“The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization” by Peter Senge Summarized by: Ronald Misa 3 October 2001

• The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization
• The team that became great didn’t start off great – it learned how to produce extraordinary results.
• What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations from traditional authoritarian "controlling organizations" will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines that is why the "disciplines of the learning organization" are vital.

1. Systems Thinking

It is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns of our thinking clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.
2. Personal Mastery

It is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization – the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.
3. Mental Models

They are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
4. Building Shared Vision

Involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counter-productiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.
5. Team Learning

It starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together." Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.

Systems Thinking as the Fifth Discipline

• It integrates the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice.
• It keeps them from being separate gimmicks or the latest organization change fads.
• Without a systemic orientation, there is no motivation to look at how the disciplines interrelate.
• By enhancing each of the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of its parts.
• It makes understandable the subtlest aspect of the learning organization – the new way individuals perceive themselves and their world.

• To grasp its meaning is to grasp the deeper meaning of "learning," for learning also involves a fundamental shift or movement of mind.
• Learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding it capacity to create its future.
• Adaptive learning or survival learning must be joined by "generative learning" – learning that enhances our capacity to create.

1. For managers – to help them in identifying the specific practices, skills, and disciplines that can make building learning organizations less of an occult art.
2. For parents – to help in letting our children be our teachers, as well as we their – for they have much to teach us about learning as a way of life.
3. For citizens – to help communities and societies learn the tools needed to build learning organizations

Chapter 2. Does your organization have a learning disability?

1. "I am my position"

Most people in organizations only see their responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of their position. When this happens, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why.

2. "The enemy is out there"

There is a propensity in each of us to find someone or something outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong. This is actually a bi-product of "I am my position," and the non-systemic ways of looking at the world that it fosters. When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond of that position..

3. The illusion of taking charge

All too often, " proactiveness" is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the "enemy out there", we are reacting – regardless of what we call it. True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems. It is a product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.

4. The fixation of events

Our fixation on events is part of our evolutionary programming. The primary threats to our survival, both of our organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes, i.e. the arms race, environmental decay, erosion of public education, decline in design or product quality etc. Generative thinking cannot be sustained in an organization if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally.

5. The parable of the boiled frog

Maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival is so pervasive in system studies. Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic. The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats.

6. The delusion of learning from experience

We learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.

7. The myth of the management team

Most management teams break down under pressure. The team may function quite well with routine issues but when confronted by complex issues that may be embarrassing or threatening, the "teamness" seems to go to the pot." "Skilled incompetence" is the result of teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning.

Chapter 3. Prisoners of the system, or prisoners of our own thinking?

Immerses us in a type of organization that is rarely noticed but widely prevalent: a production/distribution system, the kind responsible for producing and shipping consumer and commercial goods in all industrial countries. There are three main characters in the story – a retailer, a wholesaler, and the marketing director of a brewery.

Principles of Systems Thinking / Lessons of the Beer Game

1. Structure Influences Behavior

Different people in the same structure tend to produce qualitatively similar results. When there are problems, or performance fails to live up to what is intended, it is easy to find someone or something to blame. But, more often than we realize, systems cause their own crises, not external forces or individuals’ mistakes.

2. Structure in Human Systems is Subtle

We tend to think of "structure" as external constraints on the individual. But, structure in complex living systems, such as the "structure" of the multiple "systems" in a human body means that the basic interrelationships that control behavior. In human systems, structure includes how people make decisions – the "operating policies" whereby we translate perceptions, goals, rules and norms into actions.

3. Leverage often comes from new ways of thinking

In human systems, people often have potential leverage that they do not exercise because they focus only on their own decisions and ignore how their decisions affect others. In the beer game, players have it in their power to eliminate the extreme instabilities that invariably occur, but they fail to do so because they do not understand how they are creating the instability in the first place.

• Events explanations – "who did what to whom" – doom their holders to a reactive stance. Event explanations are the most common in contemporary culture, and that is exactly why reactive management prevails.
• Pattern of behavior explanations focus on seeing longer-term trends and assessing their implications. They begin to break the grip of short-term reactiveness. At least, they suggest how, over a longer term, we can respond to shifting trends.
• The "structural" explanation is the least common and most powerful. It focuses on answering the question, " what causes the patterns of behavior?" Though rare, structural explanations, when they are clear and widely understood, have considerable impact. The reason that they are so important is that they address the underlying causes of behavior at a level that patterns of behavior can be changed. In this sense, structural explanations are inherently generative. Moreover, since structure in human systems includes the "operating policies" of the decision makers in the system, redesigning our own decision-making redesigns the system structure.

PART 2
The Fifth Discipline: The Cornerstone of the Learning Organization

Chapter 4 The Laws of the Fifth Discipline

1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s "solutions."
   
   Solutions that merely shift problems from one part of a system to another often go undetected because those who "solved" the first problem are different from those who inherit the new problem.
   
   
2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
   
   "Compensating feedback" happens when well-intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention.
   
   
3. Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
   
   Compensating feedback usually involves a "delay", a time lag between the short-term benefit and the long-term disbenefit. In complex human systems there are always many ways to make things look better in the short run, only eventually does the compensating feedback come back to haunt you.
   
   
4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
   
   Pushing harder and harder on familiar solutions, while fundamental problems persist or worsen, is a reliable indicator of nonsystemic thinking – what we often call the "what we need here is a bigger hammer" syndrome.
   
   
5. The cure can be worse than the disease.
   
   Sometimes the easy or familiar solution is not only ineffective; sometimes it is addictive and dangerous. The long-term, most insidious consequence of applying nonsystemic solutions is increased need for more and more of the solution. The phenomenon of short-term improvements leading to long-term dependency is so common, it has its own name among system thinkers – "Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor."
   
