The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (1990)

As an internal/external consultant/change agent over the past ten years or so, I've tried to put Senge's "systems thinking" to work in many ways. In my experience, the benefits of achieving a learning organization are many, but it's never easy. ( )

Peter Senge's much admired book on building learning organizations and communities of learning is essential reading for trainers and anyone else interested in how successful learning is fostered. He introduces his key themes--systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building a shared vision, and team learning--in the first several pages of the book, then takes us on an engaging exploration of those themes as he shows us how successful learning organizations develop through what he terms the "core learning capabilities for teams": aspiration, reflective conversation, and understanding complexity. Chapter 14--"Strategies"--is particularly helpful through sections on integrating learning and working, connecting with the core of the business, building learning communities, and developing learning infrastructures. ( )

It has been a real treat to find so much wisdom in one book. Peter Senge clearly and logically explains how the systemic forces of organizational dynamics work, and then casts a compelling vision of how we can use this knowledge to resolve problems and create opportunities. He proposes that organizations can learn better survival skills, just as people can. The title comes from the last item in Senge's list of the five disciplines of a learning organization:
1. Personal Mastery (developing full human potential)
2. Mental Models (identifying and testing hidden assumptions)
3. Shared Vision (engaging everyone for a worthy goal)
4. Team Learning (practicing dialog to build trust and synergy)
5. Systems Thinking (discerning how influences in a system are interrelated and recognizing common dynamics, or "systems archetypes")

It turns out that living organizational systems need an ongoing, deliberate input of applied idealism to produce optimal results. What I mean by "idealism" is a set of high humanitarian standards, such as
- nurturing human development
- creating and sharing a worthy vision
- pursuing egalitarian dialog, honesty, and inquiry
- fostering a trust culture
- cultivating the kinds of relationships that create team synergy.

The convergence of interests between a fully engaged workforce and a true "learning organization" has great potential to bring prosperity to all concerned. It may be too much of a generalization, but I suspect that one of the underlying causes of our economic recession is a simple lack of engagement and alignment between the people and the institutions they work for. Perhaps the best way for American business to remain competitive in a global market over the long run is to leverage the full power and potential of the American workforce.

Whether or not the five disciplines might solve our country's economic woes, I am persuaded they can create the kind of work environments that seriously upgrade their employees' quality of life. I dearly hope these pragmatic ideals will soon transform the corporate world so that skilled practitioners of the five disciplines become the norm rather than the exception. With "over one million copies in print," and numerous other thinkers and authors promoting similar views, it seems that the movement is gathering momentum.

A tragic side note - one of the companies Senge profiled as a good example of a learning organization has recently become a byword for business practices gone wrong on a grand scale. Whatever BP was doing right when he wrote the book 20 years ago didn't work well enough to prevent disaster. However, I don't think this case necessarily undermines the validity of the model - it may simply underscore the need to apply the principles more thoroughly. ( )

To me, a still very relevant theory and method of instructional design and corporate organization. ( )

I'm in education and we tend to have a professional disdain for anything coming out of the business world. I understand that disdain and largely sympathize with it from an ideological perspective, but on a practical level, we are missing out on some really tremendous works. Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline is certainly one of these books.

Sure the book is verbose and tends to make its points ad nauseam, but there's some great discussions about leadership here. In sum, Senge encourages us to take a systems approach to organizations -- we need to look at organizations in their full context rather than through our narrow perspectives. This will allow us to see the best paths we need to take in order to success. The best way to achieve this is to create learning communities where we work, i.e., places where ideas are taken seriously and exchanged and debated on a regular basis.

The book is full of learned references to philosophy (Western and Eastern) and literature. For me, this went a long way toward dispelling the stereotype of the one-dimensional businessperson, obsessed only with profit. Nothing in the book seemed all that revolutionary to me but when I thought about that, I realized that's because so much of this book has been used in so many different conversations I've had about leadership, that Senge's ideas have become intellectual common knowledge. ( )