The Fifth Discipline

Slide 1: 

The Fifth Discipline By: Peter M. Senge

Slide 2: 

Peter Senge Born in 1947, Peter Senge graduated in engineering from Stanford and then went on to undertake a masters on social systems modeling at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) before completing his PhD on Management. Said to be a rather unassuming man, he is is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   He is also founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). His current areas of special interest focus on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.

Slide 3: 

Contents 1 The Five Disciplines 2 The Learning Disabilities 3 The 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline 4 See also 5 References

Slide 4: 

The Five Disciplines The five disciplines of the learning organization discussed in the book are: 1) Personal mastery 2) Mental models 3) Building shared vision 4) Team learning 5) Systems thinking - The Fifth Discipline that integrates the other 4

Slide 5: 

Personal mastery. ‘Organizations learn only through individuals who learn. Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. But without it no organizational learning occurs’ (Senge . Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energ ies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively’ (ibid.: 7) . It goes beyond competence and skills, although it involves them. It goes beyond spiritual opening, although it involves spiritual growth . Mastery is seen as a special kind of proficiency. It is not about dominance, but rather about calling. Vision is vocat ion rather than simply just a good idea.People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never ‘ar rive’. Sometimes, language, such as the term ‘personal mastery’ cre ates a misleading sense of definiteness, of black and white. But per sonal mastery is not something you possess. It is a process. It is a lifelong discipline. People with a high level of personal mastery are acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas.

Slide 6: 

Mental models.  These are ‘deeply ingrained assumptions, gener alizations, or even pictures and images that influence how we unde rstand the world and how we take action’ . As such they resemble what Donald A Schön talked about as a professional’s ‘repertoire’. We are often not that aware of the impact of such assumptions etc. on our behaviour – and, thus, a fundamental part of our task (as Schön would put it) is to develop the ability to reflect-in- and –on-action. Peter Senge is also influenced here by Schön’s collaborator on a number of projects, Chris Argyris. The discipline of mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny. It also includes the ability to carry on ‘learningful’ conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others. (Senge 1990: 9)

Slide 7: 

Building shared vision. Peter Senge starts from the position that if any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years, ‘it’s the capacity to hold a share picture of the future we seek to create’ . Such a vision has the power to be uplifting – and to encourage experimentation and innovation. Crucially, it is argued, it can also foster a sense of the long-term, something that is fundamental to the ‘fifth discipline’. When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-to-familiar ‘vision statement’), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to. But many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that galvanize an organization… What has been lacking is a discipline for translating vision into shared vision - not a ‘cookbook’ but a set of principles and guiding practices.The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared ‘pictures of the future’ that foster genuine commitment and enrolment ratherthan compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counter productiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.

Slide 8: 

Team learning. Such learning is viewed as ‘the process of aligning and developing the capacities of a team to create the results its members truly desire’ . It builds on personal mastery and shared vision – but these are not enough. People need to be able to act together. When teams learn together, Peter Senge suggests, not only can there be good results for the organization, members will grow more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise. The discipline of team learning starts with ‘dialogue’, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine ‘thinking together’. To the Greeks dia-logos meant a free-flowing if meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually…. [It] also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning.

Slide 9: 

The Learning Disabilities 1) "I am my position." People fail to recognize their purpose as a part of the enterprise. Instead, they see themselves as an inconsequential part of a system over which they have little influence, leading them to limit themselves to the jobs they must perform at their own positions. This makes it hard to pinpoint the reason an enterprise is failing, with so many hidden 'loose screws' around. 2) "The enemy out there." 3) The Illusion of Taking Charge 4) The Fixation of Events The tendency to see things as results of short-term events undermines our ability to see things on a grander scale. Cave men needed to react to events quickly for survival. However, the biggest threats we face nowadays are rarely sudden events, but slow, gradual processes, such as environmental changes. 5) The Parable of the Boiling frog 6) The Delusion of Learning from Experience 7) The Myth of the Management Team.

Slide 10: 

The 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline 1) Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions." 2) The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. 3) Behavior will grow worse before it grows better. 4) The easy way out usually leads back in. 5) The cure can be worse than the disease. 6) Faster is slower. 7) Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. 8) Small changes can produce big results...but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious. 9) You can have your cake and eat it too ---but not all at once. 10) Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. 11) There is no blame.

Slide 11: 

Organizational knowledge Some of this knowledge can be termed technical – knowing the meaning of technical words and phrases, being able to read and make sense of data and being able to act on the basis of generalizations. Scientific knowledge is ‘propositional’; it takes the form of causal generalizations – whenever A, then B. For example, whenever water reaches the temperature of 100 degrees, it boils; whenever it boils, it turns into steam; steam generates pressure when in an enclosed space; pressure drives engines. A large part of the knowledge used by managers, however, does not assume this form. The complexities of a manager’s task are such that applying A may result in B, C, or Z. A recipe or an idea that solved very well a particular problem, may, in slightly different circumstances backfire and lead to ever more problems. In contrast to the scientific knowledge that guides the engineer, the physician or the chemist, managers are often informed by a different type of know-how Managers often use knowledge in the way that a handyman will use his or her skills, the materials and tools that are at hand to meet the demands of a particular situation. Unlike an engineer who will plan carefully and scientifically his or her every action to deliver the desired outcome, such as a steam engine, a handyman is flexible and opportunistic, often using materials in unorthodox or unusual ways, and relies a lot on trial and error

Slide 12: 

Individual learning : A learning organization actively creates, captures, transfers, and mobilizes knowledge to enable it to adapt to a changing environment Others take it farther with continuous learning. The world is orders of magnitude more dynamic than that of our parents, or even when we were young. Waves of change are crashing on us virtually one on top of another. Change has become the norm rather than the exception. Continuous learning throughout one’s career has become essential to remain relevant in the workplace. Again, necessary but not sufficient to describe organizational learning Learning by individuals in an organizational context is the traditional domain of human resources, including activities such as: training, increasing skills, work experience, and formal education. Given that the success of any organization is founded on the knowledge of the people who work for it, these activities will and, indeed, must continue. However, individual learning is only a prerequisite to organizational learning.

Slide 13: 

Systems thinking – the cornerstone of the learning organization A great virtue of Peter Senge’s work is the way in which he puts systems theory to work. The Fifth Discipline provides a good introduction to the basics and uses of such theory – and the way in which it can be brought together with other theoretical devices in order to make sense of organizational questions and issues. Systemic thinking is the conceptual cornerstone (‘The Fifth Discipline’) of his approach Here is not the place to go into a detailed exploration of Senge’s presentation of systems theory However, it is necessary to highlight one or two elements of his argument. First, while the basic tools of systems theory are fairly straightforward they can build into sophisticated models. ‘We learn best from our experience, but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions’, We tend to think that cause and effect will be relatively near to one another. Thus when faced with a problem, it is the ‘solutions’ that are close by that we focus upon. Classically we look to actions that produce improvements in a relatively short time span The systems viewpoint is generally oriented toward the long-term view. That’s why delays and feedback loops are so important. In the short term, you can often ignore them; they’re inconsequential. They only come back to haunt you in the long term.

Slide 14: 

Leading the learning organization Peter Senge argues that learning organizations require a new view of leadership. He sees the traditional view of leaders (as special people who set the direction, make key decisions and energize the troops as deriving from a deeply individualistic and non-systemic worldview . Leader as designer. The functions of design are rarely visible, Peter Senge argues, yet no one has a more sweeping influence than the designer . The organization’s policies, strategies and ‘systems’ are key area of design, but leadership goes beyond this. Integrating the five component technologies is fundamental Leader as steward. While the notion of leader as steward is, perhaps, most commonly associated with writers such as Peter Block (1993), Peter Senge has some interesting insights on this strand. Leader as teacher. Peter Senge starts here with Max de Pree’s (1990) injunction that the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. While leaders may draw inspiration and spiritual reserves from their sense of stewardship, ‘much of the leverage leaders can actually exert lies in helping people achieve more accurate, more insightful and more empowering views of reality .

Slide 15: 

Issues and problems When making judgements about Peter Senge’s work, and the ideas he promotes, we need to place his contribution in context. His is not meant to be a definitive addition to the ‘academic’ literature of organizational learning. Peter Senge writes for practicing and aspiring managers and leaders. The concern is to identify how interventions can be made to turn organizations into ‘learning organization Organizational imperatives. Here the case against Peter Senge is fairly simple. We can find very few organizations that come close to the combination of characteristics that he identifies with the learning organization. Within a capitalist system his vision of companies and organizations turning wholehearted to the cultivation of the learning of their members can only come into fruition in a limited number of instances A question of sophistication and disposition. One of the biggest problems with Peter Senge’s approach is nothing to do with the theory, it’s rightness, nor the way it is presented. The issue here is that the people to whom it is addressed do not have the disposition or theoretical tools to follow it through. To think through and define the specific purpose and mission of the institution, whether business enterprise, hospital, or university. To make work productive and the worker achieving Politics and vision. Here we need to note two key problem areas. First, there is a question of how Peter Senge applies systems theory. While he introduces all sorts of broader appreciations and attends to values – his theory is not fully set in a political or moral framework. There is not a consideration of questions of social justice, democracy and exclusion

Slide 16: 

Conclusion John van Maurik (2001: 201) has suggested that Peter Senge has been ahead of his time and that his arguments are insightful and revolutionary. He goes on to say that it is a matter of regret ‘that more organizations have not taken his advice and have remained geared to the quick fix’. As we have seen there are very deep-seated reasons why this may have been the case. Beyond this, though, there is the questions of whether Senge’s vision of the learning organization and the disciplines it requires has contributed to more informed and committed action with regard to organizational life? Here we have little concrete evidence to go on. However, we can make some judgements about the possibilities of his theories and proposed practices. We could say that while there are some issues and problems with his conceptualization, at least it does carry within it some questions around what might make for human flourishing. The emphases on building a shared vision, team working, personal mastery and the development of more sophisticated mental models and the way he runs the notion of dialogue through these does have the potential of allowing workplaces to be more convivial and creative. The drawing together of the elements via the Fifth Discipline of systemic thinking, while not being to everyone’s taste, also allows us to approach a more holistic understanding of organizational life (although Peter Senge does himself stop short of asking some important questions in this respect). These are still substantial achievements – and when linked to his popularizing of the notion of the ‘learning organization’ – it is understandable why Peter Senge has been recognized as a key thinker.