all after hours or things like that. It's part they are employed to do those roles. And that might be but somewhere between 50 and 100% of their time, when we're looking at those people, I have quite strong opinions on who makes a good community of practice leader, but one of the things that I always say to people is that you don't need to be the expert in your particular area, but you should be an authority and you should have an opinion in it. So that you know, you should be, you know, so our leads, if nothing else, they are respected by the organization, they're respected by the members, but they are designated to lead the community rather than to be an expert in this technology or in this skill set or something like that. Something else we do, which I think is quite important is that all of our communities have a sponsor from the senior leadership team across the fan and the sponsor has quite a clear designated role, which is they are there to support and coach the lead rather than be there to set the agenda, set milestones and targets and things like that. And that, you know, we're quite open and upfront and so that's not what we need from you. That's not the value you can bring. The value that you bring is helping this agenda be delivered and how they can beat, how they can make it successful across the fan. So yeah, that's a lot of talking about how the structure works. And I haven't actually mentioned how I fit into that as well. So because we are, we're a really big firm. We've got many, many thousands of people, basically only UK, tens and tens and tens of thousands around the world. It's very hard to sort of coordinate amongst these different communities, how to do a good job with communities and how to make sure we're serving the needs of our people. So the my role and the role of the COP enablement team is we provide a safety blanket and a sort of alignment focus for all of our communities of practice. We say, okay, as PWC, this is what communities look like for us. This is what we want to be doing. This is what we think good looks like. I work with all of our respective COP leads to make sure they have the tools and the structure and the support that they need to be able to lead their communities effectively. My number one accountability is towards our people and the members of those communities to make sure that they are getting what they need from being part of the communities of practice. But there's also an element of being the inward face to the business as well, in that being there to sort of articulate the value that our communities are collectively bringing the purpose that we're there for and how the business can depend on its people, if you like. And when we are trying to democratise what the responsibility for what we do to our people and our practitioners, making sure that there is a figurehead who's someone who, where that was, messages can go either way into and out of the business. So that's probably a quick review. So many things to go deeper into. You mentioned this, that we have a lot of communities, probably in the hundreds, a lot of them are like interest community, but we have picked a number of communities that are strategically important. And already everything you share about the structure, the fact that these are, every community has a lead and that's not a half-baked role. Those are people that are actually spending a lot of time, some of them that's their full-time role. And each community has a sponsor and then you come on top with your team. It really showcased that this is a serious business, right? So let's stay in that area a bit because you also mentioned that a big part of your role is to translate this value. And in many companies, that is a challenge. It's a challenge where when people are trying to get buy-in initially for a community because they didn't have one, but it's even a challenge after you manage to launch one and in a year or two, we still struggle to have that translation that proved the value because it's social learning, it's field learning and we know that it's really hard to measure. And so I was wondering, what is, what, why does PWC nurture this? Why is this such a big program for the company? What is the value that comes out of it? And what are you reporting back to your stakeholders? What do they care to hear? Anything you can share around that would be useful for us. Yeah, it's always exciting for me to say this because I always think of PWC. We are a, you know, let's, you know, let's make no burns about it. PWC is one of the big four consultancy firm we provide professional services. Let's not be around the bush. We are a corporate environment. So when I tell people what I do and that I work for PWC, they're often quite surprised. And it's because at heart we are a people-based organization and we care about our people. And when we talk about value, we understand that people are not just numbers on a spreadsheet and because they're not numbers on a spreadsheet, value is hard to articulate from those people. Does that make sense? It's hard to say, okay, well, if we do this today, what is, you know, what's the value that this person is going to get out of this over the course of the next month, the next six months, the next year, those kind of things. So it's very hard to put a number next to it like on a, on a spreadsheet line. It is. We do this then that, right? Like that's often hard. Yeah. Yeah. And I think as an organization, we're very accepting of that. And, you know, there's a lot of good will towards what we do. And I think that comes again from having this involvement of sort of senior leadership sponsorship that everyone kind of knows what we're about. We know what we're for and what we're doing. But, you know, there's a limit, isn't there? You know, we live it, you know, we can't all just live in a world of like sunshine and rainbows like I do. We have to, sometimes there is an element, okay, but what actually is it