5.1. Small Practice Groups for a 3M Division

The culture of innovation and collaboration at 3M is well known. Although not referred to as "Communities of Practice" until the late 1990s, such collaborative groups have existed within the company for more than 50 years, starting with the R&D community's Tech Forum. In 1996, 3M's CTO, Bill Coyne, published the six imperatives to activate innovation. One of them is networking. Small practice groups have been introduced at 3M in the past two years and have been welcomed as an approach for improving networking effectiveness.

The small-practice-group approach is one of many used by 3M's Knowledge Management (KM) Program Office, which strives to be a center of expertise for improving 3M's KM effectiveness, thereby driving better business results. We develop and execute KM strategy and conduct various KM-improvement projects at the corporate, business, and division levels. At any given time, we have approximately 20 projects in various stages of engagement, the majority of which are global in nature. I'll describe one project, in which we engineered small practice groups (in addition to several other approaches) in the Really Big Division (RBD), which generates a major portion of 3M's global sales and profit. This example is real, but I've disguised the division's name.

The RBD's lab director came to the KM Program Office with a monumental challenge: over the coming five years or more, Baby Boomers would be retiring in droves in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Many of them were experts in the RBD's technologies, products, and customers. At the same time, mass hiring would occur in the developing countries, especially China and India. Traditional education and training practices would be too slow and costly to meet business demands. There was no comprehensive, detailed picture of who knew what or who knew whom in this division, which consisted of 400 employees in three lab functions in 28 countries. The director suspected that the professionals in the RBD were not communicating across countries, but he had not quantified this.