In an era where AI and automation promise unprecedented speed and scale, it's more important than ever to ensure technical expertise is nurtured, not just accelerated.

For an innovation foundation like Nesta, where over a third of our staff are methods experts, it is important there are ongoing opportunities for learning, challenge and coaching with other experts across the organisation.

Nesta is harnessing the power of communities of practice (CoPs) to foster a world-class talent-driven organisation where technical talents are supported with peer coaching and on-the-job learning.

CoPs are internal groups of colleagues with a common skillset or interest. A successful CoP does not simply appear because someone creates a Slack channel or monthly calendar invite. In busy, high-impact organisations, successful CoPs require intention, though these vary in format. Here are examples of how others have set up CoPs, that we are looking to with interest as we keep developing our own model.

• JPMorganChase’s Ignite programme supports CoPs by providing a scalable, grassroots framework that empowers tens of thousands of technologists across hundreds of self-organising communities to collaborate and share peer-to-peer technical expertise. The firm fuels these employee-led networks through active organisational backing - offering reusable session templates, enterprise visibility and global events like "Ignite 24" to turn everyday knowledge-sharing into enterprise-wide innovation and career growth.
• The Competence Centre on Humanitarian Negotiation (CCHN) is a joint initiative between the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations World Food Programme. This cross-organisational global approach provides a highly structured peer network for over 4,000 humanitarian field practitioners to safely share high-risk negotiation strategies. It is supported by a dedicated social learning team of 28 staff, associates and consultants who facilitate peer workshops and develop learning.
• ABInBev (an international brewery chain) utilises a matrix network with the special role of "senseis" (masters) to align localised teams facing identical regulatory and technical hurdles. This top-down structured approach also uses a formal certification process where CoPs are assessed on a scale from "beginner" to "advanced" to gain official recognition.

To back our commitment to fostering learning, Nesta dedicates a robust scaffold to its CoPs. It includes providing the financial engine required to support 10 active formal Methods focused CoPs, backing the initiative with a senior sponsor and a member of the community (or two) providing leadership and engagement.

At Nesta, CoPs are seen as central to our ways of working and we view our technical specialists as a critical capability that must be actively nurtured and developed. We believe in a bottom-up approach similar to JPMorganChase’s where CoPs are self-organised.

In recent years, Nesta transitioned away from a traditional hub-and-spoke model - where method experts worked within isolated, dedicated teams, called practices - to a mission-driven model. This means that method experts are now directly embedded within our three core missions. This allows us to assemble diverse, multidisciplinary mission squads - combining data scientists, qualitative researchers, policy experts and design specialists - to target our three explicit, long-term societal goals of: reducing household carbon emissions by 30% by 2030, narrowing the early-years attainment gap and halving obesity by 2030.

While this shift keeps our teams tightly aligned with the daily, frontline impact of our projects, it introduces a natural organisational risk: the isolation of specialists distributed across different missions.

To prevent a mission silo effect, Nesta has intentionally invested in CoPs to serve as the connective tissue across the organisation. CoPs break down structural boundaries, unite curious minds and lay a foundation for sharing learnings across missions.

1. CoPs ensure continuous learning across all career stages

We have benchmarked ourselves against Emily Webber’s Organisation Maturity Model and see many similarities between the environment at Nesta and level 4 in her maturity matrix. As with the model, Nesta houses networked communities and they operate at multiple scales. We provide them with dedicated support and enablement. However, instead of focusing on levels of maturity for our CoPs, we anchor them around specific purposes as laid out in the complex system framework collection. This ensures staff are engaged flexibly and avoids a one-size-fits-all format. At Nesta, CoPs sit across two crucial purposes:

• The knowledge weavers purpose: A number of our CoPs serve the purpose of sharing experiential knowledge. This means that the CoP participants are developing shared practices through regular project sharing, joint trainings and shared documentation. This purpose ensures that non-Methods colleagues can have access to and develop their knowledge on the Method, increasing its understanding and adoption. These are especially helpful for our broader community.
• The collaborative learners purpose: The majority of our CoPs are cultivating the purpose to share tacit knowledge between its members with the view to solve complex, real-world problems and sharpen deep Methodological knowledge. This can lead to experimentations, cross- Missions learning and a robust feedback culture. This purpose is specifically focusing on the needs of our Practitioners and core practitioners.

