VOICES FROM THE FRONT

Peter M. Senge reflects here on the practitioners he interviewed for the revised edition of The Fifth Discipline.

When I was invited by Doubleday to create this new edition of The Fifth Discipline, I was initially ambivalent but then became excited. One of the great joys of the past fifteen years has been getting to know countless gifted practitioners of organizational learning—managers, school principals, community organizers, police chiefs, business and social entrepreneurs, military leaders, teachers—people who have somehow found an infinite array of imaginative ways to work with and utilize the five disciplines, even if they had never heard of or read the original book. A few of these figured prominently in the first book, like Arie de Geus and the recently deceased Bill O’Brien. Since then, the worldwide growth of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) has brought me in touch with hundreds more such practitioners. In their own ways, each has created an alternative system of management based on love rather than fear, curiosity rather than an insistence on “right” answers, and learning rather than controlling. Now I could use the excuse of this revised edition to talk with many of them.

Those interviews and conversations led to my making many changes in the text of this book and to a new section, Part IV, “Reflections from Practice.” The interviews provided fresh insights into how master practitioners initiate change and deal creatively with the challenges of sustaining momentum. In addition to many business successes, people revealed a host of new possibilities in applying organizational learning tools and principles in areas few of us could have imagined fifteen years ago: from growing more environmentally sound businesses and industries to addressing societal problems like gang violence, transforming school systems, promoting economic development, undertaking the improvement of global food production, and reducing poverty. In all these settings, openness, reflection, deeper conversations, personal mastery, and shared visions uniquely energize change; and understanding the systemic causes of problems is crucial.

One example in this account is the Singapore Police Force (SPF), which had spent more than a decade applying organizational learning tools. Commissioner Khoo Boon Hui recognized that police work was increasingly complex and uncertain—new designer drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism threatened communities in ways that rigid, command-and-control structures could not handle. Moreover, the job was perceived as routine and menial, making it difficult to recruit the knowledge workers needed. In 1997, the force initiated a dual transformation: radically changing its business model and investing in a culture of trust and openness.

The SPF’s journey illustrates many core ideas. Officers had already built trusted relationships through community policing, but they lacked the skills to identify and resolve underlying issues. So their roles were enlarged to engage the community in tackling localized safety and security problems. As the work became more knowledge intensive, officers learned learning organization skills—generative dialogue, systems thinking, and stakeholder network building—to get to root causes rather than just react. Teamwork was introduced to bring different perspectives to decisions, and leadership capabilities were developed at all levels, supported by a shared vision and core values that allowed officers to exercise discretion confidently.

Equally important was connecting the whole organization. The SPF captured tacit knowledge through storytelling and personal accounts of critical incidents, held experience-sharing sessions, and implemented After Action Reviews for local reflection and system-wide awareness. An unmoderated electronic bulletin board let officers candidly share views and knowledge, as part of the effort to build trust. Standard operating procedures were rewritten to emphasize principles over prescriptive instructions, giving officers more room to exercise judgment. To address global terrorism, the force built relationships with international counterparts, academics, religious experts, and community leaders, diagnosing systemic sources of problems rather than only managing symptoms.

The account reports an annual crime rate of about eight hundred crimes per one hundred thousand population—less than two-thirds the mid-1990s figure and about one-third of Japan’s. The proportion of crimes solved had risen from 32 percent about a decade earlier to about 60 percent. It also describes stronger community relationships and more highly educated recruits. These are reported outcomes during the period of reform, rather than a measure of the reforms’ isolated effect. As Khoo says, “At the end of the day, it is the people who are the drivers of any organizational transformation. Trust and focusing on how people in the organization relate to one another form the basis of our core theory of success. As the quality of relationships strengthens, the quality of thinking improves. As the members of a team consider more facets of an issue and share a greater number of different perspectives, the quality of their actions improves, which ultimately improves the results we can achieve.”

The interviews also clarified core ideas that implicitly bound together the original work.

• There are ways of working together that are vastly more satisfying and more productive than the prevailing system of management. As one senior executive said, reflecting on her first learning experiment—“just getting people to talk to one another” as a way to rethink how their organization was structured—“… was the most fun I had ever had in business, and the ideas that emerged are still creating a competitive advantage for the company fifteen years later.”
• Organizations work the way they do because of how we work, how we think and interact; the changes required ahead are not only in our organizations but in ourselves as well. “The critical moment comes when people realize that this learning organization work is about each one of us,” commented a twenty-year veteran of corporate organizational learning projects. “Personal mastery is core. If you get the personal mastery element of these changes right, everything else falls into place.”
• In building learning organizations there is no ultimate destination or end state, only a lifelong journey. “This work requires great reservoirs of patience,” commented the president of a global NGO (nongovernmental organization), “but I believe the results we achieve are more sustainable because the people involved have really grown. It also prepares people for the ongoing journey. As we learn, grow, and tackle more systemic challenges, things do not get easier.”

I believe that the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best. Deming saw this clearly, and I believe that now, so do a growing number of leaders committed to growing organizations capable of thriving in and contributing to the extraordinary challenges and possibilities of the world we are living into.

PART I How Our Actions Create Our Reality … and How We Can Change It

1 “GIVE ME A LEVER LONG ENOUGH…AND SINGLE-HANDED I CAN MOVE THE WORLD”

From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to “see the big picture,” we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But, as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile—similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether.

The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion—we can then build “learning organizations,” organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex and dynamic, work must become more “learningful.” It is no longer sufficient to have one person learning for the organization, a Ford or a Sloan or a Watson or a Gates. It’s just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the “grand strategist.” The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own. Learning organizations are possible because not only is it our nature to learn but we love to learn. Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great team, a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way—who trusted one another, who complemented one another’s strengths and compensated for one another’s limitations, who had common goals that were larger than individual goals, and who produced extraordinary results. I have met many people who have experienced this sort of profound teamwork—in sports, or in the performing arts, or in business. Many say that they have spent much of their life looking for that experience again. What they experienced was a learning organization. The team that became great didn’t start off great—it learned how to produce extraordinary results.

One could argue that the entire global business community is learning to learn together, becoming a learning community. Whereas once many industries were dominated by a single, undisputed leader—one IBM, one Kodak, one Xerox—today industries, especially in manufacturing, have dozens of excellent companies. American, European, or Japanese corporations are pulled forward by innovators in China, Malaysia, or Brazil, and they in turn, are pulled by the Koreans and Indians. Dramatic improvements take place in corporations in Italy, Australia, Singapore—and quickly become influential around the world.

There is also another, in some ways deeper, movement toward learning organizations, part of the evolution of industrial society. Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. "Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon," says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. "The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging."

Moreover, many who share these values are now in leadership positions. I find a growing number of organizational leaders who, while still a minority, feel they are part of a profound evolution in the nature of work as a social institution. “Why can’t we do good works at work?” asked Edward Simon, former president of Herman Miller, a sentiment I often hear repeated today. In founding the “Global Compact,” UN Secretary General Kofi Annan invited businesses around the world to build learning communities that elevate global standards for labor rights, and social and environmental responsibility.

Perhaps the most salient reason for building learning organizations is that we are only now starting to understand the capabilities such organizations must possess. For a long time, efforts to build learning organizations were like groping in the dark until the skills, areas of knowledge, and paths for development of such organizations became known. What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations from traditional authoritarian “controlling organizations” will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines. That is why the “disciplines of the learning organization” are vital.