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Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company links key people throughout the world in ways that promote learning. Health care would be wise to copy this practice.
How a Learning Community Really Works (From Linkage, Inc.'s Best Practices in Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning Handbook)
Although each learning community could determine its own method for sharing knowledge, most follow an approach first developed by the petrophysics group. The petrophysics community links across teams in five different ways:
1. First, the community holds a weekly agenda-less meetings where anyone can get input on any topic. These are very different from most agenda-driven meetings in the organization. They emphasize open dialogue for exploring issues, with no pressure to come to resolution. Members are encouraged to discuss real problems they currently face and not to use the community as a rubber stamp for analyses and decisions they have already made. These are the public events of the community.
2. To share knowledge that is more explicit the community hosts formal presentations by vendors on new technology.
3. To ensure their data is consistent and widely available, the community has a data library that lets them compare data from many different sites.
4. To ensure that informal help is available at any time, one of their members acts as a community coordinator. The community coordinator's most visible community work involves facilitating the community's meetings. The majority of this person's work is in the private space of the community, making one-on-one contact with community members. The community coordinator talks to people between meetings to ensure that the topics people bring to the meetings are interesting to other community members and that the right people for a good discussion are present. Most importantly, the coordinator maintains relationships among members, connecting people with common interests or finding people who can serve as resources for particular daily work problems.
5. Finally, to educate people entering petrophysics from other disciplines, the community manages a mentor program. While the organization already had a mentoring program, most of the mentoring burden fell to a few senior petrophysicists. When the community took on mentorship, they were able to distribute the work of mentoring more evenly among the staff. One of the key qualifiers of the success of the petrophysicists' community work is the tone of their meetings. They openly discuss alternate interpretations of their data, new ideas and approaches, and new technology, without incurring the obligation to act on each other's ideas. | 
