The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization

1 I See You

Among the tribes of northern Natal in South Africa, the most common greeting, equivalent to hello in English, is the expression: Sawu bona. It literally means, I see you. If you are a member of the tribe, you might reply by saying Sikhona , I am here. The order of the exchange is important: until you see me, I do not exist. It’s as if, when you see me, you bring me into existence.

This meaning, implicit in the language, is part of the spirit of ubuntu, a frame of mind prevalent among native people in Africa below the Sahara. The word ubuntu stems from the folk saying Umuntu ngumuntu nagabantu, which, from Zulu, literally translates as: A person is a person because of other people.* If you grow up with this perspective, your identity is based upon the fact that you are seen—that the people around you respect and acknowledge you as a person.

During the last few years in South Africa, many corporations have begun to employ managers who were raised in tribal regions. The ubuntu ethic often clashes subtly with the culture of those corporations. In an office, for instance, it’s perfectly normal to pass someone in the hall, while preoccupied, and not greet him. This would be worse than a sign of disrespect under the ubuntu ethic; it would imply that you felt that person did not exist. Not long ago, an internal consultant who had been raised in a rural village became visibly upset after a meeting where nothing much had seemed to happen. When a project where he had played a key part came up for discussion, his role was not mentioned or acknowledged. Asked later why it bothered him so much, he said, You don’t understand. When they spoke about the project, they did not say my name. They did not make me a person.

*O ur understanding of the meaning of sawu bona and ubuntu derives from conversations with Louis van der Merwe and his colleagues James Nkosi and Andrew Mariti.

In putting this book together, we aspire to the mutual respect and openness that is embedded in the spirit of ubuntu. As a book of notes from the field, this volume takes its shape and meaning from the aspiration and commitment of the people who will read these pages, the people who are working to build learning organizations. You could argue that we invoke each others’ potential by our willingness to see the essence of each other. Therefore, we would like to offer a formal acknowledgment and welcome to this book:

We see you. We are glad you are here.

2 An Exchange of Lore and Learning

The Purpose of The Fieldbook

This book is for people who want to learn, especially while treading the fertile ground of organizational life. It is for people who want to make their organizations more effective, while realizing their personal visions. And it is for managers facing an array of problems which resist current ways of thinking, managers who want to know: How do I fix things? You can’t just fix things, at least not permanently. You can apply theories, methods, and tools, increasing your own skills in the process. You can find and instill new guiding ideas. And you can experiment with redesigning your organization’s infrastructure. If you proceed in all these ways, you can gradually evolve a new type of organization. It will be able to deal with the problems and opportunities of today, and invest in its capacity to embrace tomorrow, because its members are continually focused on enhancing and expanding their collective awareness and capabilities. You can create, in other words, an organization which can learn.

The idea of a learning organization has become increasingly prominent over the last few years. This book’s predecessor, The Fifth Discipline*, helped give voice to that wave of interest by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of the work of building learning organizations. Since its publication in 1990, we have talked to thousands of people who have committed themselves to the idea of building a learning organization. Many of them are still not certain how to put the concepts into practice. This is great, they say, but what do we do Monday morning? What steps should we take to instill a sense of systemic awareness in a team of people? How can we integrate new types of skills and practices with other organizational improvement efforts, like total quality, sociotechnical systems, or selfmanaging teams? How do we navigate past the many barriers and roadblocks to collective learning? How do we discover exactly what type of learning organization we wish to create? How do we get started?

No one person has the answers to these questions. But there are answers. They are emerging from the collective experience of people working to increase learning in a wide variety of settings. Thousands of us are evolving together into a worldwide community, with enormously powerful potential. In that sense, the readers of this book are pioneers. Some scout the edge of the learning organization frontier, while others settle the territory, testing new concepts in organization practice, perhaps building a new type of civilization in the process.

It would be nice to compile a definitive book of diagnosis and technique which could become the learning organization equivalent to Architectural Graphic Standards or the Physicians’ Desk Reference. But architects, physicians, and other professions evolved their tools and methods over hundreds of years. Management, particularly the management of learning organizations, is much younger. It will take years of experimentation and testing for a full-fledged handbook to be published.

Instead it is time for a fieldbook—a collection of notes, reflections, and exercises from the field. This volume, the first in what we hope will be an ongoing series, contains 172 pieces of writing by 67 authors, describing tools and methods, stories and reflections, guiding ideas, and exercises and resources which people are using effectively. Many of the pieces are intensely pragmatic, geared toward helping you solve particular problems. Many of them are deeply reflective, aimed at helping you productively change the ways you think and interact.

There are no top ten learning organization exemplars in this book—no excellent learning companies, no sterling wunder-orgs that do everything so well that the rest of us need only benchmark and copy them. Instead, we believe that the learning organization exists primarily as a vision in our collective experience and imagination. Today, to an unprecedented degree in the history of the modern professionally managed organization, people are encouraged to look beyond their own organizational walls for ideas and support. Because no single organization has the resources to conduct all the necessary experiments on its own, managers seek avidly to learn about each others’ attempts, results, and reflections. The people who develop and exchange this information are not merely talking about the learning organization; they use it as a springboard for experiments and initiatives. With each effort they make, they create a new facet of the overall image of what the learning organization can be.

*T he Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge (1990, New York: Currency Doubleday).

The more detailed and clear that image becomes, the more easily and effectively we will be able to pursue it. Since the richness of this vision depends on conversations among people, the interrelationships of this community of commitment take on enormous strategic importance. We hope this Fieldbook will contribute to making the community stronger.

