I have posted the cleared slides about the Philips Semiconductor community, that was presented during CP Week together with Suzanne Verdonschot, online.
Though the discussion continues on the members' platform of CP Square, one of the most remarkable discussion parts was about the courage that it took Philips to start off with communities using high profile selected 'hot-shots' within the organization. If the exercise would succeed, they would surely understand by practice the value of collaboration and communities - which would be of great value in the next couple of years when some of them become general managers (GM's) or managing directors (MD's) in the organization. On the other side however, failing to create value would mean the that the future leaders of the organization may be resistent to supporting / sponsoring these initiatives.
Another interesting fact about these people is that they now form the bottom line in their business unit, but will eventually (in some years) become leaders. So the approach taken here is bottom-up right now (using support from their executive managers) but will be reversed to top-down as well if the communities of practice for the course extend over the course of years. New people with similar aspirations and backgrounds will flow in the course and the (hopefully sustained) community, which will then have increased leadership and a pyramid model with respect to the formal organization. That in itself is worth a whole discussion!
Noteworthy here is the role of the coordinating team to keep on creating incentive within the group by not allowing participants (but also coordinators) to tell 'how' ("you have to do the following..") but rather ask why. In the light of the participants' background this was not an easy task, but it eliminated the risk of turning into a dead end with the discussions. And by doing so, they started to discover that they had much more in common (as far as problems, leadership issues etc.) were concerned than was apparent at the start of the community. This helped to establish trust (together with the phonecalls) and invited them to come back and participate (incentive).
This happened at 1:26:27 AM or
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