Sharing Knowledge in Heterogeneous Environments

members of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) to share ideas on leadership, organizational learning, and change. The exchange of ideas took several forms including informal and formal conversations (“germination sessions”), poster and paper sessions, and panel debates. As the conference organizers Karen Ayas (SoL) and John Carroll (MIT Sloan School) emphasized the importance of reflecting on the Greenhouse, this paper is a summary of my reflections based on my experience, memories, available research papers, and session tapes and notes. I center on the topic of knowledge sharing across boundaries—a focus of the Greenhouse’s discourse and a subject of my own research. The Community of Communities In setting the stage for the Greenhouse, John Carroll stated that one goal of the event was to build relationships and nurture research in and around the SoL community. But the notion of “community ” calls for a closer examination. Is SoL a single community? Karen Ayas noted that SoL unites researchers, consultants, and practitioners. These are three very different communities. Moreover, members of SoL belong to different national cultures, organizations, professions, and even research fields—all constituting communities in their own right. The realization that we live in a world of multiple communities is not new. However, in the past decade, research on learning has focused