The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline describes how sustainably competitive organizations comprehend the interconnectedness of people, ideas, and their operating context, can identify and treat causal, rather than the symptomatic barriers to learning, and can nurture ongoing reflective practice and open communication throughout the organization. Called “Systems Thinking”, Senge describes the practices through a series of understandings, or “laws” focused on seeing wholes rather than parts. He describes how feedback loops can obscure big-picture structures with small-picture details. Senge illuminates four core disciplines which, when integrated into a cohesive whole using systems thinking, contribute to effective organizational learning. Finally, he proposes several strategies for building learning organizations building capacity in individuals to the benefit of both themselves and the organization. Senge’s work promotes a vision of organizations as dynamic systems that can grow, respond, and lead change because individuals are learning and contributing to a body of knowledge and wisdom in response to the needs of the organization. The Fifth Discipline describes how to understand and manage the ecosystem’s elements on a way that creates effective learning organizations

Organizations work the way they do because of how we work, how we think and interact; the changes required ahead are not only in our organizations but in ourselves as well.

“The critical moment comes when people realize that this learning organization work is about each one of us”

In building learning organizations there is no ultimate destination or end state, only a lifelong journey. “This work requires great reservoirs of patience,”
The team that became great didn’t start off great—it learned how to produce extraordinary results.

Systems Thinking

All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it’s doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.

Focus on the whole

Personal Mastery

“Mastery” might suggest gaining dominance over people or things. But mastery can also mean a special level of proficiency. A master craftsman doesn’t dominate pottery or weaving. People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them—in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision
focusing our energies
developing patience
seeing reality objectively

As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation. An organization’s commitment to and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members.

The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.

Mental models start 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.

Must know yourself and your biases
Understand how our perceptions and experiences shape our reality
Find people to triangulate your views…. Approach with openness

Vision

When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-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. All too often, a company’s shared vision has revolved around the charisma of a leader, or around a crisis that galvanizes everyone temporarily. But, given a choice, most people opt for pursuing a lofty goal, not only in times of crisis but at all times. What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision—not a “cookbook” but a set of principles and guiding practices.

Shared Vision

The practice of 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 counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.

Vision must come from everyone. We all must feel it

Communication

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 dialogos meant a free-flowing of meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually.
Dialogue differs from the more common “discussion,” which has its roots with “percussion” and “concussion,” literally a heaving of ideas back and forth in a winner-takes-all competition.
The discipline of dialogue also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning. The patterns of defensiveness are often deeply ingrained in how a team operates. If unrecognized, they undermine learning. If recognized and surfaced creatively, they can accelerate learning.
Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. Unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.

Discipline

By “discipline,” I do not mean an “enforced order” or “means of punishment,” but a body of theory and technique that must be studied and mastered to be put into practice. A discipline (from the Latin disciplina, to learn) is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies.
As with any discipline, some people have an innate gift, but anyone can develop proficiency through practice.
To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner. You never arrive; you spend your life mastering disciplines.
You can never say, “We are a learning organization,” any more than you can say, “I am an enlightened person.” The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance. Thus, a corporation cannot be “excellent” in the sense of having arrived at permanent excellence; it is always in the state of practicing the disciplines of learning, of getting better or worse.
Practicing a discipline is different from emulating a model. Benchmarking best practices can open people’s eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up.
Organizations all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.” I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another “great person.”

The Fifth Discipline

It is the discipline that 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.

For example, vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.
Systems thinking also needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its potential.
Building shared vision fosters a commitment to the long term.
Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world.
Team learning develops the skills of groups of people to look for the larger picture beyond individual perspectives.
Personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world. Without personal mastery, people are so steeped in the reactive mindset (“someone/something else is creating my problems”) that they are deeply threatened by the system’s perspective.
Lastly, systems thinking makes understandable the subtlest aspect of the learning organization—the new way individuals perceive themselves and their world. At the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind—from seeing ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as caused by someone or something “out there” to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience. A learning organization is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality. And how they can change it. As Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough … and single-handed I can move the world.”

The word is “metanoia” and it means a shift of mind. The word has a rich history. For the Greeks, it meant a fundamental shift or change, or more literally transcendence (“meta”—above or beyond, as in “metaphysics”) of mind (“noia,” from the root “nous,” of mind).
To grasp the meaning of “metanoia” is to grasp the deeper meaning of “learning,” for learning also involves a fundamental shift or movement of mind. The problem with talking about “learning organizations” is that the “learning” has lost its central meaning in contemporary usage.
Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we recreate ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.
There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning. As anthropologist Edward Hall says, “Humans are the learning organism par excellence. The drive to learn is as strong as the sexual drive—it begins earlier and lasts longer.”

Learning organization—an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future. For such an organization, it is not enough merely to survive. “Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important—indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning,” learning that enhances our capacity to create.

THE ILLUSION OF TAKING CHARGE

All too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise. Whether in business or politics, 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.
Conversations in organizations are dominated by concern with events: last month’s sales, the new budget cuts, last quarter’s earnings, who just got promoted or fired, the new product our competitors just announced, the delay that just was announced in our new product, and so on. Focusing on events leads to “event” explanations: but they distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from understanding the causes of those patterns. Our fixation on events is actually part of our evolutionary programming. If you wanted to design a cave person for survival, ability to contemplate the cosmos would not be a high-ranking design criterion. What is important is the ability to see the saber-toothed tiger over your left shoulder and react quickly. The irony is that, today, the primary threats to our survival, both of our organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes.

Generative learning 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. But we cannot learn to create.

We learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.

Cycles are particularly hard to see, and thus learn from, if they last longer than a year or two.
Must step back and see the bigger picture. Galilean Relativity, you’re never aware of the system your in.

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.
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 (for example, the cardiovascular and neuromuscular) means 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.
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.

STRUCTURE INFLUENCES BEHAVIOR

When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

Two thirds of the way through War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy breaks off from his narrative about the history of Napoleon and czarist Russia to contemplate why historians, in general, are unable to explain very much: The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century present the spectacle of an extraordinary movement of millions of men. Men leave their habitual pursuits; rush from one side of Europe to the other; plunder, slaughter one another, triumph and despair; and the whole current of life is transformed and presents a quickened activity, first moving at a growing speed, and then slowly slackening again. What was the cause of that activity, or from what laws did it arise? asked the human intellect. The historians, in reply to that inquiry, lay before us the sayings and doings of some dozens of men in one of the buildings in the city of Paris, summing up those doings and sayings by one word—revolution. Then they give us a detailed biography of Napoleon, and of certain persons favorably or hostilely disposed to him; talk of the influence of some of these persons upon others; and then say that this it is to which the activity is due; and these are its laws. But, the human intellect not only refuses to believe in that explanation, but flatly declares that the method of explanation is not a correct one … The sum of men’s individual wills produced both the revolution and Napoleon; and only the sum of those wills endured them and then destroyed them. “But whenever there have been wars, there have been great military leaders; whenever there have been revolutions in states, there have been great men,” says history. “Whenever there have been great military leaders there have, indeed, been wars,” replies the human reason; “but that does not prove that the generals were the cause of the wars, and that the factors leading to warfare can be found in the personal activity of one man….

Systemic structure is concerned with the key interrelationships that influence behavior over time. These are not interrelationships between people, but among key variables, such as population, natural resources, and food production in a developing country; or engineers’ product ideas and technical and managerial know-how in a high-tech company.

THE LEARNING DISABILITIES AND OUR WAYS OF THINKING

Because they “become their position,” people do not see how their actions affect the other positions. Consequently, when problems arise, they quickly blame each other—“the enemy” becomes the players at the other positions, or even the customers.
When they get “proactive” and place more orders, they make matters worse. Because their over ordering builds up gradually, they don’t realize the direness of their situation until it’s too late.
They don’t learn from their experience because the most important consequences of their actions occur elsewhere in the system, eventually coming back to create the very problems they blame on others.
The “teams” running the different positions become consumed with blaming the other players for their problems, precluding any opportunity to learn from one another’s experience.

“Pattern of behavior” explanations focus on seeing longer-term trends and assessing their implications.

Structural explanation focuses on answering the question, “What causes the patterns of behavior?”
The reason that structural explanations are so important is that only they address the underlying causes of behavior at a level at which patterns of behavior can be changed.
Structure produces behavior, and changing underlying structures can produce different patterns of behavior.
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.
Deepest insight usually comes when they realize that their problems, and their hopes for improvement, are inextricably tied to how they think. Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization where “event thinking” predominates. It requires a conceptual framework of “structural” or systemic thinking, the ability to discover structural causes of behavior.
Enthusiasm for “creating our future” is not enough.

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.

Bringing issues to light as early as possible. Create and instill a “reflex” for addressing problems or friction.

Compensating Feedback

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. The harder he worked, the more work there was to do.
As individuals and organizations, we not only get drawn into compensating feedback, we often glorify the suffering that ensues. When our initial efforts fail to produce lasting improvements, we push harder—to the creed that hard work will overcome all obstacles, all the while blinding ourselves to how we are contributing to the obstacles ourselves.

Behavior grows better before it grows worse.

Low-leverage interventions would be much less alluring if it were not for the fact that many actually work, in the short term.

The easy way out usually leads back in

If the solution were easy to see or obvious to everyone, it probably would already have been found. 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.

The cure can be worse than the disease

The long-term, most insidious consequence of applying nonsystemic solutions is increased need for more and more of the solution.
“Shifting the burden” structures show that any long-term solution must, as Meadows says, “strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens.”

Faster is slower

For most American business people the best rate of growth is fast, faster, fastest. Yet, virtually 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.

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space

There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality. The first step in correcting that mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are close in time and space.

Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.

Systems thinking also shows that small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. Systems thinkers refer to this principle as “leverage.”
Tackling a difficult problem is often a matter of seeing where the high leverage lies, a change which—with a minimum of effort—would lead to lasting, significant improvement.
The only problem is that high-leverage changes are usually highly non obvious to most participants in the system. They are not “close in time and space” to obvious problem symptoms. This is what makes life interesting. Buckminster Fuller had a wonderful illustration of leverage that also served as his metaphor for the principle of leverage—the “trim tab.” A trim tab is a small “rudder on the rudder” of a ship. It is only a fraction the size of the rudder. Its function is to make it easier to turn the rudder, which, then, makes it easier to turn the ship. The larger the ship, the more important is the trim tab
There are no simple rules for finding high-leverage changes, but there are ways of thinking that make it more likely. Learning to see underlying structures rather than events is a starting point; Thinking in terms of processes of change rather than snapshots is another.

Principle of the System Boundary

Seeing “whole elephants” does not mean that every organizational issue can be understood only by looking at the entire organization. Some issues can be understood only by looking at how major functions such as manufacturing, marketing, and research interact; but there are other issues where critical systemic forces arise within a given functional area; and others where the dynamics of an entire industry must be considered. 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.
There is something in all of us that loves to put together a puzzle, that loves to see the image of the whole emerge.

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.” It is a set of general principles—distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management. And systems thinking is a sensibility—for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.

Complexity can easily undermine confidence and responsibility—as in the frequent refrain, “It’s all too complex for me,” or “There’s nothing I can do. It’s the system.” Systems thinking is the antidote to this sense of helplessness that many feel as we enter the “age of interdependence.” Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the “structures” that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change.

Complexity, situations where cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity. Following a complex set of instructions to assemble a machine involves detail complexity, as does taking inventory in a discount retail store. But none of these situations is especially complex dynamically.
When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in another part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity.

Unfortunately, most systems analyses focus on detail complexity not dynamic complexity. Simulations with thousands of variables and complex arrays of details can actually distract us from seeing patterns and major interrelationships.

Systems Thinking to Handle Complexity

Seeing the major interrelationships underlying a problem leads to new insight into what might be done.
The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind: seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and seeing processes of change rather than snapshots

Feedback

Systems thinking starts with understanding a simple concept called “feedback” that shows how actions can reinforce or counteract (balance) each other. It builds to learning to recognize types of “structures” that recur again and again:

“Positive feedback” means encouraging remarks and “negative feedback” means bad news. But in systems thinking, feedback is a broader concept. It means any reciprocal flow of influence. In systems thinking it is an axiom that every influence is both cause and effect. Nothing is ever influenced in just one direction.

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. Linear thinking.

Language shapes perception

What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.
Causal attributions made in everyday English are embedded in linear ways of seeing. They are at best partially accurate, inherently biased toward describing portions of reciprocal processes, not the entire process. Another idea overturned by the feedback perspective is anthropocentrism—or seeing ourselves as the center of activities.
The simple description, “I am filling the glass of water,” suggests a world of human actors standing at the center of activity, operating on an inanimate reality. 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. It allows us to see how we are continually both influenced by and influencing our reality. It is the shift in awareness so ardently advocated by ecologists in their cries that we see ourselves as part of nature, not separate from nature. It is the shift in awareness recognized by many of the world’s great philosophical systems—for example, the Bhagavad Gita’s chastisement: All actions are wrought by the qualities of nature only. The self, deluded by egoism, thinketh: “I am the doer.”

In mastering systems thinking, we give up the assumption that there is an individual, or individual agent, responsible. The feedback perspective suggests that everyone shares responsibility for problems generated by a system. That doesn’t necessarily imply that everyone involved can exert equal leverage in changing the system.

REINFORCING AND BALANCING FEEDBACK AND DELAYS: THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF SYSTEMS THINKING

There are two distinct types of feedback processes: reinforcing and balancing.

Reinforcing (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. Reinforcing feedback can also generate accelerating decline—a pattern of decline where small drops amplify themselves into larger and larger drops, such as the decline in bank assets when there is a financial panic.

Balancing (or stabilizing) feedback operates whenever there is a goal-oriented behavior. If the goal is to be not moving, then balancing feedback will act the way the brakes in a car do. If the goal is to be moving at sixty miles per hour, then balancing feedback will cause you to accelerate to sixty but no faster. The goal can be an explicit target, as when a firm seeks a desired market share, or it can be implicit, such as a bad habit, which despite disavowing, we stick to nevertheless. In addition, many feedback processes contain “delays,” interruptions in the flow of influence which make the consequences of actions occur gradually. If you are in a balancing system, you are in a system that is seeking stability. If the system’s goal is one you like, you will be happy. If it is not, you will find all your efforts to change matters frustrated—until you can either change the goal or weaken its influence.

REINFORCING FEEDBACK: DISCOVERING HOW SMALL CHANGES CAN GROW

If you are in a reinforcing feedback system, you may be blind to how small actions can grow into large consequences—for better or for worse. Seeing the system often allows you to influence how it works.
- For example, managers frequently fail to appreciate the extent to which their own expectations influence subordinates’ performance. If I see a person as having high potential, I give him special attention to develop that potential. When he flowers, I feel that my original assessment was correct and I help him still further. Conversely, those I regard as having lower potential languish in disregard and inattention, perform in a disinterested manner, and further justify, in my mind, the lack of attention I give them. 🤦‍♂️gulty!
In reinforcing processes such as the Pygmalion effect, a small change builds on itself. Whatever movement occurs is amplified, producing more movement in the same direction. A small action snowballs, with more and more and still more of the same, resembling compounding interest. Some reinforcing (amplifying) processes are “vicious cycles,” in which things start off badly and grow worse.
There’s nothing inherently bad about reinforcing loops. There are also virtuous cycles—processes that reinforce in desired directions. For instance, physical exercise can lead to a reinforcing spiral; you feel better, thus you exercise more, thus you’re rewarded by feeling better and exercise still more. The growth of any new product involves reinforcing spirals. For example, many products grow from “word of mouth.” Word of mouth about a product can reinforce a snowballing demand (as occurred with the Volkswagen Beetle and the ipod) as satisfied customers tell others who then become satisfied customers, who tell still others. With today’s network devices the physical act of sharing information (or songs) adds another reinforcing dynamic: once one person has such a device, the information can only be shared with others with similar devices.

Balancing feedback processes are everywhere/ Delays

They underlie all goal-oriented behavior.
Complex organisms such as the human body contain thousands of balancing feedback processes that maintain temperature and balance, heal our wounds, adjust our eyesight to the amount of light, and alert us to threat. In general, balancing loops are more difficult to see than reinforcing loops because it often looks like nothing is happening. There’s no dramatic growth of sales and marketing expenditures, “One of the highest leverage points for improving system performance, is the minimization of system delays.”
Delays between actions and consequences are everywhere in human systems. We invest now to reap a benefit in the distant future; we hire a person today but it may be months before he or she is fully productive; we commit resources to a new project knowing that it will be years before it will pay off. But delays are often unappreciated and lead to instability.
Virtually all feedback processes have some form of delay. But often the delays are either unrecognized or not well understood. This can result in “overshoot,” going further than needed to achieve a desired result. The delay between eating and feeling full has been the nemesis of many a happy diner;

Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. Conversely, learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them. One of the most important, and potentially most empowering, insights to come from the young field of systems thinking is that certain 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—of which there are only a relatively small number—suggest that not all management problems are unique, something that experienced managers know intuitively.

Unification of Knowledge

The greatest promise of the systems perspective is the unification of knowledge across all fields—for these same archetypes recur in biology, psychology, and family therapy; in economics, political science, and ecology; as well as in management.
Because they are subtle, when the archetypes arise in a family, an ecosystem, a news story, or a corporation, you often don’t see them so much as feel them. Sometimes they produce a sense of deja vu, a hunch that you’ve seen this pattern of forces before.
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.

System Archetypes

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. Once a systems archetype is identified, it will always suggest areas of high-and low-leverage change.

ARCHETYPE 1: LIMITS TO GROWTH DEFINITION

A reinforcing (amplifying) process is set in motion to produce a desired result. It creates a spiral of success but also creates inadvertent secondary effects (manifested in a balancing process) which eventually slow down the success.

MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLE Don’t push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.

But there is another way to deal with limits to growth situations. In each of them, leverage lies in the balancing loop—not the reinforcing loop. To change the behavior of the system, you must identify and change the limiting factor. This may require actions you may not yet have considered, choices you never noticed, or difficult changes in rewards and norms. To reach your desired weight may be impossible by dieting alone—you need to speed up the body’s metabolic rate, which may require aerobic exercise.

There will always be more limiting processes. When one source of limitation is removed or made weaker, growth returns until a new source of limitation is encountered. The skillful leader is always focused on the next set of limitations and working to understand their nature and how they can be addressed. In some settings, like the growth of a biological population, the fundamental lesson is that growth eventually will stop. Efforts to extend the growth by removing limits can actually be counterproductive, forestalling the eventual day of reckoning, which given the pace of change that reinforcing processes can create (remember the French lily pads) may be sooner than we think.

ARCHETYPE 2: SHIFTING THE BURDEN

“solutions” only ameliorate the symptoms; they leave the underlying problem unaltered. The underlying problem grows worse, unnoticed because the symptoms apparently clear up, and the system loses whatever abilities it had to solve the underlying problem.

MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLE Beware the symptomatic solution. Solutions that address only the symptoms of a problem, not fundamental causes, tend to have short-term benefits at best. In the long term, the problem resurfaces and there is increased pressure for symptomatic response. Meanwhile, the capability for fundamental solutions can atrophy.

Shifting the burden structures are common in our personal as well as organizational lives. They come into play when there are obvious symptoms of problems that cry out for attention, and quick and ready “fixes” that can make these symptoms go away, at least for a while.

Shifting the burden structures tend to produce periodic crises, when the symptoms of stress surface. The crises are usually resolved with more of the symptomatic solution, causing the symptoms to temporarily improve. What is often less evident is a slow, long-term drift to lower levels of health: financial health for the corporation or physical health for the individual. The problem symptom grows worse and worse. The longer the deterioration goes unnoticed, or the longer people wait to confront the fundamental causes, the more difficult it can be to reverse the situation. While the fundamental response loses power, the symptomatic response grows stronger and stronger.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN “SHIFTING THE BURDEN” STORY There are three clues to the presence of a shifting the burden structure.

There’s a problem that gets gradually worse over the long term—although every so often it seems to get better for a while.
The overall health of the system gradually worsens.
There’s a growing feeling of helplessness. People start out feeling euphoric—they’ve solved their problem!—but instead end up feeling as if they are victims.

In particular, look for situations of dependency, in which you have a sense that the real issues, the deeper issues, are never quite dealt with effectively. Again, once you have such a situation in mind, see if you can identify the appropriate elements of the reinforcing and balancing loops.
Start by identifying the “problem symptom.” This will be the “squeaky wheel” that demands attention—such as stress, subordinates’ inabilities to solve pressing problems, falling market share. Then identify a “fundamental solution” (there may be more than one)—a course of action that would, you believe, lead to enduring improvement. What is most valuable is recognizing the multiple ways in which a problem can be addressed, from the most fundamental to the most superficial. Then identify the possible negative “side effects” of the symptomatic solution. The primary insights in shifting the burden will come from (1) distinguishing different types of solutions; (2) seeing how reliance on symptomatic solutions can reinforce further reliance. The leverage will always involve strengthening the bottom circle, and/or weakening the top circle. Just as with limits to growth, it’s best to test your conclusions here with small actions—and to give the tests time to come to fruition. In particular, strengthening an atrophied ability will most likely take a long period of time.

SELF-LIMITING OR SELF-SUSTAINING GROWTH

Leverage in most real-life systems is not obvious to most of the actors in those systems. Our non-systemic ways of thinking consistently lead us to focus on low-leverage changes.
Because we don’t see the structures underlying our actions, we focus on symptoms where the stress is greatest. We repair the symptoms, but such efforts only make matters better in the short run, at best, and often worse in the long run.

Growth and Underinvestment

This archetype operates whenever a company limits its own growth through underinvestment. Underinvestment means building less capacity than is needed to serve rising customer demand. You can recognize growth and underinvestment by the failure of a firm to achieve its potential growth despite everyone’s working tremendously hard (a sign of the underinvestment). Usually, there is continuing financial stress—which, ironically, is both cause and consequence of underinvestment. Financial stress makes aggressive investment difficult or impossible, but today’s financial stress originates in the underinvestment of the past. If you look closely, you will also see eroding or declining quality standards.
Two things make this pattern hard to see. 1. it is gradual. If all this happened in a month, the whole organization or industry would be mobilized to prevent it. 2. managers in the middle of the syndrome see so many urgent problems requiring attention—and they are unequipped to see the larger patterns. The art of systems thinking lies in being able to recognize increasingly (dynamically) complex and subtle structures,

Information Problem

The problem 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 that can help groups or teams develop shared understanding.

When personal mastery becomes a discipline—an activity we integrate into our lives—it embodies two underlying movements.

The first is continually clarifying what is important to us. We often spend so much time coping with problems along our path that we forget why we are on that path in the first place. The result is that we only have a dim, or even inaccurate, view of what’s really important to us.
The second is continually learning how to see current reality more clearly.

Creative Tension

The juxtaposition of vision (what we want) and a clear picture of current reality (where we are relative to what we want) generates what we call “creative tension”: a force to bring them together, caused by the natural tendency of tension to seek resolution.
The essence of personal mastery is learning how to generate and sustain creative tension in our lives. “Learning” in this context does not mean acquiring more information, but expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life.