   
6. Faster is slower
   
   All natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth. The optimal rate is far less than the fastest possible growth. When growth becomes excessive – as it does in cancer – the system itself will seek to compensate by slowing down; perhaps putting the organization’s survival at risk in the process.
   
   
7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
   
   "Effects" mean the symptoms that indicate that there are problems – drug abuse, unemployment, falling orders, sagging profits, etc. "Causes" mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms, and which, if recognized, could lead to changes producing lasting improvement. There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality.
   
   
8. Small changes can produce big results – but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
   
   Leverage – a principle wherein the small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. The only problem is that high-leverage changes are usually highly nonobvious to most participants in the system.
   
   
9. You can have your cake and eat it too – but not at once.
   
   Dilemmas, when seen from the systems point of view, aren’t dilemmas at all. They are artifacts of "snapshot" rather than "process" thinking, and appear in a whole new light once you think consciously of change over time. Ex. The dilemma on choosing between low cost and high quality.
   
   
10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
    
    Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. The same is true for organizations; to understand the most challenging managerial issues requires seeing the whole system that generates the issues. The key principle, called the "principle of the system boundary," is that the interactions that must be examined are those most important to the issue at hand, regardless of parochial organizational boundaries.
    
    
11. There is no blame
    
    Systems thinking shows us that there is no outside; that you and the cause of your problems are part of a single system. The cure lies in your relationship with your "enemy" – yourself.

• Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots."
• Systems thinking is needed today more than ever because we are becoming overwhelmed by complexity. All around us are examples of "systemic breakdowns" – global warming, ozone depletion, international drug trade etc. – problems that have no simple local cause.
• Similarly, organizations break down, despite individual brilliance and innovative products, because they are unable to pull their diverse functions and talents into a productive whole.
• Systems thinking is the fifth discipline because it is the conceptual cornerstone that underlies all of the five learning disciplines. Without systems thinking, there is neither the incentive nor the means to integrate the learning disciplines once they have come into practice.

1. detail complexity – a complexity with many variables; usually solved by conventional forecasting, planning, analysis methods etc.
2. dynamic complexity – situations where cause and effect are subtle, and where effects over time of interventions are not obvious.

• The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity.
• The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind:

1. seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains;
2. seeing processes of change rather than snapshots

• The concept of "feedback" shows how actions can reinforce or counteract each other. It builds to learning to recognize types of "structures" that recur again and again.

• Reality is made up of circles but we see in straight lines.
• One reason for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language – language shapes perception.
• What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.

• From the systems perspective, the human actor is part of the feedback process, not standing apart from it. This represents a profound shift in awareness.
• In mastering systems thinking, we give up the assumption that there must be an individual responsible. The feedback perspective suggests that everyone shares responsibility for problems generated by a system.

• or amplifying feedback processes are the engines of growth.. Whenever you are in a situation where things are growing, you can be sure that reinforcing feedback is at work.

• or stabilizing feedback operates whenever there is a goal-oriented behavior. If the goal in to be not moving, then balancing feedback will act the way the brakes in a car do.

• patterns of structure recur again and again. These "systems archetypes" or "generic structures" embody the key to learning to see structures in our personal and organizational lives.
• The systems archetypes suggest that not all management problems are unique, something that experiences managers know intuitively.
• If reinforcing and balancing feedback and delays are like the nouns and verbs of systems thinking, then the systems archetypes are analogous to basic sentences or simple stories that get retold again and again.
• Mastering the systems archetypes starts an organization on the path of putting the systems perspective into practice. For learning organizations, only when managers start thinking in terms of the systems archetypes, does systems thinking become an active daily agent, continually revealing how we create our reality.
• The purpose of the systems archetypes is to recondition our perceptions, so as to be more able to see structures at play, and to see the leverage in those structures.

Balancing Process with Delay

• a person, a group, or an organization, acting toward a goal, adjusts their behavior in response to delayed feedback. If they are not conscious of the delay, they end up taking more corrective action than needed, or sometimes just giving up because they cannot see that any progress is being made.
• In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system more responsive.
• Example: real estate developers keep building new properties until the market has gone soft – but, by then, there are already enough additional properties still under construction to guarantee a glut.

• a process feeds on itself to produce a period of accelerating growth or expansion. Then the growth begins to slow and eventually comes to a halt, and may even reverse itself and begin an accelerating collapse.
• Don’t push on the reinforcing (growth) process, remove (or weaken) the source of limitation.
• Example: A new startup business that grows rapidly until it reaches a size that requires more professional management skills and formal organization; a city that grows steadily until available land is filled, leading to rising housing prices.

• a short-term "solution" is used to correct a problem, with seemingly positive immediate results. As this correction is used more and more, more fundamental long-term corrective measures are used less and less.
• Over time, the capabilities for the fundamental solution may become disabled leading to even greater reliance on the symptomatic solution.
• Focus on the fundamental solution. If symptomatic solution is imperative (because of delays in fundamental solution), use it to gain time while working on the fundamental solution.
• Examples: selling more to existing customers rather than broadening the customer base; paying bills by borrowing, instead of going through the discipline of budgeting.

• The intervention attempts to ameliorate obvious problem symptoms, and does so very successfully that the people within the system never learn how to deal with the problems themselves.
• "Teach people to fish, rather than giving them fish." Focus on enhancing the capabilities of the "host system" to solve its own problems. If outside help is needed, "helpers" should be strictly limited to a one-time intervention or be able to help people develop their own skills, resources, and infrastructure to be more capable in the future.
• Examples: dependence on outside contractors instead of training your own people; housing or job training programs that attract the needy to cities with the best programs.

