The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

Table of contents

1. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
2. Chapter 1
3. Chapter 2 - Learning Disabilities
   1. Learning Disabilities of Organizations
4. Chapter 3 - The Beer Game
5. Chapter 4 - Laws of the Fifth Discipline
   1. Laws of the Fifth Discipline
6. Chapter 5 - Shift of Mind
7. Chapter 6 - System Patterns
   1. Limits to Growth
   2. Shifting the Burden
8. Chapter 7 - Self-Limiting or Self-Sustaining Growth
   1. Limit Growth through Underinvestment
9. Chapter 8 - Personal Mastery
   1. Personal Mastery
      1. Discipline of Personal Mastery
10. Chapter 9 - Mental Models
    1. Tools of the Discipline of Mental Models
11. Chapter 10 - Shared Vision
    1. possible attitudes toward a vision
12. Chapter 11 - Team Learning
    1. Defensive Routines
13. Chapter 12: Foundations
    1. Participative Openness and Reflective Openness
14. Chapter 13: Impetus
15. Chapter 14: Strategies
16. Chapter 15: The Leader’s New Work
17. Chapter 16: Systems Citizens
18. Chapter 17: Frontiers
19. Learning Discplines
    1. Systems Thinking
       1. Essences
       2. Principles
       3. Practices
    2. Personal Mastery
       1. Essences
       2. Principles
       3. Practices
    3. Mental Models
       1. Essences
       2. Principles
       3. Practices
    4. Shared Vision
       1. Essences
       2. Principles
       3. Practices

Chapter 1

The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. (3)

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. (4)

• work has shifted from material to intrinsic value and thus we view work as a social institution
• Five Disciplines:
  • systems thinking - everything that happens is likely part of a system – “we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved.” (8)
  • personal mastery - “the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.”
  • mental models - the pictures or heuristics we use to understand the world – “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action”
  • shared vision - building a vision of the shared future we create
  • team learning - teams can be more than the sum of their parts by learning – “When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.”
• the fifth discipline is systems thinking – all other disciplines are fed by it
• metanoia - shift of mind, which underpins how we view “real” learning, as opposed to the common view of learning, which is taking in info
• business gives you freedom to experiment and since earnings present an objective and quantifiable result, you can ostensibly test your experiments

Chapter 2 - Learning Disabilities

Learning Disabilities of Organizations

1. I am my position

• when you see your identity as your role, your view of responsibilities ends at your position

1. The enemy is out there

• an offshoot of I am my position – you always perceive fault as outside one’s own context/boundaries

1. The illusion of taking charge

• often proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise, especially if it is other-directed (reacting to market, customer complaint, etc.)
• true proactiveness is inward-directed (how do we create our own problems)

1. Fixation on events

• we are conditioned to view everything as a series of events, each with a single cause, but change is a slow process and the causes are often cyclical

1. The parable of the boiled frog

• we tend not to notice slow, gradual change
• “Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic.” (25)

1. The delusion of learning from experience

• ” we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.” (25)

1. The myth of the management team

• Management team is adapt at avoiding real learning or accountability, “skilled incompetence” as Argyris calls it

Chapter 3 - The Beer Game

• the beer game can be played to demonstrate how a lack of systems thinking can lead to disastrous results

setup:

• you have a retailer, wholesaler, and brewery, and they don’t talk to each other. Customer demand increases on the retailer, and this causes ballooning and cascading demand to cripple the entire supply chain as retailer overreacts to shipment delays, and on down

3 important lessons to the beer game:

1. Structure influence behavior

• when different people are placed in the same system, they tend to produce the same results
• the system causes its own behavior

1. Structure in human systems is subtle

• we often have the power to alter the structure of the system we are operating in
• need someone to blame when there are problems, first one another, then the customer, then the system itself

1. Leverage often comes from new ways of thinking

• need to understand how your position fits within the system
• in order to succeed, others must succeed

Types of Explanations

1. Systemic Structure (generative)

• structure produces behavior, so changing structure changes behavior
• “redesigning our own decision making redesigns the system structure.” (53)

1. Patterns of Behavior (responsive)

• seeing long-term trends and focusing on their implications

1. Events (reactive)

• simple cause and effect
• easiest to do but least beneficial

Chapter 4 - Laws of the Fifth Discipline

Laws of the Fifth Discipline

1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions

• solutions that merely shift problem to another part of the system go undetected

1. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back

• lay of compensating feedback

1. behavior grows better before it grows worse

• the dominoes will eventually fall

1. The easy way usually leads back in

• “Pushing harder and harder on familiar solutions, while fundamental problems persist or worsen, is a reliable indicator of nonsystemic thinking—what we often call the “what we need here is a bigger hammer” syndrome.” (61)

1. The cure can be worse than the disease

• shifting the burden to the intervenor

1. Faster is slower
2. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
3. small changes can lead to big results, but areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious

• “small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. Systems thinkers refer to this principle as “leverage.” (64)

1. You can have your cake and eat it too, but not at once

• problems might be improperly stated as “either-or” but both can be improved over the long-term

1. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two elephants

• often the whole needs to be examined instead of component parts

1. There is no blame

• everything is part of the same system, there is no “other”

Chapter 5 - Shift of Mind

• systems thinking is the discipline for seeing the structures that underlie complex situations and for discerning high from low leverage

2 types of complexity

1. detail complexity: lots of variables
2. dynamic complexity: effects over time of intervention are not obvious

• essence of systems thinking is a shift of mind (metanoia)
  • seeing interrelationships, not linear cause and effect
  • seeing processes of change instead of snapshots
• English language, in subject-verb-object construction, is biased towards cause and effect thinking, but in a system every influence is both a cause and effect
• need to think in circles, understanding feedback and how it “builds to learning to recognize types of “structures” that recur again and again” (73)
• human actor is not separate from the feedback process but part of it
• delays are interruptions in time between two influences corresponding

2 types of feedback processes

1. reinforcing (amplifying)

• engines of growth or decline
• vicious or virtuous cycles

1. balancing (stabilizing)

• operates where there is goal-oriented behavior seeking stability
• to understand you must know both the explicit as well as the implicit goals
• more difficult to see because nothing might appear to be happening, maintains the status quo
• resistance to change almost always arises from threats to traditional norms and ways of doing things

Chapter 6 - System Patterns

• patterns of structures recur again and again
• not enough to just recognize these structures, we must change the underlying thinking that produces the problem

Limits to Growth

• an amplifying process that leads to an inadvertent second loop that limits growth
• need to address balancing loop, not reinforcing loop
• very often a cultural change
• KEY: don’t push growth, remove factors limiting growth

• EXAMPLES: new sales increase revenue, but increase the need for more senior engineers to manage and thus reducing the senior engineer pool to deliver on products, leading to delays in product delivery and reduced sales

Shifting the Burden

• an underlying problem creates symptoms that demand attention, but the underlying problem is hard to address, so a solution that handles the symptoms is implemented, leaving the underlying problem to fester and grow
• a special case of shifting the burden is Eroding Goals
  • whenever there is a gap between performance and goals, two pressures exists -> 1) improve the situation 2) lower goals
  • need to strengthen fundamental (ideal) response (first, identify it!), and also weaken symptomatic response
• strengthening fundamental response requires long-term orientation and shared vision
• weakening the symptomatic response requires willingness to tell the truth about palliatives and “looking good” solutions
• KEY: Beware the symptomatic solution. In the short term it feels good to address symptoms. In the long-term, these symptoms will recur, making a symptomatic solution easier.

• EXAMPLE - alcohol to treat stress

Chapter 7 - Self-Limiting or Self-Sustaining Growth

• intuition of many experienced managers that it is vital to hold critical performance goals through thick and thin, and those standards are most important that matter to the customer

Limit Growth through Underinvestment

• build less capacity than is needed to serve customer demand
• hard to see because it is gradual and managers prioritize other problems
• systems thinking is important to organize detail complexity into a coherent story, what is important vs. what is not

Chapter 8 - Personal Mastery

• organizations learn only through individuals that learn

Personal Mastery

• discipline of growth and learning two underlying movements

1. clarifying what is important to us
2. continually learning how to see the current reality more clearly

• creative tension between what we want and where we are relative to what we want, and this drives learning
• learning doesn’t mean acquiring info, but ability to produce results we truly want in life
• continual learning mode – never arrive
• “People with a high level of personal mastery are acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas. And they are deeply self-confident.” (133)
• resistance to learning might come from
  • those who think the idea is “soft” or unquantifiable
  • cynics – those who mistook ideals for expectations, i.e., frustrated idealists