Characteristics of Personal Mastery

They have a special sense of purpose,a vision is a calling.
They see current reality” as an ally, not an enemy.
They have learned how to perceive and work with forces of change rather than resist those forces.
They are deeply inquisitive, committed to continually seeing reality more and more accurately.
They feel connected to others and to life itself. Yet they sacrifice none of their uniqueness.
They feel personal mastery is not something you possess. It is a process. It is a lifelong discipline.
Acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas. And they are deeply self-confident.…
Are more committed.
They take more initiative.
They have a broader and deeper sense of responsibility in their work.
They learn faster.

At Hanover, O’Brien wrote about “advanced maturity” as entailing building and holding deep values, making commitments to goals larger than oneself, being open, exercising free will, and continually striving for an accurate picture of reality. Such people, he asserted, also have a capacity for delayed gratification, which makes it possible for them to aspire to objectives which others would disregard, even considering “the impact of their choices on succeeding generations.” In an interesting foreshadowing of interest in “emotional intelligence” a decade later, he pointed to a deficiency in modern society’s commitment to human development: Whatever the reasons, we do not pursue emotional development with the same intensity with which we believe that, over the long term, the more we practice the higher virtues of life, the more economic success we will have.”

THE DISCIPLINE OF PERSONAL MASTERY

The way to begin developing a sense of personal mastery is to approach it as a discipline, as a series of practices and principles that must be applied to be useful. Just as one becomes a master artist by continual practice, so the following principles and practices lay the groundwork for continually expanding the discipline of personal mastery.
The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery.

Personal vision comes from within.

Real vision cannot be understood in isolation from the idea of purpose.
George Bernard Shaw expressed the idea pointedly when he said: But vision is different from purpose. Purpose is similar to a direction, a general heading. Vision is a specific destination, a picture of a desired future. Purpose is abstract. Vision is concrete. Purpose is “advancing man’s capability to explore the heavens.” Vision is “a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.” Purpose is “being the best I can be,” “excellence.” Vision is breaking the four minute mile. It can truly be said that nothing happens until there is vision. But it is equally true that a vision with no underlying sense of purpose, no calling, is just a good idea—all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

This is why personal mastery must be a discipline. It is a process of continually focusing and refocusing on what one truly wants, on one’s visions.

It is exactly that courage to take a stand for one’s vision that distinguishes people with high levels of personal mastery. Or, as the Japanese say of the master’s stand, “When there is no break, not even the thickness of a hair comes between a man’s vision and his action.”

HOLDING CREATIVE TENSION

People often have great difficulty talking about their visions, even when the visions are clear. Why? Because we are acutely aware of the gaps between our vision and reality. “I would like to start my own company,” but “I don’t have the capital.” Or, “I would like to pursue the profession that I really love,” but “I’ve got to make a living.” These gaps can make a vision seem unrealistic or fanciful. They can discourage us or make us feel hopeless. But the gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there was no gap, there would be no need for any action to move toward the vision. Indeed, the gap is the source of creative energy. We call this gap creative tension.
The principle of creative tension is the central principle of personal mastery, integrating all elements of the discipline. Yet, it is easily misunderstood. For example, the very term “tension” suggests anxiety or stress. But creative tension doesn’t feel any particular way. It is the force that comes into play at the moment when we acknowledge a vision that is at odds with current reality.
People come to think that the creative process is all about being in a state of anxiety. But it is important to realize that these “negative” emotions that may arise when there is creative tension are not creative tension itself. These emotions are what we call emotional tension. If we fail to distinguish emotional tension from creative tension, we predispose ourselves to lowering our vision.
Mastery of creative tension brings out a capacity for perseverance and patience.

As Somerset Maugham said, “Only mediocre people are always at their best.”

We allow our goals to erode when we are unwilling to live with emotional tension. On the other hand, when we understand creative tension and allow it to operate by not lowering our vision, vision becomes an active force. Robert Fritz says, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.” Truly creative people use the gap between vision and current reality to generate energy for change.

It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does. Mastery of creative tension transforms the way one views “failure.” Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision. Failures are not about our unworthiness or powerlessness.

“A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.”

More broadly, current reality itself is, for many of us, the enemy. We fight against what is. We are not so much drawn to what we want to create as we are repelled by what we have, from our current reality. By this logic, the deeper the fear, the more we abhor what is, the more “motivated” we are to change. “Things must get bad enough, or people will not change in any fundamental way.”

“What is the first thing you would seek if you had a life of absolutely no problems?” The answer, overwhelmingly, is “change—to create something new.” So human beings are more complex than we often assume. We both fear and seek change. Or, as one seasoned organization change consultant once put it, “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

Robert Fritz. “It is more convenient to assume that reality is similar to our preconceived ideas than to freshly observe what we have before our eyes.” If the first choice in pursuing personal mastery is to be true to your own vision, the second fundamental choice in support of personal mastery is commitment to the truth.
As children we learn what our limitations are. Children are rightfully taught limitations essential to their survival. But too often this learning is generalized. We are constantly told we can’t have or can’t do certain things, and we may come to assume that we have an inability to have what we want.”
Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company’s goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear. In fact, sadly, most social movements operate through conflict manipulation or “negative vision,” focusing on getting away from what we don’t want, rather than on creating what we do want:
Fritz’s third generic strategy is the strategy of willpower where we simply psych ourselves up to overpower all forms of resistance to achieving our goals. Lying behind willpower strategies, he suggests, is the simple assumption that we motivate ourselves through heightened volition. Willpower is so common among highly successful people that many see its characteristics as synonymous with success: maniacal focus on goals, willingness to pay the price, ability to defeat any opposition and surmount any obstacle.Despite great success at work, the master of willpower will often find that he or she has gone through two marriages and has terrible relationships with his or her children. Somehow, the same dogged determination and goal orientation that works at work doesn’t quite turn the trick at home. What are you trying to achieve in life?

COMMITMENT TO THE TRUTH

It means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness, just as the great athlete with extraordinary peripheral vision keeps trying to see more of the playing field. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events. Specifically, people with high levels of personal mastery see more of the structural conflicts underlying their own behavior.
Once I recognized this pattern, I began to act differently when this happened. I became angry less often. Rather, there was a twinge of recognition—“Oh, there goes my pattern.” I looked more deeply at how my own actions were part of the outcome, either by creating tasks that were impossible to accomplish, or by undermining or not supporting the other person. Further, I worked to develop skills to discuss such situations with the people involved without producing defensiveness.
Once I saw the problem as structurally caused, I began to look at what I could do, rather than at what “they had done.” Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. Once we can see them and name them, they no longer have the same hold on us.

USING THE SUBCONSCIOUS, OR, YOU DON’T REALLY NEED TO FIGURE IT ALL OUT

What distinguishes people with high levels of personal mastery is they have developed a higher level of rapport between their normal awareness and this other dimension we have come to call the subconscious.
The greatest unexplored territory in the world is the space between our ears.
Equally important, the subconscious is critical to how we learn. At one point in your life you were unable to carry out “mundane” tasks such as walking, talking and eating. Each had to be learned. Initially, any new task requires a great deal of conscious attention and effort. As we “learn” the skills required of the task, the whole activity gradually shifts from conscious attention to subconscious control.But, for most of us, we have never given careful thought to how we mastered these skills and how we might continue to develop deeper and deeper rapport between our normal awareness and subconscious. Yet, these are matters of the greatest importance to the discipline of personal mastery.
The subconscious appears to have no particular volition. It neither generates its own objectives nor determines its own focus. It is highly subject to direction and conditioning—what we pay attention to takes on special significance to the subconscious. In our normal highly active state of mind, the subconscious is deluged with contradictory thoughts and feelings. In a quieter state of mind, when we then focus on something of particular importance, some aspect of our vision, the subconscious is undistracted.

A useful starting exercise for learning how to focus more clearly on desired results is to take any particular goal or aspect of your vision. First imagine that that goal is fully realized. Then ask yourself the question, “If I actually had this, what would it get me?” What people often discover is that the answer to that question reveals deeper desires lying behind the goal. In fact, the goal is actually an interim step they assume is necessary to reach a more important result. The reason this skill is so important is precisely because of the responsiveness of the subconscious to a clear focus. When we are unclear between interim goals and more intrinsic goals, the subconscious has no way of prioritizing and focusing.

Commitment to the Truth is also important for developing subconscious rapport

Not only does deceiving ourselves about current reality prevent the subconscious from having accurate information about where we are relative to our vision, but it also creates distracting input to the subconscious, just as our “chatter” about why we can’t achieve our vision is distracting. The principle of creative tension recognizes that the subconscious operates most effectively when it is focused clearly on our vision and current reality.
An effective way to focus the subconscious is through imagery and visualization. For example, world-class swimmers have found that by imagining their hands to be twice their actual size and their feet to be webbed, they actually swim faster. “Mental rehearsal” of complex feats has become routine psychological training for diverse professional performers.
But the real effectiveness of all of this still hinges on knowing what it is that is most important to you. Ultimately, what matters most in developing the subconscious rapport characteristic of masters is the genuine caring for a desired outcome, the deep feeling of it being the “right” goal toward which to aspire. The subconscious seems especially receptive to goals in line with our deeper aspirations and values. According to some spiritual disciplines, this is because these deeper aspirations input directly to, or are part of, the subconscious mind.
People with high levels of personal mastery do not set out to integrate reason and intuition. Rather, they achieve it naturally—as a by-product of their commitment to use all resources at their disposal. They cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.
Embarking on any path of personal growth is a matter of choice. No one can be forced to develop his or her personal mastery. It is guaranteed to backfire. Organizations can get into considerable difficulty if they become too aggressive in promoting personal mastery for their members.

The discipline of seeing interrelationships gradually undermines older attitudes of blame and guilt. We begin to see that all of us are trapped in structures, structures embedded both in our ways of thinking and in the interpersonal and social milieus in which we live. Our knee-jerk tendencies to find fault with one another gradually fade, leaving a much deeper appreciation of the forces within which we all operate. This does not imply that people are simply victims of systems that dictate their behavior. Often, the structures are of our own creation. But this has little meaning until those structures are seen. For most of us, the structures within which we operate are invisible. We are neither victims nor culprits but human beings controlled by forces we have not yet learned how to perceive. We are used to thinking of compassion as an emotional state, based on our concern for one another. But it is also grounded in a level of awareness. In my experience, as people see more of the systems within which they operate, and as they understand more clearly the pressures influencing one another, they naturally develop more compassion and empathy.

Implementing Personal Mastery in Organizations

Leaders can work relentlessly to foster a climate in which the principles of personal mastery are practiced in daily life.
Make it safe for people to create visions, where inquiry and commitment to the truth are the norm, 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, to the extent that individuals respond to what is offered, it will provide an “on the job training” that is vital to developing personal mastery. As with any discipline, developing personal mastery must become a continual, ongoing process. There is nothing more important to an individual committed to his or her own growth than a supportive environment. An organization committed to personal mastery can provide that environment by continually encouraging personal vision, commitment to the truth, and a willingness to honestly face the gaps between the two.

Many of the practices most conducive to developing one’s own personal mastery—developing a more systemic worldview, learning how to reflect on tacit assumptions, expressing one’s vision and listening to others’ visions, and joint inquiry into different people’s views of current reality—are embedded in the disciplines for building learning organizations. So, in many ways, the most positive actions that an organization can take to foster personal mastery involve working to develop all five learning disciplines in concert.