• A shifting the burden type of structure in which the short-term solution involves letting a long-term, fundamental goal decline.
• "It’s okay if our performance standards slide a little, just until the crisis is over."
• Hold the vision.
• Examples: Successful people who lower their own expectations for themselves and gradually become less successful; firms that tacitly lower their quality standards by cutting budgets rather than investing in developing new higher quality ways of doing things, all the while proclaiming their continued commitment to quality.

• Two people or organizations each see their welfare as depending on a relative advantage over the other. Whenever one side gets ahead, the other is more threatened, leading it to act more aggressively to reestablish its advantage, which threatens the first, increasing its aggressiveness, and so on.
• Look for ways for both sides to "win", or to achieve their objectives. In many instances, one side can unilaterally reverse the vicious spiral by taking overtly aggressive "peaceful" actions that cause the other to feel less threatened.
• Examples: Advertising wars. The arms race. Price wars. Increasing reliance on lawyers to settle disputes. Gang warfare.

• Two activities compete for limited support or resources. The more successful one becomes, the more support it gains, thereby starving the other.
• Look for the overarching goal for balanced achievement of both choices. In some cases, break or weaken the coupling between the two, so that they do not compete for the same limited resource.
• Examples: balancing home and work life, in which a worker gets caught working overtime so much that relationships at home deteriorate and it gets more and more "painful" to go home, which, of course, makes the worker even more likely to neglect home life in the future. Two products compete for limited financial and managerial resources within a firm: one is an immediate hit in the market place and receives more investment, which depletes the resources available to the other, setting in motion a reinforcing spiral fueling growth of the first and starving the second.

• Individuals use a commonly available but limited resource solely on the basis of individual need. At first they are rewarded for using it; eventually, they get diminishing returns, which causes them to intensify their efforts. Eventually the resource is either significantly depleted, eroded, or entirely used up.
• Manage the "commons", either through educating everyone and creating forms of self-regulation and peer pressure, or through an official regulating mechanism, ideally designed by participants.
• Examples: exhaustion of a shared secretarial pool; all manner of pollution problems from acid rain to ozone depletion and the "greenhouse effect."

• A fix, effective in the short term, has unforeseen long-term consequence which may require even more use of the same fix.
• Maintain focus on the long term. Disregard short-term "fix", if feasible, or use it only to "buy time" while working on long-term remedy.
• Examples: People and organization who borrow to pay interest on other loan, thereby ensuring that they will have to pay even more interest later; cutting back maintenance schedules to save costs, which eventually leads to more breakdowns and higher costs, creating still more cost-cutting pressures.

• Growth approaches a limit which can be eliminated or pushed into the future if the firm, or individual, invests in additional "capacity." But the investment must be aggressive and sufficiently rapid to forestall reduced growth, or else it will never get made.
• If there is a genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand. Hold the vision, especially as regards assessing key performance standards and evaluating whether capacity to meet potential demand is adequate.
• Examples: companies which let service quality or product quality of any sort decline, simultaneously blaming competition or their sales management for not pushing hard enough to maintain sales; people with grand visions who never realistically assess the time and effort they must put in to achieve their visions.

• Seeing where actions and changes in structures can lead to significant, enduring improvements. Often follows the principle of economy of means, where the best results come not from large-scale efforts but from small well-focused actions.
• Non-systemic ways of thinking are so damaging because they consistently lead us to focus on low-leverage changes: we focus on symptoms where the stress is greatest.
• We repair or ameliorate the symptoms, but such efforts only make matters better in the short run, at best, and worse in the long run.
• The leverage in most real-life systems, such as most organizations, is not obvious to most of the actors in those systems. They don’t see the "structures" underlying their actions.

• The purpose of systems archetypes, such as limits to growth and shifting the burden, is to help see those structures and thus find the leverage, especially amid the pressures and crosscurrents of real-life business situations.
• The art of systems thinking lies in being able to recognize increasingly complex and subtle structures.
• The essence of mastering systems thinking as a management discipline lies in seeing patterns where others see only events and forces to react to. Seeing the forest as well as the trees is a fundamental problem that plagues all firms.

• The art of systems thinking lies in seeing through complexity to the underlying structures generating change.
• It does not mean ignoring complexity, but means organizing complexity into a coherent story that illuminates the causes of problems and how they can be remedied in enduring ways.
• The increasing complexity of today’s world leads many managers to assume that they lack information they need to act effectively. The fundamental "information problem" faced by managers is not too little information but too much information.
• What we most need are ways to know what is important and what is not important, what variables to focus on and which to pay less attention to – and we need ways to do this which can help groups or teams develop shared understanding.
• Mastering such basic archetypes as growth and underinvestment is the first step in developing the capability of seeing the forest and the trees – of seeing information in terms of broad and detailed patterns. Only by seeing both can you respond powerfully to the challenge of complexity and change.

PART 3
The Core Disciplines : Building the Learning Organization

Chapter 9 Personal Mastery

Personal Mastery

• the discipline of personal growth and learning, a process of continually focusing and refocusing on what one truly wants, on one’s vision. People with high levels of personal mastery are continually expanding their ability to create the results in life they truly seek.

1. They have a special sense of purpose that lies behind their visions and goals
2. They have learned how to perceive and work with forces or change rather than resist those forces
3. Deeply inquisitive, committed to continually seeing reality more and more accurately
4. Feel as is they are part of a larger creative process, which they can influence but cannot unilaterally control
5. Live in a continual learning mode
• The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery
• Personal mastery means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint. It embodies two underlying movements:
1. Continually clarifying what is important to us (our vision)

• Personal vision is the goal pulling you forward that makes all the work worthwhile.
• Nothing happens until there is a vision. A vision with no underlying sense of purpose is just a great idea, signifying nothing. Conversely, purpose without vision has no sense of appropriate scale.

• The essence of personal mastery is learning how to generate and sustain "creative tension" in our lives.

