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Anecdote is an Australian consulting firm that specialises in helping organisations to tackle complex problems like organisational change, learning and project evaluation. We help to create the conditions for insight and empowerment. Anecdote can help organisations when traditional methods have failed. Better still, we can help you to avoid failure. We use a range of contemporary but proven approaches that draw on group intelligence, participation, complexity thinking and the power of narrative. We believe that everyone in an organisation has something valuable to offer in making improvements and our techniques draw on this priceless and diverse resource. Our techniques are based on the disciplines of complexity science and knowledge management and include business- narrative, storytelling, communities of practice, social network analysis and open space technology. In fact Anecdote is regarded as a world leader in the practical applications of business-narrative.

CPsquare is like a town square, a place where people gather to connect and learn together. We are from corporate, private, non-profit, and academic organizations; we hail from many nations across the globe; we are involved in consulting, research, and direct support of communities of practice; and we join together to create our own community of practice. We are a non-profit organization, registered as a 501(c)(6) organization in the US.

Social network analysis (SNA) is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). A method to understand networks and their participants is to evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is finding the centrality of a node. These measures help determine the importance, or prominence, of a node in the network. Network location can be different than location in the hierarchy, or organizational chart. We look at a social network, called the "Kite Network" (see above), developed by David Krackhardt, a leading researcher in social networks. Two nodes are connected if they regularly talk to each other, or interact in some way. For instance, in the network above, Andre regularly interacts with Carol, but not with Ike. Therefore Andre and Carol are connected, but there is no link drawn between Andre and Ike. This network effectively shows the distinction between the three most popular individual network measures: Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Closeness Centrality.

Communities of Practice, a Brief Introduction Print This Page. Author: Etienne Wenger Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice and their application to organizations. He was featured by Training Magazine in their "A new Breed of Visionaries" series. A pioneer of the "community of practice" research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, and Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), addressed to practitioners in organizations. Etienne is also a founder of CPsquare, a cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice. His work is influencing a growing number of organizations in the private and public sectors. Indeed, cultivating communities of practice is increasingly recognized as the most effective way for organizations to address the knowledge challenges they face. Etienne helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops, both online and face-to-face. His new research project, "Learning for a small planet," is a broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium. Check out his website www.ewenger.com