Guest: Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Social Learning Theorists & Founders of the Social Learning Lab
Published: December 19th, 2025
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‍Episode summary

A profound exploration of what it means to learn together in an age of artificial certainty.

Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner are the globally recognized thought leaders behind social learning theory and the concept of "communities of practice." Authors of seminal books including Situated Learning and Systems Convening, have spent decades helping organizations—from the World Bank to global tech giants—understand that learning isn't about transferring knowledge, but about people making sense of the world together.

This conversation is a masterclass in language and human connection. You’ll move beyond the outdated idea of "transmitting" skills to understanding learning as the "mutual engagement of uncertainty." Etienne and Bev offer a grounding, wise perspective on why AI challenges us to redefine our identity, how to spot "intruders" who kill curiosity, and why groupthink is actually a sign of a healthy community—until it isn't.

Key topics

• 🤝 Social Learning vs. Transmission: Why learning isn't moving certainty from one brain to another, but the mutual engagement of uncertainty.
• 🤖 AI as a New Literacy: Why we must learn to use AI to springboard our humanity, rather than imprisoning ourselves in easy answers.
• 🧠 The "Mind Trap" of Groupthink: Why groupthink is like cancer (a natural process of growth gone wrong) and how to use "newcomers" and debates to disrupt it.
• 🚫 Managing "Intruders": How to identify and handle individuals who shut down learning spaces by rushing to provide answers.
• 🏢 Strategy from the Bottom Up: How communities of practice allow engineers and frontline workers to think strategically, not just implement orders.

Top quotes

“Social learning is the mutual engagement of uncertainty... as opposed to transmission, where you have someone with certainty who transmits the certainty to someone who doesn't have it.”

“AI will do knowledge better... what's left for human beings is this agency. If you have summarized access to everything that's been written... what is the place for social learning?”

“We make it sound like groupthink is this evil thing, but it's like cancer. Cells need to divide... It's the very nature of community that will tend towards that because things always need to evolve.”

“If you have to wait until the training department comes up with a course on it... it might be too late. Engineers... don't wanna wait till they've done a course. They need to be talking to other engineers.”

“I interpret, therefore I am. I empathize, therefore I am. I think there are other verbs that will become important.”

Resources

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Full episode

Mike Courian: Bev and Etienne, it is lovely to have you on the podcast. Thank you for being here.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Thanks, Mike.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yeah. Glad to be here.

Mike Courian: One of my favorite questions that I like to ask all of our guests, and I'll start with you, Bev. What are three words that come to mind for you if you were introducing yourself to us?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Uh, multi-identitied, playful, pragmatic.

Mike Courian: I'm curious. Can you tell me what multi-identitied means?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: It means that when somebody says, where are you from, or who are you, I find it very hard to answer.

Mike Courian: When somebody asks me that, I often go, are you referring to my accent or are you wanting to know something else? Are there other facets for you that it's calling upon, other than sort of being a person of many countries or?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Yes, it's because I didn't have a traditional schooling, I didn't, um, there are lots of things that don't fit into the nice, tidy boxes that people like to hear about. But nobody really wants the long story. So they, they want a nice tidy one that they can put you in. So I learned this word multi-identitied. Well, I heard somebody else use it and I thought, okay, I'm just going to say that.

Mike Courian: I like it because it leaves it quite mysterious. And if somebody really wants to know, they can, they can ask. And Etienne, uh, yourself, three words.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I think multi-identity is also one that I'm going to steal from Bev. I always, when people ask me, you know, where are you from, I always say, well, how far back do you want to go? But also identity is an important part of our theory, so we think a lot about how identity is constructed as a part of learning. The other word I would describe myself with is scale. I'm always interested in scale, you know, from the size of the universe to the little microbes that are running on my skin.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: So I'm interested in scale. Also for identity, scale is an interesting thing. How do we identify? Do we identify locally or with a planet or with the universe? All that scale is really an important part of this multi-identity thing. And the last one is probably language. I'm very interested in the effect of language on how people think and is actually how we work actually, Beth could have also said language because that's why we work well together is that we both are very sensitive to the choice of words. And that's why we are theorists, you know, we choose, we choose our words very carefully.