• "Creative tension" is the gap between a vision (what we want) and a clear picture of current reality (where we are relative to what we want)

• Distinguished from "emotional tension". Emotional tension are the negative emotions that may arise when there is creative tension. It can always be relieved by adjusting the one pole of creative tension that is completely under our control at all times—the vision. By doing so, we move closer to our current reality—the only price to pay is abandoning what we truly want, our vision. In organizations, goals erode because of low tolerance of emotional tension. This leads to compromise and mediocrity as "only mediocre people are always at their best".

• Mastery of creative tension leads to a fundamental shift in our whole posture toward reality. Current reality becomes the ally not the enemy. Failure is viewed simply as a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity of learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that did not work as expected, about the clarity of the vision.

• "We want personal mastery because we want it." The total development of people is essential to the goal of corporate excellence. People with high levels of personal mastery are more committed. They take more initiative. They have a broader and deeper sense on responsibility in their work

1. It is unquantifiable. Cannot measure in decimal places how much personal mastery contributes to productivity and the bottom line
2. Cynicism, as once they had high ideals of people, but was disappointed and embittered because people fell short of their ideals
3. Fear that personal mastery will threaten the established order of a well-managed company.

"Structural Conflict"—the system involving both the tension pulling us towards our goal and the tension anchoring us to our underlying belief.

Two contradictory beliefs that limit our ability to create what we really want:

1. Powerlessness. Our inability to bring into being the things we really care about
2. Unworthiness. We do not deserve to have what we truly desire

1. Letting our vision erode
2. "Conflict manipulation" in which we try to manipulate ourselves by into greater effort what we want by creating artificial conflict, such as through focusing on avoiding what we don’t want (i.e. our "negative vision")
3. Willpower. Psyching ourselves up to overpower all form of resistance to achieving our goals. This has been as a characteristic synonymous with success: maniacal focus on goals, willingness to pay the price, "ability to defeat any form of opposition and surmount any obstacle".

• Commitment to the truth. Relentless willingness to recognize the structural conflict, and the resulting behavior, when it operates. Once it is recognized, the structure itself becomes part of "current reality". (One) "can’t make the choice to change before he becomes aware of his current reality".

• Using the subconscious. It is through the subconscious that all of us deal with complexity. What distinguishes people with high levels of personal mastery is they have developed a higher level of rapport between their normal awareness and their subconscious. They have the skill to ably direct focus on the desired results itself. (note: skill requires practice and continuous learning) . The principle of creative tension recognizes that the subconscious operates most effectively when it is focused clearly on our vision of current reality.

In addition to clarifying the structures that characterize personal mastery as a discipline (i.e. creative tension, emotional tension, and structural conflict), the systems perspective also illuminates subtler aspects of personal mastery:

1. Integrating reason and intuition

• It must always be remembered that embarking on any path of personal growth is a matter of choice. Compulsory training, or "elective" programs that people feel expected to attend if they want to advance their careers, conflict directly with freedom of choice.
• Instead, leaders can work relentlessly to foster a climate in which the principles of personal mastery are practiced in daily life. That means building an organization where its is safe for people to create visions, where inquiry and commitment to the truth are the norm, where the organization is willing to face honestly the gaps between vision and the truth, and where challenging the status quo is expected—especially when the status quo includes obscuring aspects of current reality that people seek to avoid.
• Such an organizational climate will strengthen personal mastery in two ways: First, it will continually reinforce the idea that personal growth is truly valued in the organization. Second, it will provide "on the job training" that is vital to developing personal mastery.
• The core leadership is simple: be a model. Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. Talking about personal mastery may open people’s mind somewhat, but action always speaks louder than words.

• New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.
• Our "mental models" (also referred to in the chapter as "microcosms") determine not only how we make sense of the world, but how we take action. Mental models can be simple generalizations as "people are untrustworthy", or they can be complex theories as to why people interact the way they do. Mental models are active- they shape how we act, they affect what we see.
• The problems with mental models lie not in whether they are right or wrong. The problem arise when the models are tacit—when they exist below the level of awareness. When people are unaware of their mental models, the models remained unexamined. Because they were unexamined, the models remained unchanged.
• The inertia of deeply entrenched mental models can overwhelm even the best systemic insights. If mental models can impede learning, the important question is "why can’t they also help accelerate learning?"

• In Royal Dutch/Shell, they discovered that by helping mangers clarify their assumptions, discover internal contradictions in those assumptions, and think through new strategies based on new assumptions they gained a unique sense of competitive advantage. Articulating managers’ mental models thus became an important part of the planing process at Shell.
• In traditional authoritarian organization, the dogma was "managing, organizing and controlling". In the learning organization, the new dogma will be vision, values, and mental models. The healthy corporations will be ones which can systematize ways to bring people together to develop the best possible mental models for facing the situation at hand.
• In Hanover, they set out to find what would give the necessary organization and discipline to have work be more congruent with human nature. They gradually identified a core set of values that are actually principles that overcome the traditional hierarchical values that had dominated the organization. Two of this values are openness and merit.
• Openness—the antidote to gamesplaying that dominated people’s behavior in face to face meetings.
• Merit- making decisions based on the best interest of the organization. This is the antidote to "decision making based on bureaucratic politics".
• "Action science" a body of theory and method of reflection and inquiry on the reasoning of our underlying actions.

• Recasting traditional planning as learning

Ex. "Scenarios" at Shell—forced managed to consider how they would manage under different alternative paths in the future. For Shell, it is less important to produce perfect plans than to use planning to accelerate learning as a whole.
• Establishing "internal board of directors" who bring outside perspective and breadth of view to empower local management through a mechanism much like corporate board of directors. Their primary function is to counsel and advise, not to control local decision makers. This brings senior management and local management together regularly to challenge and expand the thinking behind local decision making.