that you're doing here? What is it that you're doing? We use a slightly modified version of Beverly and Etienne Venge trainers value model. And the reason we did it is there's for, for those who're not familiar, I'm going to overstretch myself. We're trying to explain it. But they talk about a value framework that they do we as part of social learning, which is something else I'm quite passionate about. And they talk about eight different types of value, which are immediate value, potential value, applied value, and realize value. And then around that, they have, I'm going to struggle it, orienting value, transformative value, strategic value, and aligning value, I think. So if I got that right, I'm impressed with myself. I just opened the notes where I have a screenshot. I've got the book. I did know for that. I thought I got away with it. Anyway, yeah. So we, yeah, so we find that for, although it makes sense and it's always clear when you when you understand the source topic, if you are a casual observer who's not quite as interested in perhaps you and I are in the subject, you know, that we found that actually it can be a little bit difficult and a little bit hard to access. So we use a slightly modified version. And we focus on the four central ones. So the immediate potential applied and realized. And that's how we talk about the value that we do. So yeah, if we do one of those sessions where people come along and they talk and they just have a nice time, there is value in doing that, but it's quite hard to pinpoint on what that specific value is, or even when we're going to see the return on that, if you know, you are not, I forget how we met actually, Anna Maria, I think we sort of came across each other on LinkedIn at some point. Yeah. You know, at some point I read your LinkedIn profile and thought, oh, you sound like a cool person to know. And you know, however many months later now we're here. So something's come from that. But at the time, it's quite difficult to articulate what that value is. So we kind of talk about it like that. And by putting that bit in front of people and saying, this is value, this is something you can see and you can touch on this tangible now because we've made it tangible. There's an element of trust for those other four, the aligning strategic transformative and orienting. Thank you. Yeah, those are the ones that we can focus on. And that's when I think me and my team kind of focus and say, this is what we provide and we help provide, you know, help give you those sort of strategic and aligning and orienting values so that you can go and do your best work. So that's kind of how we talk about it. Yeah. Fascinating how in the example that you gave with how the two of us came to kind of cross paths and many months later, here we are, we are creating value for one another, right? So we have a conversation. I'm learning from you and we're sort of facing the story for the mapping ties listeners. And so it's interesting how the value from a community of practice can you can see ripples of that in time. And very often it's hard for people to go back and be like, I don't remember how where I actually read about this, I heard about this for the first time, but now I've suddenly applied it in my job. And it's been really helpful for me to achieve X, Y, Z outcome. And I wonder is there so are you collecting data? Are you looking at data? Are you going to numbers, surveys, interviews? And I know that it with Etienne and Bev, they talk a lot about stories, which is kind of the currency right of communities, how they say it. And it's and the challenges that collecting stories often has within the companies and how do we transmit them forward? Do you work on that level or are you looking at number? How do you capture this immediate potential applied value? What does that look like? I think the short answer is no. The slightly longer version is that I have developed over the years some very strong views on metrics and what the right things to measure and what the wrong things to measure are. And one of the things that I always will strongly push back against is counting the number of members as as an effective metric. Because I've kind of the opinion that if you run a community meetup, some of our communities, for example, have maybe maybe a dozen members. If that, some of them have many thousands of members. And I can say, well, we can't compare this one to this one because they're completely different. And because one has thousands and thousands of members doesn't necessarily mean it's providing more value than this one. In my mind, there is an element is say, okay, well, as a, you know, if as a community of practice, if you want to influence your craft and your people and get better at what you're doing, there is a critical mass of the number of people. So if you're, you know, if that small number is not representative of the whole, I would question whether you're able to actually be an authority and influence in those kind of areas. But at the same time, if I run a community session, and I mandate that I want 5,000 people to turn up because I wanted to look good, I've arguably wasted 4,950 of people's time because they're not going to engage with it at that level. So, you know, there is a difficult balance when it comes to talking about numbers. I like to take other people's good ideas and sort of bend them a bit to the way I look. So one of the things that we do is we, I've always been very fond of Emily Weber's maturity assessment framework that she uses. And it's one, it's a method that we use quite a lot, which is we sort of run through that every sort of six months or so. We don't, we say, we say to our COP leads, you know, don't worry about what it's, what it's saying about you or what you think it's saying about you because I assure you that it's not what it is, it's giving us a sort of snapshot in time. And that can, you know, that snapshot is going to be impacted