Mike Courian: One of my questions I had later on was, what is a theorist? But you've kind of preempted it. Now, how do you define what a theorist is?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I think what a theorist is in social sciences is very different from what a theorist would be in the physical sciences. In physics, a theorist is someone who develops equations and in order to make the equation work, has to assume that some little particle must exist or that time has to go back. And then you have all, you have people who are empiricists who try to find out whether that's true. In social science, a theorist is more someone who develops a coherent conceptual framework to allow people to tell certain stories about the human experience.

And so what we do is we develop a kind of conceptual vocabulary that together allows you to say certain things, to tell certain stories about how people learn. That's why we call ourselves social learning theorists, because we enable people to tell the story. So, so what you were saying, we started our company before we knew your work. Yeah, because what we're doing is just to put a language on what people

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: already know what people already do. But having a language does make a difference. Having a language to talk about allows you to be more precise, a bit more intentional, a bit more strategic about what you do.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: It helps you ask different questions as well. So, the language, depending on what the language is, will result in you asking different questions about what you're doing and what you're seeing.

Mike Courian: Yeah. I don't read much philosophy, but my conception that is building around the role of the philosopher seems to me to be naming the hard to name and making it, making it easy.

Yeah. Easy might not be the right word, but it is graspable, perceivable, because it's not just pointing out into the dark and going, I think something's there and then someone else has to find it. It's more like pointing to something that you know is there, but hasn't yet been named. Am I on the right track or where does it differ?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, in an essay, I was writing the difference between vertical knowledge and horizontal knowledge. So vertical knowledge would be a piece of knowledge that replaces your experience. You cannot know the age of the universe. If an astrophysicist tells you it's 13.8 billion years, you cannot say, well, no, I think it's 13.7. So you have to kind of subsume your experience.

But when we talk about a community of practice, for instance, people say, yeah, you know what, I've, I've experienced that. It's horizontal. It goes through your experience. It enlightens your experience, not replacing it. So in that sense, the theories are different in the two kinds of knowledge.

Mike Courian: I'm finding that quite a powerful visual analogy. I love the sense of it going through you because I just know when you're in a group of people and you're having that shared understanding for the first time, it really does feel like it's piercing you in that wonderful way like that. That's lovely. Now, is your native

Mike Courian: language that these mysteries are discovered. Is it English for both of you? I didn't know Etienne if you spoke other languages.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I'll talk about my identity. Yeah. I grew up in a French-speaking part of Switzerland. So I grew up speaking French. But I moved to English when I moved to California and ever since my working language has been English. So professionally, I think and write in English.

Mike Courian: I'm reading the C.S. Lewis Space trilogy at the moment. I didn't even know he wrote a Space trilogy and the main character is a philologist. And there's this whole overtone of language and meaning and it just sits right in the intersection of all these things that we're talking about. I'm digressing though.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: But maybe maybe maybe we should we should spe- specify a bit because you are talking about C.S. Lewis. In a way, a fiction writer is also giving you a new way to see the world.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: By writing fiction, right? And this book you're reading, it's gonna make you look at the world differently. The only difference between a social theorist and a fiction writer is that the social theorist makes it into a conceptual framework as opposed to a story.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Okay. But the effect is very similar. It's just that as a theorist, you are accountable to which concepts you introduce in the theory and you have to define them and you have to see that they don't overlap with others. You create a coherent framework as a theorist, and as a fiction writer, you create a story that gives you a new view of the world. But there are similar uses of language.

Mike Courian: Yeah, it's interesting. Both need to be coherent, but I imagine when you're developing frameworks, the precision, and I imagine that's a skill set of yours, that precision is really important. If, if no humility was allowed, I'm curious to know where each of you view, I like to call

Mike Courian: your superpower. What parts of the process do you find you enjoy contributing to, you're most proficient at, you are most energized by? But I'm curious where you guys see your strength shining through most.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: I think maybe two I have. One is being able to see really the big picture, but also at the same time, the micro. And I can see those two things and I can operate on those two things at the same time. And I think the other thing is I feel like I can run through somebody's experience. I mean it's to do with empathy, but it's more than that. I think that I can run language through how somebody else will experience it. I'm a sort of, in a way, an interpreter or translator of words to feelings, to actions. Yeah.

Mike Courian: Would it be fair to say you feel like you have a strong intuition for how something's going to land with somebody else? Is that what you're describing?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: It's an intuition, but intuition sort of makes me think of my head, but it's both a head and a and something else, a bodily thing.

