Communities of Practice: Performance and Evolution

TL;DR

This paper models collaboration in communities of practice, revealing a natural adaptive mechanism driven by dynamical instability that enhances group performance amid growth and environmental changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamical instability mechanism enabling communities to adapt and improve performance without central control.

Findings

Identification of a dynamical instability triggering exploration of new interactions

Community performance improves through self-organized adaptation

The model explains how communities evolve in response to environmental changes

Abstract

We present a detailed model of collaboration in communities of practice and we examine its dynamical consequences for the group as a whole. We establish the existence of a novel mechanism that allows the community to naturally adapt to growth, specialization, or changes in the environment without the need for central controls. This mechanism relies on the appearance of a dynamical instability that initates an exploration of novel interactions, eventually leading to higher performance for the community as a whole.