The core leadership strategy is simple:

Be a model.
Commit yourself to your own personal mastery.
Talking about personal mastery may open people’s minds somewhat, but actions always speak louder than words. There’s nothing more powerful you can do to encourage others in their quest for personal mastery than to be serious in your own quest.

Mental Models

Mental models are so powerful because they affect what we see. Two people with different mental models can observe the same event and describe it differently, because they’ve looked at different details and made different interpretations.

As Albert Einstein once wrote, “Our theories determine what we measure.”

The problems with mental models lie not in whether they are right or wrong—by definition, all models are simplifications. The problems with mental models arise when they become implicit—when they exist below the level of our awareness. Because we remain unaware of our mental models, the models remain unexamined. Because they are unexamined, the models remain unchanged. As the world changes, the gap widens between our mental models and reality, leading to increasingly counterproductive actions.

Developing an organization’s capacity to surface and test mental models:

Tools that promote personal awareness and reflective skills
“infrastructures” that try to institutionalize regular practice with mental models
Culture that promotes inquiry and challenging our thinking.

It is hard to say which is most important. Indeed, it is the connections among them that matter most. For example, it is one thing to espouse cultural norms like “openness” but practicing them requires real commitment and skills that many managers lack, and developing those skills requires regular opportunities to practice, the whole point of infrastructures that embed reflection in the work environment.

CEOs tend to emphasize developing the organizational culture. “In the traditional authoritarian organization, the dogma was managing, organizing, and controlling,” says Hanover’s CEO Bill O’Brien. “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 any situation at hand.” O’Brien thought about cultural change in terms of basic “diseases of traditional hierarchies” and the required antidotes. “We set out,” he said, “to find what would give the necessary organization and discipline to have work be more congruent with human nature. We gradually identified a set of core values that are actually principles that overcome the basic diseases of the hierarchy.” Two of these values in particular, “openness” and “merit,” led Hanover to develop its approach to “managing mental models.” Openness was seen as an antidote to “the disease of gamesplaying that dominated people’s behavior in face-to-face meetings. Nobody described an issue at 10:00 in the morning at a business meeting the way they described the issue at 7:00 that evening, at home or over drinks with friends.” Merit—making decisions based on the best interests of the organization—was Hanover’s antidote to “decisionmaking based on bureaucratic politics, where the name of the game is getting ahead by making an impression, or, if you’re already at the top, staying there.” Together openness and merit embodied a deep belief that decision-making processes could be transformed if people become more able to surface and discuss productively their different ways of looking at the world.

Teams and organizations trap themselves in “defensive routines” that insulate our mental models from examination. Consequently we develop “skilled incompetence,”a marvelous oxymoron to describe being “highly skillful at protecting ourselves from pain and threat posed by learning situations,” but because we fail to learn we remain incompetent at producing the results we really want.

“Many saw for the first time in their life that all we ever have are assumptions, never “truths,” that we always see the world through our mental models and that the mental models are always incomplete, and, especially in Western culture, chronically nonsystemic.”

Skills of reflection

Slowing down our own thinking processes so that we can become more aware of how we form our mental models and the ways they influence our actions.

Inquiry skills

How we operate in face-to-face interactions with others, especially in dealing with complex and conflictual issues.

Learning is eventually always about action, and one basic reflective skill involves using gaps between what we say and what we do as a vehicle for becoming more aware.

Gaps in Knowledge

While gaps between espoused theories and theories-in-use might be cause for discouragement, or even cynicism, they needn’t be. Often they arise as a consequence of vision, not hypocrisy. For example, it may be truly part of my vision to trust people. Then, a gap between this aspect of my vision and my current behavior holds the potential for creative change. The problem lies not in the gap but, in failing to tell the truth about the gap. Until the gap between my espoused theory and my current behavior is recognized, no learning can occur. So the first question to pose when facing a gap between espoused theory and a theory-in-use is “Do I really value the espoused theory?” “Is it really part of my vision?” If there is no commitment to the espoused theory, then the gap does not represent a tension between reality and my vision but between reality and a view I advance (perhaps because of how it will make me look to others). Because it’s so hard to see theories-in-use, you may need the help of another person—a “ruthlessly compassionate” partner. In the quest to develop skills in reflection, we are each others’ greatest assets. As the old saying goes, “The eye cannot see the eye.”

Leaps of Abstraction

Our minds move at lightning speed. Ironically, this often slows our learning, because we immediately “leap” to generalizations so quickly that we never think to test them.
Occur when we move from direct observations (concrete “data”) to generalization without testing. Leaps of abstraction impede learning because they become axiomatic. What was once an assumption becomes treated as a fact.
Untested generalizations can easily become the basis for further generalization.

How do you spot leaps of abstraction? First, by asking yourself what you believe about the way the world works—the nature of business, people in general, and specific individuals. Ask “What is the ‘data’ on which this generalization is based?” Then ask yourself, “Am I willing to consider that this generalization may be inaccurate or misleading?” It is important to ask this last question consciously, because, if the answer is no, there is no point in proceeding.

Where possible, test the generalizations directly. This will often lead to inquiring into the reasons behind one another’s actions.
Until we become aware of our leaps of abstraction, we are not even aware of the need for inquiry. This is precisely why practicing reflection as a discipline is so important.

Exercise: “Left Hand Column”

Start with selecting a specific situation where I am interacting with one or several other people in a way that I feel is not working—specifically, that is not producing any apparent learning or moving ahead. I write out a sample of the exchange, in the form of a script. I write the script on the right-hand side of a page. On the left-hand side, I write what I am thinking but not saying at each stage in the exchange.
The most important lesson that comes from seeing “our left-hand columns” is how we undermine opportunities for learning in conflictual situations. Rather than facing squarely our problems,

But pure inquiry is also limited. Questioning can be crucial for breaking the spiral of reinforcing advocacy, but until a team or an individual learns to combine inquiry and advocacy, learning skills are very limited. One reason that pure inquiry is limited is that we almost always do have a view, regardless of whether or not we believe that our view is the only correct one. Thus, just asking lots of questions can be a way of avoiding learning—by hiding our own view behind a wall of incessant questioning. The most productive learning usually occurs when managers combine skills in advocacy and inquiry. Another way to say this is “reciprocal inquiry.” By this we mean that everyone makes his or her thinking explicit and subject to public examination. This creates an atmosphere of genuine vulnerability. No one is hiding the evidence or reasoning behind his views—advancing them without making them open to scrutiny.

When operating in pure advocacy, the goal is to win the argument. When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer “to win the argument” but to find the best argument.

When advocating your view: Make your own reasoning explicit (i.e., say how you arrived at your view and the “data” upon which it is based) Encourage others to explore your view (e.g., “Do you see gaps in my reasoning?”) Encourage others to provide different views (i.e., “Do you have either different data or different conclusions, or both?”) Actively inquire into others’ views that differ from your own (i.e., “What are your views?” “How did you arrive at your view?” “Are you taking into account data that are different from what I have considered?”)
When inquiring into others’ views: If you are making assumptions about others’ views, state your assumptions clearly and acknowledge that they are assumptions State the “data” upon which your assumptions are based Don’t bother asking questions if you’re not genuinely interested in the others’ response (i.e., if you’re only trying to be polite or to show the others up)
When you arrive at an impasse (others no longer appear to be open to inquiring into their own views): Ask what data or logic might change their views. Ask if there is any way you might together design an experiment (or some other inquiry) that might provide new information When you or others are hesitant to express your views or to experiment with alternative ideas: Encourage them (or you) to think out loud about what might be making it difficult (i.e., “What is it about this situation, and about me or others, that is making open exchange difficult?”) If there is mutual desire to do so, design with others ways of overcoming these barriers

The goal is the best mental model for whoever happens to be out front on that particular issue. Everyone else focuses on helping that person (or persons) make the best possible decision by helping them to build the best mental model possible.”

Managers must learn to reflect on their current mental models—until prevailing assumptions are brought into the open, there is no reason to expect mental models to change, and there is little purpose in systems thinking. If managers “believe” their world views are facts rather than sets of assumptions, they will not be open to challenging those world views. If they lack skills in inquiring into their and others’ ways of thinking, they will be limited in experimenting collaboratively with new ways of thinking. Moreover, if there is no established philosophy and understanding of mental models in the organization, people will misperceive the purpose of systems thinking as drawing diagrams building elaborate “models” of the world, not improving our mental models.

Shared Vision

It is not an idea. It is a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.
Provides the focus and energy for learning.
Generative learning occurs only when people are striving to accomplish something that matters deeply to them. In fact, the whole idea of generative learning—expanding your ability to create—will seem abstract and meaningless until people become excited about a vision they truly want to accomplish. Today, “vision” is a familiar concept in corporate leadership. But when you look carefully you find that most “visions” are one person’s (or one group’s) vision imposed on an organization. Such visions, at best, command compliance—not commitment. A shared vision is a vision that many people are truly committed to, because it reflects their own personal vision.
It is impossible to imagine the accomplishments of building AT&T, Ford, or Apple in the absence of shared vision. Theodore Vail had a vision of universal telephone service that would take fifty years to bring about. Henry Ford envisioned common people, not just the wealthy, owning their own automobiles. Steven Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and their Apple co founders saw the power of the computer to empower people.
In a corporation, a shared vision changes people’s relationship with the company. It is no longer “their company”; it becomes “our company.”
A shared vision is the first step in allowing people who mistrusted each other to begin to work together. It creates a common identity. In fact, an organization’s shared sense of purpose, vision, and operating values establish the most basic level of commonality.
- Late in his career, the psychologist Abraham Maslow studied high-performing teams. One of their most striking characteristics was shared vision and purpose. Maslow observed that in exceptional teams the task was no longer separate from the self… but rather he identified with this task so strongly that you couldn’t define his real self without including that task.
Shared visions compel courage so naturally that people don’t even realize the extent of their courage. Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision.
You cannot have a learning organization without shared vision. Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming. Vision establishes an overarching goal. The loftiness of the target compels new ways of thinking and acting. A shared vision also provides a rudder to keep the learning process on course when stresses develop. Learning can be difficult, even painful. With a shared vision, we are more likely to expose our ways of thinking, give up deeply held views, and recognize personal and organizational shortcomings. All that trouble seems trivial compared with the importance of what we are trying to create. As Robert Fritz puts it, “In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears.” In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.
Fosters risk taking and experimentation. When people are immersed in a vision, they often don’t know how to do it. They run an experiment. They change direction and run another experiment. Everything is an experiment, but there is no ambiguity. It’s perfectly clear why they are doing what they are doing. People aren’t saying “Give me a guarantee that it will work.” Everybody knows that there is no guarantee. But the people are committed nonetheless.
Every instance where one finds a long-term view actually operating in human affairs, there is a long-term vision at work.

Bill O’Brien of Hanover Insurance observes, “My vision is not what’s important to you. The only vision that motivates you is your vision.” It is not that people care only about their personal self interest—in fact, people’s personal visions usually include dimensions that concern family, organization, community, and even the world. Rather, O’Brien is stressing that caring is personal. It is rooted in an individual’s own set of values, concerns, and aspirations. This is why genuine caring about a shared vision is rooted in personal visions. This simple truth is lost on many leaders, who decide that their organization must develop a vision by tomorrow! Organizations intent on building shared visions continually encourage members to develop their personal visions. 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. On the other hand, people with a strong sense of personal direction can join together to create a powerful synergy toward what “I/we truly want.” In this sense, personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared visions. This means not only personal vision, but commitment to the truth and creative tension—the hallmarks of personal mastery. Shared vision can generate levels of creative tension that go far beyond individuals’ comfort levels.