Mike Courian: Yes. Oh, those are great. Etienne, what would you say are the superpowers that you like to bring to the table?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: First, I want to tell you that when we do an icebreaker with a group, what is your superpower? is one of the questions we ask people. So that's interesting. We say exactly, what's your superpower? We don't even give details. So we have small groups discussing each other's superpower. That's just interesting.

Mike Courian: So funny. I'm very pleased that I'm not falling too far from the tree.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: And I guess for me, yeah, part of it is language, so there's sensitivity to language. And I would say the other is to see mind traps. It's funny because for someone who has done a lot of theory on community, I'm a little allergic to community when they come into group think and mind trap. I'm very, very sensitive to that. Makes me run away.

Mike Courian: Group think is a very familiar concept to me. That wasn't actually immediately what I was hearing when I heard mind traps.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: I think that groupthink is more like when a group starts to take a position on something and nobody challenges it, it is taken for granted as truth, as the way to do things, as the way to say things, and nobody will question it.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: But it often reveals a mind trap. You know, you get trapped into a word or you get trapped into a concept and you cannot escape.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: That's the downside of a community of practice, is that it can encourage group think because nobody wants to rock the boat. You know, people have a, people assume that this is good practice, best practice, best word, you know, uh, it's, it is the language to use. And so a community can be a place for group think to flourish.

Mike Courian: Bev, can you explain for everyone listening, how do you define social learning? What is the opposite of social learning?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Well, I think those are two different questions. The opposite of social learning would be transmission-based learning, where somebody who knows transmits to somebody who doesn't know something.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Mm-hm. A piece of information or some people call it knowledge or something. They hand it over, and then you get it, and then that means that you learn, right? So it's the sort of transmission of something, which is often a certainty, because if you're an expert or if you're a knower, you're pretty certain about what you're about to transmit. So the opposite of social learning, well, the opposite, it's not like it has to be one or the other, in fact, both things coexist, they're useful at different times. But social learning is not the transmission of something. It doesn't go from one person who knows to another person who doesn't. People tend to think, I have something and then I can pass it to you and then you will learn it.

Whereas I think we would say that it's a sort of negotiated thing. It's a new thing that comes out of, so for example, my experience of what you say to me may not be the same as what you're saying to me, what you think you're saying to me. So there's, you know, it's always being reinterpreted.

Mike Courian: I love that idea of it being built together rather than it being possessed by either one of the participants. Now, does this fall more under the heading of social learning or are these things that you guys articulate in detail within a community of practice?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, we articulate it in detail more in our more recent work on social learning spaces, where we define social learning really as the mutual engagement of uncertainty. As opposed to transmission where you have someone with certainty who transmits their certainty to someone who doesn't have it. We say, okay, in social learning you have this mutual engagement of uncertainty about the difference you care to make.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: that is nourished by this mutual engagement of uncertainty. To the extent that you really pay attention to what's happening coming out of that mutual engagement of uncertainty. So, yeah, we have a formal definition of that in the theory now, which is beyond communities of practice, by the way.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Yes.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: because it can happen outside of a committee of practice. It can happen if you're flying back to the US and you have this amazing conversation with the person next to you. That can happen too and it's not a committee of practice. You're never going to see that person again. So it's a clearer definition of the nature of social learning, of which the committee of practice is an example. Can be an example, not necessarily. Some communities abandon that and then they become sterile and ossified.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: In a way, social learning is the reinterpretation of something and the back and forth of something to make sense of it and to understand how it works in practice. You can be by yourself and be engaged in social learning. When I'm running an idea through my head, I'm sort of also thinking, oh, I wonder what Etienne would say, and oh God, my mother would say that, and you know, there's a, there's a whole social world that goes on

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yes.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: in my being. Any word that I use is social. It's been socially constructed, like the word learning, you know, how we understand learning in English has come about because of the social world around it. It's a life, it's a living word. It's a social word, it's a social construction. So, social learning is the sort of back and forth and the running through your experience and it's not so fixed. It's an interpretation and a reinterpretation.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: even on very small levels. In any relationship, let alone a learning relationship, there's always going to be disagreement. There's always going to be uncertainty. There's always going to be power issues, right? And those are all part of the learning relationship.