REFLECTION AND INQUIRY SKILLS: MANAGING MENTAL MODELS AT PERSONAL AND INTERPERSONAL LIVES

• Skills of reflection concern slowing down our own thinking processes so that we can become more aware of how we form our mental models and the way they influence our actions. This starts with leaps of abstraction
• We immediately "leap" to generalizations so quickly that we never think to test them—hence our learning is slowed down. More important, we have begun to treat these generalizations as facts, givens. Further, untested generalizations can easily become the basis for further generalizations.
• Failing to distinguish direct observation from generalizations inferred from observation leads us never to think to test the generalization.

1. Ask yourself of what you believe about the way the world works, and the "data" which led to it.
2. Consciously ask yourself whether you are willing to consider that this generalization may be inaccurate or misleading
3. If yes, explicitly separate the generalization from the data which led to it.
4. This will give you the opportunity to consider alternative interpretations or courses of actions.

Until we become aware of our leaps of abstraction, we are not even aware of the need for inquiry.

Inquiry skills concern how we operate in face-to-face interactions with others, especially in dealing with conflictual and complex issues.

A technique to reveal ways that we manipulate situations to avoid dealing with how we actually think and feel, and thereby preventing a counterproductive situation from improving.

1. Start with selecting a specific situation where you are interacting with one or several persons in a way that that you feel is not working.
2. Write out a sample of the exchange (a "script") on the right hand side of the page. Write what you are thinking but not saying at each stage in the exchange.

Ex. What I’m thinking What is said
• The left hand column exercise always succeed in bringing hidden assumptions to the surface and showing how they influence behavior. There is no one "right" way to handle difficult situations, but it helps enormously to see first how your own reasoning and actions can contribute to making matters worse.
• Left hand column will help you articulate your views, but it is not complete, you need to learn more about the other’s view. This is the process of balancing inquiry and advocacy/

• Most managers are trained to be advocates. But as mangers rise to senior positions, they confront issues more complex and diverse than their personal experience. Suddenly, they need to tap insights from other people. They need to learn. Now, the manager’s advocacy skills become counterproductive; the can close us off from actually learning from one another. What is needed is blending advocacy and inquiry to promote collaborative learning.
• Advocacy without inquiry begets more advocacy. The more vehemently A argues, the greater the threat to B. Thus, B argues more fiercely. Then A counterargues even more fiercely. And so on. This describes a system archetype called "escalation".
• The snowballing effect of reinforcing advocacy can be stopped, by beginning to ask few questions. Simple questions such as, "what is it that leads you to that position?" and "Can you illustrate the point for me?" But pure inquiry is also limited. Questioning can be crucial for breaking the spiral or reinforcing advocacy.. Just asking lots of questions can be away of avoiding learning—by hiding our own view behind a wall of incessant questioning.
• The most productive learning usually occurs when mangers combine skills in advocacy and inquiry—or "reciprocal inquiry", where everyone makes his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination. This involves not only inquiring into the reasoning behind others’ view but would also involve stating one’s view in such a way as to reveal his own assumptions and reasoning and to invite others to inquire into them.
• When operating in pure advocacy, the goal is to win the argument. In reciprocal inquiry, the goal is to find the best argument.

When advocating your view:

Make your own reasoning explicit
Encourage others to explore your views
Encourage others to provide different views
Actively inquire into others’ view that differ from your own

State your assumptions clearly and acknowledge that they are assumptions
Don’t bother asking questions if you are not genuinely interested in the response

Ask what data or logic might change their views.
Ask if there is any way you might together design an experiment that might provide new information

Encourage them (or yourself) to think out loud about what might be making it difficult. If there is a desire to do so, design with others ways of overcoming these barriers.
Keep in mind that these guidelines will be of little use if you are not genuinely curious and willing to change your mental model of a situation. You must be willing to be wrong.

Espoused Theory versus Theory-in-Use

• Recognizing the gap between espoused theories—what we say and theories in us (theories that lay behind our actions) is vital. Otherwise, we may believe we have learned something just because we’ve got the new language or concepts to use, even though our behavior is completely unchanged. Unless the gap between the two is recognized, no learning can occur. Moreover, one should ask himself "do I really value the espoused theory? Is it part of my vision?" If there is no commitment to the espoused theory, then the gap does not represent a tension between reality and vision but between reality and a view that one advances (perhaps because it will make him look good to others).

• Systems thinking without the discipline of mental models loses much of its power. Thus, researches focus on helping managers to integrate mental modeling and systems thinking skills. The two disciplines go naturally together because one focuses on exposing hidden assumptions and other focuses on how to restructure assumptions to reveal causes of significant problems.
• Ultimately, the payoff from integrating systems thinking and mental models will be not only improving our mental models but altering our ways of thinking: shifting from mental models dominated by events to mental models that recognize longer-term patterns of change and the underlying structures producing those patterns.
• Just as "linear thinking" dominates most mental models used for critical decisions today, the learning organizations of the future will make key decisions based on shared understandings of interrelationships and patterns of change.

Shared Vision

• is not an idea. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power.
• is the answer to the question, "What do we want to create?"
• derives it power from a common caring and aspiration
• provides the focus and energy for learning
• the whole idea of generative learning- "expanding your ability to create"- will seem abstract and meaningless until people become excited about some vision they truly want to accomplish
• provides a rudder to keep the learning process on course when stresses develop

• people are committed to a shared vision only when it reflects their own personal vision.