by many things. So you might have seen, so what you might have seen over the course of six months is that some key members of your community have left the business, and you'll no longer able to do the things that you could do six months because those key members have moved on. And that's okay because we're not saying, well, you're doing a bad job then because you're not doing that. What we're saying is this is where we are now. And what we encourage our community of practice leads to do is to talk to their sponsors and say, this is where we are. These are challenges we're facing and get their input on say, okay, well, this is how you might be able to overcome that. Have you thought about doing this? And we encourage them to share that with the community as well and say, okay, well, these are the things that we've lost in the past six months. Well, these are things we've gained. This is how we're going to take advantage of that. This is what we'd like to do. Who wants to be involved in help leading that and kind of democratize the leadership against those kind of actions? It's not metrics and in the traditional sense, but it's more to me, it's more useful if you like. So that's kind of the approach that we take when we're talking about measuring. Yes, I recall that and this is a last because we could talk about measuring and impact the whole conversation. There's so much to turn it and so much that we don't know and that we kind of have to talk about to wrap our heads around that. I remember some conversations that was having with Sophie and with Deborah from Moss around this value and impact, et cetera. And they depend on from community to community and what their purpose are or the purpose is. But they were talking about this option possibility that they were looking into to. So obviously, I don't know. And I see Mr. Samin your case communities are not mandatory, right? So people can opt in to be part of the community, right? And so if you have one of your communities is specifically around this tool or the software or this product and the purpose is to find ways to get better at using that product or be more efficient in the way that software tool is being implemented, use, et cetera. If you want to go really deep into it and have the resources to do so, you might want to look at what are the numbers in terms of that software usage, impact, time to whatever, et cetera, of people that are part of the community of practice compared to their colleagues who are not part of the community of practice and try to see if there's any type of correlation. Obviously, there's no causality there, right? That you're in the community. Ergo, you are doing a better job at using the tool. But it might open up some sort of potential conversation with the sponsor with our leadership on the potential impact of a community if there is some interesting trends emerging from there. I know that there are community of practice around a customer support. So our colleagues that are part of a community of practice engaging in discussing best practices and key studies and ways and tactics to become better at their roles. Are they actually having better performance numbers than their colleagues that are not part of the community of practice? And again, it's very hard to say that it is because of the community of practice because we cannot isolate that effect. But that's what I said number. I meant more that type of are we looking at? And that's harder if you say, we are a community for agile practitioners. That's harder to do. But especially if it's like for a specific role that has very specific KPIs and OCRs that are already being measured as part of their role. That might be an interesting deep dive for us practitioners to do just for the sake of it, if you like crunching numbers and have a look at that in detail. I think, yeah, I don't deny that would be really interesting. And I think I tend to draw back from that because I perhaps would like to think of it in a different way and think that I think it's a blessing and a curse being an organization as large as we are. You know, our size is very much our superpower if you like. But we can, you know, we could do things and we can support things in a way that you simply can't when there is such a small number with high dependencies on every individual. What works for us and I've often found is quite important is where instead of focusing on the individual, you might think about this sort of collective social memory and the sort of social governance that comes alongside that. And it's rather than focusing on perhaps one individual and say, if this person is part of this community, then they get better and better and better are better at something because then because by doing that, you're sort of concentrating your expertise into individuals, which you don't really want to do. What you want to do is you want to have your have this collective uplift of capability and understanding and so well being really as a that everybody is sort of happy and not and sort of coming together and sort of understanding subjects together collectively and sort of retaining that information because obviously the worst case scenario for any organization, let's be honest, is you have someone, you invest time in training them and supporting them and helping them grow and then they leave and you lose all of that because you've invested it all in one person and then they go. What we would try and promote is we would say, okay, well, we, you know, if you go off and you go off and you train and you do something, you learn something called come and share it, you know, come and share it with the community, make sure that other people have access to that knowledge that you've gathered and then if you do decide to go off, you go without blessing, if you like, you know, we're happy that you're moving on with your career because we've still got that sort of retained knowledge and memory that we've got from what