Peter Senge : The Learning Organisation.

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Life and career

Peter Senge (b.1947) is Chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning, a non-profit, member-governed organisation based at Massachusetts. He graduated in engineering from Stanford before doing a Ph.D. on social systems modelling at MIT. For many years Senge has studied how firms and organisations develop adaptive capabilities in a world of increasing complexity and change, but the success of his book The Fifth Discipline popularised the concept of the `Learning Organisation'.

Published in 1990, The Fifth Discipline brought the attention of the world to bear on this rather unassuming man, who suddenly found himself the modern equivalent of a medieval crusader seeking against all the odds to dramatically change corporate America and indeed the rest of the world. His message is simple - the learning organisation values and believes that competitive advantage derives from continued learning, both individual and collective. Further, the new challenges of the Information Age demand that not only businesses, but also educational institutions and governments, radically transform themselves. Senge describes himself as an `idealistic pragmatist' and spends much time with the top leaders of companies, education and government building learning organisations.

In 1999 Senge was named by the Journal of Business Strategy as one of the 24 people who have had the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years.

The Fifth Discipline

In the Fifth Discipline, Senge suggests that there are five basic ingredients for a learning organisation:

1. Systems thinking: Senge's whole approach to organisations is a `systems' approach that views the organisation as a living entity, with its own behaviour and learning patterns. He introduces the idea of `systems archetypes' to help managers spot repetitive patterns leading to recurrent problems or limits to growth.

2. Personal mastery: every modern manager recognises the importance of developing skills and competencies in individuals, but Senge takes this notion further by stressing the importance of spiritual growth in the learning organisation. True spiritual growth exposes us to a deeper reality; it helps us to learn how to see the current reality more clearly and by highlighting the difference between vision and the current reality generates a creative tension, out of which successful learning arises.

In Senge's own words a learning organisation is "a group of people who are continually enhancing their capability to create their future" by "changing individuals so that they produce results they care about, accomplish things that are important to them."

3. Mental models: the systems approach is continued with Senge's emphasis on mental models. This discipline requires managers to construct mental models for the driving forces behind the organisation's values and principles. Senge alerts his readers to the impact of acquired patterns of thinking at the organisational level and the need to develop non-defensive mechanisms for examining the nature of these patterns.

4. Shared vision: according to Senge, true creativity and innovation are based on group creativity and the shared vision the group depends on can only be built on the personal vision of its members. He claims that shared vision occurs when the vision is no longer seen by the team members as separate from the self.

5. Team learning: effective team learning involves alternating processes for dialogue and discussion. Dialogue is exploratory and widens possibilities, whereas discussion narrows down the options to find the best alternatives for future decisions. Although these two processes are complementary, they need to be separated; sadly, most teams lack the ability to distinguish between these two modes and to move consciously between them.

Senge's basic premise can be stated very simply - people should put aside their old ways of thinking (mental models), learn to be open with others (personal mastery), understand how the company really works (systems thinking), form a plan everyone can agree on (shared vision) and then work together to achieve that vision (team learning).

Practical tools - The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook

Recognising that the ideas contained in The Fifth Discipline needed to be made more accessible to practising managers, Senge and his colleagues produced a more practical guide - The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Throughout the book, the authors stress that anyone who wants to be part of a learning organisation must go through a personal change and must be willing to do so. To help this process, Senge and his co-authors provide a set of elaborate personal awareness exercises. The Fieldbook was designed as a resource for dipping into and it contains many good ideas and case studies. Even if you find Senge's thinking too general, the Fieldbook is well worth scrutinising for references and new ideas. Here are just a few:

System Archetypes and Causal Loops: the Fieldbook devotes a lot of time to mapping processes in organisations, analysing feedback loops and identifying typical organisational problems (the system archetypes). This process mapping tool can help employees to work out how complex systems interact and to develop their `mental models' of the organisation. The `Beer Game' described in The Fifth Discipline is a simulation based on these models.

Left and Right Hand Columns: by writing down in meetings what you really think (left-hand column) and what you actually said (right-hand column), you can analyse and identify those personal prejudices that get in the way of really productive work.