The five disciplines

THE CORE OF LEARNING ORGANIZATION WORK IS BASED UPON FIVE learning disciplines—lifelong programs of study and practice:

  Personal Mastery—learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

  Mental Models—reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.

  Shared Vision—building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

  Team Learning—transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members’ talents.

  Systems Thinking—a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world.

To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner on a never-ending developmental path. A discipline is not simply a subject of study. It is a body of technique, based on some underlying theory or understanding of the world, that must be studied and mastered to put into practice. As you develop proficiency, your perceptual capacity develops; you gradually surrender to new ways of looking at the world. For example, once you begin to master team learning or systems thinking, it is very difficult to play the old office game of optimizing your position at the expense of the whole.

Some people have an innate gift for a discipline, but an innate gift is not the key to mastery: many people have great artistic talent but never produce any art of consequence because they do not follow a lifelong process of honing and developing their talent. In organizations, we believe the people who contribute the most to an enterprise are the people who are committed to the practice of these disciplines for themselves—expanding their own capacity to hold and seek a vision, to reflect and inquire, to build collective capabilities, and to understand systems.

3 How to Read This Book

Start anywhere. Go anywhere

WE HAVE DESIGNED THE BOOK TO REWARD BROWSING IN ANY DIRECTION. Cross-references, for example, point out meaningful links. Zoom in where you feel engaged. Here are some starting points:

  Why Bother?—The benefits of this work: this page and this page.

  Moving Forward—Peter Senge’s essay proposing a strategic framework for designing a learning organization effort: this page.

  Defining Your Learning Organization—A solo exercise defining what kind of organization you want to create: this page.

  Designing a Learning Organization: First Steps—A team exercise for getting started: this page.

  Opening Moves—Entry paths for different organizations: this page.

Make the book your own

MARK UP THE PAGES. WRITE ANSWERS TO THE EXERCISES IN THE MARGINS. Draw. Scribble. Daydream. Note the results of what you have tried, and ideas of what you would like to try. Over time, as your field notes accumulate, they will become a record of effective practices—and a tool for reflecting on the design of the next initiative.

Do the practice

EXERCISES AND TECHNIQUES PRODUCE A DIFFERENT KIND OF LEARNING from simply reading about the work. If you feel I already know that, ask yourself honestly: Does your knowledge about these skills and methods show up in your performance? If not, then we suggest trying the exercises and techniques that seem useful.

Margin icons

TO MAKE BROWSING THROUGH THE BOOK EASIER, WE USE MARGIN ICONS to indicate different types of material:

Solo Exercise

Solo Exercise: An exercise which you practice alone—to deepen understanding and capability, to bring forth an example from your own experience, to set personal direction, or to provoke an aha!

Team Exercise

Team Exercise: An exercise for a group of people working together, sometimes conducted by a facilitator or team leader.

Guiding Ideas

Guiding Ideas: A principle (or set of principles) which we find meaningful as a philosophical source of light and direction.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure: Innovations in organizational design which affect authority, structures, information flow, and the allocation of resources.

Theory and Methods

Theory and Methods: Techniques and the theoretical underpinnings which give those techniques their power.

Cameo

Cameo: The voice of a guest contributor. We asked each cameo writer to discuss an issue that emerged in his own work, and what he discovered as he dealt with it.

Lexicon: A guide to the roots of the words we use, and the way we use them now. Staking out the precise meaning of words is important in a field like management, where so much jargon is used so loosely.

Systems Story

Systems Story: Stories which incorporate systems archetypes or other applications of systems thinking.

Tool Kit

Tool Kit: A practical device or technique.

Resource

Resource: Recommendations of books, articles, and videotapes which we have found valuable.

4 Why Bother?

Why build a learning organization? Why commit ourselves to a lifelong attempt to understand and shift the ways we think and behave?

BECAUSE WE WANT SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE

Often it seems that the essence of management in the West is to extract ideas from the heads of people at the top of the organization and place them into the hands of people at the bottom. Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of the innovative company which bears his name, believed that this was the primary reason the West would never catch up with Japan economically.

Matsushita, who died in 1989, may have been right about Western management in the past; but in the last few years, at least, most organizations we know are trying to achieve what he described. Managers talk about it in different ways. Some say they want to build high-performance organizations or gain competitive advantage. Others talk about total quality management, fast cycle time systems, self-managing work teams, empowered organizations, improving their innovation and productivity, finding core competencies, or (as we do) building learning organizations. No matter what words they use, they are all really describing different facets of the same fundamental purpose: to marry the individual development of every person in the organization with superior economic performance.

TO IMPROVE QUALITY

One of the most powerful discoveries for us during the past several years has been seeing how closely our work on learning organizations dovetails with the Total Quality movement. Again and again we have found that organizations seriously committed to quality management are uniquely prepared to study the learning disciplines.

FOR CUSTOMERS

Xerox Canada monitors some of the copiers it sells through a telecommunications link. If a machine isn’t working right, technicians replace it for free—often before the users of the machine have noticed any problems. Xerox’s marketing people estimate that the accumulated effect of customer gratitude and word of mouth is worth millions in advertising and promotion to the people they most want as customers.

To offer this service, Xerox had to be more than competent. They had to bring together people from throughout the company—marketing, research and development, technology, customer service, logistics, sales, purchasing, and accounting—in service of a common purpose.

Said former Xerox Canada CEO David McCamus during one of their shared vision sessions, If we can genuinely satisfy customers, be part of their business, and be a real resource to people, then I can feel good about that at the end of my career.

FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than its competition. No outside force can take the momentum of that advantage away from you. Arie de Geus, the former Coordinator of Group Planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, who articulated this idea in the late 1980s,* explains it this way: Any insight or invention, whether it is a new way of marketing, a new product, or a new process, is really a learning process. At Shell, we saw we did not have to be too secretive—provided we were not standing still. If we continued to learn and generate new ideas, and incorporate them into our work, then by the time anyone had copied us we would be that much further along.

FOR AN ENERGIZED, COMMITTED WORK FORCE

Without learning about the business, as well as their own tasks, employees cannot make the contributions that they are capable of. This requires dramatic learning efforts, both for the employees who must learn to act in the interest of the whole enterprise, and for the senior managers who must learn how to extend mastery and self-determination throughout the organization.

TO MANAGE CHANGE

If there is one single thing a learning organization does well, it is helping people embrace change. People in learning organizations react more quickly when their environment changes because they know how to anticipate changes that are going to occur (which is different than trying to predict the future), and how to create the kinds of changes they want. Change and learning may not exactly be synonymous, but they are inextricably linked.

FOR THE TRUTH

If I speak out, people realize when they begin building a learning organization, now I won’t be labeled as someone with a bad attitude. I can talk about the things that aren’t going right, or come clean with my customers and suppliers, instead of having to just shut up and live with it.

In many cases, the most senior executives are the most eager of all to see the freedoms to speak the truth take hold. Now they can say, I don’t know the answer. And I have faith that we’ll figure it out.

*P lanning as Learning," by Arie de Geus, Harvard Business Review , March/April 1988.

BECAUSE THE TIMES DEMAND IT

During the next thirty years, cutting-edge technological changes will spin out into everyday life. The importance of economies of scale may diminish. Factories might produce autos on Monday, refrigerators on Tuesday, and robots on Friday. New types of energy and communications grids will contribute to reshaping the political structure of local communities. People in learning organizations will be able to look forward to creating, instead of merely reacting to, the new world that emerges.

BECAUSE WE RECOGNIZE OUR INTERDEPENDENCE

Throughout human history, the critical threats to survival came as dramatic external events: saber-toothed tigers, floods, earthquakes, attacks by rival tribes. Today, the most critical threats are slow, gradual processes to which we have contributed ourselves: environmental destruction, the global arms race (which continues unabated by the breakup of the Soviet Union), and the decay of educational, family, and community structures. These types of problems cannot be understood, given our conventional ways of thinking. There is no beast to slay, no villain to vanquish, no one to blame—just a need to think differently and to understand the underlying patterns of dependency. Individual change is vital, but not sufficient. If we are going to address these conditions in any significant way, it will have to be at the level of collective thinking and understanding—at the level of organizations, communities, and society.

BECAUSE WE WANT IT

Ultimately, the most compelling reason for building a learning organization is because we want to work in one. Or because there is nothing we would rather be doing with our lives right now than building a learning organization.

5 Why Bother? (A CEO’s Perspective)

William O’Brien

William O’Brien, formerly the Chief Executive Officer of the Hanover Insurance Company, is now a member of the board of governors of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT. (Also see this page.)

Most people I talk to in business today agree that extraordinary changes are taking place in the business universe. These changes go beyond an imbalance between supply and demand, or the advance of new technology. They represent an adjustment to far-reaching forces, including an evolution of the global work force that is unprecedented in history.

In the period which we might call the modern industrial technology age—the time from 1920 to 1990, when Ford, General Motors, Du Pont, and many other large corporations were growing up—there were several driving forces behind the success of every winning company. The most important was efficiency of manufacturing; the ability to mass-produce, specialize work, and cut every cost down to the smallest tenth of a percent. Second, the winning companies learned to be effective mass marketers. A third attribute was rapid adoption of technology, and a fourth was financial acumen—the ability to analyze activity in detail, determine how to get the best rates of return, and keep capital moving. The fifth driving force was a set of elementary people skills, which companies developed through sincere efforts to move from Douglas McGregor’s Theory X to Theory Y. All these forces gave momentum to the wave of modem industrial technology.

Now, I believe, a new wave is forming: the beginning of a twenty-first-century era which is yet unnamed. It is difficult to see the potential of that era if you’re a CEO of a major corporation (or of any organization), because right now, we are at the bottom of the trough. No one knows what their industry is going to look like at the top of the next wave, in the next century. If you’re in insurance, my own business, you don’t know how the legal and regulatory situation will change; if you’re in manufacturing, every aspect of global competitiveness, trade, and technology is uncertain. For any group of people charged with corporate governance, it would be like playing Russian Roulette to base your business on any picture of what is going to happen during the next curve. If you think you can figure it out, then I suggest you are in dire need of humility.

Instead, the only prudent thing one can do in this position is to ask oneself, What are the preconditions to cope with this change? Personally, I bet that four abilities will be necessary. I don’t say there are only four; nor am I sure they’re the right four. But they are the four I bet on.

The first is learning how to disperse power on an orderly, nonchaotic basis. Right now the word empowerment is a very powerful buzzword. It’s also very dangerous. Just granting power, without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of a command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to disperse power so self-discipline can largely replace imposed discipline. That immerses us in the area of culture: replacing the bureaucracy with aspirations, values, and visions.