we've learned from you, you've contributed rather than sort of retained and extracted from that group. So that's perhaps the way I would prefer to look at it and say, say, okay, well, rather than concentrating on the individual uplift of each individual, think about what this is collectively doing for our organization. I love it. And so if we were to think about that, obviously, you're overlooking, I think you said about 10 communities together with your team, etc. What would you add, if you look at them 10, what would you actually see to make you say that XYZ community is doing this thing really, really well, where is a BC community we still have to work on it because we don't, how do we know that this collective uplift is happening in our communities in order to, you know, celebrate them or where do we know, where, where can we find the breaking point so we can support our community leads to nurture that or faster that. So to my mind is two things. So the way you do it is to trust and you trust individuals to do the right thing. And you trust that if you give people who are striving towards getting better and developing and learning, trust them and listen to them and sort of support them in terms of growth. What you see in terms of the outputs is always quality from an organizational point of view. Quality is always relative to who it's in the eye of the beholder. Quality might be you see better software delivered. You might see better customer outcomes. You might see just generally people are happier about that doing their job, but those are the outcomes and those are things that you can measure. They're not necessarily entirely the result or the consequence of strong communities of practice, but they're always better when you have them because people have knowledge, maintenance and capability and growth is always more resilient when you have them than when you don't. Yeah, but that's exactly the type of exploration, if you will, that we're often trying to make. We then had a community in EX, department field, etc. Now we have a community. It's two years later and here's what we observe in terms of what is it actually doing? Like why is it there? And so I really like how you talked about and you can look at it from oh, there's many individuals that together uplift the department or you can be like, I don't want to look at any individual numbers. I just want to look at the numbers of the department or the numbers of the software, the numbers of the output where us coming together to nurture and hone a craft, a scheme, a domain, a practice will hopefully have an impact in real life in our work, right? Yeah, I think you've got to remember. I mean, in my opinion anyway, you know, whether you, whether you embrace or prohibit communities of practice, you know, within an organization or not, it happens anyway because humans see, you know, just by default see connection with other people and see, you know, like minded people who they can, they enjoy being around because they share the same values. So whether you'll support, you know, whether as an organization, you lean into this or not, it's kind of irrelevant because it's going to happen. The, all the, I think, to my mind at least the only difference is that if you support them, they go, if you support your people and your, your communities in the way, they go further and they're more impactful and influential, than if you don't because people will just seek to be around people who think like them. So I've, yeah, whether you do it or not, it's going to happen anyway. So you may as well embrace it. Yes, this is a perfect segue to my next question, Drew, which is this. You and your team, which is called community enable months, community practice enable one team. Tell us a bit about that role. use that team, what are they doing, what are their roles? Because then, and then the link to the sponsor, because I do on the Senate, you also mentioned that the sponsor plays a pretty important role in supporting the community leaders thriving their roles. So they often seek mentorship from the sponsor, they should support, they seek ideas, tips, et cetera, when they struggle with a challenge. So I often see is that we have the community practice and able to maintain. We have the sponsor, which is really strong. It sounds to me like a very important role in that ecosystem. And then we have the community leader, that is the operational path, the on the face of the community, the person driving that strategy, actually, driving it forward with the community. So what can you tell us about that triangle? How do they overlap? Who does what, like, what are the dynamics there? Yeah, so my relationship with the individual COP sponsors, is fairly light touch. I think that that's the sort of thing if I'm involved I'm getting in the way, so I shall get out of the way, that kind of thing. That kind of exists more so between the lead and the sponsor as a direct relationship, rather than necessarily involving myself or my team. Where we get involved is I will often describe communities of practice in the particular way that we use them as the vehicle to deliver, to get things out into the business. So what may a mightier more often finding ourselves doing is we will talk to senior leadership around the business or people who have something that they want to share or want to push out and contribute to that sort of shared memory and collective knowledge and putting them in touch with the right people in the communities. And making sure they're talking to the right people, they've got the support to deliver and they've got the tools they need to succeed. So I like to think of what I do as more of a coaching role and a sort of coaching and leadership tie activity rather than necessarily getting involved in the practical side of things. 