The Five Disciplines and the Learning Organization
In the Fifth Discipline Peter M. Senge outlines five disciplines that are necessary to build a 'learning organization.'He states- 'the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.'
This is a good point on which to begin thinking about best practices and how they relate to the type organization we seek to build.
Learning organization -- 'one where people are encouraged to try new and better patterns of thinking, and doing things.'
The First Discipline - Personal Mastery
The learning organization depends on the desire of its individuals to grow and aspire to greater knowledge.
Senge suggests each person needs to approach his or her work as an artist approaches a work of art; to make a commitment to lifelong learning and to develop each skill to its highest level.
Aren't these the type of people you want to hire and develop, the lifelong learners?
A comparison can be made to Stephen R. Covey's '7 Habits of Highly Effective People.'
The first three habits -
- Be Proactive
- Begin with the End in Mind
- Put First Things First
are collectively referred to as 'Private Victory.' According to Covey, private victory must precede the habits of public victory.
A personal vision - a clear understanding of one's desired destination is central to this concept.
The gap between where you are and where you want to be stimulates 'creative tension.' (this is true on the organizational as well as the personal level of course).
The creative tension can be released in one of two ways:
- Reality can be pulled toward the vision
- Snapping the vision back to reality
Visions can die, for both individuals and organizations, because people become discouraged by the apparent difficulty of bringng the vision to reality.
Visions can also die because people become overwhelmed by the demands of current reality and lose their focus on the vision- on the goal.
The Second Discipline - Mental Models
Personal mastery can do more harm than good if the people in an organization are working to achieve different visions.
Mental models are unavoidable, everyone has them. They help individuals to intepret and navigate reality.
However, they are models; and all models are necessarily inaccurate.
The danger comes from automatically rejecting new ideas that do not fit existing models.
Mental models must be consistently held to scrutiny and re-examined.
In Hyrum Smith's 'The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management' the 6th Law is 'Your behavior is a reflection of what you truly believe.' Smith refers to our 'belief window.' This is the lens through which we intperpret reality; we look at the world through this belief window. If we are not willing to change our belief windows- our mental models- it will be difficult to change behavior.
Every organization faces the problem of transforming strategies into reality- into concrete changes in behaviors. In fact, a reason why many new strategic initiatives fail is that they conflict with our view of reality.
'Culture eats strategy for lunch every day of the week.'
When a faulty or incomplete mental model is shared by the key people in an organization (aka 'groupthink'), the consequences can be devastating.
Mental models must be brought out into the open and objectively challenged.
Failure to do this will prevent an organization from understanding what systems thinking is all about.
The Third Discipline - Shared Vision
Organizations need an image of their future (and a shared myth of their past) to inspire people around a common identity and sense of destiny.
This is how the organizational culture is defined and changed. And remember, 'culture eats strategy for lunch every day of the week.'
Shared visions are critical to the learning organization because people only learn when they strive to accomplish something that matters to them.
So, companies that build shared visions also encourage their members to develop personal visions.
Without visions of their own, people can only follow someone else's goal. This is usually done without a strong sense of commitment. On the other hand, when personal visions are put together, they create a powerful synergy to enable collective achievement.
Compare to 'vision statements' that are written by top management and consultants and sit in drawers and are ignored and fail to inspire commitment.
Rather, building a shared vision is a central part of the daily work of leadership. Every day.
The Fourth Discipline - Team Learning
I attended a PMI Chapter meeting where Michael de la Maza, a coach and trainer in agile project management, asked two salient questions:
- How many of you, in the past year, attended training that was paid for by your employer? (most hands went up)
- How many of you, ever, have attended training that was specifically directed at developing your team? (not too many hands went up).
As powerful as a shared vision can be in motivating people, it will never be more than a dream unless people develop the skills to bring the vision to life.
When individuals learn, they seldom contribute to organizational learning. (it's true- we always say we are going to enforce 'informaton sharing' - but the pressures of the day prevent this).
When teams learn, they become a catalyst for learning throughout the organization. When people truly learn together, their combined intelligence can surpass the intelligence of individuals.
Teams can produce more, while all of their members grow more rapidly then they could by learning on their own.
The Fifth Discipline - Systems Thinking
"We have to get used to thinking that we are part of a system and to understanding exactly what this means." -- Lepore and Ogden, 'Deming and Goldratt'
Organizations are made up of invisible patterns of action. Each action influences all the others. Everything is interconnected.
We humans are good at linear, basic cause and effect, thinking. The problem is that linear thinking is reductive, it focuses on one piece of a pattern.
The systems approach studies patterns, looking deeper to find deeper connections.
Systems thinking is a departure from linear thinking. Linear thinking tends to focus on 'simple solutions' when in fact the problems are deeper and more complex than is suspected.
Systems thinking focuses on underlying structure- this is where the true problems, and solutions, are to be found.
The fifth discipline, systems thinking, allows us to shift about thinking about the parts to thinking about the whole. A method to see beyond events to the forces that shape change
Systems Thinking -- Learning Disabilities
Senge maintains that healthy organizations often fail because of learning disabilities.
These learning disabilities, blindspots really, hold organizations back because they fool people into thinking they act independently. Actually, they operate in systems, in which they are independent.
- People believe they are their jobs. They feel responsbile for their tasks, while ignoring (or being ignorant of) overriding goals.
- The enemy is out there. If everyone is focused only on doing his or her own job, anything that goes wrong must be someone else's fault. Often, however, the enemy is within the system.
- Trying to be proactive. Fighting the enemy ‘out there’ gives managers a mission; but they react to a symptom of a deeper problem. To be truly truly proactive, managers need to analyze the entire problem, not just the part that is easy to see.
- Fixation on events. Events are often symptoms, the cause is part of a deeper pattern.
- Inability to learn from experience. The problem is that the results do not show up too late; they are not easily mentally correlated with the causes. As well, the consequences of a decision made in one area may be felt in another division.