Our CoPs are open to three distinctive audiences:

• Core practitioners: those deeply embedded in the day-to-day practice of a specific methodology.
• Practitioners: staff regularly applying these methods who want to refine their skills.
• The broader community: anyone at Nesta looking to build general awareness or explore cross-disciplinary collaboration.

In addition to the regular CoP meet-ups, Nesta organises events twice a year to bring together methods experts and share learnings and the latest developments in research practices.

2. CoPs bring valuable collegiate interaction

By prioritising personal relationships, coaching and mentoring over rigid knowledge management tools, CoPs keep skills sharp. Insights gathered this year show that Nesta staff highly value checking their ideas directly with human experts rather than relying on static documentation. This particularly applies in quality assurance (QA) support, where technical experts lend their expertise in other missions and projects. A principal data scientist in our sustainable future mission may, for example, conduct QA in statistical analysis in the fairer start mission. Likewise, a data scientist from the healthy life mission might share knowledge on core data pipelines and models with a sustainable future mission team.

CoPs are judgement-free environments centred around peer-to-peer troubleshooting and the sharing of tacit knowledge. It creates psychological safety, a space where technologists can openly share project failures and experiment with cutting-edge tools. If a team wants to explore using AI orchestration to analyse policy documents, they don't have to navigate that risky frontier alone. They can leverage our shared AI sandboxes, pulling down tested code patterns and relying on the collective intelligence of the entire data science community.

Dr Camille Stengel, head of qualitative methods at Nesta, co-manages the qualitative research methods CoP across Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). Camille highlights activities and ways of collaborating of the Qual CoP:

“The community meet-ups have included method-showcasing sessions and practical workshops that cover a variety of topics, like deliberative methods and analysing AI-powered interviews. Members of the community actively support one another with real-world methodological troubleshooting, such as offering peer feedback on things like participant recruitment challenges, or allowing cross-pollination learning across teams through opportunities like shadowing each other’s project-related fieldwork. The community has hosted external speakers from the charity and academic space to share their qual-related experiences, and we often collaborate with other Nesta-based communities of practice to share knowledge and insights.”

This collaboration and self-directed learning space is also found in the other CoPs. The Behavioural Science CoP, for example, has recently identified a group interest in advanced training.

3. Being non-hierarchical, CoPs have created opportunities for colleagues to develop

The CoP structure flattens the traditional hierarchy that so often stifles learning. In our CoPs, a junior methods user or a degree apprentice isn't tucked away at the bottom of a siloed team, they are structurally connected to senior colleagues across the organisation. Senior experts act as technical coaches from the very earliest stages of project design, co-sponsoring excellence and ensuring that junior talent is continuously pulled upward rather than left to find their own way.

Beyond top-down coaching, this flat dynamic creates a reciprocal exchange of ideas where early-career colleagues actively share fresh perspectives, emerging toolkits, and novel methodologies with seasoned practitioners. By serving as session facilitators or leading working groups, junior team members build crucial leadership capabilities early in their careers without needing formal managerial titles.

In practice, this has meant junior staff members getting direct input from more senior colleagues months before they would otherwise have had the level of access. Likewise, senior colleagues get a regular, structured route into mentoring that their day-to-day work doesn’t always leave room for.

As AI continues to rewrite the rules of social innovation and automate routine research tasks, Nesta’s CoPs are a deliberate tool that we use in the construction of our organisation. While transitioning to a mission-driven model keeps our teams tightly focused on real-world outcomes, our CoPs provide the vital horizontal scaffolding that prevents specialist isolation.

Going forward, we will continue to refine our community formats by prioritising human connection to support our technical experts in not only doing their best work today, but also continually evolving to tackle the complex societal challenges of tomorrow.