Communities of Practice toolkit

Margaret Logan

This Toolkit, based on the book Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage,by Huber Saint-Onge and Deb Wallace, is a hands-on operational guide that helps organizations develop their own communities of practice. While the book unveils how an organization can approach the creation and support of communities of practice (through the real life example of Clarica Life Insurance Company), the Toolkit acts as an interactive platform that supports the theory and framework outlined. It provides a step-by-step community development approach that can be adapted to the specific needs and environment of your organization.

The purpose of the Toolkit is to help organizations create their own approach for developing communities of practice by providing the framework and tools necessary for the process.

Toolkit objectives:

• identify the context for creating and supporting communities of practice as a strategic structure within the organization
• outline a process for establishing structured or strategic communities
• outline a process for implementing structured or strategic communities
• provide examples of how a strategic community was developed and supported in one organization (Clarica Life Insurance Company’s Agent Network)