The second attribute of winning companies will be systemic understanding. In the insurance industry, we have extensive information, large computers, and smart actuaries spreading risk; but when we put them all together, nobody’s satisfied with the way the automobile insurance system is working. We’re good at the type of problem which lends itself to a scientific solution and reductionistic thinking. We are absolutely illiterate in subjects that require us to understand systems and interrelationships.

The third attribute that twenty-first-century companies will need is conversation. This is the single greatest learning tool in your organization—more important than computers or sophisticated research. As a society, we know the art of small talk; we can talk about how the Red Sox are doing or where we went on vacation. But when we face contentious issues—when there are feelings about rights, or when two worthwhile principles come in conflict with one another—we have so many defense mechanisms that impede communications that we are absolutely-terrible. To navigate this enormous change we’re going through, a corporation must become good at conversation that isn’t polite.

Finally, under our old system of governance, one could lead by mandate. If you had the ability to climb the ladder, gain power, and then control that power, you could enforce these changes in attributes. But the forthcoming kind of company is going to require voluntary followership. Most of our leaders don’t think in terms of getting voluntary-followers; they think in terms of control.

INGREDIENTS FOR SUCCESS

1920–1990

Efficient manufacturing

Effective mass marketing

Rapid adoption of technology

Financial acumen

Theory Y

1990–the Future

Distributing power while increasing self-discipline

Systemic thinking skills as well developed as reductionist skills

Improved conversation

Voluntary followership

The abilities on the left of the chart will continue to be important. The bureaucratic way of life, after all, has done a great job in raising our material standard of living and relieving us from the oppression of hard, physical labor. But I don’t think the new attributes will be a fad. Their essence, when you cut through all the propaganda, is marrying together individual growth and economic performance. You can never separate them. If you try to walk down one road without the other, you will not build a great organization. For me, personally, one of the turning points was the day I had to say to myself: What do I want to do with the rest of my life? Do I want to spend it coping with politics and other organizational diseases—or do I want to spend it working on building a great organization?

6 Moving Forward

Thinking Strategically About Building Learning Organizations

Peter Senge

How do you know what to do first, second, or third in this Fieldbook? No simple recipe can tell you, because everyone’s needs are different. Hence this essay, the longest in the book, which presents a strategic framework—a conceptual map to guide your own decisions about how to proceed. You’ll note that our icons throughout the book, listed on this page–this page, are tagged directly to the architectural elements (the points of the triangle) described here.

*S peech made at International Community Leadership Summit, Winrock, Arkansas, March 1983. This quote paraphrases and expands upon a well-known statement made by Mahatma Gandhi in his book Satyagraha in South Africa (1928, 1979, Canton, Me.: Greenleaf Books).

The most dangerous stage is respect

When we try to bring about change in our societies, we are treated first with indifference, then with ridicule, then with abuse and then with oppression. And finally, the greatest challenge is thrown at us: We are treated with respect. This is the most dangerous stage.

—A T. Ariyaratne*

A. T. Ariyaratne is one of the world’s most successful community organizers. His organization, the Sarvodaya Shramadana, has mobilized millions of people in Sri Lanka in successful grass roots initiatives, with lasting benefits for Sri Lanka’s economic and community development.

Ariyaratne reminds us that it is easier to begin initiatives than to bring enduring changes to fruition. At the early stages, excitement comes easily. Later, after you begin to make progress, opposition develops—which can actually mobilize your efforts. People see themselves fighting a noble battle against the entrenched forces preserving the status quo. A few small initial victories establish confidence that more progress is just around the corner. Eventually, the initiative is treated with respect: the enemy outside begins to espouse all the same goals, objectives, and ideals as those instigating the change. At this point, it is easy for people to think that the work is over. In fact, it may be just starting.

Today, there is a groundswell of interest in learning organizations. But in times of respect, it becomes more important than ever to think and act strategically. Otherwise, all the talk about learning organizations will amount to little more than another management fad.

Thinking strategically starts with reflection on the deepest nature of an undertaking and on the central challenges it poses. It develops with understanding of focus and timing. Focus means knowing where to place one’s attention. What is truly essential? What is secondary? What cannot be ignored without risking the success of the enterprise? Timing means having a sense of an unfolding dynamic. Although every organizational setting is unique, all organizations develop learning capabilities according to the same generic patterns. Some changes are intrinsically long term; they cannot be achieved quickly. Others can be started relatively quickly, but only assume lasting importance in concert with slower-occurring changes. Some changes can be achieved directly; others occur as by-products of effort focused elsewhere. Understanding such issues is the essence of strategic thinking.

Strategic thinking also addresses core dilemmas. Inevitably, one of the factors that makes significant change difficult is conflict among competing goals and norms: we want to distribute power and authority and yet we also want to improve control and coordination. We want organizations to be more responsive to changes in their environment and yet more stable and coherent in their sense of identity, purpose, and vision. We want high productivity and high creativity. Good strategic thinking brings such dilemmas to the surface, and uses them to catalyze imagination and innovation.

For the past fifteen years or longer, many of us have been struggling to understand what learning organizations are all about and how to make progress in moving organizations along this path. Out of these efforts, I believe, some insights are emerging to enhance our ability to think and act strategically. The purpose of this section is to share those ideas and to invite all of us, the growing community involved in doing this work, to help in testing and improving upon them.

The essence of the learning organization

AT SOME TIME OR ANOTHER, MOST OF US HAVE BEEN A MEMBER OF A great team. It might have been in sports, or the performing arts, or perhaps in our work. Regardless of the setting, we probably remember the trust, the relationships, the acceptance, the synergy—and the results that we achieved. But we often forget that great teams rarely start off as great. Usually, they start as a group of individuals. It takes time to develop the knowledge of working as a whole, just as it takes time to develop knowledge of walking or riding a bicycle. In other words, great teams are learning organizations—groups of people who, over time, enhance their capacity to create what they truly desire to create.

