I like to think about this trio (Practice, Capabilities, Communities) like a query: precise inputs, clear joins, and an output that matters to the people & business.
SELECT
Practice is the formal expression of what we sell. It lives at the intersection of commercial need, company offers (services), and the capabilities we've matured because the market or our strategy demands them. When a client asks for Cloud Migration, AI Enablement, or FinOps at scale, that's the Practice answering.
Capability is how the work gets done. It's the skill, tooling, and method layer—architecture patterns, IaC, MLOps, data engineering, and SRE working methods. Capabilities power one or many Practices.
Community is the human engine, the real force behind the numbers. It forms around shared interests—people who want to learn, try, and trade notes. Communities are where ideas incubate and capabilities grow long before they're ready to be packaged into a Practice.
FROM
- Practices draw from market signals and portfolio strategy.
- Capabilities draw from talent development, repeatable patterns, and guardrails.
- Communities draw from curiosity and culture, the momentum when people find each other around a topic.
JOIN
Here's the flow I've seen work again and again:
> a community seeds an experiment
triggers
> experiments harden into a repeatable capability
generates
> the capability, once proven and needed by clients, becomes part of a Practice
The direction can reverse, too: a Practice exposes gaps, sparks a community to fill them and generates a capability. Either way, the join condition is simple—a value that shows up for customers and people doing the work.
WHERE
This really clicks when we invest in learning at scale, growing capabilities and a culture where people, knowledge, and skills blend together.
Organizations that include 30% + of their workforce in capability‑building programs see total returns to shareholders 43% above benchmarks after 18 months. That isn't soft culture talk—that's hard performance, McKinsey says. When capability building is baked into transformation, companies are 4.1× times more likely to succeed and realise 2.2× times the EBITDA benefits compared with those that skip it. Capability isn't a side project; it's the multiplier (McKinsey).
RETURN
What do you get when you wire these three well?
- Practices that are relevant and revenue‑aligned, not just a menu of buzzwords.
- Capabilities that reduce variance, improve speed and quality, and travel across accounts.
- Communities that make learning continuous and contagious—your fastest path from "interesting" to "industrialized."
INSERT INTO
The organic way is to start with a community of interest around a sharp problem. Give it a clear purpose and a light operating rhythm (demos, internal talks). As patterns emerge, capture them into a capability (best practices, paths, templates, playbooks, metrics). When demand is visible and the path is repeatable, wrap it into a practice offer with outcomes, pricing, and references. Keep the community alive to fuel version 2.0.
On the other hand, business needs can spark a Practice, building multiple capabilities and grouping people in new or existing communities. A community can be part of one or multiple capabilities and is the nursery house for your capabilities.
COMMIT
One line at the end:
Practices are the promise, Capabilities are the proof, and Communities are the momentum.
Design all three, and you'll be successful.
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