When more people come to share a common vision, the vision may not change fundamentally. But it becomes more alive, more real in the sense of a mental reality that people can truly imagine achieving. They now have partners, “cocreators”; the vision no longer rests on their shoulders alone. Early on, when they are nurturing an individual vision, people may say it is “my vision.” But as the shared vision develops, it becomes both “my vision” and “our vision.”

Building shared vision

It is not truly a “shared vision” until it connects with the personal visions of people throughout the organization.
Ultimately, leaders intent on building shared visions must be willing to continually share their personal visions. They must also be prepared to ask, “Will you follow me?” This can be difficult. For a person who has been setting goals all through his career and simply announcing them, asking for support can feel very vulnerable.

Bill O’Brien puts it, “Being a visionary leader is not about giving speeches and inspiring the troops. How I spend my day is pretty much the same as how any executive spends his day. Being a visionary leader is about solving day-to-day problems with my vision in mind.”

Visions that are truly shared take time to emerge. They grow as a by-product of interactions of individual visions. Experience suggests that visions that are genuinely shared require ongoing conversation where individuals not only feel free to express their dreams, but learn how to listen to each others’ dreams. Out of this listening, new insights into what is possible gradually emerge.

As one highly successful CEO expressed it: “My job, fundamentally, is listening to what the organization is trying to say, and them making sure that it is forcefully articulated.”

When they are committed, the “cause” can count on them. They will do whatever it takes to make the vision real. The vision is pulling them to action. Some use the term “being source” to describe the unique energy that committed people bring toward creating a vision.The committed person brings an energy, passion, and excitement that cannot be generated by someone who is only compliant, even genuinely compliant. The committed person doesn’t play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules. A group of people truly committed to a common vision is an awesome force.

The hardest lesson for many managers to face is that, ultimately, there is really nothing you can do to get another person to enroll or commit. Enrollment and commitment require freedom of choice. The guidelines above simply establish the conditions which are most favorable to enrollment, but they do not cause enrollment. Commitment likewise is very personal; efforts to force it will, at best, foster compliance.

These governing ideas answer three critical questions: “What?” “Why?” and “How?”

Vision is the “What?”—the picture of the future we seek to create.

Purpose (or “mission”) is the “Why?” the organization’s answer to the question, “Why do we exist?” Great organizations have a larger sense of purpose that transcends providing for the needs of shareholders and employees. They seek to contribute to the world in some unique way, to add a distinctive source of value.

Core values answer the question “How do we want to act, consistent with our mission, along the path toward achieving our vision? “A company’s values might include integrity, openness, honesty, freedom, equal opportunity, leanness, merit, or loyalty. They describe how the company wants life to be on a day-to-day basis, while pursuing the vision.

There is a genuine need for people to feel part of an ennobling mission, but stating a mission or purpose in words is not enough. Many mission statements end up sounding like ‘apple pie and motherhood.’ People need visions to make the purpose more concrete and tangible. We have to learn to ‘paint pictures’ of the type of organization we want to have. Core values are necessary to help people with day-to-day decision making. Purpose is abstract. Visions may be long term. People need ‘guiding stars’ to navigate and make decisions day to day. But core values are only helpful if they can be translated into concrete behaviors. For example, a core value like openness’ requires the skills of reflection and inquiry within an overall context of trusting and supporting one another.”

Negative visions are limiting for three reasons.
- 1. energy that could build something new is diverted to “preventing” something we don’t want to happen.
- 2. 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.
- 3.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. There are two fundamental sources of energy that can motivate organizations: fear and aspiration. The power of fear underlies negative visions. 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.

Personal vision, by itself, is not the key to releasing the energy of the creative process. The key is “creative tension,” the tension between vision and reality. The most effective people are those who can “hold” their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.

This principle is no less true for 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.
Visions spread because of a reinforcing process of increasing clarity, enthusiasm, communication and commitment. As people talk, the vision grows clearer. As it gets clearer, enthusiasm for its benefits builds. And soon, the vision starts to spread in a reinforcing spiral of communication and excitement. Enthusiasm can also be reinforced by early successes in pursuing the vision (another potential reinforcing process)
The visioning process can wither if, as more people get involved, the diversity of views dissipates focus and generates unmanageable conflicts. People see different ideal futures.
Approaching the visioning as an inquiry process does not mean that I have to give up my view. On the contrary, visions need strong advocates. But advocates who can also inquire into others’ visions open the possibility for the vision to evolve, to become larger than our individual visions.
Visions can also die because people become discouraged by the apparent difficulty in bringing the vision into reality. As clarity about the nature of the vision increases so does awareness of the gap between the vision and current reality. People become disheartened, uncertain, or even cynical, leading to a decline in enthusiasm. The limits to growth structure for “organizational discouragement” looks like the following figure. In this structure, the limiting factor is the capacity of people in the organization to “hold” creative tension, the central principle of personal mastery. This is why we say that personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared vision—organizations that do not encourage personal mastery find it very difficult to foster sustained commitment to a lofty vision.
Vision paints the picture of what we want to create. Systems thinking reveals how we have created what we currently have.

Emerging visions can also die because people get overwhelmed by the demands of current reality and lose their focus on the vision. The limiting factor becomes the time and energy to focus on a vision:

Leverage must lie either in finding ways to focus less time and effort on fighting crises and managing current reality, or breaking off those pursuing the new vision from those responsible for handling “current reality.” In many ways, this is the strategy of “skunk works,” small groups that quietly pursue new ideas out of the organizational mainstream. While this approach is often necessary, it is difficult to avoid fostering two polar extreme “camps” that no longer can support one another. Lastly, a vision can die if people forget their connection to one another.

Vision becomes a living force only when people truly believe they can shape their future..

Unaligned Team

The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy. Individuals may work extraordinarily hard, but their efforts do not efficiently translate to team effort. By contrast, when a team becomes more aligned, a commonality of direction emerges, and individuals’ energies harmonize. There is less wasted energy. In fact, a resonance or synergy develops, like the “coherent” light of a laser rather than the incoherent and scattered light of a light bulb. There is commonality of purpose, a shared vision, and understanding of how to complement one another’s efforts. Individuals do not sacrifice their personal interests to the larger team vision; rather, the shared vision becomes an extension of their personal visions. In fact, alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team. Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing the team even more difficult:

Jazz musicians know about alignment. There is a phrase in jazz, “being in the groove,” that suggests the state when an ensemble “plays as one.” These experiences are very difficult to put into words—jazz musicians talk about them in almost mystical terms: “the music flows through you rather than from you.”

Team learning

It builds on the discipline of developing shared vision. It also builds on personal mastery, for talented teams are made up of talented individuals. But shared vision and talent are not enough. The world is full of teams of talented individuals who share a vision for a while, yet fail to learn. The great jazz ensemble has talent and a shared vision (even if they don’t discuss it), but what really matters is that the musicians know how to play together.

Within organizations, team learning has three critical dimensions.

First, there is 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. While easy to say, there are powerful forces at work in organizations that tend to make the intelligence of the team less than, not greater than, the intelligence of individual team members. Many of these forces are within the direct control of the team members.
Second, there is the need for innovative, coordinated action. The championship sports teams and great jazz ensembles provide metaphors for acting in spontaneous yet coordinated ways. Outstanding teams in organizations develop the same sort of relationship—an “operational trust,” where each team member remains conscious of other team members and can be counted on to act in ways that complement each other’s actions.
Third, there is the role of team members on other teams. For example, most of the actions of senior teams are actually carried out through other teams. Thus, a learning team continually fosters other learning teams through inculcating the practices and skills of team learning more broadly.

The discipline of team learning involves mastering the practices of dialogue and discussion, the two distinct ways that teams converse. In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep “listening” to one another and suspending of one’s own views. By contrast, 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. Dialogue and discussion are potentially complementary, but most teams lack the ability to distinguish between the two and to move consciously between them. Team learning also involves learning how to deal creatively with the powerful forces opposing productive dialogue and discussion in working teams.

Chris Argyris calls “defensive routines,” habitual ways of interacting that protect us and others from threat or embarrassment, but which also prevent us from learning. For example, faced with conflict, team members frequently either “smooth over” differences or “speak out” in a no-holds-barred, “winner take all” free-for-all of opinion—what my colleague Bill Isaacs calls “the abstraction wars.” Yet, the very defensive routines that thwart learning also hold great potential for fostering learning, if we can only learn how to unlock the energy they contain. The inquiry and reflection skills introduced in Chapter 9 begin to release this energy, which can then be focused in dialogue and discussion.

Bohm suggests that what is needed to bring about such a change of priorities is “dialogue,” which is a different mode of communication. By contrast with discussion, the word “dialogue” comes from the Greek dialogos. Dia means through. Logos means the word, or more broadly, the meaning. Bohm suggests that the original meaning of dialogue was the “meaning passing or moving through … a free flow of meaning between people, in the sense of a stream that flows between two banks.”5 In dialogue, Bohm contends, a group accesses a larger “pool of common meaning,” which cannot be accessed individually. “The whole organizes the parts,” rather than trying to pull the parts into a whole. The purpose of a dialogue is to go beyond any one individual’s understanding. “We are not trying to win in a dialogue. We all win if we are doing it right.” In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually. “A new kind of mind begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning … People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning, which is capable of constant development and change.”
suspend their assumptions but they communicate their assumptions freely. The result is a free exploration that brings to the surface the full depth of people’s experience and thought, and yet can move beyond their individual views. “The purpose of dialogue,” Bohm suggests, “is to reveal the incoherence in our thought.” There are three types of incoherence.

“Thought presents itself (stands in front) of us and pretends that it does not represent.” We are like actors who forget they are playing a role. We become trapped in the theater of our thoughts (the words “theater” and “theory” have the same root—theoria—“to look at”). This is when thought starts, in Bohm’s words, to become “incoherent.” “Reality may change but the theater continues.” We operate in the theater, defining problems, taking actions, “solving problems,” losing touch with the larger reality from which the theater is generated. Dialogue is a way of helping people to “see the representative and participatory nature of thought [and] … to become more sensitive to and make it safe to acknowledge the incoherence in our thought.” In dialogue people become observers of their own thinking.

Suspending Assumptions

To “suspend” one’s assumptions means to hold them, “as it were, ‘hanging in front of you,’ constantly accessible to questioning and observation.” This does not mean throwing out our assumptions, suppressing them, or avoiding their expression. Nor does it say that having opinions is “bad,” or that we should eliminate subjectivism. Rather, it means being aware of our assumptions and holding them up for examination. This cannot be done if we are defending our opinions. Nor, can it be done if we are unaware of our assumptions, or unaware that our views are based on assumptions, rather than incontrovertible fact.

Balancing Dialogue and Discussion

In team learning, discussion is the necessary counterpart of dialogue. In a discussion, different views are presented and defended, and as explained earlier this may provide a useful analysis of the whole situation. In dialogue, different views are presented as a means toward discovering a new view. In a discussion, decisions are made. In a dialogue, complex issues are explored. When a team must reach agreement and decisions must be taken, some discussion is needed. On the basis of a commonly agreed-upon analysis, alternative views need to be weighed and a preferred view selected (which may be one of the original alternatives or a new view that emerges from the discussion). When they are productive, discussions converge on a conclusion or course of action. On the other hand, dialogues are diverging; they do not seek agreement, but a richer grasp of complex issues. 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 byproduct of dialogue.

A learning team masters movement back and forth between dialogue and discussion.

If dialogue articulates a unique vision of team learning, reflection and inquiry skills may prove essential to realizing that vision. 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 of 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 ideas. In great teams conflict becomes productive. There may, and often will, be conflict around the vision. In fact, the essence of the “visioning” process lies in the gradual emergence of a shared vision from different personal visions. Even when people share a common vision, they may have many different ideas about how to achieve that vision. The loftier the vision, the more uncertain we are how it is to be achieved. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own. Conflict becomes, in effect, part of the ongoing dialogue.