Intrinsic vision is looking inward to discover one’s internal standards. This type of vision uplifts people’s aspirations.
(note: extrinsic and intrinsic can coexist)
 

THE DISCIPLNE OF BUILDING SHARED VISION

• Shared visions emerge from personal visions. Caring is personal. It is rooted in an individual’s own set of values, concerns and aspirations. If people don’t have their own vision, all they can do is "sign up’ for someone else’s. The result is compliance, never commitment.
• Personal mastery is the bedrock of developing shared visions. This means not only personal vision, but commitment to the truth and creative tension. Shared vision can generate levels of creative tension that go far beyond individual’s comfort levels.
• In encouraging personal vision, organization must be careful not to infringe on individual freedoms. Instead positive actions can be taken to create a climate that encourage personal vision. The most direct is for leaders who have a sense of vision to communicate that in such a way that others are encouraged to share their visions. This is the art of visionary leadership—how shared visions are built from personal visions.
• The first step in mastering the discipline of building shared visions is to give up traditional notions that visions are always announced from "on high" or come from an organization’s institutionalized planning process.
• "Top-down" vision is often a "one-shot" vision, a single effort at providing overarching direction and meaning to a firm’s strategy. Once it’s written, management assumes that they have now discharged their visionary duties. More often, such written visions remain in unread files. Top-down vision also does not build on people’s personal visions. Instead, these reflect the personal visions of one or two people. There is little opportunity for inquiry and testing at every level so that people feel they understand and own the vision. Thus, such "official visions" rarely inspire energy and commitment.
• This is not to say that visions cannot emanate from the top. Often they do. The origin of the vision is much less important than the process whereby it comes to be shared. It is not truly a "shared vision" until it connects with the personal visions of the people throughout the organization.
• Vision is also not a "solution to a problem." Building shared visions must be seen as a central element of the daily work of leaders. It is ongoing and never ending.
• The process of building shared vision is not always glamorous. It is not about giving speeches and inspiring troops, it is about solving day to day problems with the vision in mind.
• Visions that are truly shared take time to emerge. They grow as a by-product of interactions of individual visions. They require ongoing conversations where individuals not only feel free to express their dreams, but learn how to listen to each others’ dreams.
• We must allow multiple visions to coexist, listening for the right course of action that transcends and unifies all our individual visions.

• Ninety percent of the time, what passes as commitment is compliance.
• "Enrollment" is the process of becoming part of something by choice. "Committed" describes a state of being not only enrolled but feeling fully responsible for making the vision happen.
• Compliance is often confused with enrollment and commitment. It is because there are several levels of compliance, some of which lead to behavior that looks like a great deal like enrollment and commitment.
• Most problematic is the state of "genuine compliance". The prototypical "good soldier" of genuine compliance will do whatever is expected of him, willingly. He is in fact committed, but only to "being part of the team."
• Yet there is a world of difference between compliance and commitment. The committed person brings an energy, passion, and excitement that cannot be generated if you are only compliant, even genuinely compliant. The committed person does not play with the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving a vision, he will find ways to change the rules.
• People who are enrolled or committed truly want the vision. Genuinely compliant people accept the vision.
• Traditional organizations did not care about enrollment and commitment. The command and control hierarchy required only compliance. Still, today, many mangers are justifiably wary of whether the energy released through commitment can be controlled and directed. So we settle for compliance and content ourselves with moving people up the compliance ladder.

Be enrolled yourself.

Be on the level. Don’t inflate benefits or sweep problems under the rug

Let the other person choose.

• There are many times when managers need compliance. In such cases, be open about it. This will remove hypocrisy. It also makes it easier for people to come to their choices, which may, over time, include enrollment. There is nothing you can do to get another person to enroll or commit. Enrollment and commitment require freedom of choice. It is likewise very personal; efforts to force it will, at best, foster compliance.

• Building shared vision is actually one piece of a larger activity: developing the "governing ideas" for the enterprise, its vision, purpose or mission ,and core values. Vision is the "What?"-- the picture of the future we seek to create. Purpose (or mission) is the organization’s answer to the question "why do we exist?". Core values answer the question "how do we want to act, consistent with our mission, along the path toward achieving our vision?" Taken as a unit, all three governing ideas answer the question "what do we believe in?’
• People need visions to make the purpose more concrete and tangible. Core values are necessary to help people with day to day decision making. Purpose is very abstract. Vision is long term. But core values are only helpful if they can be translated into concrete behaviors.

• Negative vision—what we do not want, the source of the energy is fear. It is limiting for three reasons: First, energy that could build something new is diverted to "preventing" something we don’t want to happen. Second, negative visions carry a subtle yet unmistakable message of powerlessness: our people really don’t care. They can pull together only when there is sufficient threat. Lastly, negative visions are inevitably short term. The organization is motivated so long as the threat persists. Once it leaves, so does the organization’s vision and energy.
• On the other hand, the power of aspiration drives positive visions. Fear can produce extraordinary changes in short periods, but aspiration endures as a continuing source of learning and growth.

• In the chapter on personal mastery, it was said that personal vision, by itself, is not the key to more effective creativity. The key is "creative tension". The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to their curent reality clearly. This principle is no less true in organizations. The hallmark of a learning organization is not lovely visions floating in space, but a relentless willingness to examine "what is" in light of our vision.

Why Visions Die Prematurely – The Limits to Growth Structures

• The visioning process can wither if, as more people get involved, the diversity of views dissipates focus and generates unmanageable conflicts.

As enthusiasm builds, people are talking about the vision. The diversity of view increases, leading to people expressing potentially conflicting visions. If other people are unable to allow this diversity to be expressed, polarization increases, reducing the clarity of the shared visions, and limiting the growth of enthusiasm.
• Visions can also die because people become discouraged by the apparent difficulty in bringing the vision into reality. People become disheartened, uncertain, or even cynical, leading to decline in enthusiasm. Here, the limiting factor is the capacity of people in the organization to "hold" creative tension.
• Emerging visions can also die because people get overwhelmed by the demands of the current reality and lose their focus on the vision. The limiting factor becomes the time and the energy to focus on a vision. In this case, the leverage must lie in either finding ways to focus less time and effort on fighting crises and managing current reality, or to break off those pursuing the new vision from those responsible for handling "current reality".
• Lastly, a vision can die if people forget their connection to one another. It is undermined whenever we lose our respect for one another and for each other’s views. We then split into insiders and outsiders—those who are true believers in the vision and those who are not. When this happens, "visioning" conversations no longer build genuine enthusiasm towards the vision.