Looking more closely at the development of such a team, you see that people are changed, often profoundly. There is a deep learning cycle. Team members develop new skills and capabilities which alter what they can do and understand. As new capabilities develop, so too do new awarenesses and sensibilities. Over time, as people start to see and experience the world differently, new beliefs and assumptions begin to form, which enables further development of skills and capabilities.

This deep learning cycle constitutes the essence of a learning organization—the development not just of new capacities, but of fundamental shifts of mind, individually and collectively. The five basic learning disciplines are the means by which this deep learning cycle is activated. Sustained commitment to the disciplines keeps the cycle going. When this cycle begins to operate, the resulting changes are significant and enduring.

NEW SKILLS AND CAPABILITIES

We know that a genuine learning cycle is operating when we can do things we couldn’t do before. Evidence of new skills and capabilities deepens our confidence that, in fact, real learning is occurring.

The skills and capabilities that characterize learning organizations fall into three natural groupings:

  Aspiration: the capacity of individuals, teams, and eventually larger organizations to orient themselves toward what they truly care about, and to change because they want to, not just because they need to. (All of the learning disciplines, but particularly the practice of personal mastery and building shared vision, develop these capabilities.)

  Reflection and Conversation: the capacity to reflect on deep assumptions and patterns of behavior, both individually and collectively. Developing capabilities for real conversation is not easy. Most of what passes for conversation in contemporary society is more like a Ping-Pong game than true talking and thinking together. Each individual tosses his or her view at the other. Each then responds. Often, we are preparing our response before we have even heard the other person’s view. In effect, we are taking our shot before we have even received the other’s ball. Learningful conversations require individuals capable of reflecting on their own thinking. (These skills emerge especially strongly in the disciplines of mental models and team learning.)

See the material on dialogue, this page, and on reflection and inquiry skills, this page.

  Conceptualization: the capacity to see larger systems and forces at play and to construct public, testable ways of expressing these views. What seemed so simple from my individual point of view looks much less so when I see it from others’ points of view. But constructing coherent descriptions of the whole requires conceptualization skills not found in traditional organizations. (Systems thinking is vital for these skills, especially in concert with the reflectiveness and openness fostered by working with mental models.)

See Brownie’s Lamb, this page.

Like any new skills, the skills and capabilities required in building learning organizations shape what we can understand and accomplish. But they are unusual because they affect us deeply. They are not skills of specialization, like learning financial accounting for executives. They inevitably lead to new awarenesses because they bring about deep shifts in how we think and interact with one another.*

*A more in-depth discussion of these skills and capabilities appears in The Fifth Discipline , chapters 9 and 11 (aspiration), 10 and 12 (reflection and conversation), and 5 and 6 (conceptualization).

NEW AWARENESSES AND SENSIBILITIES

Over time, as our new skills and capabilities develop, the world we see literally shifts. For example, as we become better in systems thinking, we literally start to see underlying structures driving behavior. Where we might have leaped immediately to blame someone in the past, we now have an instinctive awareness of the forces compelling them to act as they do. Similarly, with increased awareness of our mental models, we become increasingly aware of the ways in which we continually construct our views of the world. Rather than seeing a customer as tough to deal with, we are more able to hear the exact words she or he said, and recognize how their words trigger our own mental models. Rather than seeing a mature market, we see assumptions and practices that have gone unquestioned for years—and perhaps begin to imagine alternatives.

When a group begins to advance in the practice of dialogue, as William Isaacs points out, a new type of listening emerges. People begin to listen to the whole, hearing not only what individuals say, but deeper patterns of meaning that flow through the group. For example, it is quite common in advanced dialogues for people to report that someone else gave voice to the thoughts they were about to say. This eventually quiets our anxieties about getting our points out. More importantly, it gradually builds a subtle awareness of collective thought that profoundly transforms our experience of what is possible in genuine conversation.

As we practice the disciplines of personal mastery and shared vision, we become increasingly aware of the presence or absence of spirit in an enterprise. We become more and more conscious of when we (and others) are operating based on our vision, versus when we are simply reacting to events. When a decision must be made by a team, people see the alternative in light of their vision and sense of purpose; and they often see new alternatives which would not have been visible if their deeper purpose were obscure.

NEW ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS

Gradually, new awarenesses are assimilated into basic shifts in attitudes and beliefs. This does not happen quickly. But, when it does, it represents change at the deepest level in an organization’s culture—the assumptions we don’t see, as Edgar Schein puts it.*

Schein, who is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, distinguishes deep beliefs and assumptions from an organization’s or a society’s espoused values. For example, growing up in the United States, we are aware of our society’s beliefs in the individual’s innate rights and dignity. If, however, an American lives for some time in an Asian culture she becomes aware of a very different set of deep beliefs about loyalty to the group. She might discover that behind our espoused belief in the individual often lies a fear of losing our identity in a group—a fear that most Asian cultures do not engender.

Deep beliefs are often inconsistent with espoused values in organizations. The organization might espouse an ideal of empowering people, but an attitude that they won’t let us do it prevails. Thus, even though espoused values change, the culture of the organization tends to remain the same. It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

*S ee Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein (1992, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass), p. 21 and following. See Fieldbook , p. 267.

