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The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.” 

Discipline

The Fifth Discipline

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

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.

Structure Influences Behavior 

STRUCTURE INFLUENCES BEHAVIOR 

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

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 

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

1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions”

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

Compensating Feedback

Behavior grows better before it grows worse. 

The easy way out usually leads back in

The cure can be worse than the disease

Faster is slower

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space

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

Principle of the System Boundary 

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.

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

Systems Thinking to Handle Complexity

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:

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

Language shapes perception 

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

Balancing feedback processes are everywhere/ Delays

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

System Archetypes 

ARCHETYPE 1: LIMITS TO GROWTH DEFINITION 

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

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.

  1. There’s a problem that gets gradually worse over the long term—although every so often it seems to get better for a while. 
  2. The overall health of the system gradually worsens. 
  3. 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. 

SELF-LIMITING OR SELF-SUSTAINING GROWTH 

Growth and Underinvestment 

Information Problem

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

Creative Tension

Characteristics  of Personal Mastery

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 

Personal vision comes from within.

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.

HOLDING CREATIVE TENSION

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

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

COMMITMENT TO THE TRUTH

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

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

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

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: 

  1. Be a model. 
  2. Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. 
  3. 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

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: 

  1. Tools that promote personal awareness and reflective skills
  2. “infrastructures” that try to institutionalize regular practice with mental models
  3. 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.

“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 

Inquiry skills 

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 

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.

Exercise: “Left Hand Column”

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.

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 

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.

Building shared vision 

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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:

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

Unaligned Team

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 

Within organizations, team learning has three critical dimensions. 

  1. 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. 
  2. 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. 
  3. 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.

“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 

Balancing Dialogue and Discussion 

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.

Defensive routines 

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?”

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 

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,”

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: 

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

6. BUILDING LEARNING COMMUNITIES

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

7. WORKING WITH “THE OTHER”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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