• The discipline of shared vision lacks a critical underpinning if practiced without systems thinking. Vision paints the picture of what we want to create. Systems thinking reveals how we have created what we currently have.
1. Vision becomes a living force only when people truly believe that they can shape the future. As people in an organization begin to learn how existing policies and actions are creating their current reality, a new, more fertile soil for vision develops. A new source of confidence develops, rooted in deeper understanding of the forces shaping current reality and where there is leverage for influencing those forces. It is discovering that the reality we have is only one of several possible realities

• Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire. It has three critical dimensions:
1. The need to think insightfully about complex issues. Here, teams must learn how to tap the potential for many minds to be more intelligent than one mind.
2. There is a need for innovative, coordinated action. There is "operational trust", where each team member remains conscious of other ream members and can be counted on to act in ways that complement each others’ action.
3. There is the role of team members on other teams.
• Team learning is a collective discipline. It involves mastering the practices of two distinct ways that teams converse--dialogue and discussion. It also involves learning how to deal creatively with the powerful forces opposing productive dialogue and discussion in working teams.
• In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep "listening" to one another and suspending one’s own view. In dialogue people become observers of their own thinking. Through it, people can help each other to become aware of the incoherence in each other’s thoughts, and in this way, the collective thought becomes more and more coherent.

The three basic conditions of dialogue:

1. All participants must "suspend" their assumptions, literally to hold them "as if suspended before us" constantly accessible to questioning and observation. This will allow the tem members to see their assumptions more clearly because they could be held up and contrasted with each others’ assumption.
2. All participants must regard one another as colleagues; and acknowledge the mutual risk, and establish the sense of safety in facing the risks. Dialogue is "playful"; it requires the willingness to play with new ideas, to examine them and test them. As soon as we become overly concerned with "who said what" or "not saying something stupid", the playfulness will evaporate.
3. There must be a "facilitator" who "holds the context" of dialogue.

Functions:

1. Help people maintain ownership of the process and the outcomes—we are responsible for what is happening
2. Must keep the dialogue moving, but must always walk a careful line between being knowledgeable and helpful in the process at hand, and yet not taking on the "expert" or "doctor" mantle that would shift attention away from the members of the team, and their own ides and responsibility.
As teams develop experience and skill in dialogue, the role of the facilitator becomes less crucial and he or she can gradually become just one of the participants.
 
• In discussion, different views are presented and defended and there is a search for the best view to support decisions that must be made at this time. In team learning, discussion is a necessary counterpart of dialogue. It is where decisions are made. Both dialogue and discussion can lead to new courses of action; but actions are often the focus of discussion; whereas new actions emerge as a by-product of dialogue.
• A unique relationship develops among team members who enter into dialogue regularly. They develop a deep trust that cannot help but carry over to discussions. They develop a richer understanding of the uniqueness of each person’s point of view. They learn to master the art of holding a position, rather than being held by the positions.
• Skills that allow dialogue and discussion to be productive: inquiry and reflection
Just as personal vision provides a foundation for building shared vision, so too do reflection and inquiry skills provide a foundation for dialogue and discussion. Dialogue that is grounded in reflection and inquiry skills is likely to be more reliable and less dependent on particulars or circumstance, such as the chemistry among team members.

• One of the most reliable indicators of a team that is continually learning is the visible conflict of idea. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual could have come to on his own. Conflict becomes, in effect, part of the ongoing dialogue. On the other hand mediocre teams are characterized either by on conflict on the surface or there is rigid polarization.
• Defensive routines (see mental Models) are entrenched habits we use to protect ourselves from the embarrassment and threat that come with exposing our thinking. The source of such is the fear of exposing the thinking that lies behind our views. Exposing our reasoning is threatening because we are afraid that people will find errors in it.
• The most effective defensive routines are those we cannot see. An example is keeping people on the defensive through intimidation, so they won’t confront your thinking. Managers who take on the burden of having to know the answers become highly skillful in defensive routines that preserve their aura as capable decision makers by not revealing the thinking behind their decisions. Teams stay stuck in their defensive routine only when they pretend they don’t have any defensive routines, that everything is all right, and that they can say "anything".
• If we perceive a defensive routine, it is good bet that we are part of it.

Skillful managers learn to confront defensiveness without producing more defensiveness. They do so by self-disclosure and by inquiring into the causes of their own defensiveness.
• The skills for defusing defensive routines are essentially the same skills for strengthening the "fundamental solution" in the shifting the burden structure—the skills of reflection and mutual inquiry. By inquiring effectively into the causes of the problem at hand—that is, by inquiring in such a way as to reveal your own assumptions and reasoning, make them open to influence, and encourage others to do likewise- defensive routines are less likely to come into play.
• A team committed to the truth has unique powers to surface and acknowledge their own defensiveness. Then the defensive routines can actually become a source of energy rather than inertia.
• Defensive routines can become a surprising ally toward building a learning team by providing a signal when learning is not occurring. Defensive routines may signal especially difficult and especially important issues. But we must learn to recognize the signals and learn how to acknowledge the defensiveness without provoking more defensiveness. When defensiveness is met by self-disclosure and inquiry balanced with advocacy, team members begin to see more of each other’s thinking.
• As team members learn how to work with rather than against their defensive routines, they build confidence that ‘we are senior to our defensiveness". When a team sees itself transcends blocks that have been preventing learning, they gain tangible experience that there may be many aspects of their reality that they have power to change.
• Learning teams practice a special form of alchemy, the transformation of potentially divisive conflict and defensiveness into learning. They do this through their vision and skill. Through dialogue, team members gain tangible experience of the larger intelligence that can operate. But unless the team also builds the skills for seeing rather than obscuring current reality, their capacity for learning will be unreliable. Without reflection and inquiry skills, they will get thrown off course when defensiveness arises—their learning will depend on circumstances.
• It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced. A team committed to learning must be committed not only to telling the truth about what’s going on "out there", in their business reality, but also about what’s going on "in here", within the team itself. To see reality more clearly, we must also see our strategies for obscuring reality.

