THE FIFTHDISCIPLINEFieldbook

PETER SENGE RICHARD ROSS BRYAN SMITH

CHARLOTTE ROBERTS ART KLEINER

• What different organisations do to build learning capacity? And

• Why some organisations use learning better than others?

Senge codified these practices into what he called 'The 5 Learning Disciplines' as well as coming up with the concept-label of 'learning organisations’.

In 1990, Peter Senge published "The Fifth Discipline" (later followed by "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization" in 1994). His books pulled together his extensive research into:

5 writers with 5 disciplines

Peter SengeRichard RossBryan SmithCharlotte RobertsArt Klenier

Personal MasteryMental ModelsShared VisionTeam LearningSystems Thinking

Organizational Improvement

According to Senge, “Great teams are learning organizations – groups of people who, overtime, enhance their capacity to create what they truly desire to create.”

Continuous state of change is Senge’s vision for the productive, competitive, and efficient institutions of the future.

Generating some thinking and action around change by:

Strategies

Real Work: Work of implementation

Creating and building great teams

Collection of reports theoretical summaries

Reports

Getting StartedIt addresses the basic concepts and ideas of the Learning Organization. It means the continuous testing of experience, and the transformation of that experience into knowledge-accessible to the whole organization, and relevant to its core purpose.

Each of the five disciplines is explained, and elaborated in the following Four questions. These questions can help and guide a group's learning and improvement . • Do you continuously test your experience?• Are you producing knowledge?• Is the knowledge shared?• Is the learning relevant?

A section of getting started is about the Wheel of Learning (Mastering the Rhythm of a Learning Organization).

People pass:Between action & reflection, andBetween activity & repose.

Systems Thinking (the fifth discipline)

It is 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 (pg 6).

Systems is the cycles of cause and effect (pg 87). The time of your greatest growth is the best moment to plan for harder times (pg87). A system is a perceived whole whose elements “hang together” because they continually affect each other over time and operate toward a common purpose (pg90).

In A Universal Language the subject-verb-object constructions of most Western Languages (where A causes B) make it difficult to talk about circumstances in which A causes B while B causes A and both continually interrelated with C and D (pg 88).

The tools of systems thinking: Casual loop diagrams, Archetypes (Models), and Computer models. Systems thinking encompasses a large and fairly amorphous (unstructured) body of methods, tools, and principles, all oriented to looking at the interrelatedness of forces, and seeing them as part of a common process. The systems for describing how to achieve fruitful change in organizations called “Systems dynamics”. The tools and methods are the “links and loops”, archetypes (standards, models) , and stock-and –flow modeling (pg 89) .

X

Reinforcing Loops when small changes become big changes (pg 114)

The two building blocks of all systems representations are as follow:

Reinforcing• Generate exponential growth &

Collapse• Small change build on itself• Linear thinking can always get

us into trouble

Balancing• Generate the forces of resistance,

which eventually limit growth.• Always bound to a target• Are the mechanisms, found in

nature and all systems, that:• Fix problems• Maintain stability• Achieve equilibrium

Systems thinking recognizes:

- the circular nature of cause and effect,

- focuses on incentives and the influence of organizational structures on individual action.

A good systems thinker can see four levels operating simultaneously (pg 97):

Events

- Consider all the individual events/problems- Replacing the events, - Improve training program, - improve servicing, - rewrites of the operations manuals

Patterns of behavior

- Brainstorm about possible solutions,- List all the related factors,- Introduce different way of thinking,- Work on patterns of behavior,- Review the problems

Systemic Structure

- Consider causal relationship,- List key interrelationship, between factors,- Discarding hypotheses,- Draw diagrams

Mental models

- Change the system,- introduce a new policy,- incentives rewards,- Prevailing motivations,- Work on key assumptions- Deal effectively with problems- Restructured targets

To understand the problems and find solutions we can follow the Five Whys step by step (pg 108):

Step 1: Pick the symptom where you wish to start; Ask the group Why is such-and-such taking place?

* put all the answers on the wall

Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, and Step 5: * Repeat the process for every statement on the wall, asking “Why” about each one.

* Post each answer near its “parent”* Follow up all the answers that seem likely* You will find them converging, a dozen separate symptoms may be

traceable back to two or three systematic sources

Systems Thinking (the fifth discipline)

It is about bridging the gap between text and context. Offers everyone a deep and refreshing look at what work can be and should be. All the stories, examples, exercises in five conceptual touchstones--personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. And these disciplines accurately reveal three core tasks in

leadership:

1. looking at self,

2. developing others,

3. seeing the larger picture in order to chart a meaningful course.