For most of us, exposing our reasoning is threatening because we are afraid that people will find errors in it. The perceived threat from exposing our thinking starts early in life and, for most of us, is steadily reinforced in school—remember the trauma of being called on and not having the “right answer”—and later in work.
The most effective defensive routines, like that of the forceful CEO, are those we cannot see. Ostensibly, the CEO hoped to provoke others into expressing their thoughts. But his overbearing behavior reliably prevented them from doing so, thereby protecting his views from challenge.
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.

Defensive routines

Become a surprising ally toward building a learning team by providing a signal when learning is not occurring. Most of us know when we are being defensive, even if we cannot fully identify the source or pattern of our defensiveness. If you think about it, one of the most useful skills of a learning team would be the ability to recognize when people are not reflecting on their own assumptions, when they are not inquiring into each other’s thinking, when they are not exposing their thinking in a way that encourages others to inquire into it.
When we are feeling defensive, seeking to avoid an issue, thinking we need to protect someone else or ourselves—these are tangible signals that can be used to reestablish a climate of learning. But we must learn to recognize the signals and learn how to acknowledge the defensiveness without provoking more defensiveness. Defensive routines may signal especially difficult and especially important issues. Often, the stronger the defensiveness, the more important the issue around which people are defending or protecting their views. If these views can be brought out productively, they may provide windows onto each other’s thinking.
It cannot be stressed too much that team learning is a team skill. A group of talented individual learners will not necessarily produce a learning team, any more than a group of talented athletes will produce a great sports team. Learning teams learn how to learn together.

MEMO TO: FROM John MacCarthy SUBJECT Special Meeting

As you are well aware, we are accelerating change and I need your input prior to finalizing our strategies and implementation plans. I believe there is opportunity for us to improve our understanding and the way we implement change. The session is intended to be the first in a series of dialogues to help us clarify the assumptions, programs, and responsibilities underlying the implementation of our key strategies. We have the view that only through the input from a larger group can we execute our changes and programs in a coherent and unambiguous way. The purpose of this two-day session is to gain understanding of each other’s view by thinking through the major issues facing us at this time. This session is not an attempt to make decisions as much as a setting to examine directions and the assumptions underlying them. We have a second goal. This is to be together as colleagues, leaving all our roles and positions at the door. In this dialogue we should consider ourselves equals who still have substantive knowledge of the situations we are considering. We see this meeting as the first step toward establishing ongoing substantive dialogue among us. Our experience begins to show that to engage in dialogue takes practice, and we should expect to be learning how to do this in this session. Several ground rules are helpful and we invite you to participate by following these as much as you can. Suggested Ground Rules Suspension of assumptions. Typically people take a position and defend it, holding to it. Others take up opposite positions and polarization results. In this session, we would like to examine some of our assumptions underlying our direction and strategy and not seek to defend them. Acting as colleagues. We are asking everyone to leave his or her position at the door. There will be no particular hierarchy in this meeting, except for the facilitator, who will, hopefully, keep us on track. Spirit of inquiry. We would like to have people begin to explore the thinking behind their views, the deeper assumptions they may hold, and the evidence they have that leads them to these views. So it will be fair to begin to ask other questions such as “What leads you to say or believe this?” or “What makes you ask about this?”

Rather than seeing the defensiveness in terms of others’ behavior, the leverage lies in recognizing defensive routines as joint creations and to find our own role in creating and sustaining them. If we only look for defensive routines “out there,” and fail to see them “in here” our efforts to deal with them just increase the defensiveness.
Perhaps the single greatest liability of management teams is that they confront these complex, dynamic realities with a language designed for simple, static problems.

Because we see the world in simple obvious terms, we come to believe in simple, obvious solutions. This leads to the frenzied search for simple “fixes,” a task that preoccupies the time of many managers.Each team member carries his or her own, predominantly linear mental models. Each person’s mental model focuses on different parts of the system. Each emphasizes different cause-effect chains. This makes it virtually impossible for a shared picture of the system as a whole to emerge in normal conversation. Is it any wonder that the strategies that emerge often represent watered-down compromises based on murky assumptions, full of internal contradictions, which the rest of the organization can’t understand, let alone implement?

In one way or another, everyone we spoke with had sought to create more reflective work environments where dialogue and seeing taken-for-granted mental models were possible. The idea of growing organizations through growing people permeated all the stories. Many interviewees spoke of the shift in mindset from “fixing parts” to appreciating organizations as living systems that have immense capabilities, typically untapped, to learn, evolve, and heal themselves.

Growing as a human being starts with a commitment to something that truly matters.

The long-lived companies tended to think of themselves more as human communities than as financial institutions. In the words of the original Shell study, they “had a sense of who they were that transcended what they did,” giving them capabilities to evolve and adapt—to learn—not matched by their contemporaries.

Visa’s founding CEO Dee Hock had a realization. He saw clearly that it was “beyond the power of reason to design an organization” capable of coordinating a global network of financial transactions of the sort that had started to develop. Yet, he also knew that nature regularly achieves just that. Why, he wondered, couldn’t “a human organization work like a rain forest?” Why couldn’t it be patterned on biological concepts and methods? “What if we quit arguing about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?” In short, Visa was inspired by abandoning our “old perspective and mechanistic model of reality” and embracing principles of living systems as a basis for organizing. Eventually Hock even coined a term for the type of organizing he envisioned, “chaordic,” because in nature “order continually emerges from seeming chaos, while in management we always try to impose order because we fear that chaos will take over.”

“The problem starts with not understanding knowledge, how it is created and how it operates in practical settings—because knowledge is social. Knowledge is what we know how to do, and we do things with one another. That is how the work gets done. Collaboration is the flip side of knowledge management. You can’t talk about one without the other. So, to manage knowledge you need to address collaboration and tools that help people collaborate. Today, much of our work is on knowledge networks, which we also call networks of collaboration: how people work together to create value and to create new sources of value. This is a very organic process, but there are ways to understand it and ways to help rather than hinder it.”

Allen and Sandow’s work has developed a novel bridge connecting the practice of reflection, the importance of relationships, and an understanding of organizations as living systems. “Over time we’ve learned that networks of knowledge expand and become stronger through reflection,” says Allen. “When we think about who we collaborate with, and together reflect on our process of collaboration, we legitimize one another.”

Looking back on their work, Allen and Sandow concluded, “As the philosophy of the physical sciences dominated the Industrial Age, the philosophy of the biological sciences is beginning to dominate the Knowledge Age. This philosophy views knowledge, people, and organizations as living systems … [which represents a shift from] (1) focusing on parts to focusing on the whole, (2) focusing on categorization to focusing on integration, (3) focusing on individuals to focusing on interactions, and (4) focusing on systems outside the observer to focusing on systems that include the observer.”

Allen and Sandow’s view of social systems was influenced by the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, who is famous for his pioneering studies of cognition in living systems. Maturana says that intelligent action is created in social systems where all the members of a network accept the others as legitimate participants in the network. In 2000, the management of ISO hosted the first of two two-day seminars given by Maturana. It was a memorable experience, as more than one hundred engineers listened to him talk about love as the recognition of the other as a legitimate other—and the “emotion that expands intelligence.” His comments made me recall something I had learned in writing the foreword for de Geus’s book. The English word “company” comes from the French compaigne—the sharing of bread, the same root as “companion.” Interestingly, the oldest Swedish term for business, narings liv, means “nourishment for life,” and the oldest Chinese symbol for business translates as “life meaning.” Perhaps when we rediscover organizations as living systems, we will also rediscover what it actually means to us as human beings to work together for a purpose that really matters.

“I think our success has been helped a lot by having so many line managers who embody a spirit of vision and who have included others in building a learning environment. Once you have a few of these people in an organization you build momentum, and everything gets much easier.”

Cultures are not built from scratch, but instead evolve, as they conserve and improve upon what is working and let go of what is not.

“leveraging the power of collective thinking.” Last, they emphasized developing leadership capabilities at all levels and inculcating core values, “so as to entrust our officers with greater discretion, confident that they would decide and act in alignment with our shared vision.”

As the officers dealt with a wider range of issues, they also needed to be more connected across the entire organization. “They needed to draw from the SPF’s vast store of knowledge, including other officers’ and their colleagues’ personal experiences. We embarked on capturing the tacit knowledge of experience through the use of narratives and storytelling—making available the personal accounts of officers involved in resolving critical incidents.” To encourage knowledge transfer, they also set up special experience-sharing sessions that helped frontline police officers learn how to deal with difficult situations and customers, and implemented After Action Reviews (AARs) to further increase local reflection and to broaden awareness across the system. This effort also led to an electronic bulletin board, where police officers could log on and share their views about almost anything. “It surprises many people to know that the discussion threads are not moderated and what you read is what our police officers actually feel and think. What makes the bulletin board tick is the passion of the contributors who feel safe and concerned enough to be utterly candid in expressing their views and sharing their knowledge and experiences.” Lastly, Khoo and his team shifted the traditional emphasis on rigid SOPs; many of them were “rewritten to stress principles rather than prescriptive instructions, so as to facilitate the exercise of discretion based on best practices.”

“At the end of the day, it is the people who are the drivers of any organizational transformation. Trust and focusing on how people in the organization relate to one another form the basis of our core theory of success. As the quality of relationships strengthens, the quality of thinking improves. As the members of a team consider more facets of an issue and share a greater number of different perspectives, the quality of their actions improves, which ultimately improves the results we can achieve.”

Bill O’Brien used to define happiness as “the general sense that your life is headed in the right direction and that you have the opportunity to make a difference.” I have always thought of it as one of those odd qualities we value but cannot achieve by direct effort. Have you ever known anyone working to be happy? In my experience such people have one thing in common: they are not very happy. On the other hand, if we live our lives in pursuit of what matters most to us, and we do our work with people whose friendship we value, we will have all the happiness we need. In this sense, happiness is simply a by-product of a life well lived. This is what motivates practitioners of organizational learning.

THINKING AND ACTING STRATEGICALLY

What does it mean to think and act strategically in building learning organizations? For The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, my colleagues and I developed a simple picture of a framework that helped readers understand strategic leadership at any level in building learning organizations. The framework addressed two sets of questions.
- What are our aims? What are the fundamental areas of growth and innovation that define a learning culture and make it robust? How would we know it if we saw it?
- Where do leaders focus their attention and efforts to create such a culture? How can we do it? The former we called the “deep learning cycle.” The latter we called the “strategic architecture.” Today the circle-triangle figure provides an overall perspective for appreciating the strategies that diverse leaders employ.1 While this framework has several elements, the primary distinctions arise from basic insights about learning. Learning always has two levels.
  - At one level, all learning is judged by what the learner can do, the results he or she produces, as shown at the bottom of the figure. But we wouldn’t say we had learned to ride a bicycle if we succeeded in riding only once.
  - On the deeper level, learning is about developing a capacity to reliably produce a certain quality of results. It is about becoming a “bicycle rider” not just riding one time, and this capacity is what grows as a result of the deep learning cycle. The learning environment needed to sustain this deep learning cycle is the focus of the strategic architecture.2 The deep learning cycle encompasses five elements, each of which skillful leaders pay attention to in building a healthy learning culture: beliefs and assumptions, established practices, skills and capabilities, networks of relationships, and awareness and sensibilities. These five cultural elements are always influencing one another. Start with beliefs and assumptions (you could start anywhere in the cycle). While these taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world are often invisible to those who hold them, they shape organizational practices, guide how people do things, and, in turn, determine what skills and capabilities people develop based on those organizational practices. For example, if people believe real listening matters, they establish practices like “check-ins” in daily work that encourage reflecting on our ways of listening. Similarly, our practices and skills and capabilities influence networks of relationships and shape awareness. For example, when people develop skillful practices of dialogue, they become more appreciative of who they depend on and who depends on them, and this strengthens social networks. Or, when people become skillful in systems languages like systems archetypes, they start to see patterns of interdependencies that were previously invisible to them. In turn, “seeing is believing”—our experience is the most direct source of reinforcement for our beliefs…

It is common to talk of an organization’s culture as if it is simply “the way things are.” But no culture is static. It is continually reinforced by how we live with one another day to day. By connecting these elements as part of a deep learning cycle, this framework expresses the important assumption that all these elements can and do change (albeit slowly)—and when they do, they tend to evolve together. The deep learning cycle can either reinforce the culture as it exists now or reinforce what is emerging. When we operate differently with one another, we also set in motion possibilities for changing all of these elements.