• Team learning, like any other discipline, requires practice. The process where team learns is through continual movement between practice and performance, practice, performance, practice again, perform again.
• Team learning is a team skill. Learning teams learn how to learn together. This is why learning teams need "practice fields", ways to practice together so that they can develop their collective learning skills.
• Practice is an experimentation in a "virtual world". The essence of a virtual world is the freedom it allows for experimentation. No move is irreversible. Actions that cannot be reversed or taken back and redone in the real setting can be redone countless times.

Example of Practice Fields:

Practicing Dialogue, so that a team can begin to develop its joint skill in fostering team IQ that exceeds individual IQs Basic Conditions in Dialogue Session:
 
1. having all members of the team (those who need one another to act) together
2. explaining the ground rules of dialogue
3. enforcing those ground rules so that if anyone finds himself unable to "suspend" his assumptions, the team acknowledges that it is now "discussing" not "dialoguing
4. making possible, indeed encouraging, team members to raise the most difficult, subtle, and conflictual issues essential to the team’s work
Learning Laboratories and Microworlds where team learning confronts the dynamics of complex business realities.

• Both the perspective and the tools of systems thinking figure centrally in team learning. Likewise, the approach taken by learning teams to defensive routines is intrinsically systemic. Rather than seeing the defensiveness in terms of other’s behaviors, the leverage lies in recognizing defensive routines as joint creations and to find our own role in creating and sustaining them.
• Perhaps the single greatest liability of management team is that they confront complex, dynamic realities with a language designed for simple, static problems. Because we see the world in simple obvious terms, managers come to believe in simple, obvious solutions. The find and fix mentality results ina n endless stream of short-term fixes, which appear to make problems go away, except they keep returning. So then, we go off and fix them again.
• The system archetypes offer a potentially powerful basis for a language by which management teams can deal productively with complexity. As teams master the basic archetypes, their conversations will naturally become more and more conversations about underlying structures and leverage and less and predominated by crises and short-term "fixes".
• When the system archetypes are used in conversations about complex and potentially conflictual management issues, reliably, the conversation is "objectify". The conversation becomes about "the structure", the systemic forces at play, not about personalities and leadership styles. Difficult questions can be raised in a way that does not carry innuendos of management incompetence or implied criticism. This is the benefit of a language for complexity- it makes it easier to discuss complex issues objectively and dispassionately.
• Without a shared language for dealing with complexity, team learning is limited. On the other hand, the benefits of teams developing fluency in the language of the systems archetypes are enormous, and the difficulties of mastering the language are actually reduced in a team. Language is collective. Learning a new language, by definition, means learning how to converse with one another in the language. There is simply no more effective way to learn a language than through use, which is exactly what happens when a team starts to learn the language of systems thinking.

PART 4
Prototypes

• Prototypes are essential to discovering and solving the key problems that stand between an idea and its full and successful implementation. Significant innovation cannot be achieved by talking about new ideas: you must build and test prototypes. The prototyping era for any new significant innovation is a time of searching for synergy, for pulling together diverse elements into a new whole.
• Just as so may of the most "learningful" aircraft prototypes crashed, so will many of the most daring and important organizational prototypes fail, with painful consequences for everyone involved. Yet these are often the experiments from which most learning is learned.
• Whether or not the five disciplines learned in this book prove sufficient will depend on whether, in concert, they can resolve the practical problems and issues faced by the prototype learning issues. These include:
• Openness-- How can the internal politics and game playing that dominates traditional organizations be transcended?
• Localness—How can an organization distribute business responsibility widely and still retain coordination and control?
• A Manager’s Time -- How can personal mastery and learning flourish both at work and home?
• Microworlds—How can we learn from experience the consequences of our most important decisions?
• The Leader’s New Work-- What is the nature of the commitment and skills required to lead learning organizations?

PART 5 Coda

A Sixth Discipline

• The five disciplines now converging appear to comprise a critical mass. They make building learning organizations a systematic undertaking, rather than a matter of happenstance.
• But there will be other innovations in the future. If the airplane analogy is apt, perhaps one or two developments emerging in seemingly unlikely places, will lead to a wholly new discipline that we cannot even grasp today.

• The tools for systems thinking are specially designed for understanding dynamic complexity – when "cause and effect" are not close in time and space and obvious interventions do not produce expected outcomes.
• They help in seeing underlying structures and patterns of behavior that are obscured in the fury of daily events and the incessant activity that characterizes the manager’s life.
• They help in understanding why conventional solutions are failing and where higher leverage actions may be found.
• It is also important to recognize that we have enormous capacities to deal with detail complexity at the subconscious level that we do not have at the conscious level.
• It is also important to recognize that the subconscious can be "trained." There are many ways by which the subconscious gets programmed. Cultures, beliefs and language program the subconscious.
• Building learning organizations involves developing people who learn to see as systems thinkers see, who develop their own personal mastery, and who learn how to surface and restructure mental models, collaboratively.
• Given the influence of organizations in today’s world, this may be one of the most powerful steps toward helping us "rewrite the code," altering not just what we think but our predominant ways of thinking.
• In this sense, learning organizations may be a tool not just for the evolution of organizations, but for the evolution of intelligence.

• The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole.
• Nature is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes.
• All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary.
• We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them.
• Something new is always happening. And it has to do with it all – the whole
  
  

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