But deep beliefs and assumptions can change as experience changes, and when this happens culture changes. The carrier of culture is, as author Daniel Quinn says, the story we tell ourselves over and over again. As we gradually see and experience the world anew, we start to tell a new story.*

The set of deep beliefs and assumptions—the story—that develops over time in a learning organization is so different from the traditional hierarchical, authoritarian organizational worldview that it seems to describe a completely different world. Indeed, in a way it does. For example, in this world we surrender the belief that a person must be in control to be effective. We become willing to reveal our uncertainties, to be ignorant, to show incompetence—knowing that these are essential preconditions to learning because they set free our innate capacity for curiosity, wonder, and experimentalism. We start to give up our faith in the analytic perspective as the answer to all of life’s problems. Eventually, a deep confidence develops within us. We begin to see that we have far greater latitude to shape our future than is commonly believed. This is no naive arrogance. It develops in concert with awareness of the inherent uncertainties in life, and the knowledge that no plan, however well thought out, is ever adequate. This confidence is based simply on firsthand experience of the power of people living with integrity, openness, commitment, and collective intelligence—when contrasted to traditional organizational cultures based on fragmentation, compromise, defensiveness, and fear.

*I shmael by Daniel Quinn (1992, New York: Bantam/Turner). See Fieldbook , p. 304.

The architecture of learning organizations

SINCE THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE WAS PUBLISHED, PERHAPS THE MOST OFTEN asked question has been, How do we get started in practicing the learning disciplines? People ask, Do we simply need to get together and talk about the book? Or is it a matter of developing the right training programs?

While the disciplines are vital, they do not in themselves provide much guidance on how to begin the journey of building a learning organization. The deep learning cycle is difficult to initiate. Skills involving fundamental new ways of thinking and interacting take years to master.

New sensibilities and perceptions of our world are a by-product of long-term growth and change. Deep beliefs and assumptions are not like light switches that can be turned on and off.

Imagine that we are standing in a beautiful open field, with the vision of building a new type of school—a school where children could continually develop their innate capabilities for learning. As architects, we would work with three critical elements. First, there would be materials needed in the construction. Second would be the tools with which we would design and eventually build the physical structure. Last would be our overarching ideas about how the school building should look, and how it could support the learning we desired to occur. Ultimately, many people will be involved in bringing the vision of the new school to fruition. But without the work of skilled and committed architects, they can never begin. The architecture is the shell within which the real work of the school will eventually take place.

In the same way, the real work of building learning organizations is the work of the deep learning cycle, and it is the province of all who engage in ongoing practice of the learning disciplines. But it takes place within a shell, an architecture—of guiding ideas, innovations in infrastructure, and theory, methods, and tools.

GUIDING IDEAS

Good ideas drive out bad ideas, says former Hanover Insurance CEO Bill O’Brien. The problem with most companies is that they have no good ideas. Instead, they are driven by ideas like: ‘The name of the game is climbing the corporate ladder,’ or ‘Do whatever it takes to win personally.’ Like a bad ecology, these ideas pollute the organizational climate and become self-reinforcing.

Fortunately, guiding ideas can be developed and articulated deliberately. Indeed, this has long been a central function of genuine leadership. We hold these truths to be self-evident … With these simple words, the cornerstone ideas upon which the United States system of governance is based were articulated. Few acts of leadership have had greater impact.

Guiding ideas (or governing ideas, as O’Brien calls them) for learning organizations start with vision, values, and purpose: what the organization stands for and what its members seek to create. Every organization, whether it deliberately creates them or not, is governed according to some explicit principles. They are not necessarily benign. Perhaps the most pernicious guiding idea to penetrate to the heart of Western business management over the past thirty to fifty years is that the purpose of the enterprise is to maximize return of the shareholders’ investment. If people really come to believe this, then whatever ideas are articulated will, by definition of the organization’s purpose, be subordinate to making money. Can there be little wonder that people in such organizations are uncommitted, that they view their jobs as mundane and uninspiring, and that they lack any deep sense of loyalty to the organization?

By contrast, management writer Ikujiro Nonaka describes the Japanese view that A company is not a machine but a living organism, and, much like an individual, it can have a collective sense of identity and fundamental purpose. This is the organizational equivalent of self knowledge—a shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it’s going, what kind of world it wants to live in, and, most importantly, how it intends to make that world a reality.*

But many attempts to articulate guiding ideas in organizations result in bland motherhood and apple pie mission or vision statements. What, then, distinguishes powerful guiding ideas? The first distinguishing feature is philosophical depth. Before the Founding Fathers could agree on the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence they literally invested years in study and conversation. They studied the evolution of democratic thinking in the West, the history of democratic governance systems among Native Americans, and hermeneutic philosophy, as transmitted through the Masonic order. Benjamin Franklin served as a colonial envoy to the Iroquois nation; during a three-decade period he wrote and published a number of works on Iroquois government practices. Only after five or ten years of patient and challenging conversation could they declare that We hold these truths to be self-evident, jointly authoring a statement of precepts to which they were literally willing to commit their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Contrast this history to the three-day retreats where management teams repair to author corporate mission or vision statements.*

*T he Knowledge-Creating Company" by Ikujiro Nonaka, Harvard Business Review , November–December 1991, p. 313.

*F orgotten founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution by Bruce E. Johansen (1982, Ipswich, Moss.: Gambit Press).