So, especially with the word like community or social, people tend to gloss over with words like collaboration, the sort of fundamental essence really of human relationships, which is disagreement, which is uncertainty, and which is power issues.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: But you know, you know, what once Bev was facilitating a meeting in East Africa, and one person from Laos said, I want to thank you, you reminded us of the way we used to do things. So, it's not like it's ancient. What we're talking about is ancient. It's not, you know?

Mike Courian: I'm curious because many of the listeners will be in the corporate world and they'll be senior leaders in that space and they're trying to build effective development within those organizations. How do you see organizations prioritizing social learning and are they realizing that it is more of a missing piece of the puzzle in today's working environment?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: I think that with the volatility and the uncertainty in the world, people are seeing the need for social learning, the need to be able to run things through other people based on their experience. When, for example, COVID came, heads of universities, deans of universities were suddenly phoning each other up, which they never usually do.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: But it was like, how are you dealing with this? You know, all the students are at home. They wanted to know. Oh, you tried that. How did it work? Oh, that worked, that didn't work. Oh, I don't know if that would work in my case. But they wanted to communicate with each other.

I expect if you've got to the position of senior leader, you also do that just as a matter of course. You're constantly talking to different people and finding out different things. But that's no different from anybody lower down the chain as well. If you have to wait until the training department comes up with a course on it and has designed their modules, it might be too late.

So, engineers working for Shell who are drilling for oil, they don't want to wait till they've done a course, they need to be talking to other engineers there and then. Oh, we've got a problem here. Has anybody seen something similar? Okay. When there's a lot at stake and when conditions are not clear, then it's vital. And it happens, actually, it does happen anyway, but very often it's squeezed out as if it was something that wasn't important, whereas we'd say, it is important and you can capture it and you can be intentional about it and magnify it and magnify the value of it.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I just wanted to add a facet to, to what Bev was saying, which is the facet of identity. In a traditional industrial system, you have a design and the fingers of the organization are the implementers of that design. The value creation is in the design and the extent to which workers comply with the design. That's an assembly line, you know? You comply with the design. The value is in the design, not in, in what you think. Actually, as a matter of fact, you have to think as little as possible. But when we move into a knowledge economy, what people think is very important.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: and their identity as intelligent beings is actually extremely valuable to the organization. And so, in a way, social learning is a way to recognize that, to recognize all the intelligence that exists in the people. I remember an engineer in a company that we were working with told me, before, I had two relationships with the organization. I was either on project or on availability. Those were my two relationships. Now, I am a member of a community of practice and there's a place for me as an engineer.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yeah? Because there's a place where I'm with other engineers, I reflect on our practice in the service of making the organization successful. So it's not like they are using this opportunity to talk about soccer or whatever. They discuss their practice. But they use these discussions to think strategically about how to make their practice better. So normally strategic thinking is reserved for an elite group in headquarters.

But when you have these communities of practice of peers who are thinking about what is our practice and how do we make it world class. All of a sudden, you have this kind of strategic thinking that starts developing in this group that is extremely valuable for an organization, extremely valuable. It gives people a new sense of who they are. That's what I was thinking about identity. When you are the cog implementing somebody else's strategy, it's a very different sense of who you are than if you are yourself starting to think strategically about how to do this better.

Mike Courian: Yeah, I was just thinking about how those different levels of engagement and how this fascinating thing of when you're isolated,

Mike Courian: even if you're passionate, when you're isolated, that passion can fade and inevitably your imagination just is drawn towards feeling like you are just part of the cog.

And we're seeing a common pattern with our customers using Make Shapes. There's a lot of peer-to-peer learning happening. You get people together and all of a sudden, you get that sense of you're not above me, you're not at some different stage, you're at my stage. And I just love you calling out how it really changes the engagement. which ultimately is this thing that every organization wants is for their employees to be engaged.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I read these articles that the CEOs of of Silicon Valley companies, these big tech companies are kind of rediscovering that they can be powerful and they don't have to just listen to their employees because suddenly their employees say, hey, we don't want to serve the the Department of Defense. The problem you have when you engage employees is that they get engaged. So it's, it's a, it's a, it's a tricky balance that you have to find because once you start messing with social learning, all of a sudden, you know, you, you are not just the puppeteer, you know?

