To learn as individuals and to foster a learning culture in our organizations, most of us end up looking outside our organizations for knowledge and information. We take courses and attend conferences, where we meet people and share our ideas and experiences. Afterward, however, we may find that the valuable learning that has taken place outside does not change anything inside the organization. The problem is that we have not mastered the organizational skills and practices that would allow us to take full advantage of external learning opportunities. And we have only a scattershot approach to choosing which external opportunities to pursue. If we do attend a particularly inspiring conference, we can share what we learned easily enough by posting a summary on the organizational intranet or by sending e-mails to potentially interested parties, but most of the new ideas do not get used because there is no internal social process for making sense of them.

These gaps in organizational capability are the motivation for creating a learning network, a group of people who come together in an informal and experiment-based association that bridges organizational boundaries in order to share information, learn about a topic, and create knowledge using mutually agreed learning strategies and collaborative tools and methods.

Why do I write about “learning networks” and not “communities of practice”? From my perspective, here are some of the differences between the two.