To illustrate more serious efforts, consider the following statement by Bill O’Brien: Our traditional organizations are designed to provide for the first three levels of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs—food, shelter, and belonging. Since these are now widely available to members of industrial society, these organizations do not provide anything particularly unique to command the loyalty and commitment of people. The ferment in management today will continue until organizations begin to address the higher order needs: self respect and self actualization.

In this statement, O’Brien articulates a larger context within which to consider the specifics of an organization’s mission, vision, and values. He suggests that changes in the world offer a new opportunity for organizations to reach for higher aspirations. Regardless of whether you agree with his views, it is clear that they arise from considerable thought. They carry a sense of passionate conviction not captured in most mission statements. The fact that O’Brien and his colleagues at Hanover Insurance worked continually for twenty years to develop a guiding philosophy for the organization speaks eloquently for patience and perseverance.

The second distinguishing feature of powerful guiding ideas follows from the first—seeing the process as ongoing. Guiding ideas are not static. Their meaning, and sometimes their expression, evolve as people reflect and talk about them, and as they are applied to guide decisions and action. This, of course, is the central tenet of the discipline of building shared vision—that shared visions live in our ongoing conversations about what we seek together to create.

*I am indebted to Fred Kofman for helping me to understand these three ideas and their potential significance (see Communities of Commitment: The Heart of the Learning Organization by Fred Kofman and Peter M. Senge, Organizational Dynamics , Fall 1993).

THREE KEY GUIDING IDEAS FOR LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS

Are there guiding ideas relevant for all efforts to build learning organizations? A five-day introductory program developed for the member companies of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning offers one perspective. The program is organized around three interrelated ideas which constitute the philosophical core of the systems perspective. All three of these ideas question bedrock tacit assumptions of the Western cultural tradition.* Time will tell the merit of these as guiding ideas for a workable philosophy of management, but they seem to be pointing in the right direction.

*T he Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz (1973, New York: Basic Books).

  The primacy of the whole suggests that relationships are, in a genuine sense, more fundamental than things, and that wholes are primordial to parts. We do not have to create interrelatedness. The world is already interrelated.

   In the West, we tend to think the opposite. We tend to assume that parts are primary, existing somehow independent of the wholes within which they are constituted. In fact, how we define parts is highly subjective, a matter of perspective and purpose. There is no intrinsic set of categories, no innate way to define elements that is built into the nature of the real thing we are looking at. Consider a simple mechanical system, like an airplane. Is it made up of a fuselage, wings, tail, and cockpit? Of metal parts and plastic parts? Or of a right half and a left half? There are an infinite number of ways to partition the plane. The categories we invoke depend upon whether we are a designer, a parts supplier, or a passenger. But what makes an airplane an airplane cannot be found in the parts. A submarine also has a fuselage and a tail; a large crane in a steel mill has a cockpit; and a blimp has all three. The identity of the airplane exists only in the function and design of the whole. The parts of the plane are neither absolute nor out there. Rather, they arise as we as observers interact with the phenomenon we are observing.

   The primacy of the whole is even more compelling when we consider living systems. Dividing a cow in half does not make two small cows. A person might be said to be comprised of a head, a torso, and limbs; or of bones, muscles, skin, and blood; or of the brain, lungs, heart, liver, and stomach; or of a digestive system, circulatory system, respiratory system, and nervous system; or of many, many cells. No matter what distinctions we choose, we cannot grasp what it is to be human by looking at the parts.

   In the realm of management and leadership, many people are conditioned to see our organizations as things rather than as patterns of interaction. We look for solutions that will fix problems, as if they are external and can be fixed without fixing that which is within us that led to their creation. Consequently, we are inevitably drawn into an endless spiral of superficial quick fixes, worsening difficulties in the long run, and an ever-deepening sense of powerlessness. In organizations, articulating the primacy of the whole as a guiding idea may be the first step in helping people break this vicious cycle.

  The community nature of the self challenges us to see the interrelatedness that exists in us. Just as we tend to see parts as primordial to wholes, we tend to see the individual as primordial to the community in which the individual is embedded. There is no such thing as human nature independent of culture, says anthropologist Clifford Geertz.*

   When somebody asks us to talk about ourselves, we talk about family, work, things we care about, and what we do for fun. But in all of this talk, where is our self? The answer is nowhere, because the self is not a thing. The self is, as my colleague Fred Kofman says, a point of view that unifies the flow of experience into a coherent narrative—a narrative striving to connect with other narratives. Moreover, the narrative is deeply informed by our culture. The stories we construct to make sense of our experience, to give meaning to our actions and thoughts, are stories that we have learned to construct.

   When we forget the community nature of the self, we identify our self with our ego. We then assign a primordial value to the ego (part) and see the community (whole) as secondary. We see the community as nothing but a network of contractual commitments to symbolic and economic exchanges. Encounters with others become transactions that can add or subtract to the possessions of the ego.

   The resulting loss is incalculable—isolation, loneliness, and loss of our sense of place. We lose a sense of self which other cultures know very well. For example, in many indigenous cultures the essence of being a person is being in relationship to other people (like the culture of ubuntu described on this page of this book). In such cultures, our unquestionable reality of separation is not so real. A culture where people greet one another with I see you, and where speaking a person’s name brings him or her into existence as a person, may seem crazy to us. But it is perfectly consistent with a systems view of life, which suggests that the self is never given and is always in a process of transformation.

   As a guiding idea for learning organizations, the community nature of the self opens the door to powerful and beneficial changes in our underlying values. When we do not take other people as objects for our use, but see them as fellow human beings with whom we can learn and change, we open new possibilities for being ourselves more fully.