Mike Courian: Yes. Yes. You give agency.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Mike Courian: Now, Etienne, I'm thinking about your first book. So the title is Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems. I imagine that the artificial intelligence you were creating concepts around and researching was quite different from the large language models that many people are engaging with. And I'm curious, what is going on for you in your mind and in the conversations you're having and in your imagination with this swell of this technology. I'm wondering what large language models are doing for communities of practice and social learning spaces.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, first of all, I should say,

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: that you're completely right. The artificial intelligence we were talking about is completely different. At the time we were trying to imitate the human mind, but now this large language model is based on big data, not just the human mind. So it's a different science and it's really just completely different.

Actually, Bev is even more involved than I am now with artificial intelligence. She should contribute, I mean she uses it a lot more than I do. And it's a big question for us. If you have summarized access to everything that's been written about a topic, then what's the place for social learning? Because if it's just a question and answer, then AI will probably do it better. If it's just like, how do I do that, then somebody said, I don't remember who it was, that AI will do knowledge better.

What's left for human beings is agency. I think it's going to push our understanding of social learning to say, okay, what's left for human beings in these mutual forms of learning engagement that cannot be achieved through AI.

I think it's both a challenge and how could communities of practice collectively use AI. And there is some interesting research done at Procter and Gamble by some researchers at Harvard Business School. They've seen that in terms of producing innovative ideas, an individual is at the lowest, then better is an individual with AI, then a team, and then a team with AI. The team with AI is better at producing novel ideas than a team without AI.

And if you look at the researchers would consider radical innovation,

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Then the team with AI is way beyond any other configuration. So, that's interesting. But communities of practice, in that sense, and social learning spaces, will have to learn how to incorporate AI in a productive way. That's going to be the challenge.

Mike Courian: Bev, especially because you're engaging with it more, I'm so curious to hear your thoughts.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Well, I mean, I do think that it will push us. It could push our imagination. You know, you can go a certain amount of the way with an AI companion, and that in a way leaves you feeling like you can think, well, okay, now, wow, I've got it now. I've got, either I've got the idea or I've solved my emotional problem, because you can use it for every, every different thing, you know, you want. So I've solved my mathematical problem, I've done my finances, whatever, which can leave you free in a way to either go beyond it or do something else where you can use your imagination and your playfulness and your humanity, your human skills. So, I think if we can use it to springboard our abilities and our sensitivities, or we can use it to imprison ourselves.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: There's going to be a sort of, I I don't know, it's going to have to be almost like another literacy, but literacy isn't just how do we read the world or speak the world through AI, but how do we grow and develop and flourish as humans, not without AI but above AI. So I think that's going to be interesting.

Mike Courian: I'm gonna try and say something that's far more lofty than my grounded sensibilities.

Mike Courian: normally allow me to, but I was thinking about Descartes, and I was thinking about I think therefore I am. And how that created such an identity for humans to begin. We are the ones that think and we are the ones that know. I've never studied Descartes, so I might not be doing that justice, but if you run with my sentiment, it was something that we clung to so much.

And this alien intelligence all of a sudden being thrust into our world that knows, whatever knowing we would call the neural network, it has so much information and it's able to use our own language to communicate it to us in tailored ways. You prompted this thought in my mind, Bev, as you were speaking that there is this enormous disruption in what many people might have held central in their identity. It feels like we're at this intersection where we could enslave and entrap ourselves at the mercy of this thing, or that we can figure out what sets us apart and sort of almost rise above what it offers us.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: In a way, I think therefore I am, well, I'd say good if AI is challenging that, because also, I feel therefore I am, you know?

Mike Courian: Yes. Exactly.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: I commit, therefore I am.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Yes. I interpret, therefore I am. I empathize, therefore I am. So,

Mike Courian: Yes.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: I think there are some other verbs that will become important.

Mike Courian: One of my favorites is I love, therefore I am.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Um, right. Mhm. When we work with people who are leading communities of practice, I mean, most people are really embracing it, you know.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: AI is great, for example, frequently asked questions, recording calls, seeing the patterns across calls, helping with sense-making. In this sort of community of practice space, we haven't yet seen any negative disruptions.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yeah, and we're not researchers in quantitative sociology. So our view of the world is very, very small. But I have a daughter who is an aspiring film composer in LA, and she's not sure she's going to have a job.

