Principles for a community of professionals - I

Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals

– Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship.

“Team” has recently become a dogma. Accelerated improvement and the avoidance of wasting time, resources and talents can only be achieved within a community, where both teams and teams of teams are effective. The evidence for this comes from the evolution of human civilization. After lengthy  prehistory, where the main organizational form was the team, the transition to “history” was triggered by the emergence of the first human communities. The history of mankind is the direct result of how humans find ways to share experience and knowledge within various forms of communities.

A better way to accelerate improvement and avoid waste in any profession is to go beyond teams and make individuals and teams collaborate across various communities.        

Conditions and principles for creating and evolving a community of professionals:

Critical mass of potential skills

Knowledge and experience sharing

Active collaboration between individuals

Active collaboration between and across teams

Talents valorization: promote and connect “rare ideas”

Knowledge persistence

Evolving stability

Promoting valuable ideas 

Different kinds of communities

Emergence: Creating new values, new practices and new communities

Corollary

The axe of progress is: individual, team, teams of teams, communities

See next - Principles for a community of professionals - II