  The generative power of language illuminates the subtle interdependency operating whenever we interact with reality and implies a radical shift in how we see some of these changes coming about.

   Werner Heisenberg shocked the world of classical physics in 1927 by claiming that when we measure the world we change it. With his uncertainty principle, Heisenberg gave hard science credibility to what philosophers had gradually come to understand over the preceding hundred years: that human beings cannot ever know what is really real. We participate more deeply than we imagine in shaping the world that we perceive.

   Philosophers have given the name naive realism to the worldview which holds rigid positions like the primacy of the parts and the isolated nature of the self. This worldview takes reality as a given entity outside our perception, and sees language as the tool through which we describe this external reality out there. But as Heisenberg suggests, we have no actual way of ever knowing what is out there. Whenever we articulate what we see, our language interacts with our direct experience. The reality we bring forth arises from this interaction.

   The alternative to naive realism is recognizing the generative role of the traditions of observation and meaning shared by a community—and that these traditions are all that we ever have. When we are confronted by multiple interpretations of the real world, the alternative to seeking to determine which is right is to admit multiple interpretations and seek those that are most useful for a particular purpose, knowing that there is no ultimately correct interpretation. The alternative to seeing language as describing an independent reality is to recognize the power of language that allows us to freshly interpret our experience—and might enable us to bring forth new realities.

   When we forget the generative power of language, we quickly confuse our maps for the territory. We develop a level of certainty that robs us of the capacity for wonder, that stifles our ability to see new interpretations and new possibilities for action. Such are the roots of belief systems that become rigid, entrenched, and ultimately self-protective. When we forget the contingent nature of our understanding, who we are becomes our beliefs and views. This is why we defend against an attack on our beliefs as if it were against an attack on ourselves. In a very real sense, it is.

THEORY, METHODS, AND TOOLS

Ideas such as these, which represent significant shifts in our predominant ways of thinking, can be daunting. The point of raising them is not to have people grasp them intellectually, nor to have people adopt them posthaste—but to find a way to pursue them meaningfully. It may be enough if they challenge all of us to think more deeply. If they stand the test of time, they will have to find their way into the way we conduct our work. How might this happen?

Buckminster Fuller used to say that if you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

There are many tools and methods vital to developing learning organizations. Much of this book elaborates on methods and tools introduced originally in The Fifth Discipline, or presents new, complementary tools. All of these methods and tools help us enhance the capabilities that characterize learning organizations: aspiration, reflection and conversation, conceptualization.

Examples of methods and tools that help individuals, teams, and eventually larger organizations orient themselves toward what they truly care about (aspirations) include reflective practices for drawing out personal vision (see Drawing Forth Personal Vision, this page), and interactive practices for developing shared vision (see Building Shared Vision: How to Begin, this page). Examples of the methods and tools of reflective conversation include Left-Hand Column Cases (see The Left-Hand Column, this page), and dialogue exercises such as Projector and Screen, and the use of blindfolds (this page). Methods and tools for conceptualizing and understanding complex, interdependent issues include system archetypes, (see this page), and management flight simulators based on generic management structures such as new product development and service quality (see this page).

Thinking in terms of theory, methods, and tools sheds new light on the meaning of the disciplines for building learning organizations. These disciplines represent bodies of actionable knowledge comprised of underlying theories, and practical tools and methods derived from these theories.

The synergy between theories, methods, and tools lies at the heart of any field of human endeavor that truly builds knowledge. In music, the theory of sonata form has given rise to methods for developing sonata structures, as well as many instructional techniques for helping students understand and practice writing sonatas. In medicine, the theory of cardiac functioning—how a healthy heart functions and the irregularities that indicate a heart attack—has led to a long-standing methodology for cardiac monitoring to track heart attacks in progress and to avert those that are starting. The method advanced significantly when electronic cardiac monitors were developed—a tool which enabled much more precise and extensive monitoring.

THEORY, METHOD, TOOL

By the term theory, I mean a fundamental set of propositions about how the world works, which has been subjected to repeated tests and in which we have gained some confidence. The English word theory comes from the Greek root word theo-rós, meaning spectator. This derives from the same root as the word theater. Human beings invent theories for the same basic reasons they invent theater—to bring out into a public space a play of ideas that might help us better understand our world.

It is a shame that we have lost this sense of the deeper meaning of theory today. For most of us, theory has to do with science. It suggests something cold, analytic, and impersonal. Nothing could be further from the truth. The process whereby scientists generate new theories is full of passion, imagination, and the excitement of seeing something new in the world. Science, as Buckminster Fuller often said, is about putting the data of our experience in order.

New theories penetrate into the world of practical affairs when they are translated into methods and tools. Method comes from the Greek méthodos—a means to pursue particular objectives. It gradually evolved into its current meaning: a set of systematic procedures and techniques for dealing with particular types of issues or problems.

Tool comes from a prehistoric Germanic word for to make, to prepare, or to do. It still carries that meaning: tools are what you make, prepare, or do with.—PS

Conversely, through developing practical tools and methods, theories are brought to practical tests, which in turn leads to the improvement of the theories. This continuous cycle—of creating theories, developing and applying practical methods and tools based on the theories, leading to new insights that improve the theories—is the primary engine of growth in science and technology.

The same basic connections between theory, method, and tools underlie each of the learning disciplines. Each embodies practical tools, which are grounded in underlying theory and methodology. In systems thinking, the tool of system archetypes is based on a general methodology, developed at MIT over the past 40 years, called system dynamics, for understanding how the feedback structure of complex systems generates observed patterns of