So it's happening, you know? Not only in knowledge work, but also in the arts. So, I mean, the danger is that it's going to create stratification. So for instance, in the world of film composing, what's going to happen is that there will be a few left who compose, you know, maybe five or 10 people in the world who compose for movies, and the rest is going to be done by AI. And I think that's where we're going to have to be creative as a society to understand what the implications of that are. And that's maybe where a social learning perspective could be politically and sociologically interesting to think, okay, how do we avoid it because basically, people who look at AI say, right now, AI is better at writing than 90% of the population. But it's still not as good as writing as those 10% or whatever percentage of people who are really, really good writers. So you can see it replacing a certain level of mediocrity, of competent mediocrity, but it's not yet replacing the top top, right? Maybe it will one day, but right now, the danger is this stratification.

Mike Courian: Here, we were talking about group think and the question I wanted to ask you both is, how do you prevent group think?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: We encourage things like, so for example, having newcomers come in and new perspectives. That's why it's important to have newcomers in a community of practice. That's why it's important to have diverse perspectives, because they come in with fresh eyes, fresh questions. So the way that you treat newcomers and their integration into the community is an important aspect of the learning, because rather than enculturate them into group think, you want to see them as fresh eyes and perspectives.

And we do encourage, for example, communities of practice to debate like formal high school debate where you take something and then you take its opposite and then you have to debate both sides. And so that's a good way to challenge groupthink because it allows the unspoken to be spoken because people on the other side, right, have to come up with arguments which could be more or less convincing, but I mean, at least they are spoken.

Mike Courian: And is this a part, is it like an aspect of being in a community of practice that you would say should be happening often and regularly? Because I was, as you were describing that, I thought, man, that's so valuable, but that I so rarely take the time to construct a situation where there will be disagreement and contrary viewpoints.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Yeah, it's important, especially if it's an established community who are comfortable in themselves. It's very easy not to do it. As you become mature, you've got your routines, you've got your language, everyone knows what to do, which is fantastic. It's a sign of

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: thriving mature community of practice. That's when the little group thinks worms can raise their ugly heads.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: We make it sound like a group thing is this evil thing. But it's like cancer, you know? Cells need to divide. When they divide a bit too much, it becomes cancer. You see what I mean? It's like one of those things. It's a sign of a mature community is this sense of like, we know what we're doing. But that's, you know, if you see evolution as learning, you know, your beak grows longer and longer and longer because it allows you to get more and more of the juice of the flower, and then the little climate change, and poom, this beak is your problem. So, learning is always a problem, because it always becomes its own enemy. You know, so it's, it's not like, like a group thing is this evil thing that comes out. It's, it's the very nature of the community that says, will tend towards that, because things always need to evolve. So yeah, I would agree with that. It's really important to do that on a regular basis. And another way to do it is with other communities, to bump against other communities. So, we tend to encourage communities to have interchanges at the boundaries between communities, or with your clients, or with your competitors, or whatever.

Mike Courian: Yeah, and so I could imagine this in a corporate setting, this might be a well-established group might intentionally meet with a completely different part of the business for this very purpose is to, yeah, okay.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yeah, you have sales people meeting with engineers. Actually, I had a colleague who was exactly doing that. You know, and he said, these people, these people hate each other. Because they don't trust each other. Because the sales people say, these people don't care about the customer. All they care about is the bells and whistles, like kids in the playground trying to design those things. And the engineer says, these people don't care about the quality of our work.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: They all only care about their sales quota and they really distrust each other. And it was very productive to have them engage in conversation but not easy because of the distrust, you know?

Or another example, a group of engineers in automotive, where the community was buying the brakes of competitors, taking them apart, and making sure that that company had a world class practice. They had found a way to use the outside to challenge what they were doing inside. So these are very good processes in a community to avoid the group thing which is a natural part of learning.

Mike Courian: Yes, and I love that you make it clear that it's an inevitability of a community that it will tend towards that homogeneity. And that at a certain point, it will reach its peak, and then there will have to be a devolution into a different direction to support the continued growth. That is so helpful. I was wondering, are there any others, so bringing in newcomers to the community makes a lot of sense. Two communities coming together makes a lot of sense. Are there any other techniques that you've learned over the years that are effective in supporting the continued growth of the group?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, sometimes what we do is we create what we call leadership groups. And those are a subset of the communities whose responsibility is to watch out for certain dysfunction.

Mike Courian: Okay, I like to assign responsibility.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yeah.