'Cause like I said to you before, we have all these different communities and as much as I'd love to be, I can't be an expert in all of those particular domains. And for the, well, I'd like to think in some of them, maybe, but not in all of them, I can't necessarily be the authority in those areas. So my role is very much making sure that the lead has all the tools they need to succeed and making sure that they're supported to go and do what it is they need to do. We do tend to provide sort of alignment activities as well and provide that sort of collective leadership that we do. So something that has always been very important to me is that it's actually spending time together as a group. And I was very keen when I joined the organization that I wanted to make sure that we as a group of leads felt we were together and supported and a community amongst ourselves. So we do regular in-person events for all of them because we have many offices across the UK. So we're actually quite as an organization, even if we're all in the office, we're not in the same office, we're all distributed. And so it's important for me that we do these things in person so that we can build these sort of close relationships together as a group and as a team so that we can learn about each other and what's going on in our particular domain space, what the challenges we're having, the solutions that we're finding because we all find that we're doing the same but different in terms of what we're doing and we're coming up against the same problems just in a slightly different shape. So there's always something that we can learn from each other and this sort of cross-community pollination where find is really, really useful. And we're actually looking at how we can do more of that at the individual community level and say, okay, well, what can this community learn from this one? So yeah, that's, I don't know if that really answered your question. Yes, that did. Yeah, so just to sum up, I need to give like thumbs up, you got it or you have the community leads and they're the operational part, they are the ones actually making sure stuff gets done and the community members are coming together and they're convening and they're learning and they're doing, you know, the activities, improving the practice. They have a very strong connection to their sponsor and that connection and support is mainly specific to the domain. So that sponsor is really someone that understands what those people are talking about and they're able to provide support in very specific, domain-specific related questions. So where is the community of practice enablement team gather the community leads to align this cost strategy challenges approaches from a community of practice point of view. So it's almost as if your domain, the domain that you're operating under is that of a community of practice leader and you're in charge of making sure that they keep on skilling and learning and getting better at the role as a community of practice leader. That's your domain. Where is the sponsor and everything they're doing on the ground, that's for their specific domain. Software, agile competencies, whatever, what not. Is that a good assessment of what you said? That's exactly it, yeah. All right, now let's get a bit into the weeds. I know that you're not very operational, you have a very big team and there's a big structure there, but I know that also our listeners are constantly looking for ideas of activities and to learn about what are your communities actually doing. And the reason we ask this question to all of our guests is I think when you start building community, there's the easiest thing to do is to find some experts that can come for an hour to talk on top of some slides around the specific topic and everyone in the room listens. And those are the famous webinars and that's the easy way in and that's usually a lot of communities that are just starting and they haven't found their way around, they function around that sage on the stage four months. And what we're hoping to do with mapping ties is to really find out what are other ways in which people are coming together to learn from one of them, and truly share in the peer and social learning sense. So do you have some examples for us, Drew, of some activities, some of what keeps your communities busy, what are they doing? Yeah, sure. So I will just call out first because otherwise, I'm going to sound quite dismissive of that. I've not heard sage on a stage before, but I like that, I'm going to copy that. They absolutely have value. That sort of transactional exercise where you go, you learn something from somebody else. That is always very useful because that's how we learn. As not just a human being, that's how all higher mammals learn. It's that transactional passage of knowledge and that's really, really important. But there's so much more to it. So I know we were speaking about it a little bit earlier when I had to name drop here, but last week, I was at the Communities of Practice Summit in Sussinbury, Portugal. And one of the phrases that I heard discussed at the summit, which I know is going to-- it's one of those things you hear it, and you know it's going to stick with you for the-- you're going to be saying it a lot for the rest of the year was when they're researching these kind of things, what they're finding is that it's not the training that's value, it's the social learning that goes along side around the training that people remember and take value from. So those are the kind of things that I would always encourage anybody who's starting up a community to be thinking about. And that's where the real leadership comes in. And those sorts of interactions only really occur. If people actually feel like they belong and they care about being part of a group, because if all I'm going to do is sit in a room and listen to somebody talk and then go back to whatever it is I'm doing, I may as well have just sat on my desk with my headphones on and dialed into it. I'm not getting that enriching experience around it. So anywhere I go, whenever I