The Ladder of Inference this exercise provides a step model for analysing our values, beliefs and actions. Climbing down the ladder helps us to discover why we behave the way we do and helps us to avoid jumping to dangerous conclusions. The steps on the ladder are as follows:

* I take ACTIONS based on my beliefs

* I adopt BELIEFS about the world

* I draw CONCLUSIONS

* I make ASSUMPTIONS based on the meanings added to my mental models

* I add MEANINGS (cultural and personal)

* I select DATA from what I observe

* I OBSERVE data and experiences

The Container: this is a dialogue tool that has proved very effective (if not explosive!) in some organisations. People at a meeting are encouraged to imagine a container that holds everyone's hostile thoughts and feelings. As everyone speaks out, putting their fears, prejudices and anger on the table, the hostility between different factions is neutralised, because it is exposed in a safe place for all to discuss. In the early days of such experiments, a good facilitator is probably essential.

Learning Labs and Flight Simulators: the Fieldbook provides useful references for all those who wish to design effective simulations for training sessions.

In Perspective

Though Senge's Fifth Discipline was a best seller, its basic concepts had emerged from extensive research carried out at the influential Sloan School of Management at MIT over 15 years. The success of the Learning Organisation concept is a reflection of the times. None of the Fifth Discipline's concepts are new, but Senge was able to put them all together and to create a simple but very powerful concept.

Senge is a product of his age, probably greatly influenced by the culture of the 1960s in America. His systems approach towards organisations shows the same maturity displayed in the systems analysis tools developed by workers like Peter Checkland at Lancaster University. Here the organisation is viewed as a `superorganism' with its own behaviour patterns, but also profoundly influenced by the value and nature of its constituent members. The sad fact is that Senge was one of the first management gurus to make the accepted beliefs of a whole generation of social scientists, biologists and environmentalists credible to the corporate world. In his own words Senge says "We live under a massive illusion of separation from one another, from nature, from the universe, from everything. We're depleting the earth and we're fragmenting our spirit. The symptoms are pollution, anger and fear. Everything in our culture is about the management of impressions and appearances, from physical fitness to the way we dress. And yet on another level we know it's all bullshit". As we approach the Millennium, there is little evidence that the change in attitude needed to achieve Senge's ideal of long-term corporate sustainability and freedom for all to achieve personal mastery is in sight as there are very few organisations that have been able to implement his ideas successfully.

The main criticism that can be levelled at Senge's work is the inherent difficulty of applying these models. Senge was trained as an engineer and then became involved in social research. Both require a systems approach, but this cannot be learnt easily. Systems thinking is about as easy as learning brain surgery on a three-day seminar. Nor can most companies afford the luxury of their top executives learning to `crash land' for too long.

Breaking old corporate habits is very hard. Transforming an enterprise into a learning organisation is highly problematical and not for the faint-hearted. The reason for this is simple - in order to move forward to a new, cooperative learning model, managers have to give up their traditional areas of power and control. They have to hand over power to the learners and allow them to make mistakes. In a blame-orientated culture, this change in attitude remains a major obstacle.

Despite its drawbacks, The Fifth Discipline has proved highly influential. Although it represents an elusive ideal for most corporate cultures, the concept has stimulated the debate and acceptance of issues such as self-managed development, empowerment and creativity. Its practical impact can be seen in modern human resource management strategies, teamwork principles and in quality models.

It is more important perhaps to recognise that in life all the most profound truths are deceptively simple, yet almost impossible to apply in practice. The difficulty experienced in applying Senge's ideas does not invalidate them - if anything it confirms their importance for companies in the next millennium.

Key works by Senge

The dance of change: the challenges of sustaining momentum in learning
organizations (with others)
London: Nicholas Brearley, 1999

The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization
New York and London: Doubleday Century Business, 1990

The fifth discipline fieldbook: strategies and tools for building a learning
organization, (with others)
London: Nicholas Brealey, 1994

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Title Annotation:	what organizations need to do to achieve vision
Publication:	Thinkers
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Mar 1, 2002
Words:	1804
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