START WITH THE THING YOU'RE GOING TO BUILD
- Jul 12
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 27
Week 9 · Blog Post 16 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026
THE GROUP I KEEP NOT STARTING
There's a conversation I've had maybe a dozen times this year, always with a slightly different person: An instructional designer. An L&D lead. Someone in HR who drew the wellbeing straw. The assignment is always the same: build something about mental health for our managers. And every one of them is building it alone, from scratch, on a deadline, with no real way to know whether what they're making is any good.
That is a community of practice waiting to happen. I just haven't started it — partly because every time I sit down to plan one, I end up designing a small nonprofit.
So I read a playbook on communities of practice in higher education (Adams et al., 2023), hoping it would hand me a shortcut. It gave me something better. It gave me a clear picture of which of my instincts were right, and which ones were nostalgia for institutions I don't actually work in.
THE PLAYBOOK ASSUMES A BUDGET I DON'T HAVE
The playbook lays out five stages: envisioning, designing, facilitating, evaluating, sustaining. It's a genuinely good structure, and I'd use it. But the design chapter recommends a two-hour synchronous session built around a twenty- to thirty-minute presentation, held monthly, supported by a course site in a learning management system.
Read that again as a freelancer. Two hours. Monthly. Plus an LMS.
That cadence assumes people whose employer considers this part of their job. Faculty with service obligations. A center for teaching and learning footing the bill. The people I want in the room are contractors and understaffed internal teams. Nobody is giving them two hours.
So the first translation is an inversion: asynchronous first, synchronous optional. A shared document does the actual work; a short monthly call, recorded, is the social glue. The playbook treats the digital space as the thing that supports the meeting. For a group like mine, it has to run the other way. The meeting supports the doc.
PICK THE ARTIFACT BEFORE YOU PICK THE MEETING TIME
Buried in the envisioning section is the step I think matters most, and it's the one everyone skips: Identify, up front, the artifact the group will produce — a resource, an action plan, an asset that operationalizes a goal. Their example is a department-wide syllabus template, rebuilt to be more equitable. Concrete. Ownable. Finished, eventually.
Without that, you don't have a community of practice. You have a recurring meeting where people are nice to each other, which is lovely and is not what anyone signed up for. The playbook says it plainly: there has to be a mechanism for turning discussion into action.
For my group, the artifact gets obvious the moment you ask the question. A shared, versioned library of manager-facing mental health training assets. Session outlines. Job aids. The language you use to hold the line between education and clinical advice. The questions you ask to find out whether any of it worked. Everyone contributes what they've built. Everyone leaves with more than they came with.
That's also my hedge against the specific risk of this particular topic. A group of well-meaning learning people talking about mental health with no output will drift toward group therapy in roughly four sessions. An artifact keeps the practice in practice.
THE QUIET ONES ARE NOT A PROBLEM TO SOLVE
Here's where I part company with the playbook. Its evaluation framework asks facilitators to notice who is staying silent, and why — reasonable enough — but the document as a whole leans toward treating visible participation as the measure of a healthy community.
The research on lurking (and my personal experience) says otherwise. In a review of two decades of online teacher communities, Lantz-Andersson and colleagues (2018) found the familiar pattern: a small core doing most of the posting, and a large majority reading, saving, and using what others share without ever making that visible. They're clear that this quiet use is meaningful learning, not failed engagement. People lurk because they have no time, or because they're reading the room before they speak.
I've thought about this a lot in the context of mental health work, where the cost of speaking up is higher than usual and the reasons to stay quiet are excellent. So I want a space where reading, saving, and borrowing feel like full membership — anonymous submissions to the library, no leaderboards, no public participation counts. The platform shapes the behavior. If you reward visibility, you get performance.
PLAN THE ENDING ON DAY ONE
The line I keep returning to is the playbook's quiet paradox: sustaining a community can mean working toward its dissolution. Communities stagnate. Keeping one alive takes as much effort as launching it, which nobody ever budgets for, which is why so many of them quietly die of founder fatigue around month seven.
So my version has an end date. Six months. Twelve to fifteen people, capped. Ship the library. Ask two members to co-facilitate by session three, so it isn't mine. And if it's still useful at month six, the group decides what it becomes — but the default is that it finishes, rather than limping on because ending feels like failure.
A short cohort that makes something real beats an open-ended group that makes a calendar invite. I'd rather run the first one badly than plan the second one forever.
If you've started a group like this — small, unfunded, stitched together across organizations — what actually kept it alive past the first three months? I'm asking sincerely, because I'm about to find out the hard way.
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