talk about Communities of Practice, or getting started and getting off the ground, the first thing I tell people to think about is you want to be-- you want people to feel like they are part-- start building those sort of relationships and nodes in their own network amongst that group and decide whether this is a group of people I feel like I am part of, whether their values align with my values, and whether I feel part of that. So sessions where we get to know each other are a bit of really, really fundamental, particularly in the early stages and from sort of ongoing maintenance aspects of those relationships. So we all know the cheesy icebreaker kind of things. And we try and avoid them because nobody likes doing that. But things like experiential learning exercises where people come together and they learn through play with doing stuff with their hands, things where people are actually learning together are really, really valuable. And those are the things that we remember when we think about, what did we do at this learning experience? We remember the thing that-- where we laughed together and we did something that was fun and enjoyable. And that's how we get to know each other as people and as professionals and as practitioners in these areas. I am always a fan. And because of that, I'm making sure that you have your sort of serious, sort of up-skilling type exercises where you go off and you learn in that transactional basis that we talked about, where you have practical hands-on demonstrations, where you've got something in your hand that you can touch and you can play with, you can work with. And I'm also, I'm always in favor of just social activities, things where you are, you might not even be talking about work or whatever the focus of that community of practice might be. You might just be doing something that's fun because that's the thing that nurtures those nebri-s and that's the enabling thing for all the other good stuff to happen as well. So that's kind of my, you know, that's kind of my, but I don't know if that was too theoretical for your answer, but that would be my answer for it. So that was awesome. Yeah, so I hear this combination and that is actually, we learn in different stages and sometimes we need an expert to pass on information, whether that expert is someone that sits in the room, whether that expert is someone that is invited, I guess, as a, at a podcast or has a YouTube video, et cetera, or wrote an article or a blog, it doesn't matter how that conversation reaches you. Sometimes we need to sit down and be like, okay, has anyone else done this thing before me? So I do not have to reinvent the wheel. And then once you have that beat and pieces of information, we go out into the world and we practice it, we practice and we try and we test and we apply to our contacts and we see, oh, this work, this is different, et cetera. And then we get more questions and then we go back to the experts and sometimes we sit to make sense of the stuff with peers. So it's mainly in this kind of mix that learning happens because it has different facets and sometimes we need to reflect and learn from what we just, we've done like from our practice and other times we're missing pieces, puzzle pieces of knowledge where we need to tap into expertise and it's just constant kind of cycle. So spot on answer for for that one. Now, I know that you and you've mentioned this, you're a big fan of doing things that have probably nothing to do with the delay. And I know that you've been thinking and writing as well about community culture and how that like, what is it and how does it manifest and how do we even think about culture and community and how do we work with that? And that's a fascinating topic because I always think that building communities within an organization, it's a heart not to cry at times because communities have their micro culture or they develop their micro culture as a community, but they're also part of the wider company culture and at times that wider company culture is very beneficial. It's very supportive and very nurturing and it boosts a community type of gathering and in many instances it robs against it. And so it kind of challenges the community culture that it's trying to somehow be like, okay, now let's do it, we can do it, right? So what can you tell us about this term? Where's your head at? Like, how come you're exploring this? And I suppose I like to explore it and the reason that it fascinates me is because it's something that's so fundamental to my own experiences into how I started to grow as a professional. And again, I'll sort of call back to that sort of that sort of first experience that I mentioned with the alongside the Ministry of Testing. It was the first time that I actually felt like, even though I didn't know anybody, I felt like I belonged in that space with the, you know, there were people who felt the same as I do and cared about the same things that I did. And I just wanted to be part of it. And that was that was kind of my introduction into wanting to think about getting better at what I do. And I always think that there is, there isn't, it's something that all communities are practiced be they're organizational be they in a, you know, purely enjoyment-based space or whatever they might be, there is an element of belonging that comes with that that I belong as part of this group because I think alike with the people who are part of it. So that is something that I write about because as a leader, I think he is one of the most fundamental responsibilities that you have is to protect that culture and nurture it and develop it and revere it, if you like. There's a very good book which I recommend in pretty much every conversation I ever have with anybody. So I'm going to do it now as well is by someone called Owen Eastwood and it's called "Belonging". And he talks about this concept of an "us story". So he sort of relates back to something in his