Discipline of Personal Mastery

personal vision

• “The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery.” (137)
• sometimes expressed as “genuine caring”
• “But vision is different from purpose. Purpose is similar to a direction, a general heading. Vision is a specific destination, a picture of a desired future. Purpose is abstract. Vision is concrete. Purpose is “advancing man’s capability to explore the heavens.” Vision is ‘a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.’ Purpose is ‘being the best I can be,’ ‘excellence.’ Vision is breaking four minutes in the mile.” (138)

creative tension

• gap between vision and current reality
• not to be confused with being in a state of anxiety, which is emotional tension
• it is not what vision is, it’s what it does, how it leads to growth
• “Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning” (143)

structural conflict

• most of us hold one of two contradictory beliefs

1. our powerlessness to bring our world into being
2. our unworthiness of the endeavor

• this leads to 3 coping strategies

1. letting vision erode
2. conflict manipulation - creating a conflict to incite additional effort
3. will power - bulldoze through by sheer will

• one way to overcome structural conflict is to tell the truth, “to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are” (148)

using the subconscious

• use the automatic mind to achieve vision
• focus on the desired result itself by asking “what would it get me?”
• “what matters most is the visible behavior of people in leadership positions in sharing their own personal visions and demonstrating their commitment to the truth.” (155)

systems perspective illuminates personal mastery by

1. integrating reason and intuition – giving managers who rely on intuition a language to express that intuition reasonably
2. connectedness to the world - “to continually expand our awareness and understanding, to see more and more of the interdependencies between actions and our reality, to see more and more of our connectedness to the world around us.” (160)
3. compassion and empathy
4. commitment to the whole - “work relentlessly to foster a climate in which the principles of personal mastery are practiced in daily life” (162)

Chapter 9 - Mental Models

• mental modesl are active – they shape how we act
• they are the images, assumptions, and stories we carry in our heads, and they affect what we see
• all models are simplifications, the problems arise when they become implicit – when we are unaware of them, they impede learning

3 facts to developing an organizations ability to surface and test mental models

1. tools - that promote personal awareness and reflective skills
2. infrastructure - that try to institutionalize regular practice with mental models
3. culture that promotes inquiry and challenging our thinking

2 important values for overcoming the toxic hierarchical thinking

1. openness (honesty)
2. merit (making the decision that is best for the organization)

• also important are skills of reflection and skills of inquiry: “Skills of reflection concern slowing down our own thinking processes so that we can become more/aware of how we form our mental models and the ways they influence our actions. Inquiry skills concern how we operate in face-to-face (interactions with others, especially in dealing with complex and conflictual issues.” (175)

Tools of the Discipline of Mental Models

reflective practice

• bringing key assumptions about important business issues to the surface espoused theory vs theory-in-use
• using gaps between what we say and what we do to become more aware leads of abstraction
• leap to generalizations/assumptions too quickly to allow learning
• bad because those leaps become axiomatic
• until we are aware of leaps in abstraction we aren’t aware of need for inquiry left-hand column
• right-hand side, write an exchange, and on the left, write what you were thinking but not saying
• brings hidden assumptions forward balancing inquiry and advocacy
• aka reciprocal inquiry
• everyone makes thinking explicit and subject to public examination

When advocating your view:

• Make your own reasoning explicit (i.e., say how you arrived at your view and the “data” upon which it is based)
• Encourage others to explore your view (e.g., “Do you see gaps in my reasoning?”)
• Encourage others to provide different views (i.e., “Do you have either different data or different conclusions, or both?”)
• Actively inquire into others’ views that differ from your own (i.e., “What are your views?” “How did you arrive at your view?” “Are you taking into account data that are different from what I have considered?”)

When inquiring into others’ views:

• If you are making assumptions about others’ views, state your assumptions clearly and acknowledge that they are assumptions
• State the “data” upon which your assumptions are based
• Don’t bother asking questions if you’re not genuinely interested in the others’ response (i.e., if you’re only trying to be polite or to show the others up)

When you arrive at an impasse (others no longer appear to be open to inquiring into their own views):

• Ask what data or logic might change their views.
• Ask if there is any way you might together design an experiment (or some other inquiry) that might provide new information

When you or others are hesitant to express your views or to experiment with alternative ideas:

• Encourage them (or you) to think out loud about what might be making it difficult (i.e., “What is it about this situation, and about me or others, that is making open exchange difficult?”)
• If there is mutual desire to do so, design with others ways of overcoming these barriers

