The Art and Science of Learning Organisation
The Fifth Discipline
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Peter M. Senge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Leader-full Organizations! hange. Like it or not, it’s the predominant fact of our age. Patricia Fahey, lead trainer for the 1995 Head Start Phase III management training institute said, “Shift Happens!” None of us can prevent it. We can only deal with it. That institute drew heavily on the work of MIT’s Peter M. Senge of the Sloan School of Management and his 1994 book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. Senge’s five key disciplines are 1) systems thinking, 2) achieving personal mastery, 3) shifting mental models, 4) building shared vision, and 5) team learning. Senge says that the five disciplines’ convergence creates new waves of experimentation and advancement—and, hopefully, “learning organizations” in which “people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire.” The training program focused on helping create or enhance agency environments that engage “systemsthinking,” challenge our self-limiting “mental models,” fosContinued on page 9
Learning...and Staying Calm!
C
O
ur traditional ways of thinking are breaking down” says Peter Senge. That’s why we’re seeing Washington, D.C., “gridlock,” the demise of huge corporations, and the crisis in our schools, he says. Having been taught to break problems down and see things laterally and sequentially, we’ve lost a sense of the whole. And when we try to gather the pieces we’ve created and see the “big picture,” it’s futile. “It’s similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mind to see a true reflection,” he says. We must learn to think, interact and see the connectedness of all things in new and different ways. Before we can re-think and redesign, though, we must see things differently. Everything we “see” and “know” is filtered through our internal structures Senge calls “mental models.” We accept
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Peter M. Senge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Leader-full Organizations! hange. Like it or not, it’s the predominant fact of our age. Patricia Fahey, lead trainer for the 1995 Head Start Phase III management training institute said, “Shift Happens!” None of us can prevent it. We can only deal with it. That institute drew heavily on the work of MIT’s Peter M. Senge of the Sloan School of Management and his 1994 book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. Senge’s five key disciplines are 1) systems thinking, 2) achieving personal mastery, 3) shifting mental models, 4) building shared vision, and 5) team learning. Senge says that the five disciplines’ convergence creates new waves of experimentation and advancement—and, hopefully, “learning organizations” in which “people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire.” The training program focused on helping create or enhance agency environments that engage “systemsthinking,” challenge our self-limiting “mental models,” fosContinued on page 9
Learning...and Staying Calm!
C
O
ur traditional ways of thinking are breaking down” says Peter Senge. That’s why we’re seeing Washington, D.C., “gridlock,” the demise of huge corporations, and the crisis in our schools, he says. Having been taught to break problems down and see things laterally and sequentially, we’ve lost a sense of the whole. And when we try to gather the pieces we’ve created and see the “big picture,” it’s futile. “It’s similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mind to see a true reflection,” he says. We must learn to think, interact and see the connectedness of all things in new and different ways. Before we can re-think and redesign, though, we must see things differently. Everything we “see” and “know” is filtered through our internal structures Senge calls “mental models.” We accept