Peter Senge Teaches Organizations to Learn 133.0

Systems thinking puts the world together
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, considers systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and dialogue as the “core learning capabilities of teams.”

I first read The Fifth Discipline in the 1990s as a pioneering but, I thought, standalone work on the same stream as Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing and Total Quality Management (TQM).

I found Peter Senge again when I started blogging on national innovation systems (NIS) and concluded that systems thinking is a common thread in learning for teams and for economies.

The Back Story. Bengt Ake Lundvall, from Denmark, through his studies from 1988 of NIS as the interaction between STI- and DUI-learning, later inferred that the innovative economy is one that is organized for continuously learning.

NIS has Joseph Schumpeter, with his holistic and evolutionary view of economics, i.e the entrepreneur and creative destruction as the source of growth, as its intellectual inspiration.

Evolutionary economics has a leading light in Richard Nelson of Columbia University. Professor Nelson spent his younger days at RAND Corporation whose achievements stem from its development of systems analysis – a holistic view of the world.

Both Lundvall and Nelson are also involved in GLOBELICS, the Global Network on the Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence-Building Systems. The use of the word ‘system’ as vector in NIS versus the more benign word ‘network’ is often emphasized in the literature.

Professor Lundvall, particularly, has been SYNTHESiST’s inspiration for national innovation systems in nineteen out of 133 posts starting from Post 17. I wrote about Professor Nelson and his foundation book, Technical Change and Economic Theory (1988), in Post 113.

Therefore, the holistic and systems thinking approach run in parallel in America and Europe.

Peter Senge, in 1990, considered systems thinking as the integrating discipline for learning organizations.

The Book. Systems thinking is the fifth discipline. The four other core disciplines are: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. Here we quote lengthily from Professor Senge’s book.

“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing whole. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’ It is a set of general principles [and] … specific tools and techniques. [Finally], systems thinking is a sensibility – for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems heir unique character.”

Personal mastery is “the discipline of personal growth and learning… [where] learning is expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life. Organizations learn only through individuals who learn.”

Mental models are “internal pictures of how the world works. They are active – they shape how we act. They affect what we see. [On one hand], the inertia of deeply entrenched mental models can overwhelm even the best systemic insights. [On the other hand, learning can be accelerated by] bring mental models to the surface and challenging them so they can be improved.”

Shared vision is “a force in peoples heart. At its simplest level, [it] is the answer to the question, ‘What do we want to create?’ [It} provides he focus and energy for learning.”

‘Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire. [It] involves mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion. In dialogue, there is a … deep ‘listening’ to one another and suspending of one’s own views. Mastering team learning [is] a critical step in building earning organizations.”

The five disciplines work together as the legs of one stool of organization learning.

The Fifth Dimension is considered by the Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the past seventy-five years. Like reading the Bible, I found continuing relevance as principle and as tool upon re-reading it recently.

SYNTHESiST and Systems Thinking. The famous aphorism on systems thinking is a subtle dig on the deductive approach of analytics: “one cannot learn about the elephant by cutting it up.”

The SYNTHESiST, as one who synthesizes or puts together, is biased towards the holistic approach though it cannot fully separate itself from its partner, the analyst.

I have two ongoing projects involving innovation and change management: one on corporate culture and another on adjusting to automation and a major increase in client flows due to clustering.

In both cases, I used the learning academy as virtual classroom and GE workout and quality circle techniques to excite ‘thinking together’ and institutionalize Peter Senge concept of learning – as expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life.

I hope the seeds planted keep and grow.

Click here for Amazon links for The Fifth Discipline.