Chapter 10 - Shared Vision

• shared vision is not an idea (although might be inspired by one) but a force of impressive power in people’s hearts
• answers the question “what do we want to create”
• shared vision provides the focus and energy for learning
• can be extrinsic (outward focused) or intrinsic, with intrinsic shared vision often more effective
• their company becomes our company, people work together and share a common identity
• “Without a pull toward some goal which people truly want to achieve, the forces in support of the status quo can be overwhelming.” (195)
• without a shared vision, it might be impossible to convince humans to take the long view
• shared visions emerge from personal visions
• you can’t compel people to your vision – if you try and force it you will only get compliance and not commitment

need to give up the notion that shared vision needs to be created from on high, which is bad for 3 reasons:

1. that vision is sinlge effort at providing overarching direction and meaning to the firm’s strategy
2. that vision does not build on personal vision
3. that vision is not a solution to a problem

possible attitudes toward a vision

1. Apathy - Neither for nor against vision. No interest. No energy. “Is it five o’clock yet?”
2. Non-Compliance - Does not see benefits of vision and will not do what’s expected. “I won’t do it; you can’t make me.”
3. Grudging Compliance - Does not see the benefits of the vision. But, also, does not want to lose job. Does enough of what’s expected because he has to, but also lets it be known that he is not really on board.
4. Formal Compliance - *On the whole, sees the benefits of the vi sion. Does what’s expected and no more. “Pretty good soldier.” *
5. Genuine Compliance - Sees the benefits of the vision. Does everything expected and more. Follows the “letter of the law.” “Good soldiers.”
6. Enrollment - Wants it. Will do whatever can be done within the “spirit of the law.”
7. Commitment - Wants it. Will make it happen. Creates whatever “laws” (structures) are needed.

• vision is the what, purpose is the why
• core values answer how we want to act
• “There are two fundamental sources of energy that can motivate organizations: fear and aspiration. The power of fear underlies negative visions. The power of aspiration drives positive visions.” (209)

Chapter 11 - Team Learning

• goal of a team is “alignment”, or when a group of people function as a whole
• “The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy […] There is a commonality of purpose, a shared vision, and understanding of how to complement one another’s efforts.” (217)
• “Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire” (218)

Team learning has three critical dimensions

1. a need to think insightfully about complex issues
2. a need for innovative, coordinated action
3. the role of team members on other teams, i.e., a learning team continually fosters other learning teams through inculcating practices and skills of team learning more broadly

• need to master the practices of dialog and discussion two primary types of discourse dialogue
• a free and creative exploration of complex issues
• deep listening
• suspending one’s own views
• “the purpose of dialog is to reveal the incoherence in our thought” discussion
• different views are presented and defended
• search for the best view to support decisions that must be made

three basic conditions necessary for dialogue

1. suspend assumptions
   • must be aware of our assumptions and hold them up for examination
   • this is similar to “leaps of abstraction” and “inquiring into reason for abstraction” with mental models
2. regard one another as colleagues
   • necessary for a willingness to treat others as colleagues
   • hierarchy is antithetical to dialog, so individuals must want the benefits of dialogue more than the privileges of rank
3. a facilitator must hold the context of the conversation
   • moves the conversation along and resists the urge for dialogue to become discussion (pushing for decisions)
   • also capable of framing counter views and participating in the dialogue

• discipline of team learning requires practice, and a continual movement between practice and performance
• thought is participative, and collectively we can be more insightful and intelligent than we can be individually
• a reliable indicator a team is learning is visible conflict of ideas
• difference between great and mediocre teams is how they face conflict and deal with defensiveness that arises

Defensive Routines

• entrenched habits we use to protect ourselves from embarrassment and threat that occurs when we expose our thinking
• response to a problem, and obscure their own existence
• the most effective defensive routines are those we cannot see
• managers internalize an idea that they must know what’s going on, which leads to two problems:
  1. close themselves to alternative realities and make themselves uninfluenceable
  2. maintain air of confidence by obscuring ignorance
• leverage in reducing them, like all shifting the burden structures, lies in:
  • weakening symptomatic solution
  • strengthening fundamental solution
• need to confront defensiveness without producing more defensiveness, and we need a ruthless commitment to telling the truth about our current reality

