DISABILITIES AND DISCIPLINES

These learning disabilities have been with us for a long time. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman traces the history of devastating large-scale policies “pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest,”5 from the fall of the Trojans through the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In story after story, leaders could not see the consequences of their own policies, even when they were warned in advance that their own survival was at stake. Reading between the lines of Tuchman’s writing, you can see that the fourteenth-century Valois monarchs of France suffered from “I am my position” disabilities—when they devalued currency, they literally didn’t realize they were driving the new French middle class toward insurrection.

In the mid-1700s Britain had a bad case of boiled frog. The British went through “a full decade,” wrote Tuchman, “of mounting conflict with the [American] colonies without any [British official] sending a representative, much less a minister, across the Atlantic … to find out what was endangering the relationship …”6 By 1776, the start of the American Revolution, the relationship was irrevocably endangered. Elsewhere, Tuchman describes the Roman Catholic cardinals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a tragic management “team” in which piety demanded that they present an appearance of agreement. However, behind-the-scenes backstabbing (in some cases, literal backstabbing) brought in opportunistic popes whose abuses of office provoked the Protestant Reformation.

More recently, historian Jared Diamond tells similar stories of arrogance and blindness leading to demise, only this time the victims are entire civilizations. From the Mayas to the Easter Islanders, Diamond shows how powerful dominant empires collapse, often in remarkably short periods of time. Like failing organizations, most of those inside the empire sense that all is not quite right, but their instincts are to more strongly defend their traditional ways of doing things rather than to question them—let alone develop the capacity to change those ways. 7

We live in no less perilous times today, and the same learning disabilities persist, along with their consequences. The five disciplines of the learning organization can, I believe, act as antidotes to these learning disabilities. But first, we must see the disabilities more clearly—for they are often lost amid the bluster of day-to-day events.

3 PRISONERS OF THE SYSTEM, OR PRISONERS OF OUR OWN THINKING?

I n order to see the learning disabilities in action, it helps to start with a laboratory experiment—a microcosm of how real organizations function, where you can see the consequences of your decisions play out more clearly than is possible in real organizations. For this reason, we often invite people to take part in a simulation called the “beer game,” first developed in the 1960s at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Because it is a laboratory replica of a real setting, rather than reality itself, we can isolate the disabilities and their causes more sharply than is possible in real organizations. This reveals that the problems originate in basic ways of thinking and interacting, more than in peculiarities of organization structure and policy.

The beer game does this by immersing us in a type of organization which is rarely noticed but widely prevalent: a production/distribution system, the kind responsible for producing and shipping consumer and commercial goods in all industrial countries. In this case, it’s a system for producing and distributing a single brand of beer. The players at each position are completely free to make any decision that seems prudent. Their only goal is to manage their position as best they can to maximize their profits.1

As with many games, the playing of a single session of the beer game can be told as a story. There are three main characters in the story—a retailer, a wholesaler, and the marketing director of a brewery.2 This story is told, in turn, through each players’ eyes.