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Etienne Wenger, the theorist behind the CoP movement, says the odds of a Community’s success increase if a compelling business case for its purpose can be made, which means it needs to deliver tangible outcomes. The business case for the 2010 Professional CoP pilot project has three basic elements to it.

First, the HR CoPs are truly pilots attempting to find the best way to sustain CoP in the professional setting in Singapore. For HCS and WDA, it is a given that flourishing CoP(s) in the HR profession is a legitimate and valuable alternative path to learning and professional development. Thus, one important business outcome is to demonstrate that it is possible for Professional CoP to provide enough value to members to keep them coming back.

Second, when examining the practice, new knowledge will be created. Simply understanding that there is no variation or that there is wide variation in the way members practice the profession can be very useful knowledge. Learning how peers are innovating to improve productivity or to deal with the same changing market conditions can dramatically improve the experience curve. Members can take such observations and ideas back to their workplaces, but they can also record them into the practice library established for the profession. Thus, a second important business outcome is the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the way the profession is practiced, about practices that are working, and about practices that are working best.

Third, and this may be unique to the HR profession, is to focus CoP as a “practitioners think tank” to think through and develop the practices necessary to transform Singapore’s labour force as per the 2010 Economic Strategies Committee report. The HR profession will be in the middle of this transformation and many of their practices will have to change. The business outcome is to get out in the front of the changes in order to accelerate them.

Our job as facilitators is to understand and position the business case such that members see their CoP participation as not entirelyself-serving (e.g., my learning, my network, my career). Instead we need to help them understand that their participation in CoP contributes to better training for fellow professionals, to advancing the profession itself, and to the economic strategies of the nation.