Learning is essential for sustainable growth, for organizational and personal development. It is a set of practices and perspectives, which views all aspects of life as inter-related and playing a role in some larger system. The idea is on reinforcing and balancing.

Personal Mastery

It is about learning to expand our personal capacity to create results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves towards the goals and purposes they choose (pg6).

The learning starts with each person. For organizations to learn and improve, people within the organization must learn to reflect on and become aware of their own core beliefs and visions. Personal Mastery covers the area of individual development and learning. It covers the self-growth and self-improvement.Personal mastery is the most individual of the five disciplines for a reason:

if individual learning can not occur, then group learning can not occur.

The maturity to handle creative tension and pursue total development are elements of personal mastery.

Mental Models

-Reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions (pg6) .

- Are the images, assumption, and stories which we carry in our minds of ourselves, other people, institutions, and every aspect of the world (pg 235) which guide their institutional directions, practices, and strategies. It is the pictures that we have in our head which represent reality.

- Differences between mental models explain why two people can observe the same event and describe it differently; they are paying attention to different details. Mental models also shape how we act (pg 236).

- According to some cognitive theorists, changes in short term everyday mental models, accumulating over time, will gradually be reflected in changes in long-term deep-seated beliefs (pg 237).

Mental models are simplifications of reality. Mental models are a good thing as long as they are explicit. The danger is when implicit mental models are considered universal truths rather than sets of conditions that reflect a place and time.

There are 2 types of skills to consider: 1. Reflection: Slowing down out

thinking process awareness of how we form our mental models.

2. Inquiry: Sharing views openly, developing knowledge about each other assumptions

It is about:

The Ladder of inference

It is a common mental pathway of increasing abstraction, often leading to misguided beliefs (pg 243).

I take actions based on my beliefs

I adapt Beliefs about the word

I draw conclusions

I make Assumptions based on the meanings I added

I add Meanings (cultural and personal)

Select “Data” from what I obsrve

Observable “data” and experiences

The reflexive loop(our beliefs affect what data we select next time)

We can improve our communications through reflection, and by using the laddr of inference in three ways (pg 245):1. Reflection Awareness of our own thinking and reasoning2. Advocacy Making our thinking and reasoning more visible to

others3. Inquiry Inquiring into others’ thinking and reasoning

Shared Vision

It is about 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 (pg6).

The discipline of building shared vision is centered around a never-ending process, whereby people in an organization articulate their common stories – around vision, purpose, values, why their work matters, and how it fits in the larger world (pg298).

It offers many strategies and perspectives on how to move an organization toward continuous reflection, and also find a common cause with the rest of the people in the organization, something that all work for. It is about the case for the stakeholders of an organization to adapt their: vision Values Purpose goals

When a team has a shared vision, they are all pulling in approximately the same direction.

Key precepts for a successful strategy for building shared vision (pg 298)

1. A deep purpose that expresses the organizations reason for existence.2. An organizations founders’ aspirations, and the reasons why its industry came into being.3. Not all visions are equal. Visions must emerge from many people reflecting on the organization’s purpose.4. To become more aware of the organization’s purpose ask the members of the organization and learn to listen for the answers.5. Designing and evolving ongoing processes in which people at every level of the organization, in every role, can speak from the heart about what really matters to them and be heard - by senior management and each other6. “Creative tension” – the innate pull that emerges when we hold cleared pictures of our vision close to or side by side with current reality.

In conclusion the shared vision discipline is essentially focused around building shared meaning, Potentially none existed before. Shared meaning is a collective sense of what is important, and why?

The following picture shows the five stages:

The further to the left the more the organization depends on a strong leader to tell everyone what the shared vision should be.

The further to the right the more leadership, direction-setting, and learning capacity the organization as a whole must have

Team Learning

It is about transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual member’s talents (pg6)

As we work with other people in teams or groups, we need to pass the stuff that we have learnt and the wisdom we've acquired to others. At this stage, the learning is no longer that of the individual, but the group.

It rely mostly on the work of William Isaacs and others, and make a case for educating organization members in the processes and skills of dialogue and skillful discussion.

Learning as a team also requires each of the other four disciplines to work well. Each member of the team should have a level of personal mastery and acceptance of the shared vision.