own experience as that he's of Maori descent. His father was a New Zealand Maori. They had emigrated in his father died when he was quite young and he'd found the tribe in New Zealand that he came from. He wrote to them and said, "Can you, you know, I don't know anything about my history. Is there anything you can tell me?" And they wrote back to him with essentially a family tree going back hundreds and hundreds of generations just with the head saying, "You belong here." And I think that's so powerful, isn't it, that you can be part of something that's ongoing. And what I've taken from that is that as a leader or any member of a community or any community of practice, you kind of have a responsibility to both those who are there now but also those who are there before and they're hard work and also those who are going to come after you as well. Because at some point, you're not going to want to be part of that community of any more. The reason that you wanted to be part of it, the need that brought you here will be met and be satisfied. That's okay, by the way. That means that it's worked well and that it's done its job. So we should have no shame in that. But your responsibility is that you are doing something so that those who join it later on have a better experience and want to be part and are better for the effort that you've put into it, that you are contributing to the ongoing culture of that group. And it's a complex balance from a leadership point of view to say, this is what we hold sacred. These are our rituals that we perform. These are the things that we do as a group that means something to us without excluding new views to the group. And it is a delicate balance and say, okay, well, you can't be part, you don't want to say to some, well, you can't be part of our group because you're not like this. You need to be open and inclusive without damaging that sort of community culture that builds up around it. So I think that's why it's so fascinating is because it's such a deep rabbit hole that goes and it just plugs into my brain and I can't get enough talking about it. I know. I think it's because I don't know the answer. That's why that's why I'm interested. That's why it's important to talk about things we don't know much about because by talking and sense making and kind of pooling ideas, insights, impressions from others is where that puzzle gets kind of, you know, completed. And we could talk about this maybe maybe we'll record another episode purely on this topic. Yeah, that would be fun. Curiosity here is though, is this something, is this culture something that rather emerges, it has to be kind of collectively kept or is it something that community leads or core teams of communities can intentionally design? Does it happen or is it by design or is it somewhere in the middle or where do you stand or what's your brain doing with this? I think the answer is both yes and no. So I say, I say no in the sense that if you and I, let's say tomorrow, you and I decided we were going to we were going to start a community about books because I can see books behind you. I've got a stack of books here as well. So we want to talk about books. We want to get better at learning about books and finding books. So we put out a message to our respective networks and say, do you want to come and join our new community of practice? We're going to focus on learning through reading. People are going to turn up to that. If on day one, we say we believe that we only want to read books with red covers and that is our culture. We read books with red covers. Everyone's just going to get up and leave because you know, we miss out on so much more richness. If we if we just say we have decided that we are going to impose our values and our beliefs of what is right and wrong and what is good on that community. So to that extent, no, it shouldn't be the the lead responsibility to do that. What it should be is their job is to help the community discover what its values are and what it believes and what its culture is and then help put the help put the guard rails around that so that the group can respect and revere its culture and it let it grow and develop and evolve over time. But it shouldn't necessarily be that you are imposing your beliefs on somebody else as a leader, you are there to help that collectively discover what their culture is. Made me think and I had to go look for the reference because I couldn't remember it by heart, but made me think of this, the McMillan and Chavez 86 studies on fastering the sense of communities and kind of the elements that they discovered and how one of them is this, in order to create a sense of community leaders or communities in general, should members should feel that they are empowered to influence. And they mentioned how important it is for that empowerment to influence to happen both ways, meaning the members of the group, the members of the community should feel empowered to have influence over what the community does, like be able to, okay, I have something to say here, I'm valued, my voice matters, I can contribute to this conversation and I'm being heard, but at the same time, the group cohesiveness depends on the group having some influence over its members. So over time, there is some sort of, almost like third entity, or how do you want to call it, besides the people, it's the third entity of the community or the group that kind of holds it together. So it's this fine balance in between I can influence and impact because otherwise I wouldn't be motivated to be here if I can't speak up, if I can't shape this, if I can't bring in my juice to the conversation, but at the same time, there would be no community and no cohesiveness if everyone suddenly starts imposing and doing an influencing. So is that, or how do we do that? That's why I like how feel always says feel right as communities and art, right? It's more art than it is science. So I always say that on