Mike Courian: to certain individuals. Yeah. Okay.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: And we have them, we've had them intervene in the proceedings of a community. Hey, this person said that, nobody responded. What's happening? And so it creates a bit of self-reflection and self-awareness into how to maintain the learning capability.

Mike Courian: A word that I can't remember which of you said it before or a phrase, sensemaking.

Mike Courian: I love that phrase, and I was wondering, do you put that as one of the central purposes of a community of practice?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, it's not a concept that we theorize.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: And it's not the purpose.

Mike Courian: Okay, great. Okay, flesh these out for me.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Meaning-making is central to the idea of social learning. That we are constantly in the process of making meaning of what we hear and see and touch and feel. So, you never get anything directly. It always runs through your experience and your participation in it, in a word. So, meaning-making, rather than sense-making. Sense-making is a sort of general term.

Mike Courian: Did you know one of the things I was afraid of speaking with both of you was I could tell this exact thing. I thought, Mike, you're going to be sloppy with your language, and these two are not sloppy with their language. And so I'm laughing. I'm falling victim to that sensibility of mine because it's clear in my mind, it just comes out loosely.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: No, no, but that's all right. We we are, we are not, we take that, we take that job of being theorists very seriously.

Mike Courian: And I love that you do. I'm appreciating it so much.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: But we don't hold anybody accountable to it, you know? Because it's a, it's a specialty, you know? It's a nerdy specialty.

Mike Courian: I think it's a wonderful specialty. I'm wondering, what are each of you contributing to at the moment? It could be work-related, it could be outside of what you consider work that you're excited about and energized by.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I think the recent reconstruction of the theory around this notion of a social learning space, as opposed to simply

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: of practice. and then around what are the ethics associated with that process. For us, it's very exciting work uh, because it's, it's really deepening and, and taking it into new, new territories and making it both more applicable generally and also more personal. So, this is something that we're working on together now, really kind of reshaping the theory. It's almost like in physics, at some point you had an atom, and now all of a sudden there are subatomic particles, and you have to rethink the whole thing because what you thought was your unit of analysis is actually not the most fundamental. So that's what's happening to us. It's a transition, an important paradigm shift almost.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: A fun thing that I'm doing which came out of one of our workshops. We have a workshop which is a very loose workshop where we work on cutting-edge issues that have come up. And one thing that came up was about intruders. Okay, so we talk about inner social learning space. We talk about intruders. So an intruder is, for example, somebody who shuts down uncertainty. So, for example, somebody brings in a challenge, and somebody else jumps straight in with the answer, that you should do that. So, you know, there's little space left for learning.

Mike Courian: I love calling them intruders.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: So, we've started to categorize all the different kinds of intruders and the different ways that they intrude on a space. And then, of course, doing that actually, it made me realize that we all have an intrusive side to us. So, it's more about what are the different types

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: of intrusion and making it also into a sort of a reflective tool so you can also be more aware of the different ways that you intrude in a space. Also to sort of provide a tool in a way for somebody who's in a social learning space to be able to deal with intruders, what prompts they can use, what are the underlying reasons why they do it because it's very often to do with anxiety or insecurity. It's not necessarily because they're malevolent or because they don't want you to learn. So, anyway, that's a fun and interesting little piece of work that we're doing.

Mike Courian: I was just thinking about some of the words that have come out of how you guys are articulating when people come together intentionally. Agency, self-awareness, meaning-making. These are such wonderful things and they're such human things and they just resonate deep within me. And I feel like you've named them and brought dimensionality to something I've always been doing, but I've been so grateful for the language you were bringing around that experience because it's been so rich for me and I'm just thankful that I've kind of bumbled my way into something that feels effective, but it really has been effective. So, I guess that's my way of saying thank you.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Yeah. Yeah.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: So that's what we're trying to do, you know, is to say learning is done by a learner. There's a human being there. Let's not forget that. As opposed to viewing learning as a curriculum and an exam, and then there is somebody in between.

Mike Courian: Coming towards the end, I'm curious to round this off, do you have any messages that you like to reiterate when you're speaking to senior leaders about things

Mike Courian: Just things to remain mindful of, things to remember to prioritize.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, are you ready for the 21st century? Because the 21st century is not the century of an industrial century. It's a different relationship. So, I think that if you're a leader, you need to start thinking about what it means to develop a collective ability to do something useful. And what does it mean to engage others in that enterprise? You know, it's not just an employment contract, it's an identity contract. And you were talking about agency. I think agency is very central to our theory. How does an agency distribute itself in an organization to make it most productive? I think it's a very important and interesting question.