People naturally want to know where to intervene in order to influence this deep learning cycle. Many approaches are possible, but coherent strategies have three elements: (1) guiding ideas; (2) theory, tools, and methods; and (3) innovations in organizational infrastructure. Guiding ideas constitute the governing concepts and principles that define why an organization exists, what we seek to accomplish, and how we intend to operate. It is the domain of purpose, vision, and values. Theory, tools, and methods refers to explicit ideas about how things work (for example, a systems map of the procurement process or a simulation model of why “fire fighting” characterizes new product launches), and the practical means by which people apply those theories, solve problems, negotiate differences, and monitor progress. Tools are crucial to any deep learning process. Buckminster Fuller used to say that “you cannot change how someone thinks,” but you can give them a tool “the use of which leads them to think differently.” Organizational infrastructures such as formal roles and management structures, like their physical counterparts, shape how energy and resources flow. Many of the important innovations described in this chapter take the form of new learning infrastructures, implemented in concert with clear guiding ideas and appropriate tools and methods. The overarching viewpoint behind this framework is known in social theory as “structuration,” or the theory of “enacted systems.” Chapter 3 presented the central principle of systems thinking, that structure influences behavior and that the leverage for change increases as we learn to focus on underlying structures, rather than events or behaviors. These structures are made up of beliefs and assumptions,…

Reflection

“Reflection gets a bad rap in business because we don’t have the discipline to connect reflection and action,”

“Our aim is to build real shared understanding and commitment to what we say we will do. What reflection says is that we hear everything. It does not say we’re going to attend to everyone’s needs. This is something that is a big part of Intel’s culture—we call it ‘disagree and commit.
A culture that integrates action and reflection arrives at better decisions to which people can genuinely commit, and its people have a more prepared mental state. The latter means having a richer set of perspectives about issues that concern you, a crucial capability in today’s turbulent organizational environments.

when things turn out contrary to our expectations, we go immediately into problem-solving mode and react, or just try harder—without taking the time to see whether this unexpected development is telling us something important about our assumptions.

After Action Review

AAR consists of three questions:

What happened?
What did we expect?
What can we learn from the gap?
Having simple protocols like AARs for connecting action and reflection matters, but having a supportive management environment is essential. In the Army, AARs took root as part of a long-term journey, as one general put it, “from a culture of reports to a culture of review: we were always good at writing reports for our superiors but not necessarily at learning from our experience.”

AARs into the culture took several years and was guided by four specific strategies: Leadership by request and example. Help managers at all levels appreciate the importance of deep learning and ongoing discipline versus one-time events and quick fixes, and help them develop a learning practice that reflects their own priorities and challenges. Events seen as learning opportunities. Develop the organization’s ability, at senior, middle, and grassroots levels, to recognize day-to-day events, as well as major crises, as opportunities to learn, and help teams link past and present so that lessons from the past can be applied to improving current results. Grassroots exposure to AARs. Introduce teams to the tool by demonstrating its ability to provide a safe environment for learning their own priorities and challenges, but don’t mandate its use, and don’t insist on perfection. A cadre of trained facilitators. Develop specialists who understand both how to facilitate AARs and how to help guide teams toward “high-yield” applications (tangible return for the investment).

The simple question, “If you could improve performance in one area that would make a significant difference for the enterprise, what would that be?”

Guiding principle for many of the most talented leaders of learning initiatives: focus on problems that people believe cannot be solved.

I try to start looking at this problem and say, ‘What is this problem trying to tell us? What can I see that’s different about this? Once I start to figure that out, then I can enroll people.

“The irony is that if we were only working at the top of the organization we might never have been aware of some of these problems and thus might never have attempted to solve them. But when you build a team that believes that change from any place in the system is possible, significant change can sprout from even the tiniest of seeds.”

Tackling the “impossibles” happens only when you are able to tap people’s talents and deepest aspirations. I never cease to be amazed how steadfast master learning practitioners are in their conviction that this is always possible, even in very difficult circumstances.

We discovered that one source of the trouble lay in the very enthusiasm and passion of the innovators themselves. Without this passion they would never take the risks involved in doing something truly new. Without this passion they would not have the patience and perseverance required to succeed. Nor would they attract others who shared their passion. But their passion can also get them in trouble. It can blind them to how they are being perceived by those who are not part of their effort, and it can make them uninterested in how their efforts affect others.

4. CREATING PRACTICE FIELDS The fourth of our eight strategies for building learning organizations, one that often evolves into more established learning infrastructures, involves creating “practice fields.” The idea of practice fields comes from a simple fact: it is very difficult to learn anything new without the opportunity for practice. While a classroom is often the first image that comes to people when they hear the word “learning,” the typical classroom does not evoke much of the spirit or practice of learning. Classroom learners are usually passive. The classroom concerns mostly listening and thinking, not doing. For many people, classroom imagery evokes strong feelings of the need to avoid errors and the importance of getting “right answers.” Real learning processes, in contrast, are defined by trying something new and making many mistakes. Practice fields or rehearsal halls offer a very different environment from traditional classrooms. People are actively doing what they want to be able to do well. They are making mistakes, stopping, trying again, talking about what’s working and what isn’t, and gradually developing a greater ability for effective action in the “performance fields,” where results matter. For this reason, creating practice fields and establishing a regular rhythm of practice and performance has become a common strategy among practitioners of learning organization development.

5. CONNECTING WITH THE CORE OF THE BUSINESS

For radical new ideas and practices to take root within an organization there must be fertile soil. How to find this may not be apparent at the outset. Successful learning practitioners intent upon having a large-scale impact learn how to connect with the core of the organization—at the deepest levels of individual and collective identity—and how the organization most naturally creates value.
Would-be change leaders often limit themselves through encountering two subtle barriers that they fail to recognize: They do not go deeply enough into themselves to discover what is truly calling them, and they do not go deeply enough into the organization to discover what it stands for. When people fail to go deeply enough into themselves, they pursue “good ideas” that fail to tap their own passions. When they do not go deeply enough into what the company stands for, they end up trying to “push” their ideas into the organization.
As the connection to “who we are” starts to become clear, the next question arises: how a new vision can tap into the organization’s creative process, how new sources of value are generated most naturally in the organization. This is the journey from vision to reality, discovering how compelling new ideas most naturally shape organizational action and results.
When there was a connection, I just went deeper. The emerging leaders, people who were going to take the idea and run with it, just presented themselves.

6. BUILDING LEARNING COMMUNITIES

when our own deep questions and aspirations connect with an organization’s essence, community develops. Attunement to new learning communities, networks of relationships based on common aims and shared meaning, becomes both a strategy and an outcome for leaders. And there is nothing that limits this process to businesses.

“Communities grow from people pursuing questions that have heart and meaning to them,”

create a space for the deeper conversations. When this is done, learning communities arise as a by-product. It is important that this “social space” be created consciously and be maintained. But it is also important to realize that the creation of learning communities is a natural process that does not need to be controlled or manipulated—indeed, attempts to control it can easily backfire.

7. WORKING WITH “THE OTHER”

The shadow side of a community is clique or even cult, when people gravitate toward people like themselves and with whom they mostly agree, excluding others. For this reason, embracing diversity, our seventh strategy, becomes a key guiding idea for leaders,

Several years ago, Margaret Wheatley, a long-time student of living systems and organizations,14 was studying the then-new phenomenon of “Internet communities” and made a surprising comment. “The more I look at these, the more they seem ike anticommunities,” she said. When I asked her what she meant, she observed, “On the Internet there is zero cost of exit. If people get tired of each other or turn off to what others are saying, they can simply disconnect. That’s it. The result is ‘communities’ where everyone mostly agrees with one another. It’s made me realize that real community is something that can only happen when we are stuck with one another.”

an inclusive work environment shifts to each and every employee. We have to look at who we pick to work with on our teams, the choices we all make, and whether those choices are really in line with what it will take to get the work done. If I am uncomfortable working with my Chinese colleague, or he with me, the networks that form might preclude good solutions to our problems.”

8. DEVELOPING LEARNING INFRASTRUCTURES

Learning infrastructures do not leave learning to chance.
For the Army, learning infrastructure includes: Training and Formal Education: this includes entry-level training institutions like the Military Academy at West Point
Practice: ways that various types of simulations (computer-based and physical) are carried out and tools like After Action Reviews (AARs) are used to debrief and learn from simulated experience.

Research: study of real and simulated engagements to analyze successful and unsuccessful practices; includes institutions like the Army Center for Lessons Learned, which is responsible for distilling insights and lessons to shape future education and training, new simulation practices, and ultimately doctrine. Doctrine: the highest level of policy, articulating core assumptions and beliefs about successful command; this is the responsibility of the Office for Doctrine, directed by one of the most senior generals.

Most of the executives leave this experience with an acute sense that learning requires much more than good intentions and a few tools. It has to become deeply embedded in the fabric of how an organization works if it is to have a real impact. Many conclude that it borders on dereliction that their organizations invest so few resources in studying what has succeeded and failed in their past strategies, operational changes, and leadership approaches. Instead, they more or less “make it up as they go along,” with little serious theory to guide leaders at different levels. It’s no wonder that a new CEO typically sees his or her job as pushing a whole new strategy, almost as if there were no history.

LEADERS

“To become a leader, you must first become a human being,” said Confucius,

Local line leaders, like Dave Marsing of Intel or Roger Saillant, formerly of Ford, are vital for integrating innovative practices into daily work: for testing the efficacy of systems thinking tools and for working with mental models, for deepening conversations and for building shared visions that connect to people’s reality, and for creating work environments where learning and working are integrated. Without effective local line leaders, new ideas—no matter how compelling—do not get translated into action, and the intentions behind change initiatives from the top can easily be thwarted.

Network leaders are helpers, seed carriers, and connectors. They often work closely with local line leaders in building local capacity and integrating new practices. They are vital for spreading new ideas and practices from one working group to another and between organizations, and for connecting innovative line leaders with one another. They build larger networks that diffuse successful innovations and important learning and knowledge.

Executive leaders shape the overall environment for innovation and change. They lead in developing guiding ideas about purpose, values, and vision for the enterprise as a whole. They do not have to be the sole source of these ideas; such ideas may come from many places. But they must take responsibility for ensuring the existence of credible and uplifting guiding ideas in the organization. Executive leaders are also vital for dealing with structural impediments to innovation, such as poorly designed measurement and reward systems. And they are role models who must embody values and aspirations if these are to be credible. In many ways, it is this symbolic impact of hierarchical authority that is most important for change, and most neglected. Effective executive leaders embrace the old dictum “Actions speak louder than words,” knowing that in any organization it applies especially to those who are most visible.

Each of these types of leaders needs the others. Local line leaders need executive leaders to understand and address larger systemic barriers to change, and network leaders to prevent isolation and to enable learning from peers.

The neglected leadership role is that of the designer of the ship. No one has a more sweeping influence on the ship than the designer.

Leaders who appreciate organizations as living systems approach design work differently. They realize that they can create organizational artifacts like new metrics, or formal roles and processes, or intranet Web sites, or innovative meetings—but it is what happens when people use the artifacts or processes or participate in the meetings that matters.

Learning infrastructures that effectively integrate working and learning do not emerge wholly formed. Rather, they develop over time in ways that depend on leaders who appreciate and are comfortable with an open, iterative design process.

New infrastructures start with the willingness to experiment.

When you approach the design of guiding ideas with this in mind, several things happen. First, you worry less about getting the words right and more about using the words to engage people.

“At the end of the day, you just ask yourself, ‘How did our vision and values influence decisions I made today?’ If they did not, then they are pretty much BS.”

“How do you lead an organization of this scope and scale when you cannot be involved in everything directly? For me, the secret is to focus on a very few, carefully considered interventions and a way of conducting myself that is personally consistent with that. For example, when we bring people together for a strategy conversation, the only thing I control is the construction of the space, and the construction of the intention, what I feel is the real imperative. The rest of it, I don’t control. It is controlled by the people who are there through their conversations and interactions.”

The True Believer, philosopher Eric Hoffer asks what ultimately distinguishes the committed person from the fanatic.10 His conclusion is “certainty.” The fanatic is certain that he is right. By Hoffer’s definition, whenever we act with certainty that we have the answer we act as fanatics, regardless of the cause. There is a part of us that is closed, that sees a world of black and white. Genuine commitment, on the other hand, always co-exists with some element of questioning and uncertainty. In this sense, commitment is truly a choice, rather than a compulsion.

The second paradox of stewardship, conservation and change, comes from the fact that in one sense, leadership is always about change. Leaders, individually and collectively, work to bring about a different order of things. Their focus is invariably on the new, on what is trying to emerge. I believe one of the reasons a deep sense of purpose is so important for leaders is that it also provides an anchor. While pursuing what is new and emergent, they are also stewards for something they intend to conserve. Yet what they seek to conserve, paradoxically, is a key to enabling change.

Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana says evolution is a process of “transformation through conservation.” Nature, according to Maturana, conserves a few basic features, and in so doing frees everything else to change. A simple example is “bilateral symmetry” in the animal world: two eyes, two ears, four legs, and so on. But what is important is the extraordinary evolutionary variety that occurs within the constraints of bilateral symmetry. Change leaders often forget to ask a powerful question: “What do we seek to conserve?” Change naturally induces fear in us all: fear of the unknown, of failure, of not being needed in a new order of things. When we obsessively focus only on what needs to be changed, and not on what we intend to conserve, we reinforce these fears. But when we can clarify what we intend to conserve, some of this fear can be released. When leaders consciously apply this principle, they usually discover that people seek to conserve identity and relationships, such as their identity as innovators, their partnership in reducing poverty, or their support of one another’s mental and physical well-being.

To achieve significant long-term results. It starts with focus. When positional authority leads managers to invest energy in protecting or expanding turf, it comes at the expense of focusing, focusing on short-term results becomes a strategy for further concentrating power.

We would watch managers fix immediate problems, like ‘waiting list targets,’ by not attending to anything else. But if you’ve done nothing to fundamentally change how the whole system is working, once you take your eye off it, the problems come right back. If you take the time to figure out with people how you can get a system that is going to continue to deliver better results, it takes a lot longer but when you’ve got it, it doesn’t walk away from you.

BEING A STEWARD OF YOUR VISION

This commitment brings with it a shift in our relationship to our personal vision. It ceases to be a possession, as in “this is my vision.” We become a steward of the vision. We are “its” as much as it is ours.
What distinguishes them is the clarity and persuasiveness of their ideas, the depth of their commitment, and the extent of their openness to continually learning more. They do not “have the answer,” but they seem to instill confidence in those around them that, together, “we can learn whatever we need to learn in order to achieve the results we truly desire.”
Despite all their many differences, truly effective leaders seem to come to a shared appreciation of the power of holding a vision and concurrently looking deeply and honestly at current reality. I have never seen an effective leader who did not recognize this principle, whether he or she had thought about it consciously or not.

All organizations sit within larger systems—industries, communities, and larger living systems. In one sense, it is illogical to think that the well-being of a company can be advanced independent of the well-being of its industry, its society, and the natural systems upon which it depends. For a long time, businesses have taken these larger systems mostly for granted, but it is now increasingly evident that businesses, individually and collectively, influence these systems and that the consequences of that relationship are becoming significant.

Seeing Systems

There are two fundamental aspects to seeing systems: seeing patterns of interdependency and seeing into the future. The ability to see interdependencies can be aided by tools like systems diagrams, but can also arise from stories, pictures, and songs. Seeing into the future starts with knowing how to interpret signs that are present today but go unrecognized by those without a systems perspective.

Seeing interdependencies that have been invisible to us leads to a particular kind of awakening, “knowing what we knew but didn’t know that we knew.”
My experience is that when people truly see a systemic pattern that they have created and comprehend the suffering it will create in the future, they invariably discover ways to change the pattern.

Herein lies a secret of the systems worldview. The system is not only out there, it is in here. We are the seed carriers of the whole in the sense that we carry the mental models that pervade the larger system. We are all actors in the global energy system, the global food system, and the global industrialization process. We can either think and act in ways that reinforce the system as it currently operates, or think and act in ways that lead in different directions. Because the systems that shape our lives manifest themselves at multiple levels, we can work at multiple levels.

Finally, enacting new systems is not about getting “the answer,” it is about developing networks of engaged and trusting people who are guided by a common understanding of the current system and a commitment to create new systems. “If I learned anything … it is the notion that we need to be working on all different parts of the system in order to successfully change the whole system,”

Profit Beyond Measure,2 a heretical book that suggested that Toyota’s extraordinary long-term success was due in part to carefully limiting the use of performance metrics by managers. In particular, Johnson argued that when performance metrics are reported to those at higher levels in the management hierarchy, managers are induced to use them to set numerical targets and drive change—what W. Edwards Deming called “meddling.” Johnson, like Deming, claimed that continual learning and superior performance actually depend on connecting metrics and target setting with in-depth process knowledge at the front lines. This directly contradicts what many managers consider their primary task—setting numerical targets and driving results—which may be why so few competitors have been able to match Toyota’s long-term performance.3

But sensing and acting locally is exactly how complex living systems work—indeed, it was through studying living systems that Johnson came to understand Toyota’s approach to cost management. No one is “in charge” of a forest. Your body does not wait for orders from the brain to flow coagulants to a cut in your finger. Whatever “centralized” control does exist in nature is possible precisely because of complex networks of local control. We have no idea how we walk, but once this “body knowledge” is developed, the body responds to our conscious directives; without that body knowledge, all the central directives in the world would be ineffectual. Johnson realized that Toyota’s approach to performance management embodied the essence of living systems: company managers were engaged in continually building and deploying locally embedded know-how and then trusting frontline workers to manage and improve cost performance. In effect, Toyota’s approach to localized performance management amounted to discovering and embodying nature’s patterns, and that is why Toyota’s team were superior learners.

This spirit of learning as discovering and embodying nature’s patterns subtly infuses all the other innovations discussed in the preceding chapters. When managers are committed to growing people in order to grow the enterprise or committed to utilizing conversation as the core process for change, their practices reflect insights into human nature—our innate desire to grow as human beings and to be in relationship with one another. Similarly, consider the new understanding of self-creating social networks as a natural pattern of organizing—“how work actually gets done,”

“Why couldn’t an organization work like a rain forest?”

Eventually, H. Thomas Johnson’s definition of learning led me to realize that the first principle underlying our work on organizational learning is simply to develop a system of management consistent with nature—human nature and the nature of the larger social and natural systems in which we always operate.

Comments from readers about the books impact

young woman from China as to why The Fifth Discipline had become so popular in her country. She answered in a surprising way. “We see it as a book about personal development,” she said. “So much of management theory from the West contradicts our basic belief in developing our deepest nature as human beings. Your book reinforces this belief and gives us hope that this can be consistent with building successful organizations.”

Bringing vision and deep listening to on-the-ground settings, these community leaders catalyze forces for systemic change that larger organizations cannot access. “The essence of my capacity to serve as a leader,” says Sayra Pinto of Roca, “is that people know that I am one of them, that I have traveled the road they have traveled, suffered the fears they suffer, and that I know just how smart and capable they really are.”

taught people how to formulate their visions and how to build shared visions, how to recognize mental models that held them back and how to resolve differing views through listening to one another, and how to think about their villages as systems.

My colleague and co-author of Presence, Otto Scharmer, explains a shift in orientation and intention that arises from three “thresholds,” or openings through which we must pass in leading profound change: opening the head, opening the heart, and opening the will.

The first involves opening ourselves to see and hear what is in front of us but we have not yet been able to see. This is the threshold of “suspension”—suspending taken-for-granted assumptions that have shaped our perceptions in the past.
The second threshold involves seeing with the heart—opening it to see our connection to what is around us, the pain, the suffering, and the problems, as well as the joy. Here we move beyond our comfortable stories that blame outside forces or people for what is not working and see that we too are part of the problem.
The third threshold involves letting go of the last remnants of what Scharmer call “our small ‘s’ self” and letting whatever may arise come through us. Here we connect “with the future that comes into being through us and with what we are here to do.” Passing through this third threshold does not mean that all our questions about the meaning of our lives are suddenly answered, but that “we are alive in the heart of this question and it carries us forward.”
Scharmer’s second and third shifts are catalyzed by seeing, cognitively and emotionally, and by connecting with our deepest aspirations.

“We cannot start to talk together seriously about the future we truly want to create, and the changes that may be needed, without opening our hearts, and we will never undertake the actions needed without this,”

He concluded that this was because, at some level, they knew it entailed a degree of vulnerability, of being human, that is never comfortable, and most of them were not prepared to feel that exposed. As we move through the third opening, we become willing to let go of our agendas and predetermined goals, to allow our intentions and strategies to be molded by forces larger than our own individual wills. This is the hardest of the three to talk about in the abstract, but it is very clear when it happens.

I believe each one of us is here for a reason, and when you find it, and embrace it, your heart will sing, and you will be carried along by life as you follow her desire for you.”

“If you can achieve real innocence in what you do,” “become truly insignificant in the sense that you’re not trying to lay claim to it for yourself or trying to be recognized for the outcome—and that’s very tough to do—gifts arrive. They may take the form of influence, of strength, of will, of a sense of purpose, of energy, or just all sorts of things happening that aid the cause. When people can find that inside themselves, when they can get connected to what we all kind of sense is there, when they can get to that light, it’s one of the greatest gifts. It’s the place where miracles come from.”

“Life is sacred and should be met in that way.” She adds, “I guess it is simply the experience of slowing down enough to really appreciate the beauty that surrounds us—the stunning colors of an evening sky, the gentle beauty of a flock of cows, the miracle of a seedling pushing its way through the earth, the grounding experience of settling down on one of the huge granite rocks that mark the Zimbabwean countryside, the magic of connecting deeply with another human being whether in joy or in sorrow … Each time I notice and appreciate the miracle of these seeming simple acts of creation, I also feel more certain that life is infinitely rich and full of magic and love, and that the being that manages to stay connected to that sense is richer than the one which does not.”

The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole. Nature (and that includes us) 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.