• the stronger the defensiveness the more important the issue

• an essential principle of practice is experimentation in a “virtual world”
• dialogue sessions allow a team to come together and practice, basic conditions are:
  1. having all members of team together
  2. explaining the ground rules of dialogue
  3. enforcing those ground rules, and if anyone is unable to suspend assumptions, you acknowledge you are discussing and not dialoguing
  4. encouraging team members to raise the most difficult issues
• “Perhaps the single greatest liability of management teams is that they confront these complex, dynamic realities with a language designed for simple, static problems” (249)
• find and fix mentality leads to a stream of short term fixes
• need a better language for describing complexity beyond linear cause and effect – systems thinking is that language

Chapter 12: Foundations

Participative Openness and Reflective Openness

• participative (expressive) openness is about sharing your own views, and while it is important, it is incomplete
• can be a type of communication that blocks learning
• on the other hand is reflective openness, or thinking about you how think and work and taking accountability for your learning

• reflective openness is the cornerstone of mental models and requires vulnerability and a willingness to be open

• in order to grow a company, you need a purpose beyond just growing revenue – growing revenue is like oxygen for a company, or table stakes
• need to have projects worthy of your commitment
• commitment to personal growth starts with you
• we need to see the business as a living system, as a community of humans, and not as a machine
• this involves a shift from focusing on:
  1. parts to the whole
  2. categorization to integration
  3. individuals to interactions
  4. systems outside the observer to systems including the observer

Chapter 13: Impetus

three motivations for people to take on work of building a learning organization

1. seek a better model for how to manage and lead change
2. build an organizations overall capacity for continual adaptation to change
3. there is a way of managing and organizing work

Chapter 14: Strategies

learning has two levels:

1. learning is judged by what the learner can do, the results they produce
2. learning is about developing a capacity to reliably produce certain quality of results
   • not just about riding a bike one time, but being a bike rider

Deep Learning Cycle

1. beliefs and assumptions
2. established practices
3. skills and capabilities
4. networks of relationships
5. awareness and sensibilities
   • these five cultural elements influence one another

Strategic Architecture

1. guiding ideas, or, the governing concepts and principles that define why an organization exists, what we seek to accomplish, how we intend to operate
2. theory, tools, and methods, or, explicit ideas about how things work and the practical means by which people apply those theories, solve problems, negotiate differences, and monitor progress
3. organizational infrastructure, or, formal roles and management structures that shape how energy and resources flow

Theory of Structuration

• theory of “enacted systems” two predominant ideas:
  1. structure influences behavior, and leverage for change increases as we learn to focus on underlying structures rather than events or behavior
  2. structures that govern social systems arise from cumulative effects of the actions taken by the participants in those systems

1. Integrating Learning and Working
   • fragmentation, or making learning an ‘add-on’ to people’s regular work, limits how we can integrate learning and working
   • need to tie reflection to action so learning isn’t fragmented
   • reflection doesn’t mean agreement on everything but rather that we hear everything – we can disagree and commit
   • a culture that integrates action and reflection arrives at better decisions to which people can generally commit to

   After Action Review

   • used by US Army to reflect
   • simplest form involves answering three questions:
     1. what happened?
     2. what did we expect?
     3. what can we learn from the gap
   • another question we can ask is: “If you could improve performance in one area that would make a significant different for the enterprise, what would that be?”
   • in order to be successful, you need 1) leadership by request and example, 2) events as learning opportunities 3) grassroots exposure to AARs 4) a cadre of trained facilitators
2. Starting Wherever You are with Whoever is There
   • the idea that only top managers can drive change is false
   • you can concentrate on the “impossibles”, or the problems people believe can’t be solved
   • this can only happen when you can tape people’s talents and deepest aspirations
3. Becoming Bicultural
   • becoming bicultural, or never losing touch with the larger organizational environment
   • need to consider the greater environment
   • fundamental innovations that produce significant leaps in performance are threatening to teams producing closer to the norm
   • need to become adroit at working with political forces within an organization so as not to run afoul of corporate immune system
   • one strategy is to keep innovations below the radar of senior leadership by underpromising and overdelivering
4. Creating Practice Fields
   • it is very difficult to learn anything without opportunity for practice
   • setting up practice fields for learning
5. Connecting with the Core of the Business
   • successful learning practitioners intent upon having a large-scale impact learn how to connect with the core of an organization – at the deepest levels of individual and collective identity – and how the organization most naturally creates value
   • change leaders limit themselves with two subtle barriers
     1. they do not go deeply enough into themselves to discover what motivates themselves
     2. they do not go deeply enough in the org to discover what it stands for
6. Building Learning Communities
   • when our own aspirations connect with an organization’s essence, community develops
7. Working with the Other
   • embracing diversity in order to resist surrounding oneself with those who think like you
   • partnering with those who are different
   • the importance of building diverse and inclusive communities will grow in an increasingly networked world
8. Developing Learning Infrastructures
   • when we redefine management roles to support reflection or systems thinking, we create learning infrastructures
   • learning infrastructures do not leave learning to chance

Chapter 15: The Leader’s New Work

what do we mean by leader?