that. Yeah, I always think if you have your community and you have your culture, a piece of you is part of that culture and you know, and each individual piece is part of every other person and that community culture, it shouldn't all be one person who is sitting there. So yeah, you're quite right there. Good things. Well, we're almost at the end, but I do have two more questions for you Drew. I'm very curious. You've speaking of Phil and Etienne and Bev, which we talked about quite a, we've mentioned them quite a lot today is you just return from the community of practice summit. You've mentioned that and I'm very curious to know, well, you spend a couple of days immersed with bright minds, practitioners in our world. What is a thought that it's still lingering after all those good conversations and explorations, something that really stuck with you? Yeah, so I think the things that's done with, so yeah, so for those who are not familiar with it, so Beverly and Etienne Venger train a run, a series of retreats at the social learning lab in, in portugal and the one that I've recently just got back well, because I know you were at one just before I was there, but yeah, the one I was was the communities of practice summit and its practitioners from all over the world in different domain spaces who come together and we kind of talk about the state of the nation if you like them, we sort of learn from each other about the challenges we're having, the sort of real sort of global challenges or opportunities that we're seeing. So I suppose the thing that really came out of it for me was there was a lot of talk about generative AI and artificial intelligence and what that, what that means for people, if you like, as a, because we look at some of the capabilities of what generative AI has at the moment and you think, okay, well, what does that mean for me? How is that going to impact me as a, as a professional, as a person, as a human? What is going to change for me? And I forget who it was who said it, but somebody used this when we talked about this a lot and somebody used the phrase that the future is human and it's, and what I think I took away from it was how do we go about using the generative AI tooling to help us get better at the things that we are exceptional and we are special for rather than what can we replace by using generative AI tools. So, you know, how do we add rather than subtract from, from what it is? And I think that's something that meant, you know, I came away feeling quite strongly about and how we do. So yeah, I think that's probably the big thing that I took away from that. I have to play in here. Are you experimenting in some sort of way already with AI at work in any shapes or forms? Might be. All right. Yeah. Okay. So have fun with that. Maybe we share not some other time and maybe off the record. Last question, Drew. What is your recommendation or advice for someone that's, you know, just at the beginning of the journey and the thinking, this community building roles, world looks pretty good. I want to get to it. I want to give it a try. Where does one start building a career, say, in community, communities of practice? I think getting started is always the most difficult thing. And I know it's a bit cliché to say every journey starts with a single step, but it really does. And I think there is an element of bravery that you have to put yourself out there to say, does anybody else feel like this too? Or is anybody else good? So I often refer to it as a spark, a spark of inspiration that somebody has inside them that there is a need that is not being met by where I am right now. And somebody needs to be brave enough to say, does anybody else feel like this? And that's the point where invariably there's half a dozen other people who go, yeah, actually I do, because we're never alone. You know, we're all a product of our environments and around us. And you know, sometimes all it takes is somebody to take that first budding leadership step and say, does anybody else feel like this? And that's where these communities grow from. I would say to anybody who's just starting out with a community is go and be brave and get things wrong. Go and try things that don't work. Go and work out what it is that is going to work for you and for other people and, you know, always keep in mind that what you're doing should make you happy and you should be enriched from doing those things. So and if you don't, you're either doing something wrong or it's just not the right thing for you. And it's okay to walk away from it if that's not for you. You know, don't enter into career in working with communities because you think that it's an opportunity for you to, you know, end up ruling the world in, in sort of all your might. Or you might, but you know, that's not what you're, that's not why you're coming out to start, is it? You're coming out because you want to make a difference in some way, you know, and you want things to be, you know, you want to change something for the better. And that is, I think that's the most important thing to remember in terms of success is that do you feel like the work you're doing is making things better and you can keep stepping on from that and and read your whatever one of you go to something you should read. So I love that. Well, I already mentioned you, you said, I will link that in the show notes. That's a great place to start for anyone listening that things, can we subpractice are awesome because they are a new light accidentally and that really ruling the world. You never know. Julie was a pleasure to have you here with us. Thank you for generously sharing and spending an hour with mapping ties. I'll tell you soon. Lovely. Thanks for tuning in for today's conversation. If you are building internal communities within your organization, with love to learn from you, find the link to our tally form in the show notes and share your story with the mapping ties business.