Peter Michael Senge

Born 1947, Stanford, California.

Received a B.S. in Aerospace engineering from Stanford

University.

Earned an M.S. in social systems modeling from MIT in 1972.

Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1978.

Founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL).

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

(1990)

Convert companies into LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS.

Group problem solving using the systems thinking method .

The five disciplines represent approaches :-

Developing three core learning capabilities:

○ Fostering aspiration,

○ Developing reflective conversation,

○ Understanding complexity

The Learning Organization

Organizations where people continually

expand their capacity to create the results

they truly desire.

New and expansive patterns of thinking

are nurtured.

Collective aspiration is set free.

People are continually learning to see the

whole together.

The Learning Organization

Adaptive Learning

Generative Learning

Learning Organization

In a Learning Organization

Flexibility

People

Staff Opinions

Exchanging information

Learn new skills

Opportunities exist

Learning Occur

A company that needs to learn…

1. Employees seem unmotivated or uninterested

in their work.

2. Workforce lack the skill and knowledge to

adjust to new jobs.

3. Workforce simply follow orders.

4. Lack communication between each other.

5. Teams argue constantly

and lack real productivity.

The Five Disciplines

Distinguishes the learning organisation from traditional

ones on the basis of the mastery of five disciplines.

All five are concerned with a shift in focus from people

as ‘helpless reactors’ to ‘active participants’.

Who create the future instead of reacting to the

present.

Five Basic Disciplines

PERSONAL MASTERY

MENTAL MODELS

SHARED VISION

TEAM LEARNING

SYSTEMS THINKING

1. Personal mastery

Measured by the difference

between our goals and our current

reality.

Relieve the tension by reducing

your goals to match your current

reality.

Change your perception of your

current reality to be closer to your

goal.

2. Mental Models

Deeply ingrained assumption,

generalizations, or even pictures of

images that influence how we understand

the world and how we take action.

The widely acknowledged truth that

many good ideas never get past the

drawing board.

Senge explains reason for this with

people’s profoundly held ‘mental models’

which reject anything untried or

unfamiliar.

3. Shared Vision Shared vision is the difference between people doing work

because they are told to and doing it because they want to.

Vision must be dictated to the organisation through a ‘top-down’

process.

An organisational vision is not truly shared until it connects with

the personal visions of everyone inside the organisation

3. Shared Vision Allows the group to discover insights not attainable individually.

Is a shared vision only when it connects with the personal vision of people

throughout the organization.

Shows group how to recognize the patterns of interaction that undermine

learning.

Vision creates the spark; the excitement that lifts an organization out of

the mundane.

Fosters risk taking and experimentation.

Encourages building personal vision-personal mastery

4. Team Learning

Pooling knowledge, expertise and intellect to produce results which are

beyond the sum of the individual parts.

Begins with the practice of ‘dialogue’, “the capacity of members of a

team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine ‘thinking

together’ .

When teams are effectively learning they are producing successful

results.

Individual team members are growing faster than they could have on

their own.

If teams can not learn, neither can the organization.

4. Team Learning

5. Systems Thinking

Fifth Discipline that integrates the other four:-

Is a language for learning and acting.

Helps us see how we create our reality.

Points to higher leverage solutions to problems.

Helps us understand and describe complex issues.

One can only understand a system by stepping back and viewing it

from a distance

The Laws of the Fifth Discipline

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

The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.

Behavior grows better before it grows worse.

The cure can be worse than the disease.

Faster is slower.

Contd....

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and

space.

You can have your cake and eat it too--but not at once.

Dividing the elephant in half does not produce two small

elephants.

There is no blame.

(Senge (1990) pp.. 57-67)

The Learning Disabilities:

Most organizations learn poorly and create fundamental learning

disabilities

The seven learning Disabilities:-

1. "I am my position." 

2. "The enemy out there."

3. The Illusion of Taking Charge

4. The Fixation of Events

5. The Parable of the Boiling Frog

6. The Delusion of Learning from Experience

7. The Myth of the Management Team

1. I am my Position

Trained to be loyal to our job and confuse them with our own

identities.

Tendency to see responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of

position.

When people in organizations focus only on their position, they

have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all

positions interact.

2. THE ENEMY IS OUT THERE

The propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to

blame when things go wrong.

Thou shall always find an external agent to blame.

Marketing blames manufacturing blames engineering blames

marketing.

This syndrome is a by-product of "I am my position”.

3. THE ILLUSION OF TAKING CHARGE

Proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise.

Aggressive fighting the ‘enemy out there’ means we

are reacting.

True proactiveness comes from seeing how we

contribute to our own problem.

4. THE FIXATION ON EVENTS

• Focusing on events distract from seeing the longer-term patterns

of change.

• Distracts from understanding the cause of those patterns.

• Cave men needed to react to events quickly for survival-ability.

• Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if

people's thinking is dominated by short-term events.

5. The Delusion of Learning from Experience

Practice makes permanent, rather

than perfect

6. THE PARABLE OF THE BOILED FROG

We are adept at responding to sudden changes in

our environment.

We are terrible at assessing slow, gradual changes,

even when they threaten our survival.

7. The Myth of the Management Team

The team may function quite well with routine

issues.

But when they confront the complex issues that

may be embarrassing or threatening, the

teamness seems to go to pot.

Avoiding anything that will make them look bad

personally

Pretending that everyone is behind the team’s

collective strategy.

Books by him

The Fifth Discipline Field book: Strategies and Tools for

Building a Learning Organization (1994).

The Dance of Change.

The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning

Organizations (1999).

Schools That Learn (2000).

THANK YOU