• typically, leader refers to positional authority via title, a synonym for top management
• this creates two problems:
  1. it declares all others are not leaders and have little power to effect change
  2. it fails to understand the diverse roles of leaders at many levels

local line leaders

• vital for integrating innovative practices into daily work, and testing the efficacy of systems thinking tools

network leaders

• helpers, seed carriers, and connectors
• carry ideas from one working group to another

executive leaders

• shape the overall environment for innovation and chance
• must take responsibility for existence of credible and uplifting guiding ideas in the org

Leader as Designer

• leaders who appreciate orgs as living systems realize it isn’t enough to create organizational artifacts like new metrics or formal roles and processes – it’s how they are used that matters
• what it means to be a designer of learning infrastructures:
  1. recognize an important need for communication and learning isn’t being met
  2. have the courage and imagination to break the mold
• need to design guiding ideas that aren’t BS – a useful question to separate guiding and governing ideas from regular ideas is “How did our vision and value influence decisions I made today?”

Leader as Teacher

• a great teacher is someone around whom others learn, someone who creates a great environment for learning
• desire to serve (“servant leadership”) as core motivation for great leaders
• leaders work as teachers starts by recognizing a core capacity isn’t being met
• how can leaders help people to see reality as a medium for creating their vision rather than as a limitation
  • one way is to help people see reality in terms of underlying structures and mental models rather than short-term events
• to be a true teacher you must be a learner first

Leader as Steward

• leaders who serve
• stewardship is also about serving a larger purpose there are two paradoxes of stewardship:
  1. certainty and commitment - too much certainty leads to being closed off – genuine commitment always coexists with some element of uncertainty and questioning
  2. conservation and change – just as important to what leaders would change is what they would conserve (often identity and relationships) – obssessively focusing on what we would change reinforces fears of change
• leaders don’t always need to be singularly focused on ambition – sometimes having a larger life might help managers gain perspective and be more effective

• managers also need to create sustainable results – if they are only focused on short term results, it justifies intervention – the whole point is to try and improve so no more intervention is needed

• what distinguishes good leaders is the “clarity and persuasiveness of their ideas, the depth of their commitment, and the extent of their openness to continually learning more” (339)
• “truly effective leaders come to a shared appreciation of the power of holding a vision and concurrently looking deeply and honestly at current reality” (340)

Chapter 16: Systems Citizens

there are fundamental aspects to seeing systems:

1. seeing patterns of interdependency
2. seeing into the future

Chapter 17: Frontiers

• learning is a process of enhancing learner’s capacity, individually and collectively, to produce results they truly want to produce
• this emphasizes two features of learning:
  1. building capacity for effective action as opposed to intellectual understanding only
  2. this capacity builds over time, often over considerable time

three openings when leading change

1. opening the head - opening ourselves to see what is in front of us but we have not been able to see yet
2. opening the heart - opening ourselves to see our connection to what is around us, the pain, the suffering, the problems, as well as the joy
3. opening the will - letting go of the last remnants of our small ‘s’ self

Learning Discplines

• practices: what you do
• principles: guiding ideas and insights
• essences: the state of being of those with high levels of mastery in the discipline

Systems Thinking

Essences

• holism
• interconnectedness

Principles

• structure influences behavior
• policy resistance
• leverage

Practices

• system archetypes
• simulation

Personal Mastery

Essences

• being
• generativeness
• connectedness

Principles

• vision
• creative tension vs. emotional tension
• subconscious

Practices

• clarifying personal vision
• “holding” creative tension
  • focusing on the result
  • seeing current reality

Mental Models

Essences

• love of truth
• openness

Principles

• espoused theory vs. theory-in-use
• ladder of inference
• balance inquiry and advocacy

Practices

• distinguishing “data” from abstractions based on data
• testing assumptions
• “Left-hand” column

Shared Vision

Essences

• commonality of purpose
• partnership

Principles

• shared vision as “hologram”
• commitment vs. compliance

Practices

• visioning process
  • sharing personal visions
  • listening to others
  • allowing freedom of choice
• acknowledging current reality