Mike Courian: Is there anything you'd like to add, Bev?

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: No, I think that Etienne puts it very well what I was going to say.

Mike Courian: I'd love to hear it in your words though, if there was any different Bevology that you would bring to it.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Well, I think the thing about agency or caring is to make a difference, in the world we live in, people feel powerless to make a difference. And it's really an opportunity, I think, in business to communities of practice are a way where you can regain a sense that you can make a difference, not as an individual and not because you're changing the system, but it's a sort of just big enough space that you feel like you can make a difference. And

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: time feels like an opportunity to really be cultivating those spaces, you know, to keep the right people, to to shape the world for the future. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

Mike Courian: I love it. Do you know, you both, uh, even through the two one dimension that is a video, uh, you both have such a warmth and a settledness, um, and a I want to say confidence, but it's like a type of a version of that word that I wouldn't normally associate. There's no arrogance to it. You both possess something, different versions of it, but you both possess that. And I was wondering, it's been, it's stood out to me throughout this conversation. And I was wondering, do you have any secrets to a good life? I can see you and and and proverbial good. But I can just see you both have been formed into wonderful people. And I was wondering, do you have anything you do regularly that you think contributes to that?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: I don't know, we're just we just live life.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: We just bumble through life. Yes. I mean, I think I'm very, uh, I am, but Etienne's not necessarily, but I have an ongoing conversation with myself about what's happening. So an ongoing reflection and sort of after action review of everything. But I don't know if that contributes to anxiety or whether it contributes to a good life.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: But yeah, something similar. For me, I have an immense sense of my fragility. Yeah. Hmm. Deep sense of my total fragility, but also sort of an acceptance of it, you know.

Mike Courian: Yeah, cuz I was thinking that sounds

Mike Courian: almost ironic because I could imagine that easily leading somebody to feel quite crushed or or or burdened by that sense of fragility, but I don't perceive that. Uh, would I be right or or is there many layers that I'm not getting to receive yet?

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Well, once you accept your fragility fully, then the fragility doesn't come out, you know. Because it's accepted, it's embraced.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: So that's...

Mike Courian: I love that.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: We also have moments of reflection, because we are both married and working partners and we have time that we cultivate where we reflect on how that's going and so on. That also contributes to it.

Mike Courian: And I have to imagine that the skill sets that you're teaching, the skill sets that you're watching and learning from the communities of practice that you guys are participating in or overseeing. I was just thinking, I have to imagine those skills come back and just sort of equip you with more tools.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Yeah, actually, I should say, we've had such, I mean, the fact that we work with such diverse communities across different countries in the world, across different sectors, across different disciplines, Yes. across different languages. Those experiences and also seeing so much diversity and so many different ways that people do things. I think that that all adds also to your sense of, well, I'm going to say humanness, but it's a sense that you can never be ideological, you can never be pedantic. The world is full

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: of some really extraordinary people, but in the end we are all fallible.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Yes.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: And we are all, uh, gonna die, you know, and it is like, once you accept that then there's nothing left but to get on with life.

Mike Courian: I love that. Well, Bev, thank you so much. I know you've recently been sick. Thank you for bearing through a long conversation and using your voice, which is probably still feeling a bit fragile. You are both, as I said before, wonderfully articulate, and I, I do think in this small way, you're sending out ripples that are shaping the world. So thank you for your work. Uh, please continue doing it. I love that you're both so deeply engaged in it still and it's evolving. We've got subatomic particles to figure out now. As you said, Etienne. So keep figuring those out for us, please. And yeah, thank you so much for generously giving me so much of your time.

Etienne Wenger-Trayner: Good. Thank you.

Beverly Wenger-Trayner: Thanks, Mike.

Mike Courian: And that wraps up this episode of Shapeshifters. Thanks so much for being with us.

We really want this to become a two-way conversation. So we would love for you to send in any questions or comments that this episode has prompted. You can do that by emailing shapeshifters@makeshapes.com or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop it into the comment section. We'll be incorporating these questions and comments into future episodes.

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Until next time, I'm Mike Courian, and this is Shapeshifters.