PUTTING THE IDEAS INTO PRACTICE

I take no credit for inventing the five major disciplines of this book. The five disciplines described below represent the experimentation, research, writing, and invention of hundreds of people. But I have worked with all of the disciplines for years, refining ideas about them, collaborating on research, and introducing them to organizations throughout the world.

When I first entered graduate school at MIT I was already convinced that most of the problems faced by humankind concerned our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world. Little has happened since to change my view. Today, the environmental crisis, the continuing gap between "haves and have-nots" and consequent social and political instability, the persisting global arms race, the international drug trade, and the explosive U.S. budget, trade deficits, and consequent financial fragility all attest to a world where problems are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected. From the start at MIT I was drawn to the work of Jay Forrester, a computer pioneer who had shifted fields to develop what he called "system dynamics." Jay maintained that the causes of many pressing public issues, from urban decay to global ecological threat, lay in the very well-intentioned policies designed to alleviate them. These problems were "actually systems" that lured policymakers into interventions that focused on obvious symptoms not underlying causes, which produced short-term benefit but long-term malaise, and fostered the need for still more symptomatic interventions.

As I began my doctoral work, I began to meet business leaders who came to visit our MIT group to learn about systems thinking. These were thoughtful people, deeply aware of the inadequacies of prevailing ways of managing. Unlike most academics, they were engaged, not detached intellectuals, and many were working to build new types of organizations—decentralized, nonhierarchical organizations dedicated to the well-being and growth of employees as well as to success. Some had crafted radical corporate philosophies based on core values of freedom and responsibility. Others had developed innovative organization designs. All shared a commitment and a capacity to innovate that I found lacking in other sectors. Gradually, I came to realize why business is the locus of innovation in an open society. Despite whatever hold past thinking may have on the business mind, business has a freedom to experiment missing in the public and education sectors and, often, in nonprofit organizations. It also has a clear bottom line, so that experiments can be evaluated, at least in principle, by objective criteria.

But why were they interested in systems thinking? Too often, the most daring organizational experiments were foundering. Local autonomy produced business decisions that were disastrous for the organization as a whole. "Team building" exercises focused on better relationships among people who often still held radically different mental models of the business system. Companies pulled together during crises, and then lost all their inspiration when business improved. Organizations which started out as booming successes, with the best possible intentions toward customers and employees, found themselves trapped in downward spirals that got worse the harder they tried to fix them.

When I was a student and young professor, we all believed that the tools of systems thinking could make a difference in these companies. As I worked with different companies, I came to see why systems thinking was not enough by itself. It needed a new type of management practitioner to really make the most of it. At that time, in the mid-1970s, there was a nascent sense of what such a management practitioner could be. But it had not yet crystallized. It began to do so with the formation of a "CEO group" that met regularly at MIT starting around 1980 that included William O'Brien of Hanover Insurance, Arie de Geus of Shell, Edward Simon from Herman Miller, and Ray Stata, CEO of Analog Devices. The group continued for over a decade eventually drawing participants from Apple, Ford, Harley-Davidson, Philips, Polaroid, and Trammell Crow.

For over twenty-five years I have also been involved in developing and conducting leadership workshops, which have introduced people from all walks of life to the fifth discipline ideas that grew out of our work at MIT. These ideas combined initially with Innovation Associate's path-breaking work on building shared vision and personal mastery and the workshops continue today as part of the global Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). When The Fifth Discipline was originally published, over four thousand managers had attended these workshops and they were in fact the "target audience" to whom the book was aimed. (When it became apparent that many more people were using the book as an introduction to organizational learning, we created The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook in 1994, thinking that a book of practical tools, stories, and tips might in fact be a better introduction.) Over the course of these experiences the initial focus on corporate senior executives broadened, as it became evident that the basic disciplines of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, team learning and shared vision were relevant for teachers, public administrators and elected officials, students, and parents. All were in leadership positions of importance. All were in "organizations" that had still untapped potential for creating their future. All felt that to tap that potential required developing their own capacities, that is, learning.

So, this book is for the learners, especially those of us interested in the art and practice of collective learning.

For managers, this book should help in identifying the specific practices, skills, and disciplines that can make building learning organizations less of an occult art (though an art nonetheless).

For parents, this book should help in letting our children be our teachers, as well as we are theirs—for they have much to teach us about learning as a way of life.

For citizens, the dialogue about why contemporary organizations are not especially good learners and about what is required to build learning organizations reveals some of the tools needed by communities and societies if they are to become more adept learners.

2 DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE A LEARNING DISABILITY?

Few large corporations live even half as long as a person. In 1983, a Royal Dutch/Shell study found that one-third of the firms that had been in the Fortune "500" in 1970 had vanished.1 Shell estimated that the average lifetime of the largest industrial enterprises is less than forty years, roughly half the lifetime of a human being! Since then this study has been repeated by EDS and several other corporations, and served as a point of reference in James Collins' Good to Great, published in 2001. The chances are fifty-fifty that readers of this book will see their present firm disappear during their working career.

In most companies that fail, there is abundant evidence in advance that the firm is in trouble. This evidence goes unheeded, however, even when individual managers are aware of it. The organization as a whole cannot recognize impending threats, understand the implications of those threats, or come up with alternatives.

Perhaps under the laws of "survival of the fittest," this continual death of firms is fine for society. Painful though it may be for the employees and owners, it is simply a turnover of the economic soil, redistributing the resources of production to new companies and new cultures. But what if the high corporate mortality rate is only a symptom of deeper problems that afflict all companies, not just the ones that die? What if even the most successful companies are poor learners—they survive but never live up to their potential? What if, in light of what organizations could be, "excellence" is actually "mediocrity"?

It is no accident that most organizations learn poorly. The way they are designed and managed, the way people's jobs are defined, and, most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact (not only in organizations but more broadly) create fundamental learning disabilities. These disabilities operate despite the best efforts of bright, committed people. Often the harder they try to solve problems, the worse the results. What learning does occur takes place despite these learning disabilities—for they pervade all organizations to some degree.

Learning disabilities are tragic in children, especially when they go undetected. They are no less tragic in organizations, where they also go largely undetected. The first step in curing them is to begin to identify the seven learning disabilities: